Fighting Your Fight

Every battle ends up with one side having had the advantage in the fight. That does not mean that the winner is predetermined, it just means that a series of inputs allowed one player to have the upper hand. How they exploited that advantage or how they maintained it is another mater entirely. Today I want to go over a number of reasons that a player can gain an advantage.

So lets get some simple ones out of the way. The following advantages you have no control over (or at least shouldn't):

• Mission/deployment selection
• Terrain
• Luck
• Opponents army list
• Opponents tactics

Next are pretty obvious ones:

• Your tactics - I'm sure that the netz are ablaze with info on the best tactics. Obviously more than I can fit into a bullet point. Me I just try not to fuck myself with stoopid tactics cause me not so smart sometimez.
  
• Your army list - This is what I love most about the game. You have to have a good army list if you plan on winning. This means you have to follow the fundamentals: lots of troops, use units that compliment your weaknesses, have a solution to compete in every type of mission, etc. This is an area that is very personal to the army, but again is more detail than I can go into in a bullet point.

So the final two are what I would like to discuss most and what I think are the most important in a battle:

• Your tactics vs. your opponents tactics
• Your army list vs. your opponents army list

These are really the fundamentals of the actual game play, and goes beyond just the simple planning. Its not just how you plan on winning the game, its how you plan on winning the game after you see what your opponent is gonna do. Its not just how good of a list it is but how well it stacks up to your opponents list. A good example is no matter how great your list is, if it is fundamentally weak against marines every time you fight marines you are gonna be at a disadvantage (and you may see more than one marine army in a tournament....)

The good news is the way to get an advantage in these match ups is to always, always "fight your fight." What this means is that your army list and your tactics are always designed to play a game the way you want to play it and that is how it wins. So following along that track here is some advice for achieving that.

Be balanced, or be REALLY good at something - A balanced list is key if you want to take all comers. A more flexible and balanced list will enable you to modify your tactics after you see what your opponent is going to do. The flip side to this is be the best at what you are gonna do. Usually this means a very shooty or a very assaulty army, but it may be a huge hoard army that is gonna swallow an opponent. What ever it is make sure you are the best, or intrinsically have a good fallback plan (OK maybe my Space Wolf assault force is not gonna beat 100 genestealers..... OK boys its back to bolters). This is really how you define "your fight" and sets you up for the advantage you expect to see.

Balance your list by bringing everyone to your level - Minimize your weaknesses using your army list. If you are a very shooty army, take units that murder transports that give you more time to shoot at them. If you are assaulty, take lots of strong transports that make sure your not legging it. If you are a balanced force, maximize your unit count so you have a lot left over after an attrition war. This is when you start to see your advantage take place during game play (e.g. you just unloaded your assaulty army in front of your opponent, your opponent is on the other side of the table and you have superior firepower, you have the numerical advantage after an attrition fight).

Bring a game changer - This is one of the more overlooked aspects of the game. Bring something that is gonna fundamentally change the way your opponent has to play. Put it out front and make sure he has to deal with it. What you are doing is putting you opponent on the back foot as they try to deal with this unstoppable Juggernaut, and all the while you are letting the rest of your army do what it does best (whatever that may be). This is where you are gonna maximise your advantages, either you break your opponents back with these or they have spent so much time dealing with these (or running away from them) that you are in a position to win the game. I will go into some ideas for these in a later post.

Find your tactical groove and stick to it (Unless you are gonna lose) - I played an assaulty space wolf force for a long time that deployed, moved, and assaulted the same way every game. It was a very feared, and was a great example of being REALLY good at something. It took awhile to get the list and the tactics in line but once they were, I wasn't afraid to use it over and over again. Remember that if you don't have a plan that has a good probability of winning when you show up than you are doing something wrong (even if your plan is to formulate your plan after you see your opponents, i.e. a balanced list). The only time you should change is when you see you are obviously outmatched (see 100 genestealers above), but if you find yourself doing that to much than you need to rethink your army list. This is how you make your advantages repeatable.

Rix