You have all met them. (If not, you are very very lucky or are living under a rock.) They are the people who bring a C’tan to a 750 point game. Or they go to get more templates when they hear you play orks. Or they take 150 Ork Boyz to a 1000 point game, when they know they are playing against marines, just so there is no way of them losing. These are the people who play 40K only to win. (AKA the people who completely miss the point of the game.)
This is how to kill them.
First off, don’t simply power game against them. Even if they take a C’tan, don’t take Ghazkull. However, if it is a non-tournament game, and they are ‘list tailoring,’ to beat your army, (EG, orks,) don’t list tailor back, just do something to throw them off. I play orks, (You all know that,) so if someone tries to tailor a list against that, I will simply alter my strategy. They will probably take a lot of blast weapons, so in response I would make heavy use of tanks and guns. Anything that their tailoring won’t work against. You could even have two pre-fab lists, so it isn’t tailoring at all. (Just make them complete opposites, so an army can’t be tailored to beat you.)
If they are simply taking a Uber-model in a game that cannot support it, giving them a huge edge that is unfair, (They can do this in tournaments, so I am going to assume you didn’t plan ahead for it,) you will have to use a different strategy. As in, either tie it up in a situation that it cannot possibly escape from, (Charging a C’tan with 30 ork boyz. It probably won’t lose, but it probably won’t win either.) Or, you could try the relatively successful, (And in some cases, hilarious,) tactic of ignoring it, as if it weren’t there. Don’t shoot at it, don’t let anyone get in combat with it, isolate it. (This won’t work in games on smaller boards.) Lastly, and probably most effective, you can simply fire everything you have against it. Every slugga, every rokkit, every Power Klaw attacking it, no matter what it is it will die.
The last form of power gaming is simply taking an over-powered army list. Something with no strategy to it, just exploiting the codex using the units that are way to cheap for what they do. Blood Angels are good at this, since they are a newer codex, and able to take ridiculously powerful lists. Against these, I don’t have much advice. (It will commonly be pretty easy to tell who is doing this, just by the models they put out. Other similar forms that are just as ridiculous are: Not letting you see army lists, or even telling you wargear, not notifying you of reserves until they appear, ETC.) If they are only playing to win every game, the only way to beat it is to power game as well, which sort of defeats the purpose. Or, you can either play the game and hope to beat the odds, or refuse to play. Neither is a great option, so in this case I actually would not care about an equal amount of power gaming, because that is the only way for there to be a sporting chance. Of course, it would be best if people never actually power gamed, but there always will be some.
0 Responses to “Anti-Power Gamers”