[Tactics] What's Yours Is Mine, What's Ours Is Also Mine
It seems so simple, when you think about it, or read about it on other and infinitely more popular websites.
Warhammer 40,000 has been, for some years now*, a game about objectives: points on the battlefield which must be controlled in order to win.
At its most basic, in Only War, this is a matter of holding one, or two, or three objectives: if both sides hold two for the duration a draw is certain. Therefore, an army needs the capacity to secure three objectives: Mine (the one nearest and ideally in my deployment zone), Ours (one in the middle that we'll be brawling over) and Yours (one in your deployment zone that you'll be relying on to underpin your score, and therefore represents the biggest swing in scoring terms).
When I think about my Chaos Space Marines in this context, things fall into place nicely and I start to understand why this army won its first engagement under tenth edition. My objective is easily managed, since Chaos Space Marines are blessed with a datasheet for ten gormless objective-holding wounds at 55 points a pop, or "Cultists." Our objectives are the responsibility of the Helbrute, Chosen plus Chaos Lord and melee Cultists. Your objective, meanwhile, is reached out and touched by the swarm of deep striking Raptors units I have available, any of which can also muck into the brawl over Our objective should that be necessary.
The only unit that doesn't have a clear job to do in this context is the big blob of boltgun Legionaries with the Sorcerer, who are geared out to hold My objective but whose unit abilities make them better suited for dealing with Ours. This is part of why I've picked up a set of the older Start Collecting ones - that gives me a squad of five with chainswords and two heavy close combat weapons, and a second squad of five with a plasma gun and a model who can very easily be given a Balefire Tome. (The autocannon will be sitting out in favour of a spare body from the Blackstone Fortress duo.) That first squad gets a Master of Executions and joins in the scrap for Our objective, the second retains the Sorcerer and can either drop back to My objective or support the push on Ours.
When I think about my Necrons, though, I now grasp more fully what went wrong in their first outing. The previous organisation of forces left me without anything cheap and cheerful to hold My objective - that's what led me to commit 300 points of Overlord and Warriors to the job, resources that should have been in the middle contesting Our objectives. Likewise, I didn't really have anything to push onto Your objective - the Tomb Blades and Scarabs are fast but too fragile to rush a deployment zone, and everything else is too dang'd slow. The Immortals did their job of wrangling one of Our objectives at first but were overwhelmed when they had to push for the other, because everything else was either dead or misplaced.
More or less the same models (with one notable exception) can be realigned, though, into a configuration which allows more nuanced deployment and movement. Thus:
Kadavah Dynasty (1000 points)
Necrons
Incursion
Awakened Dynasty
CHARACTERS
Overlord (105 points)
• Warlord
• 1x Resurrection Orb
1x Voidscythe
• Enhancement: Veil of Darkness
Royal Warden (40 points)
Royal Warden (40 points)
BATTLELINE
Immortals (140 points)
• 10x Immortal
• 10x Gauss blaster
Necron Warriors (110 points)
• 10x Necron Warrior
• 10x Gauss flayer
Necron Warriors (110 points)
• 10x Necron Warrior
• 10x Gauss flayer
OTHER DATASHEETS
Canoptek Scarab Swarms (40 points)
• 3x Canoptek Scarab Swarm
Flayed Ones (70 points)
• 5x Flayed One
Night Scythe (145 points)
Skorpekh Destroyers (100 points)
• 3x Skorpekh Destroyer
Skorpekh Destroyers (100 points)
• 3x Skorpekh Destroyer
Exported with App Version: v1.6.0 (27), Data Version: v299
This time, the Overlord joins the Immortals and will be working to storm Our objectives, supported by the Skorpekhs, Scarabs and Flayed Ones. One Warrior unit and its Warden will be tagging My objective - still more points and resources than I'd like to commit, but 150 points as opposed to 300 is a better allocation of resources, until I get my mitts on some Deathmarks anyway. The other is going in the Night Scythe, ready to drop down and contest Your objective - and potentially be reinforced by the Immortals if the push there has serious legs, using the Veil of Darkness.
We shall have an opportunity to test this approach in ten planetary rotations...
* We can talk about the detachment of "objective" from "terrain" later,
and I promise we will: I have strong feelings about this and a sense of
where it came from, but we'll save this for when I start frothing about
Codex: Cityfight, the best supplement 40K ever had.
I'm not sure I'd want to commit any less than 150 points on rear echelon security myself. The trouble I have with the 'token minimum unit sitting on the divot to make the number go up' concept is that much like my 'token resource mining operation in the far corner of the map' system in RTS video games it relies a lot on the token unit not being bothered in the first place. If there's a serious push against Your Objective, the token holding element isn't really going to be able to do too much about it.
ReplyDeleteThat's why I usually like my rear echelon defence to be a little more formidable if at all possible. I want them to be able to have at least a fighting chance of actually fending off a swarm of Raptors sent after My Objective, for instance. Or of at least tying them up long enough for me to stabilise Our Objectibe and Your Objective.
(The other side of this of course is my alternative high-aggression doctrine of "My Objective Does Not Matter, I Will Be Occupying Yours Soon Enough" where I don't leave anything at all in the backfield and effectively turn a third of the table into an irrelevant limbo-space for the other side to overcommit into, but that model is rooted in WWIII which has different objective mechanics and would probably collapse in an environment with turn-to-turn number scores)
I suspect this might be a factor in why so many of the 10th edition players around me seem to favour plonking a big monster of some kind down on their own objective, besides a general affinity for Big Shiny Newness and 10th edition generally appearing to devolve into big monsters raining death on ants at the higher points levels that seem to be in vogue among the local 10th edition groups.
But I digress. I am a little curious about the disappearance of the Tomb Blades from the revised list. Sure they may not have made the biggest contribution to the last game, but they did carry the most sophisticated reconnaissance and surveillance equipment in the army, and I wonder if the aerial surveillance of the Night Scythe is enough to make up for it given the army's stated purpose of exploring and studying what has become of the Maledictus Sector.
Without that, and with the more occupation focused replacement of air-landing troops, this seems like a dangerous case of mission creep that has serious potential to entangle the Kadavah Dynasty in a costly and dangerous military quagmire.
I agree that it's useful to have more than one unit able to pop back to My objective and reinforce, should the token defence blobule located on it attract unwelcome attention. In some respects it's an issue of Incursion gameplay: the 1000 point limit only stretches to full objective handling capacity if you happen to have an affordable token unit that has a useful rule for interacting with home objectives. (I could use 5 Immortals, but they're at their best pushing against Our or Your objectives - in much the same way as my bolter Legionaries, their special rules ultimately create an opportunity cost that constrains the use of the unit in play. It's a notable flaw in the design of tenth edition.)
ReplyDeleteYour point about mechanics is of interest. 40K's shift from board-state mission-accomplished on-off victory conditions to progressive points scoring has been going on for a while now, of course - I was there for the start of the trend with sixth edition's missions (I won't dignify them with the name 'scenario') - but the pure form expressed by Only War is a bit different from the version I'm used to. In my day scoring was modulated by consistent Linebreaker and Slay the Warlord and First Blood points that introduced interest in something other than fondling divots. I really need to give the Leviathan mission cards a try - it may be that in choosing Fixed Objectives I can give myself something that's closer to what I'm used to.
(Also, I've just remembered that the second edition battle reports used to be scored progressively, to account for the various different conditions in play and things like Guerilla War which had to be counted that way to be manageable...)
With regard to the Monstrosities on My Objective, Scouring Your Pitiful Little Mans Like Insects phenomenon, I can attribute this to a greater luxury of points at the tournament-standard Strike Force tier of play. When you only have 1000 points to spend, 150 feels like a lot; when you have 2000, 300 buys you something hefty (a couple of War Dogs, a Forgefiend and maybe some Havocs, two whole Triarch Stalkers...)
Mission creep, you say? Almost as if some sort of Narrative is being Forged? As if the shift to Occupation Protocol represents a movement in a direction?