I didn't find any of these things a major problem. Of course it does encourage you to play and build your army in a different way but that's the point. Also, it's really nice as monkey boy says for games not to be decided by who wins the turn 2 activation and assaults half of the opponent's army off the board. Lastly, worth pointing out that the armies that came 1st and 2nd didn't have any indirect fire.

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Thanks to Florian for being an excellent TO and my opponents for some fun games.

In general I agree 'no retain' worked for reasons already stated, most the games I played in ended with two players still being able to compete for objectives, rather than whoever won the assaults turn 2 mopping up any survivors.

Having now played it, I think people will find it easier to build their lists around no retain next year (Rugs space marines were a good example of how to do this)

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I also didn't have any indirect with my DEldar in 4th. I did however try and maximise my use of the webway to prevent my army being on the board for as long as possible when I faced the Iron Warriors and then kept mounted in Raiders when I suspected I'd come under fire to minimise the number of To Hit dice he got to roll compared to having the infantry out on foot.

No Retain did not bother me.

Allowing the Eldar the "Farseer retain" once per turn should be tested IMO, possibly with the proviso that this does not occur on the first activation of each turn.

You could try a unit with a farseer is allowed to retain. But considering eldar in some form made up the 3-5th places I wouldn't say it's vital.

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Photos of the various armies

More armies

final armies

I take your point on the top armies not having indirect fire :p

Keep the discussion up, guys. We are listening.

Thanks Gavin, for uploading army shots.
The weekend took its toll and i missed an opportunity to do so myself yesterday.

Though i like to add more detail shots of Radek's superb Iron Warriors, also showing his great display terrain.






Last but not least, Rug's colour-blind Ravenwing army!

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FYI - my club played some mini geddon the last couple of Fridays with the "no retain" rule. I was sceptical at first as I though that if using mini-geddon as a warm up for full EA it needed to teach people when to try to retain and when not. I had to admit it did actually seem to improve the mini game quite considerably and kept the result in the balance right till the end.

Therefore not sure if a change is necessary but as a suggestion (not tested) perhaps you could give each player one retain to spend for the whole game? Perhaps then eldar could get an extra for each farseer?

Heh, Eldar really don't need it - even stripping out two of their special rules (avatar and farsight) they're still damn nasty!

Overall i thought the no retain worked well, winning turn 2 activation was in most cases still a game winner, but not quite the annihilation it can be with the retains. Minigeddon is still a bit of a crapshoot overall, but that's just the nature of the game when pared back and at that points level.

Yme-Loc were a bit of a fail in the end, but i wasn't expecting miracles with them going in so that's ok - being a fragile shooting army in an assault game is damn tricky, especially when the dice rolling's on the lower end of the spectrum! Poor Nick had to suffer all my decent rolling for the event condensed into one game, but the rest of it was pretty much dross. Ah well, something more sturdy next time i think!

No pics of my chaps? i was quite pleased with how the hornets turned out as well

That list is utterly broken. But at least in minigeddon you can take single EoVs...

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Kyrt's Battle Result Tracker (forum post is here)
Kyrt's trade list

That kinda helps a bit compared to the standard list, not that the two EoV's i took (a scorpion and a cobra) did much in most of the games other than die horribly as soon as someone looked at them, but there we go! I'd had hopes that the new cobra rework might be ok, but if anything in practice it seems even more awful than the old one! Failing repeatedly to win initiative really didn't help it's cause much mind you...