A Word (Or several hundred) on Strategy

As opposed to talking about strategy for specific units, today I’m going to talk about something I haven’t before: How to actually win games. 

Obviously, this won’t be a completely perfect tactica. Depending on your army and playstyle, the following might not be applicable at all. However, I’m going to give my opinions on playing (Hopefully with as little Orky bias as possible) and playing to win.

FIRST OFF: I am NOT referring to power-gaming. If you take ‘optimized’ army lists you pulled off the internet and are playing entirely to win… Not what I’m going for here. Rather, this is a guide for improving strategies so that you can win with whatever list you want. Therefore, I am going to skip the ‘list-building’ phase for the most part. (Especially since I don’t know much about a lot of codices.) Also, I’m going to use examples… Most of them are going to revolve around marines, guard, tyranids and orks since those are the most commonly played armies at my local Games Workshop. With that in mind…

 

Stage 1. Pre-game. So, you’ve started a game with someone, have you? The first thing you need to do is analyze your opponents army and compare it to yours. What are their strengths? Weaknesses? What do they have that’ll be the biggest threat to you? If you’re taking a tank line, this could mean meltaguns or lascannons. If you’ve taken a bunch of terminators, this refers to plasma and AP2 weapons. But it doesn’t matter what you have or they have, so long as you recognize threats. Never go into a game without knowing what you will be facing, at least approximately. (Even if you are playing blind, so you don’t know their list until post-deployment, you will still know the army they are playing and what to expect from them.)

Once you know what your enemy is taking that’ll be a threat, figure out what you have that beats that threat. If you’ve taken horde orks and they’ve got battlecannons, decide how you are going to deal with that. Will you try and use board cover and spread out models to dodge fire until you reach combat? Mass heavy fire against it and hope to destroy your target before they cause to much damage? There are no bad plans here. (Okay, there are. But there’s a lot of good ones too.) Just make sure that you HAVE a plan, and you’ll be better off.

 

Stage 2. Deployment. This is possibly the trickiest stage, depending on how talented your opponents are. It may seem ideal to go with first turn every time you get the chance, but before you do think about it… If you are playing a close combat army and it is night fighting, do you really want to give up your Shrouded by moving closer, while losing the ability to see the enemy’s deployment? Moving second is no disadvantage if you know what you are doing. 

Since you’ve already assessed the threats on the enemies army, make sure you are prepared to kill them. If you deploy first, this means making sure your solution to the threat is as close to centered on the board as possible so you have rapid response. If you go second, then make sure the vulnerable units are as far away as possible and that the killy stuff is near his vulnerable stuff. You can’t simply form a giant gun-line across the board and expect it to work without prioritization and planning beforehand. (Trust me, I’ve seen people try this… A lot… and it never works.) Make sure to take game type into account. If you’re playing killpoints it’s obvious what you have to do, but your plan changes if there’s five objectives on the board. If the Relic is centered, do you place your fastest guys ready to seize it or just make sure your battle cannons are in range to blast anyone who tries to take it? If you’re a mainly defensive army, will you try and keep the opponent from taking objectives or just take them yourself and fend him off? Remember: Your decisions deploying will determine your deadliness all day. (Alliterations are always amazingly awesome!) 

Stage 3. Actually playing the game. If you followed the first two steps properly, this is actually the easiest part. A well laid plan to flank the enemy, seize objectives, take out his HQ, or…

CREEEEEEEEEEEED!

Assuming that doesn’t happen though, a well built plan should go along smoothly. You’ll obviously have to adapt when he does something you don’t expect, but you should be fine. 

If your opponent DOES do something you don’t expect, then stop before you move on. Let’s say he got a lucky roll and killed your most powerful unit, or dropped five Grey Knights Paladins on the main objective, or whatever. Immediately figure out how you are going to deal with it. You’ll probably have to divert models from a less important objective. You might even have to completely abandon parts of the board to deal with it, but make sure to prioritize and take care of the biggest problems first. A couple of marines with heavy bolters might be annoying, but you can ignore them for the Land Raider full of terminators if you don’t have the models to spare. 

 

Now, a word on Map control. In 6th edition, killing your enemy outright is no longer the most vital part of the game. You can pound your enemy to fine dust and leave almost no survivors, but that doesn’t mean you’ll win. I once saw a game where a Dark Angels player demolished all but a single model in his opponent’s Chaos army. But… That model was a troops choice, it was the last turn, and he was standing by the relic with nobody to contest. Despite having put hardly a dent in his enemies army, and being almost completely vaporized, the Chaos player won because he had better map control. NEVER consider the game to be ‘Four turns of swapping firepower than a turn to seize the objectives.’ You obviously don’t need to be holding any objectives on turns 1-4. It’s probably not vital on turn five. But you still have to keep an eye on where the objectives are in relation to your army if you want to get anywhere. Another fun tactic is to target troop choices, denying chances to hold any objectives by the last turn and guaranteeing he won’t be able to get many victory points. Unfortunately this tactic requires you to ignore the bigger threats (Land Raider full of Terminators cough cough…) but it’s really effective in larger games where you have the firepower to spare.