Overall, I liked the approach and the added detail on painting. The checklists for sportsmanship and painting were very useful although it was still difficult to differentiate significantly between nice armies and armies with real WOW!!
In terms of areas that could use some tweaking, I did notice that battle points have increased in absolute value and in the disparity between winning and losing (18 to 2 vice 15 to 3 or 5). IMHO, I believe that putting too much emphasis on battle points is not a good thing for the following reasons:

1. it encourages power gaming with nasty lists.
2. having one bad game during a tourny, for all intents and purposes, compeletely eliminates someone from contention.
3. it creates a somewhat more ruthless vice cordial gaming environment since giving your opponent a break will be far less likely given the consequences of doing so.

Given the potential negative impacts of excessive battle points, I believe it would be more beneficial to adjust the battle points to reduce their overall value in a tourny (I know that the draft guide allows for this) but more importantly, it is vital to reduce the disparity between winning and losing to a maximum of 5:1 or perhaps even 3:1 for lower "power" tournies. This would mitigate the negative impacts of excessive importance of battle points and create a more enjoyable gaming environment.

One key area that I observed had very little detail or weight (2 points I believe), was army composition. Personally, I am a strong believer in having comp weighted heavily (30-50% of max battle points for the tourny) as anyone can win with an over the top list but a true test of generalship is winning with a list that isn't min/max to the hilt. Along those lines, Conquest Windsor had a simple and effective system that I think could be easily adapted to provide an effective method of differentiating armies pointswise without getting bogged down by something as complicated as the WPS scoring system. Here is a rough outline of such a system based on a 4 game tourny with a max possible of 60 battle points for fantasy (I wouldn't have a clue what to do with 40K!!):

Characters (monstrous mounts count toward special/rare):
<25% - 10 points
<30% - 8 points
<35% - 5 points
<40% - 3 points
>40% - 2 points

Combined Rare/Special Troops (including character monstrous mounts):
<25% - 5 points
<30% - 4 points
<35% - 3 points
<40% - 2 points
>40% - 1 point

Power Dice(PD) (one use items count a 0.5PD, bound spells and items/powers that add more dice add 1PD each) :
<6PD - 5 points
<7PD - 4 points
<9PD - 3 points
<11PD - 2 points
>=11PD - 1 point

Shooting Units (including war machines, weapon teams, monsters with ranged attacks, etc but not characters):
<3 - 5 points
3 - 4 points
4 - 3 points
5 - 2 points
6+ - 1 point

Cavalry (or troops with >=7" movement including fliers, chariots, monsters, etc.)
<3 - 5 points
3 - 4 points
4 - 3 points
5 - 2 points
6+ - 1 point

Other
Either a bonus or penalty of up to 3 points to reflect organiser's judgement.

Well, I figure I have gone on long enough for now. Hope the comments help or at least initiate some debate.

As there is nearly full agreement on all other aspects of the new scoring system, I will focus on the area of army composition that is still in debate. I fully agree that any comp system can be worked around but that does not mean that it should be avoided altogether and even the "worked around" lists are far less nasty than an unlimited list in terms of power. The draft proposal initially provided was exactly that, a draft, and as such was a start point for experimentation and debate. Ideally, a few trial runs and user feedback would help tweak the comp guidelines to better reflect what works and what doesn't. In addition to the aforementioned benefits of having a significant component of scoring being comp based, it has the added advantage of providing significant score differentiation, thus making it easier to separate players at all levels.

Taking the Epidemeus list as an example, I personally think the proposed comp system would give it a score commensurate with the army. The two versions I have seen are very character and magic heavy and would score 2 on characters and 3 on magic (PD include the base 2 so a 4th level GUO and 2 1st level heralds = 8PD). Everything else would receive full points so the list would score ~20/30 overall and taking an "under priced" special character might warrant an organiser's minor penalty perhaps offset by a bonus for having only core choices or pure Nurgle for troops. Having played against the list, I think that 20/30 is appropriate as it can be readily beat and has several weaknesses.
In summary, I think there are a number of advantages to replacing some of the current battle points with comp points such as improved gaming environment and another method of score differentiation. Experimentation would help improve the draft comp scoring proposal or might even prove/disprove its utility.

Stonecutter,

With that Epidemeus list (and it gets to near perfect if you go with 4 heralds over the GUO which makes the army even more of a rock), is it readily beatable by lists from all Army Books that score in the 20-30 range on the comp system? Or are you having to use all the tools at your disposal in a lot of cases? I am not picking on the system you presented in particular, just trying to point out that each system that can be created will skew the game in one direction or another.

I know as a player of all 3 Elf Armies (Wood, Dark and High) that there is no core heavy list I can put down that has a chance to do more than draw (and the lists I need to take are Cav heavy that can dance and never engage). Elves generally rely on their Rare and Magic to deal with the anvils of other armies. Overall, Elves are intended to be Elite forces that don't focus on Core.

Other books that have power levels that also require pulling out every trick in the book to be competitive. Orks, Ogres, Dogs, Tomb Kings come to mind quickest but there are lots of Pre-High Elf ASF books that cannot compete with the books post-High Elf ASF. How do you make sure they can compete? I've seen systems that go so far as award additional points to lists from some books. Or break down comp, book by book, unit by unit and item by item. Which passes me back to this next section....

I'd also like to come back to this point since we haven't discussed it:
"In addition, how do you make a composition system that is not biased to how the maker(s) believes the game should be played. Some people are drawn to the game cause of casting lots of spells, some people want a fast moving cavalry force, some people want to play with monsters. Some people like the uniformity of ranked up units. Not all monster lists, or magic heavy lists are broken. Which way of playing the game is the 'right' way? Do you prosecute some innocents just to be sure we get the guilty?"

Later,
Greg

Greg,

For the Epidemeus list, going with 4 heralds vice a GUO would definitely tone down the army as the GUO is the main problem for most armies both from a fighting and magic perspective. Without the GUO, the army could be march blocked and outflanked as it is only 4" move, at which point I think almost any army in the 20-30 range would have a reasonable chance of dealing with it.

One of the advantages I see of the proposed system, despite its warts, is that it allows people to pick a certain flavour of play (magic heavy, shooting heavy, cavalry heavy, etc.) and they can still achieve very good (not perfect as that is and should be very difficult) composition since it covers all aspects of the game. Obviously, certain armies have a focus on specific aspects (wood elf and skaven shooting, tzeentch magic, bret cavalry, etc.) but a balanced list will suffer in only one or two area(s) while scoring high elsewhere. As for dealing with the armies that have what is deemed to be a weaker or stronger book overall, the organiser's bonus/penalty can help compensate for this so that the tiered points system or an army by army approach does not have to be used. Perhaps allocating more points to the organiser(s) bonus/penalty would also help preclude people from "breaking" the system.

Speaking of breaking the system, there is no perfect solution and yes, people may manage to find a gap and exploit it. The system isn't etched in stone and can adapt and the organiser's penalty/bonus can help compensate - as will sportsmanship scores since a person is obviously trying to gain an unsporting advantage!! Only time and experience will tell if the proposed comp system works and thus it needs to be used in order to gain player feedback and ideas for improvement.

Finally, after some thought, I believe the shooting and cavalry scores should be based on percentages vice number of units as a big difference exists between a unit of 5 x regular orc boar boyz and a lance of 10 grail knights. Using this approach, the scores could be as follows:

Shooting Units (including war machines, weapon teams, monsters with ranged attacks, etc but not characters):

<10% - 5 points
<15% - 4 points
<20% - 3 points
<25% - 2 points
25%+ - 1 point

Cavalry (or troops with >=7" movement including fliers, chariots, monsters, etc.)

<10% - 5 points
<15% - 4 points
<20% - 3 points
<25% - 2 points
25%+ - 1 point

Lastly, one point that still needs to be determined is if units can be double/triple counted or not (i.e. a dragon is a special/rare, shooter and cavalry).