Ahh. I love the smell of fresh tournaments in the morning.
Sandwyrm and I have been gearing up for a tourney put on by a local gaming club, Fireteam Nova. I know Chambers has been getting ready for traveling to, and playing in Urbana on the same day, June13th.
It's a bit nerve wracking to try to figure out how to put together a perfect 'all-comers' list. one that can handle all-infantry orks and IG, as well as not too do badly against Mech IG, and Marines with 10TH/SS termies and 3 Land Raiders. That's not even getting into the psyker armies with Eldrad in a Grav tank, or Dual flying lash Chaos Princes.
so far there are 30 people signed up for Saturday's tourney. It's a lot of people, and a lot of variety in forces. I hate to say it, but the Metagame might be as daunting as the play itself. I'm expecting to see some fairly unbalanced lists. They always throw a wrench in the best laid plans.
so how do I deal with it?
I go for lists that can take a lot of types of opponents.
- long range shooty
- mech infantry
- assault elite
- assault horde
- armor company
You can take a hybrid list, mixing a few of the types of forces. Many commanders will tell you you need pure, single strain forces to overwhelm your opponents. all assault Blood angels, and gunline guard are good examples of two pure style lists.
pure style forces can overwhelm an opponents ability to deal with a particular aspect of your army. They can be easier to play due to a single theme for the entire force. All out assault or all out shoot. These lists can easily fall flat when met with a counter force, or a well balanced force that can cope with the saturated threat category.
An all assault force can have a bit of a problem running into the face of Demolisher and plasma fire to the point that it's not too scary by the time it gets there on turn 2 to eat some sacrificial squads, and get shot up again on turn 3.
Likewise, IG gunlines can be hampered by maneuverability and infiltrating assaults.
Warhammer 40K can be a sort of rock-paper-scissors game with single tactic forces.
I may take time to write something about using mixed element forces. In the future. They can be difficult to master. Amost as much as trying to create a force that pushes the envelope in the armor, or horde directions, and still tries to be able to take out everyone.
Hope that you have fun at the tournament! It's not always rock / paper / scissors as a good set up combined with going first or second can really influence the outcome in a number of ways. Good luck mate!
ReplyDeleteI agree fully. I had started to write this Monday, and then found Jwolf over at BoLS had done it again! He wrote an article similar to what I had intended to write, and beat me to the presses. (the last time I was going to write about gunlines, when he did a writeup on gunline Marines)
ReplyDeleteI actually don't run single tactic lists. I run a blend. I started to write about my theory and tactics, then in the proofread realized I was too tired when I was writing, and it sounded like rubbish. So I scrapped the last section, and decided to save that for another post.
I think an effective all-comers list comes down to a couple of principles. Redundancy and Flexibility.
ReplyDeleteRedundancy means that I'm not relying on just one unit to get something important done. They could whiff a die role, or get killed by something unexpected. But 2 or more units with that same role will usually get the job done.
Flexibility means taking units that do more than one roll well. The Russ, for instance, is tops at killing heavy infantry. But with a hull lascannon, it's also very respectable at AT.