King of the Hill – But we have no hill terrain currently!

My little gaming group seems to want a custom mission and I have been given that task. A kind of Race / King of the Hill idea has been batted about a little bit and so I’m going to attempt to formalise that into a playable mission for a 1v1v1v1 game. The last one went OK, I think. Wish me luck.

The original idea was a player in each corner, deploying Fast Attack only, each player would have an objective near their corner. There would also be a single primary objective in the centre of the table. Claiming their near by objective would then allow reserve units to start to enter play from their corner. Claiming the centre objective would be worth more points and probably win them the game.

I think thats all that was discussed so far and so we will stick with that as a basis. One major issue that did crop up was that if Fast Attack deploy first then some armies will have a significant advantage with their Fast vehicles. For example Land Speeders for Marines and Piranha for the Tau are going to be very zippy. The Guard have Hellhounds andRough Riders but no nice Jinking Skimmers. This feels like a slight disadvantage but I also think having something fast right away defeats the point of having a near by objective. You can easily grab it in turn one, its easy? Better to use a much weaker and simpler unit to make it a challenge for the unit try to reach the near by objective?

King of the Hill Custom Mission

So we will run with the following;

Victory Conditions

• Single Primary Objective in the centre of the board, worth 3 VP when the game ends. This is the King of the Hill part.
• Single Secondary Objective 18″ from each corner of the board.
• Each Secondary Objective is worth 1 VP to which ever team controls it at the end of the game.
• Slay the Warlord and Linebreaker are in effect and worth 1 VP each.
• First Blood is not used.
• The team with the most VPs at the end of the game is the winner.

Deployment

• A single Troop choice is deployed first within 6″ of the player’s starting corner, no other units  can be deployed at the start of the game.
• The starting Troop choice must be equal to or less than 20% of the force’s total points cost. E.g. in a  500 point game the starting Troop choice must be 100 points or less.
• All other units must be placed in reserve and arrive from with 12″ of the player’s starting corner.
• Reserve rolls are successful on a 4+, not the usual 3+. 
• If a player controls their own Secondary Objective or any other Secondary Objective then they add 2 to their reserve rolls. Making reserves successful on a 2+. 
• The effects of multiple Secondary Objectives are not cumulative. 

Starting the Game

• Players roll off for their corners, the highest roll decides their corner first, second highest decides their corner second etc. Re-roll duplicates to determine a winner.
• Roll off to see how goes first, there is no Seize the Initiative in play.
• Play continues clockwise around the table after the first player’s turn is complete.

Other

• The game uses a variable length.
• We’ll be playing with 500 points per army.
• We’ll be using a 6′ x 4′ board.
• Objective Secured units operate as normal.

What are your thoughts? Anything massively broken?