I'm refereing to the upcoming 1500p tournament where you'll test changes to Predators, Vindicators, thinderhawks, Landing Crafts & Spaceships, flamers etc. Theres alot of changes there and a few of them haven't been discussed on here that much.
The post is also not a piss-take on the German gaming community. It states what got me to decide to make the appeal. What if thoose planned changes happened all over the globe at about the same time?

I'm unsure what the rest of the stuff you posted is about. I also work, have kids and travel. Ialso organize tournaments and do battlereports (lots of them even) and I'm an AC. But i fail to see what thoose facts has to do with the suggestion of changing the ERC structure to more open one?

Efit: Realized that the last part probably sounded more douchy than intended. Just didn't see what that part was aimes at. Sorry.

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Nah, no problem at all. Rereading my post I realized that it can be understood as being quite salty as well. there was no intention to that. thanks for clearifying nevertheless.

the point is, we are not going for german lists. we are going for testing some stuff that has seen discussion as was viewed as valid in the group. also note that those are not seen as start for separate list building. more like add some fun to the tournament. 1500pts at mostly minigeddon rules isn't to be taken seriously in any case.

the stuff about batreps, rl, job, etc was actually a bit salty from my side but misdirected as it is not really reflected on in your post. guess that came in through the other posts following your initial one. sorry for that. point is as many complains have been filed on the lack of support for list development and counterposts have argued for rl getting in the way and stuff. i think overall it is a type of lazyness and a kind of egoistic view at the same time. wanting everything now in that very instant. and if not today than at last by tomorrow. my point is.. it takes effort. if you love your hobby and want it to progress --> take effort. it can be done no matter the excuses. if you only get in one report per 6 months, so be it. but write it. no matter if friendly game, tournament, fun. cuz if its just whining on taccom people that actually take effort will be put off eventually. and splintering will happen as progress slows down even more and people take matters in their own hands without validation from the comminity. in that regard i cannot applause pfe200 and many others here that backbone progress substatially enough. again, sorry it was not directed at you.


if your interested to know why we introduced the /houseruls/changes read on, otherwise the topic related part ends here.


the reduction of access to an all out sm flyer build is somewhat a break on the pillage train just in case someones takes dans thunderfuck idea for a walk. that one has been discussed quite a lot on taccom and is common sense in our opinion. we are more than confident that this change will make it to the astartes netea list in any case.

on the validity of ork transports. making them cheaper was discussed on taccom. we opted for making them spacier instead of cheaper to allow with only 3 waggons to transport a mob including 1 extraboy + grot for the same price. Inspiring was also discussed on taccom as well as more stompalove. we thought it as a fun implement to grant +1 inspiring to a mob containing at least one stompa. not per stompa. maybe someone will be persuaded to bring them to the table in a tournament in this way. it's a tryout.
ork powerfields on fortresses is a uk thing that seems to work reasonably well. we wanted to give it a go. if it is fine why not implement it and streamline netea and uk lists towards a unified version?

vindicator and predator armour saves.. well.. those are new. granted. but we kinda viewed the 4+ on them as too weak and opted for 5+ ra. feedback from that might not be of value to netea but so far no sm or chaos player registered for the gig.

chaos flamer demons are considered as too op throughout our community. flamer nerf was also discussed on taccom. we have seen abuse in tournaments. a reduction in offensive capability for our tournamnt was the conclusion. we used kyussinchains suggestion to go with a single 3+ff attack.

death korps of krieg. it was argued on taccom that commissars on gorgons is abuse. we second that. so it has become house rule that commissars may not be placed on them. common sense I guess.

basilisk formations see absolutely no love in any tournament. its manticore or nothing. maybe a 25pts reduction for all out basilisk formations will sway some players as it might open up minor options in their established builds. tryout as well. we'll feedback.

baneblade. no love as well. lengthy discussions on taccom. we try out the most favoured version with the 2 battlecannon shots. if someone brings them. my bet is they still opt for shadowswords but lets see if some love comes up.

tyranids spore cluster. uk list clone. didn't like it but still got voted on to be included. anyways might add to unification process with uk list.

cheers guys

To be honest, I am the guilty one to bring forth these house rules in the first place, Graf Spee and Saukopfblende opted for a more conservative way while I copied other stuff from the FERC lists which I actually prefer to the NetEA ones and would definitely play more if they would be in English as my french is pretty poor and it is hard enough to get new people into this game.

Both tourneys are fairly close to each other, so we may see wealthy discussions on the tournament day as well as games.

On the topic: I believe there should be a "Common Sense" directive, this would fix a tremendous amount of stubborness and laziness (eg Gorgons, singleton warhounds in Krieg, Flamer Daemons, unusefulness of Defilers vs Deathwheels, Baneblades vs any other SHT...

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I don't really get the obsession with battle reports anyway. If I actually had anyone around me to game with and could get faster I would do some; instead I try in other ways like providing a place to track battle results. But honestly it just seems so pointless. If an AC has a big gaming group and does a deal with another big gaming group then the list will be approved (and the contents will be based on their opinion of what should or shouldn't be in it, let's be clear). That works. It won't be balanced until it hits tournaments, but then only a handful of people will ever play it until then anyway. If you don't have that capacity to get games in with the list yourself it will not get there, and we should probably just accept that - if you dont have such a gaming group, even with the best of intentions taking on an AC role is probably only going to delay change.

Ironically the smallest changes seem much harder to get through than entire lists, mainly because of the inane insistence on battle reports to "prove" something that is either unprovable or obvious. It is quite ridiculous to think that it's possible to learn anything from a battle report testing a 25 point drop. Even if it were possible to draw a conclusion, people very rarely change their opinions based on others' opinions, least of all on the internet. We might as well just drop the charade, let ACs do whatever they want, call it approved and expose it to the wider tournament scene where actual good players come across it and go from there. No offence to anyone intended, but 18 battle reports of fluffy games are as good as useless for determining balance next to the insight that will come out of it being brought by a good player to one tournament.

But hey, lets not forget why we're still here. It's still fun to debate what should be changed, even if you know full well you can't convince everyone of your opinion. But let's not pretend you can get something changed just by debating it or posting batreps. If the AC isn't into it and they're allowed to just sit on lists then it won't happen. Yes it's a shame to see the community fragment, but honestly it's surprising that it took so long (since epic UK and ferc) to realise that if you want pace you need to centralise control.

The thing I've realised recently though is that the epic playing community is much larger, and much less taccomms centric than it used to be. (Lets face another home truth - tac comms is being allowed to die in the age of modern web). So maybe we attach too much importance to NetEA in the first place? Plenty of people are quite happy to play with their own unit and army tweaks and don't feel the need to all be doing everything the same way.

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I’ve been trying to find a diplomatic way to say exactly what Kyrt has said a above: battle reps are pointless for the majority of cases.

Good players know what the problems are - a handful of battle reps by an average (at best) player like me playing 12 or so games a year against even less experienced players is never going to convince anyone - i realised this a few years back. But when a problem is obvious (Baneblades etc) and the discussion is still going on 8 years after i join taccoms it becomes a farce.

What is even more frustrating is that obviously discussion is going on about whether ideas should be approved or not by the committee, but that discussion is not done in public and often it seems even the ACs don’t know when, why or how to progress changes. Many of the “faces” seem to be completely absent from the board nowadays and without their say-so nothing seems to get done.

Ive stopped directing new players to taccoms tbh. They get excited about “new ideas” for “their” army and then realise the discussion has been going on longer than they have been an adult and the discussion regularly becoming a slanging match without the AC Better a benign dictatorship like EUK and house rule locally for friendly games.

I applaud the few individuals who do put so much effort in to the NetEA process (most represented in this thread) but i generally struggle to see what i can contribute other than coming up with my own irrelevant little niche list which seems basically pointless when i could do this locally anyway with a lot less hassle. But then i don’t really agree with the niche list approach anyway.

Not helping is the sucking dry of taccoms (and many other forums for many hobbies) by Facebook. It is a thing. Can’t see its going to unfortunately.



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Very good post, Kyrt. I have similar thought about those but i think also that the battle reports work to slow or stop the craziest ideas from getting into approved lists, which will allow to maintain the value of the Approved status. If not i think anyone will play whatever they think after what their local meta thinks and put them on same tier as approved lists with years of experience.

Maybe rely less on reports and more on a more active ERC could work better? Easier to get fewer people motivated.



My two cents into this: since i began making battle reports i have noticed people outside TacCom talking about the work it takes for battle reports but when they tell me what they did to make the report, it feels that the problem is more that they try to do too much or not have thought about what's required or needed on a battle report, where to put the focus and where not. They do twice the work I do while playing but get half the information.

For example, when i make a battle report, i just write down ''Warband 1 doubles on Tactical 2, kills some/kill none/break down'' and take one or two photos per turn to know where each formation was and where they went, nothing else, nothing more. It is easy, only take 3 seconds per activation which can be done while the opponent goes or while talking and the end result is good and understandable on my reports even if i were to turn the maps into quick sketches or photos. Dave´s suggestions also works into making it easier and less work intensive. What i don't agree with Dave is that practice is needed to make them informative and easy, but that its about thinking a bit about what's needed to make one, to avoid extra unneeded work, instead of making battle reports more work than they are.

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I disagree that battle reports are pointless, having been someone who has batrepped quite extensively I find they are a very useful tool for a variety of reasons, firstly they *show* that in practice, some ideas are either good or bad, now that can often be reached by consensus, but some people don't like criticism of their lists, however constructive and the only way to make the point is to knuckle down and show what you mean (I had to do this with the old skool nephilims in the dark angels list, and probably made an enemy for life of kev101 who had to face it....)

more importantly they can change your own view too, I have played quite a few games with the OGBM list and was really struggling to win or even draw games, my opinion was that they were weak and suffered from typical-war-engine-list-itis

but after posting a batrep with pictures, E&C and I had some good constructive discussion about decisions I had made and positioning choices, the next two games I took his feedback into account and managed back-to-back wins, one on objectives, one on points, my opinion of the list now is that it's actually quite potent if played correctly and my earlier results were from my not utilising cover effectively and a focus on shooting (ie. I was playing it expecting it to work like AMTL and it wasn't working) I still love the list but think it probably needs a few smallish point increases to cut down on some options and bring it back into line

none of this information came from any kind of robust statistical analysis, but from feedback and discussion, and battle reports give an anchor to work around and base discussions on

they can also be handy for rough 'wet finger in the air' ideas of how good a particular unit is which helps focus development more, and maybe shows a need to add or remove options from the list

my issue with playing batrep games is that inevitably halfway through the game or thereabouts I start getting absorbed into the game and forget to take photos which screws up my activation-by-activation plans, that being said, copies of the lists used and a paragraph or two discussing the salient points and maybe sharing some opinions is perfectly useful data, especially if you have the understanding with your opponent that it's not a typical game and if you make a really obvious mistake they should point it out (I've known some particularly sporting guys to do that even in tournament games, looking at you Consul Avenging Angel )

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Just thinking out loud here but i wondering if the tracking features of vassal kinda help in that respect. You can just play the game and then review all the moves and actions afterwards. Also because it, in theory, allows players from all over to play, and it would remove modeling vagarities so things would reduce the number of fungibles. Oh also you can save a picture of the table top at any point from the historical moves so no need to take pictures. Hell now that I think about it, you could even just post the vsave file and anyone can open and see the game action by action.

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I like that one. Is there a step by step for the modules. Last time I tried to get to grips with vassal I utterly failed..

To reiterate, there is no battle report requirement for changes to an approved list. It comes down to what the AC feels comfortable changing. If they would like to see a change in action, they ask for the reports. If they don't, they put it straight to the ERC for a vote. From there it'll get approved or not. If not, three or more players out of the five on the committee felt the change to be too extreme, that it does require testing, or disagree with it for some other reason.



We put all of this in the NetEA CRaP. If people don't know the when, why or how they should ask. I haven't seen anyone do that though.

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well in danger of taking this thread OT, there's basic information on the vassal website but I suspect you're more asking specifically about a 'hypothetical' epic vassal module. Less so there but the module wouldn't really act all that much different than vassal as a hosting app anyways. The major difficulties are around the fact the stupid application doesn't actually follow the gestures of the underlying OS (yay SWING /s ). The way I describe it is that's it's simple as hell and unintuitive as All Frack. Honestly the best way to get up to speed is working with someone that is familiar for the 5 minutes intro it takes. Perhaps a screen recorded session posted to youtube ?

edit: I should add that 99% of the diffculty seems to be around building the table terrain. This is why Apoc, Norto, myself, and others have started [ab]using the save game feature as a cheap easy way to create premade maps. What would be awesome would be getting about 20-30 in place (right now I've got like . Of course this really means people giving back to the community but very few people ever do.

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Let me give a current real-life example of exactly what Dave's talking about here. Whitescars have the trial addition of walke-less vindicators balanced with a speed boost so the play style of a highly mobile army is preserved and swapping Storm Talons for TBolts into the list. I could just put it up there without any testing but as that list's Shepard, I personally will not do that until I can get one test from three different geographic areas as a sanity check. This should take 0 time but no one wants to step up and put their money where their mouth is. So what's an AC/ERC so supposed to do with that?

Now personal opinion here is that honestly I'd rather, at this point, NetEA just have semi-closed development with a core group of really good players and call it good (allowing periodic public comments and of course welcome any ad-hoc tests). The community doesn't test things anyways and really the true testing doesn't happen till TOs allow a list in so why does it matter in the end?

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I'm open to that as well, but I think the other groups can get away with this rather easily as face-to-face meetings are more likely to happen. People take other's ideas and conduct themselves differently when this isn't the case. There'd be outcries of "no list approvals without representation" in my opinion. And even if we worked all the separate groups in there I still don't think everyone's going to get behind a single banner. There's still going to be Botswana lists with only a few minor changes from the UNEA list because that's how Botswana wants to play it.

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I for one welcome our Botswanan allies
I'm going to move to some really remote island country just so I can screw with y'all

But I mean that's also a bagatelle already. They're already going to alter it so getting lists out there and gathering TO feedback is probably a better thing in the end. I mean having say Apoc, yourself, Kyuss, TT, Ginger, etc take a hard look at a list for exploits that make it easy to violate Wheaton's Law coupled with another group that is based on providing highly stylized list themes is a nice dialectic.

Also, and I could be mistaken here, but my understanding for this last CANCON's use of the DBAD rule involved list submission and approval prior to being accepted. Personally, I couldn't imagine running a tourny and not having a vetting process. Seems just axiomatic to me.

Also we probably need some better overview on ACs and subACs. I mean for instance MSL, not to pick on him, hasn't even logged on in the better part of a year so it's no surprise that issues brought up about DKoK singleton warhounds go without being dealt with, even if they ultimately give the answer of "NO". I do think there's a huge organizational issue on most dev lists or even just cataloging the lists but that's not my area to throw stones, but yeah... it's an ontological abortion for the most part.

Slight tangent: I know how much work the TP lists are to deal with but perhaps even just putting them (names) on the TP website linking to the current thread post with the PDF is a cheap way to gain visibility. I have to really give it up to Si for instance in gaining visibility to lists via his work on managing the Army Forge entires.

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Lots of great replies here. Alot of the objections that has come up i was expecting. But instead of bickering and getting stuck into counter-arguments of every aspect of the process i will present my idea how the "NEW ERC" should look and work.
It's obvious to me that the format being used now is not functioning and that changes are needed for the Community to stay together. So hopefully theese following ideas can inspire people to think about change:

The New ERC and how it could function.

The comittee would have 30 places. Theese places are divided equally between the active Epic communities of Sweden, Germany, France, UK, USA and Australia (so 5 each). The seats should be filed with active and interested players that are familiar with the game and it's rules.

The commitee is active 4 months a year (January through April) where they playtest and discuss changes to lists or approve new ones. The rest of the year is spent gathering data in their local gaming communities and casual playing.

During the ”downtime” of the year anyone can send in requets for changes in lists or ask for the approval for new lists to the comittees e-mail or post them on the comittees official thread on Taccoms (or Facebook).

When the ”active” part of the year starts the comittee will examine and deal with the requests in the following steps:

1. First they vote on what changes to existing lists or new lists that they want to take on. This is done by a majority vote (50%) in the comittee. The requests who gain enough votes to be examined will go to step 2. The voting of all requests should be done within 2 weeks after the ”active” period starts.

2. The comittee discusses the changes that made it to this step. Members try them out in their local gaming groups and give back reports of the games to the comittee. This testing and discussing should happen within a 8 week period that starts right after the first 2 week voting period in step 1 has finished.

3. The committe decides what changes to existing lists or new approved lists should be approved. This is done via a ¾ majority vote (75%). This vote should happen under a 2 week period that starts right after the testing period in step 2 finishes.

4. The comittee presents all new changes to the NetEA community and amend all lists that are affected.

Voting and discussion should happen on a separate forum than Taccoms.

If a member of the comittee wants to step down the remaining members of this members country gets to decide who will fill the spot. No national community can ever gain more than 5 seats on the committee.

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