Tenets of 40k

[Warp Angel]

I've enjoyed looking at some of warp angels principles on kilhammer too, but I think that whilst both you and JK bring up some fantastic points you fail to look at the downsides to your arts in some ways.

 

For instance I wholeheartedly agree that threats win games, it cranks up the number of units, guns and problems for an enemy and this makes it easier on you. Sadly this is also around another £20-40 you could be spending, if not more for individual bits and what not. Which makes some of the information provided hard to adhere to and goes against a strong principle of mine, which is to enjoy what you have.

 

This costing side I think is the harshest killer to many a battle plan as it can really rip the heart out of playing with larger numbers!

 

Play what you are comfortable with and what you can afford/convert. No problem at all. Any decent tactics write up or "rules of war" thing apply even if you have "substandard" troops. The principles work for any group of troops. Since we are in JK's thread, you simply have to maximize your actual strengths and minimize your enemy's while attacking his weaknesses. If you do this, then your chances of victory will increase, no matter your enemy.

 

I'm fortunate that I'm able to afford pretty much everything that I could possibly want to play with. In a relatively recent apocalypse game, I fielded the first company and a battle company with most of a Ravenwing force still in the cases and plenty of heavy support to go well. And that's just one of my five playable armies. I've also had 20 years to accumulate 'stuff'.

 

Not bragging, but I need to speak to the purchasing aspect of the game - which is part of applying JK's tactics above.

 

Rule 1) When it matters, play what you have. When it doesn't matter, proxy to find what works for you. You should never invest in models you aren't sure you're going to want to play with. So play some friendly games with proxies. This way you can find your comfort zone before spending gobs and gobs of money.

 

Rule 2) Focus your purchases. Know what you want to buy, don't just buy because its cool or you want more. Your purchases should reflect what and how you want to play.

 

Rule 3) Find deals. Trade first. Places like Bartertown, Craigslist, and many dedicated gaming forums have trade areas. Buy discounted second. Whether this is used or just deeply discounted, plenty of online places and FLGS sell at a discount. I never make bulk purchases at less than 20% off retail.

 

Rule 4) Improvise and multipurpose. The only thing you need for Sternguard is for them to be identified as veterans. Use different colored borders for their shoulder pads, add a stripe to their helmet, or a different pattern on the right knee. Whatever. The next game, when they are tacticals, you just tell your opponent it's a squad designation. If you've got the skill, use greenstuff and magnetize to be able to swap weapon combinations for characters, sergeants, terminators, and vehicles.

 

Rule 5) Create a 'counts as'. I've got a 'counts as' Marneus Calgar in power armor that I'm really happy with. Same thing with a Lysander, Pedro Kantor, and have plenty of models that make a good Khan. I don't play any of those chapters, so I don't pay a premium to have the pewter models that I'd have to file down and modify anyway.

 

The most important of these rules is the first one. You can try anyone's army list or tactical advice if you proxy, because the models aren't important. I even know of people that use cardboard cutouts to represent models... As a matter of fact, there's technically a legal Ork Dreadnaught model from the 2nd Ed boxed set that is a cardboard cutout with a stand.... It was the official dreadnaught "model" provided with the boxed set. This hobby doesn't have to be expensive to TRY new things.

[Brother Tual]

Ork Dreadnaught model from the 2nd Ed boxed set

I remember that... and the stand size was a small base and not even a big dread one...

 

hahha go on the gw web site and print out the pics of models u like and put on a stand.. classic..

[Jackelope King]

I think that more experienced 40k players know when they've been beat. When a player look across the table and see how much of the enemy presence is left, and how many guns he or she has left, and a nagging little voice says, "It's over."

 

Put in more specific terminology, a player recognizes defeat when the opponent has too many threats left for his or her army to deal with. So the key to victory lies in your ability to cram threats down your opponent's throat with all your might.

 

Two Units are Better than One

Warhammer 40k is a game of squads fighting other squads. One squad can only ever project its power and attack a single unit per turn, with a few exceptions (Longfangs, multi-assaults, popping a transport and assaulting the passengers, Target Locks in Tau).

 

What this means is we have a pretty decent application of Lanchester's Square Law, where each unit you have on the field exponentially increases the survivability of every other unit. I've talked about this before with the power of spam, but let's review it briefly. Let's say you have a weapon that can reliably kill one tank per turn. Now I put one tank on my side of the board, and we have it out. My tank gets one turn of shooting and then dies. But what if I put two tanks on the board? Now you need two turns to kill both tanks. Both of my tanks get one turn of shooting, but by virtue of you needing to kill the first tank, the second tank gets an "extra" turn of shooting. Awesome. So those two tanks are really three tanks as far as the damage they inflict is concerned. And if I put three tanks on the board, it takes you three turns to kill them all, so I wind up getting the shooting equivalent of six tanks on the board.

 

As I keep adding tanks, what I've done is achieve saturation. You only have one reliable way to kill tanks, and I over-saturate that weapon with targets. Each additional target I add provides an increase in durability for each other target, and provides them with more opportunities to use their firepower.

 

Keep it Light

Let's take one of the more typical examples out there and compare two kinds of Tactical Squads in Codex: Space Marines. There is a school of thought that says your Tactical Squads should be tooled up to be able to take on anything and everything, so 10 men, Power Fist on the sergeant, plasma gun for one Marine, Multi-Melta for another, all riding in a Rhino, for a grand total of 240 points. A pretty big chunk of change but, the theory goes, they can take on anything and do good enough. (I disagree with this, by the way, and I'll go into that more when we talk about how upgrades increase the threat-profile of a unit.)

 

On the other side of the coin, we have a 5-Marine Tactical Squad in a Razorback with a Twin-Linked Las-Cannon Turret. Slap a combi-flamer on the sergeant, and the squad weighs in at 175 points. 65-point difference. Now let's assume a 2000 point game, and assume the "conventional wisdom" that you need 4 troops choices at 2000 points (nonsense, by the way). The tooled-out Rhino squads weigh in at 960 points altogether. For that price I've got 5 Razorbacks and almost a whole Typhoon speeder. Or I could instead go with 4 Razorback squads and most of 3 Typhoons. Let's assume the latter, so we have an identical number of scoring units.

 

Just assuming this set-up, turn one, the Razorback army has an advantage. 7 units versus 4. Even if the Razorbacks were somehow in range for multi-melta shots, that's still a maximum of 4 enemy units that the Rhino army can threaten. Doing the math, I can reasonably expect to slow down (and potentially destroy) about 1-2 Rhinos.

 

This is, of course, just a brief sample. Rhinos with multi-meltas inside are what make Codex: Space Marines the best army in the game for holding midfield (yes, better than Space Puppies and Space Vampires), and while I'd definitely say "drop the power fist, drop the plasma for flamers, and run 2-3", it's still very viable. This example was simply meant to illustrate the disparity that armies with expensive units face when dealing with cheap, effective firepower, which many armies get in droves in 5th Edition.

 

But How Will They Survive?!

This is the common refrain I get when I advocate for minimalist units. My Tau are actually a good example here: for troops, I run two Kroot screens, then stuff a squad of 6 Fire Warriors in a Devilfish. Front armor 12 + obscured (thank you, Disruption Pod) isn't as easy to shoot down as people expect. And all the while, my Crisis Suits are pounding you into dirt.

 

That's similar to how I'd respond to people who say that small units in general die too easily. They don't die quite as easily as you'd expect (especially when mech'd up), and if you actually devote the firepower to kill any one of them off, you're going to be devoting less firepower to my other threats. Remember, Interference can give you the option to suppress the fire of enemy units relatively cheaply. I only need to stop you from shooting (or moving, as the case may be for true transports like the Rhino) for a turn. Then all those "extra" threats I have can work on chewing up your threats for good.

 

Put another way, assume that two lists have identical firepower and will kill off one enemy unit per turn. One list has 5 threats, the other has 8 threats. The one with 8 threats will win, simply because it can survive attrition better than the list with 5 threats. This is obviously not a realistic situation, but serves only to illustrate that all other things being equal, the list with more threats has the edge.

 

Any given unit might not survive well, but the army as a whole will not just survive, but thrive.

[Algesan]

Put another way, assume that two lists have identical firepower and will kill off one enemy unit per turn. One list has 5 threats, the other has 8 threats. The one with 8 threats will win, simply because it can survive attrition better than the list with 5 threats. This is obviously not a realistic situation, but serves only to illustrate that all other things being equal, the list with more threats has the edge.

 

Any given unit might not survive well, but the army as a whole will not just survive, but thrive.

 

IMO, the only weakness of this logic process comes from the game itself, that you trade off more survivable units for more fragile effectiveness and in at least 1/3 of the games it introduces a weakness in KP at least against bigger unit armies.

 

Not that I'm disagreeing with your premise, I'm also into building small effective units as you are. The only exceptions would be potential deathstars (which can be affordable at 1.5k-2k) that have a higher treat level plus potential psych advantages vs. an opponent. Not necessarily the massive "I kill everything I hit" units, but ones that will do "I kill everything I hit" vs other small unit armies and still be able to rip up the first few units in an army of bigger units.

 

It just needs to be pointed out that there is a potential for weakness. I disregard it because unless they switch out for a flamer of some sort and get position on me, it will still take two shots for that full SM squad to kill a small unit.

[Jackelope King]

IMO, the only weakness of this logic process comes from the game itself, that you trade off more survivable units for more fragile effectiveness and in at least 1/3 of the games it introduces a weakness in KP at least against bigger unit armies.

It's a good point that needs to be analyzed.

 

In a KP game, having more units than your enemy provides you enemy with more potential KP to obtain by game's end. However, in order to score those KP, your opponent will need to have sufficient threats to actually achieve this goal. Further, focusing on "easy" KP, your opponent necessarily has less firepower to devote to your "harder" KP, which are often killier anyway.

 

On that second point, allow me to deviate from Marines for a moment to describe my Tau army. One of the key units in the Tau arsenal are Piranha Fast Skimmers, akin to Marine Land Speeders. They're Fast Melta for the Tau army, and can perform many of the same blocking maneuvers that you can with Marine Speeders. However, they also carry Gun Drones as "passengers". There's a potential for this unit to give up three KP if it's shot down in sequential turns. However, it'd also take the dedicated firepower of at least 2 units each turn to pull this off (most likely more, because the Piranha will most likely fly flat-out on turn 1, thus affording them a 4+ concealment bonus). The two units will also need different types of firepower: Piranha require mid-strength or anti-tank firepower to be brought down reliably, while gun drones are light infantry. (Note that there is an exception to this in units being able to shoot down the Piranha and then assault the gun drone passengers, but few units have that kind of firepower and/or are Relentless). But if you're devoting at least two units' worth of firepower to killing my Piranha and gun drones, that's two fewer units that are firing at my real killing power in my Battlesuits or the like. I've created a virtual reduction in your threats for a turn, and hopefully capitalized on it with my army's big firepower.

 

This applies to Marines too. An army with MSU suffers less attrition over the course of a battle, and brings more threats. If you focus on eliminating one threat, the durability of my other, numerous threats increases. So what if you killed the skimmers I threw at you to block your Land Raider? The rest of my force is still alive and unscathed, and will hopefully take advantage of the virtual threat-advantage to deal some damage.

 

Note that I don't include a "Defensive" role for a reason: 40k is a game of threats. Especially in KP games, you don't lose any points for having your units killed, but you can only gain them from killing enemy units. Assuming a defensive posture can be beneficial in numerous scenarios, but flat-out playing defensive implies that you're not cramming threats down your opponent's throat. This works in Objectives games and KP games. The more you kill, the fewer enemy units remain to threaten you. Yes, you might give up more KP if the game lasts for a long time, but you should also be reaping KP from a smaller enemy force and hopefully eliminating threats, thus eliminating your opponent's ability to score KP.

 

...

 

Death Stars are a whole 'nother point, but again, an important one.

 

Viscerally, I love 'em. I just plain love sending a Biker Command Squad crashing into enemy lines and scoring some decisive hits. They're heavy Offense, usually with good durability. And in a pure Biker army, having those guys around to bail out normal bikers is really critical to playing successfully. However, comparing my pure bikers to my hybrid bikers, pure bikers have 10 threats at 2000 points, while the hybrid list squeaks out 13.

 

For one threat to be worth replacing two potential threats, that threat should more dangerous than those two other threats combined (remember how Support works, and that Threats win games... an army is greater than the sum of its parts). This is the calculation you need to make when considering Death Stars. (I will go into the basics of considering the threat-profile of a unit soon.)

 

I read somewhere recently that "Death Star" is an apt name for them not just for their killing power, but also for their vulnerabilities. I mean, whoever would've thought that the Death Star could be killed by Multiple Small Units (starfighters) :lol:?