Awesome to hear that BG might be considering an earlier start/finish time.
Cool to hear that you're tweaking the lateral quadrants mission, though I think it was already a darn cool mission.
I think Ben's made some reasonable points and asked reasonable questions. I expect it just comes across a little more brusque on teh interwebs than its intended.
I agree with his point that every tournament modifies the book missions to a greater or lesser extent, even if it's just by putting them in the multi-round framework which necessitates tiebreakers and so forth. And that even the big, well-known events like NOVA have made substantial changes. We're still early in this edition and folks are justifiably experimenting and evolving event formats and rules.
Some armes/lists WANT to go first, some want to go second. All first blood does is give more of a benefit to armies that want to go for first anyways.
And all Slay the Warlord does is give a benefit to armies who normally hide/keep their HQs back anyway... And all Linebreaker does is give a benefit to more mobile armies who normally move stuff into the enemy DZ anyway...
Really, though, both of those have been common secondary objectives in lot of (GW and independent) tournament missions at least since I started playing in 1999. I share your concern that First Blood does tend to reinforce gunlines a little, and on insufficiently-terrained tables there's some legit concern that it's too easy to get on turn 1, but between terrain, 50% chance of Night Fight on turn 1, and the ability to reserve more fragile units, it's not very hard to defend against. And I agree with the earlier point that it provides and important counter-balance to 5/6 of missions being objective-based, which normally strongly favor going second. Especially since Kill Points are now only a factor in 1/6 of missions, so they're not mitigating as strongly against MSU builds as they used to.
How do Big Guns help balance a mission for an army with inherently weak(er) Heavy Support options?
I think Big Guns and Scouring are nice because they give an incentive to invest in slots other than Troops, while also making those units targets worth additional VPs, so those missions have more avenues to earn VPs. I don't know if I'd expect BOTH a BG and a TS mission in a three-rounder. Maybe just one or the other, although with three-tiered objectives, it could make sense to fit both in at different levels.
