Premeasuring- good/bad after ~1 year

I've only known MkIII, started about 3.5 months ago. I've always preferred pre-measuring in games. It just makes sense, and there are so many work-arounds anyway that it saves time in the long run. It also reduces the "experience advantage" players that know a board have over people that don't. It removes the need to "Cheat" by deducing distances from other sources of information. Using shooty units as range-finders for melee units, for example. Just saves everyone time, and prevents soreness and accusations of cheating.

Premeasuring is good. But i think it might have led to some silliness including planning out perfect turns and taking back mistakes "cause we already measured it."

Like i think we need some sportsmanship rule similar to chess. Like once the your hand leaves your model that model has reached that position and has used up n amount of movement to get there. You can't take it back. It can move back but it would need to use more movement to do so. Also like once your dice leave your hand you're committed to that die roll unless the roll is illegal (rolling too many dice)

I'm quilty of the first one. I moved thyra up was about to roll dice then realized i had a better charge to said model and rolled it back to do the better charge. My opponent want bugged by it cause i had yet to roll and same model was getting attacked anyways. But still.

I honestly don't mind as long as the position of the original model is there and measurable and dice haven't rolled. 

Like I said in the last thread, all that the premeasuring rules needed at all were 2 stipulations:
1. That any base representing the CURRENT place that a model stood be labelled as such
2. At the end of either player turn, all proxy bases be removed. 

But even then, I don't think its necessary. 

I personally sometimes have a personal rule of no take backs.  If you play and take backs are acceptable,  then you get sloppy.  Though I'd rather enforce that personally.  In a friendly game, which I hope mine are, if you want take back I'm normally really happy for you to have one.  I've noticed that take backs slow me down too,  and with some of my lists I'm already fighting against the clock as much as my opponent.

Premeasuring is a net positive. It made the game much cleaner, and more tactical. 

Premeasuring has a number of bad side effects for game balance.

1) It heavily favors factions with longer threat ranges. You can easily park yourself the smallest squidge out of your opponent's charge threat, while being well within your own. Combine this with the SR17 packet which doesn't encourage people to commit to the scenario, and you've got way too much of a skew towards factions which are innately fast and towards gunlines in general. Since not all factions are equally fast, nor can all of them do gunlines as easily, you have a major balance issue.

Before, the player of a slower faction could attempt to play a game of chicken. He could park himself where he would attempt to bait his opponent's models out. Gambling that he is outside charge range. While his opponent would have to decide if he was in out out using limited data. This was an extremely fun mental game for me, and I know it was for a lot of other people. It also balanced out the fact some factions are just flat out faster. Sure, you did have a longer threat, but you had to be sure you were in, otherwise you might overextend and fail a charge.

2) It favors gunlines too much. Just like factions which are faster than others, gunlines can park themselves just outside of their opponent's charge threat and shoot from relative safety, being safe from immediate reprisal. While their slow opponent has no choice but to slog it across the field and get shot to pieces.

And as I mentioned above, with SR17, the scenario doesn't force gunlines to actually enter their opponents threat ranges immediately. He can hang back quite safely for 3-4 turns without being in danger of losing. Then once he has shot his opponent off the board, he can swoop in and take the scenario with no trouble.

3) Skill reduction. Many of us have spent decades honing our ability to judge distances. It's a skill anybody who has the spatial perception to play a game that's reliant on 3 dimensional space can develop, so it's not an unfair skill requirement. Now all those years of skill development are wasted. Eliminating a good chunk of the skill from the game, pissing off the veterans who are necessary to keep the game healthy. You can't afford to piss off the experienced players or you'll not have a meta for new players to join and people to teach them. A poor PR move on PP's part, and the game is less skill based and less tactically deep than it was previously. No more playing the mind game with your opponent over if he is in charge range or not. It's now just open information, which removes a good chunk of the game's appeal.

4) Premeasuring leads to some games being drawn out and painful affairs where one opponent is measuring everything. He does out a whole proxy turn before taking his actual turn. Deathclock existing only partially alleviates this problem. Sure, you might win because your opponent spent all his time measuring and clocked himself. Deathclock wins are only satisfying when you spent most of that time actually playing instead of watching your opponent fiddle around with measurements. The SR17 measurement rules provide somewhat of a disincentive to do this since you have to spend more time picking up the previous measurement's markers, but it doesn't prevent it completely.

5) It doesn't make the game cleaner like many above claim. You could play just as clean of a game in Mk2. A game being clean means that all measurements are done properly and with precision. Nothing about not being able to freely premeasure prevented you from measuring correctly when the time came to measure. It just meant you had to make a decision and then were locked into that decision before you knew the outcome.

Overall, it's an improvement. But guns weren't rebalanced for never missing a chance to aim, and being able to kite 0.5" out of threat.