Welcome to a another guest post by Togashi Shinkaze. You can catch him lurking about over at Laughter of the Thirsting Gods talking about “metas” and “fun 40k”. Worth a read!
I built the list below specifically to play at Nova. I wouldn’t really play it at any other tournament that I know of. I thought it would do well at tying any primary goal I couldn’t easily win and forcing the match to decided on the secondary or tertiary objective that favored me. To show the thought process here is a quick summary of my strategy by mission goal.
1) Table Quarters – Most VPs in quarter, scoring units always counted for full.
Well I got some expensive stuff and I could overload the center with 3 units of DCA. Controlling the center of the board is huge in Quarters because you can get into any quarter with just one move and run even if you have to take difficult. No matter how battered my DCA are after the fight they will count at full at 135, 165, and 165. Also the Ven Dreads can mosey into HtH even against a Power Fist and likely survive though even a lowly shaken result will result in them counting for half points. Any surviving Storm Ravens can boost into any quarter unless they are in a corner and even then they still have a choice of quarters.
2) Seize Ground – 5 objectives centered in each quarter and the center of the board.
The mobility/maneuverability of my army combined with lots of twin linked long range shooting to cripple their mobility and shooting meant it was really easy to play keep away. There isn’t alot that 15-23 DCA can’t cut down and it was easy to hide out of LoS on the center objective. The little 3 man squads coming out of reserves were insanely valuable for sneaking onto objectives. I could bunch up the DCA in the middle and take both of the west or east objectives and then contest other objectives with Storm Ravens once I had knocked out most of the AA fire. An interesting point to note is people have often asked me what about 6 or more Hydras? Well I don’t move flat out very often anyways. I can knock those and the Manticores out(often by reverse alpha strike from reserves) and there isn’t alot of high strength weapons left to hurt my tanks. For some reason people don’t have a lascannon in every single veteran squad.
3) Kill Points – you must have 3 or more to win, otherwise it is a tie.
This is super easy for me on a standard board. Most people want to go first, especially when it isn’t an objective mission. This is great because I don’t mind going second. I can refuse flank by putting all of my Dreads in a corner and go for the seize. Even if I don’t get it they will have to spend several turns trying to reach me and difficulty hurting my dreads with shooting due to cover and Ven reroll. If they are walking(oh, and they will be walking) they could easily end up ambushed by DCA running off an assault ramp. It isn’t that hard to take out their Heavy Support and massed long range firepower before and when my Ravens come on from reserves. If I need to reserve the Dreads the normal ones can be packaged with the Ravens so the Ravens enter with their support units. If I go first against an army that doesn’t like to play from reserves they are truly screwed because the plan was to set the Ravens up on the center line and then boost away on turn 1 just firing Lascannons at max range. The standard sort of Mech army would find itself beaten on turn 1.
This part of the plan didn’t go exactly right because I ended up winning by Seize Ground or Table Quarters in every one of the 8(out of 13) missions I managed to win. Also even if I was up on Kill Points I did lose 1 game by the ultimate tiebreaker, VP. I lost by 80.5 VP! Man, it was a great game and I’ll have some nagging doubts about how I played it for quite some time. The problem with winning by Kill Points was that almost every board was like playing in a mountain range. There would be 3 hills on the table that were a little lower than Dread high and then had a 2nd middle piece on top that was also Dread high. Those are some big ass hills! My Dreads had huge LoS issues, it was very easy to hide anything smaller than a Land Raider.
So I had a detailed and flexible game plan that was ready to exploit the mission format. I was also happy going second or first in almost all match ups. I ran into a slight problem with the size of the hills forcing me to fall back on objectives. My army was fine for that but if the tables were more of a standard sort of shooting gallery you see at almost all tournaments then I could have crushed most armies in KP. I did manage to run into one of my only bad match ups in 3 of the 13 games! That army was slower GK armies with more shooting and stealth. Lots of people were playing GK in all sorts of different ways and I doubt more than 1/3rd were the variety that gives me big problems. My other potentially bad match ups were Horde Orks and non Mech Marines but it really depended on the mission parameters. I did manage to win two of those games vs GK through luck and daring reinforcing the principles of never giving up and gambling when the situation looks grim.
The List!
- 3x Storm Raven TL MM, TL Lascannon
- 3x mix of DCA and a few Crusaders
- 2x 3 4pt Warrior Acolytes
- 5x 2xAC Psydread(2 Venerable)
- Coteaz
In the next couple of days I will write an article about how you need to tailor your list to the tournament you are going to play in. There is a quite a bit of difference between playing the rulebook missions and the Nova format, just as their is between Nova and ATC, or ATC and Wargamescon etc. I’ll look at 4 different tournaments and talk about ways to make better decisions in list design for those events.
More to come on the benefits of building for your event’s meta. -MBG
About the Author: Rob Baer
