I love it when a plan comes together

Over the last few weeks I've been trying to hone my game and get a grasp of some of the finer points of 40k. I've been doing lots of reading and testing to try to come up with some standard formations that I can deploy on the fly based on what I'm up against. I haven't come up with a plan of attack for every situation, but here is what I've come up with so far.

These formations are designed to work with my 2000 point list for Ahriman's Renegades. Now my list has some decent firepower at range with 5 twin-linked lascannons, 3 battle cannons, and 3 havoc launchers. I also can use 3 bolts of change from 24" so as enemies approach I've got some nice killing power also. My general plan is to milk my range attacks and soften up the opponent. I know versus some of the new armies like IG and wolves I will still be at a disadvantage, but its the best I can do with my Thousand Sons theme :)

Formation #1 - Phalanx

Usage - Spearhead deployment missions.

There are two different ways to use this formation with my army. First, before you decide how you will line up you must look at what you're up against. The main thing to look out for when you are a castle up and fire kind of army imo is outflankers toting melta. They can really rain on your parade.

If the enemy DOES have and outflanking element or you suspect that they will be reserving a good amount of their forces I deploy like this.

Here you can see the object is to stay away from the table edges to create the maximum amount of distance between you and enemy outflankers. You will also want to deploy your objectives accordingly if this is your plan by trying to make sure that at least half of them are located somewhere near the middle of the board.

You move your forces into the center of the board and prepare to receive the enemy all the while firing off the long range shots to take out any enemies down range. When the outflankers to arrive you have the troops engage them supported by the defilers.

The Dreadnoughts press into the enemy mid-field and deployment zone if you can, they are basically a distraction for the enemy and hopefully they can even manage to knock out some pesky reserve units.

The second way to use this formation is if the enemy is not going to be fielding outflanking troops. You would deploy your forces like this and attempt to move up your flank keeping your main force together and away from the enemy.

The goal here is to change the flow of the game. Normally you will be fighting along the short table edge (48"). At this range pretty much all of the enemies weapons will easily be in range. When you move your fire base up the flank of the board what you're doing is changing the flow of the game to the long table edge. This army has lots of long range weapons that can reach out and touch the enemy from 72". So use it to your advantage. You should be getting off a good 2 to 3 turns of shooting before they get near you, then you can unload your troops and terminators to meet the assaulting forces. Backed up by defilers, even Thousand Sons are nasty in combat.

The other nice thing about this is now your foe has to basically redeploy his entire force because in just one simple turn of moving you've just shut down his entire right flank as they are very far away from you. You will create a traffic jam if he has lots of vehicles and could even land some side armor shots if you're really lucky.

The one weakness of this is if your opponent reserves a lot of his forces. They will be coming out right ontop of you. Now, this may not be a bad thing because you will have your forces all in one block. You should still be able to bring a great deal of hurt on them. But it is a risk.

I will be looking at some other formation types in the future. These are meant to help me with my game. I'm finding that when I am going into matches sometimes I do poorly because of bad deployment. This is meant to give me a plan of action as the battle begins so that I can more clearly direct my forces. I really need this with my overpriced and under performing units. I've found the only real way to get them to be effective is to have them work together as best they can.

Do you guys have a plan of action coming into the game? Or you a fly by the seat of your pants kinda player? Let me know your tactics and strategies!

Learning the Necron Tactica

Of late I've been trying to really learn my army (the necrons) and get better with them. I bought Fritz's pdf how to win with necrons and I'd have to say it helped me alot. I already knew alot of what was in the pdf but it helped to have it reinforced. For instance I know to keep my units together that way if one unit is wiped out a unit nearby will pick up the guys who died with we'll be back; but sometimes I end up spreading my units out too much. I think personally I've come a long way as a player but I still have alot to learn as do we all.

The One thing that I really need to work on is castling up, it's esential to the necron victory. I've tried to play as many of the Space marine players do esentially barring down on my opponent, it doesn't work for Necrons.  The main thing is you need to have your oppenent come to you. Sometimes your oppent will not come to you and they will sit in their corner and drop templates and las shots into your army. In this case bring the heat, turbo boost that destroyer lord with scarab escort right where your enemy MUST deal with them and while your at it deepstrike your monolith in the middle of their ranks. Of course this all ends up being a judgment call. I'm certianly not going to deepstrike my monolith into assualt range of Moros's defilers or Brother C's venerable dreadnouight, Actually I might try it once just to see what happens maybe I'll get lucky.

I just learned recently that the C'tan ignore all saves which makes a huge difference in the way that I play them  and I also learned how the monolith portal works. The Portal says it works like disembarking from a transport so the unit I teleport can't have moved and if I move the monolith I can't move the unit I teleport.

Lastly I haven't been able to truly appreciate how awesome some of the Necron fear tactics are. The nightmare shroud is EPIC in my last game I forced two marine squads to run off the board with it and another squad was running when the game ended. Normally I'll play either Moros, Brother C, or the Prophet all of whom run fearless heavy armies but against normal space marines and blood angels you can use all your fear evoking goodies.

Like I said at the begging of this post I've got a long way to go but I'm getting better and showing a lot of people in our local area that Necrons are still a viable army. All said Moros and I have discussed that Necrons are really easy to be ok with because they are forgiving with their high armour, toughness and the We'll be back rule. The problem is Necrons are difficult to master, as opposed to aggressive/ assualty armies, and I've seen the other players in my group quickly pass me in terms of skill with their armies and now I'm closing the gap on them. Eventually we all reach a plateau in terms of skill hopefully mine is a long way off.

July 40k Day - Thousand Sons List

Hey all, Moros here.

I've been mulling over my lists and after reading up on some fine articles in the last few weeks and having some good discussions with Brother C. I've decided to change up my list a bit. I am going for a more offensive and aggressive style of play with my Thousand Sons themed army.

With the cost of my troops being as high as it is, I feel like the best thing to do is limit myself to 2 troop choices and put more points in my heavy hitters. The resilience of my thousand sons should help them survive the game, but it is a risky venture. I feel like the goal of this list is to table my enemy as fast as possible.

It is fashioned as an all comers list, I haven't had a ton of practice with this list, but I should be getting some games in soon so I will let you know how it goes!

Ahriman's Renegades - 2000 points

HQ -
Ahriman - 250

Troops -
7x Thousand Sons - 296
+ Aspiring Sorcerer with Warptime or Bolt of Change
+ Rhino with Havoc Launcher

7x Thousand Sons - 296
+ Aspiring Sorcerer with Warptime or Bolt of Change
+ Rhino with Havoc Launcher

Elites -
5x Terminators -225
+Reaper Autocannon
+Chainfist
+Icon of Tzeentch

5x Terminators -225
+Reaper Autocannon
+Chainfist
+Icon of Tzeentch

6 Possessed - 186
+Icon of Khorne

Heavy Support-
Defiler - 150

Defiler - 150

Land Raider - 220

Total = 1998

The idea here is that the 2 thousand sons fellowships will hold the base of fire with the Defilers. The defilers will rain down battle cannon rounds forcing the enemy to react to them. The thousand sons can give them cover and anti-infantry support. I will probably run with bolt of change on the sorcerers so they can provide some ranged AV support as well.

With the fire base holding strong the land raiding packed with the possessed and Ahriman can punch the enemy in the face fast and hard. The terminators will deep strike within 6" of Ahriman's personal Icon and deliver a powerful punch into the enemy lines.

It should be difficult for my opponent to deal with both the offensive bomb and the defiler cannons in the backfield. I am hoping that this will throw off their game plan and force them to focus on just one of the threats so that I am free to hit them as I will.

Obviously since I am playing a Tzeentch army and I am taking Ahrmian I am nerfing myself. I don't see this as a competitive list by any means. But I really want to stick with the theme and I think this might be as competitive as a Tzeentch list can get. Thoughts are welcome!

Thousand Sons Thoughts

So I've tried again and again, list after list to make a decently powerful Thousand Sons/Tzeentch themed list. They have some great back story and are my favorite looking of all the chaos marines.

I'm no pro player by any means, but I have noticed some things over the past couple matches. I've been trying to figure out the strengths and weaknesses of the Thousand Sons and how to best deploy them.

They have some decent strengths. The 4+ invulnerable save is awesome, and makes them pretty hard to kill even in melee. It makes them pretty resilient against high power weapons and blast templates. There is a 50% chance of doing nothing to them, with any weapon. So they are really good at absorbing those powerful hits that would normally crush vanilla marines.

They have the AP 3 bolter which is good, but, really only shines against armies with good armor (basically space marines). But, you can still just jump in cover, so its not that a huge of an advantage all around. It's still a nice weapon, I'll give them that.

They also have the double edged sword of slow and purposeful and relentless. I love relentless, its amazing being able to move, rapid fire, then assault to deny your enemy the extra attacks. Or move and then shoot bolters 24" and then assault. But, your movements are very dependent on dice rolls which I don't like. A Rhino can definitely help this out however they go down pretty easily.

Then you have the Aspiring Sorcerer. Which is an amazing unit. Very versitile. He can be a deadly melee opponent with warptime, assassinating independent characters and monstrous creatures with his force weapon. He also can't be targeted in melee and taken out because he isn't an independent character. He can also be given the wind of chaos power and really take it to hordes. But the big drawback with this guy is he is SUPER expensive and you must take them.

The Thousand Sons themselves aren't very cheap, at 23 points a model they add up fast for a troop choice. They are the same price as plague marines, but Tsons really can't melee aswell as PMs.

The best way to take out Thousand Sons is just with masses of small arms fire. Their 3+ armor save is the same as a normal marine, so they go down just as fast. This has always been the thing that makes Thousand Sons a so so choice. Your enemy can just force you to keep rolling and eventually you will fail.

So taking this all into consideration I've basically summed it up to this. Thousand Sons are one the most resilient troops in the game vs high power weaponry and blast templates and I want to take advantage of this. Their weakness is small arms fire and masses of non-power weapon melee attacks against them. So why not just make a huge squad of them? you can take up to 19 of them and the Sorcerer.

Now, a large squad would do 2 things. First of all, it would make so you could have more models of them on the field without having to shell out an arm and a leg for a blasted Sorcerer on every 8 models or so. You could essentially have 2 squads of thousand sons (9+9) and only pay for 1 Sorcerer. This would allow them to absorb a HUGE amount of small arms fire. I mean, each one that dies would have to fail a 3+ armor save. I'm probably wrong but that's near 4 shots on average for each guy. So something like 72 shots to take them out. That's a lot considering they can shoot back and have a better time than their foes because of the AP 3, plus a rapid fire from 18 bolters is gonna be painful.

Now, the downside to this idea is obviously mobility. Tsons are gonna be slow, and a large squad is gonna attract a lot of attention. For this reason I use a squad like this as the center of my force. With the 4+ invlun save, they are like a huge wall of moving cover for your whole army. With some vindicator or defiler backup that is a nice firebase.

I am gonna try to run this in my new list and let you know how it works out. Its a bit unconventional, but it might just be something that works for the Tsons.

Warbiker mob!

Hey all! Here is my first attempt at an Ork list! WAAAAAAGHHHh! My thinking with this list is that Ork bikers are awesome! So the more the merrier! The bikerz charge in taking out all they can and absorbing as many hits as they can. The trucks and battle wagon follow up behind them and finish anything off that is left.

The tankbustas are in the battlewagon for anti-vehicle duty. Power Klaws will also help with vehicles.

I think it is a pretty decent list, but then again I am no ork player. I am doing this to help out the Prophet at the club. Gotta get him some wins for the green tide!

If you know something about orks comments would be great!

HQ -
Wazdakka Gutsmek - (180)

Troops -
12 Boyz - (147)
+Nob
+Power Klaw
+'eavy armor
+Trukk

12 Boyz - (147)
+Nob
+Power Klaw
+'eavy armor
+Trukk

12 Boyz - (147)
+Nob
+Power Klaw
+'eavy armor
+Trukk

12 Boyz - (147)
+Nob
+Power Klaw
+'eavy armor
+Trukk

Elites -
5 Nobz - (305)
+ 5x warbikes
+ 2x Power Klaw
+ 3x Big Choppa
+ 3x Combi-Rokkit
+ 5x 'eavy armor

10 Tankbustas - (150)

Fast Attack -
10 Warbikers - (285)
+ Nob
+ Power klaw

10 Warbikers - (285)
+ Nob
+ Power klaw

Heavy Support -
BattleWagon - (200)
+killkannon
+kannon
+ 4x rokkit launchas

getting started in 40k - form some strategies

I've recently been pondering how best to help our new members. and I decided to share some of my own experiences from learning to play the game. So.. you purchased a codex and you started to create a list. aka, you picked some really cool guys you think will help you win the match. that's great, most important thing is that you should be playing the army and the units you like; Since there really is no wrong way to start an army.

Now that you have your list, schedule a match. An important thing to do when first starting out is to play matches. Lots of matches. At the club, we allow the new players to use cardboard cutouts to represent their forces for educational purposes. We do not want to turn anyone away from learning the game just because they can't drop the money for all the models right away. We are all about growing and learning as a community, focusing on the teaching side of the game, instead of merely hardcore beat downs. Club members will be more than willing to take you under their wing and play some practice matches till you get the hang of things.

Having said that, we will not go easy on you. Just because you are not playing with a fully painted, modeled army does not mean you can slouch for strategy and sound tactics. Use this as an opportunity to try out units and strategies so you aren't wasting money and time one models you won't field in the end; all along developing your skill and experience in the world of 40k.

(there will another article in the near future detailing how to start an army on a small budget)





Now, the point of all this introduction...

You need to develop strategies for your list. As a player you need to consider all the possibilities you army has and develop a few strategies to use depending what your opponent may field. Some units can outflank, infiltrate, scout, deepstrike, etc. How will those special abilities play into your decisions as the field commander. How many units do you leave in reserve? Do you leave any? Do you leave them all? These decisions are important to think about well before you take the field in a match. As Moros talked about in an article last week, the first 20 matches should be treated as teaching tools. So, I encourage all the new players to use that time wisely, have some strategies to try out, take notes on things that worked and things that failed. Always take into consideration the wrath of the dice gods when hind sight analyzing. (attached above you will find a photo of some of the sketches I used when developing the strategies for my army. I encourage everyone to do something similar. Have a game plan, execute, don't go in blindly, trial and error is the key, but simply throwing units on the field is not going to help you become a better player.

And don't be afraid to ask LOTS of questions to the more experienced players.

Tyranids Comin' at ya!

So I've recently taken it upon myself to help some of our newer members get some wins under their belts at the club. My first task was to help Agni get a new list built for his Tyranids with the new codex and all.

So I read over the codex and came up with this.

HQ - (245)
Hive Tyrant - (245)
+ Old Adversary
+ Armored Shell
+ Adrenal Glands
+ Psychic Scream
+ Paroxysm

Troops - (882)
18 Hormagaunts - (144)
+ 18x Adrenal Glands

18 Hormagaunts - (144)
+ 18x Adrenal Glands

13 Genestealers - (267)
+ Brood lord
+Scything Talons

13 Genestealers - (267)
+ Broodlord
+Scything Talons

6 Ripper Swarms - (60)

Heavy Support - (870)

Carnifex Brood - (510)
3 Carnifexes
+ 3x Adrenal Glands

Mawloc - (180)
+ Adrenal Glands

Mawloc - (180)
+ Adrenal Glands

Not sure how it will work out, But the basic idea is use the hormagaunts and rippers up front as a screen for the rest of the army. They then tie up anything they hit and the genestealers back them up with the killing blow on that unit.

The Mawlocs will strike into the back lines and go for vehicles and critical targets (like template/blast weapons). Then the Fex brood and the Tyrant smash in and finish off anything left.

I think the key is to deploy as close to the enemy as possible and keep everything semi-bunched up around the Tyrant. Not too close so the blast templates don't kill you. The goal is to overwhelm the enemy with close combat.

Comments welcome! Lets get some strategy talk going on for everybody's forces!

Necron Tactics for beginners

I've looked into just about everything on Necron tactics. I have read other people's ideas and battle strategies. Through this I have come to one conclusion. Most people are wrong. A large majority of people who think they are helping necron players with their advice are actually doing the opposite. That said I'll give a brief description of what I think is ideal in a necron army compared to the tips others give.

1. One of the main tactics I found for necron army builds is taking tons of warriors. Ok, warriors are good but you shouldn't take 5 units at full capacity. during my last game against Agni Prime my warriors were practically useless. one thing I know for certain is, keep the numbers LOW in your units of warriors. 10 is perfect but 11 to 13 warriors are ok too. In a 2000 point game you should take 4 squads of this small size. Especially in a capture and control mission, you need lots of troops units. Even if you can zoom in with your destroyers to contest, to win you need to have some points under your control.

2. Tip number two, TAKE HEAVY DESTROYERS

I've read so many negative comments on heavy destroyers, about how they are worthless. As far as I can tell these comments are wrong. especially in our gaming club armor is power and saves keep your units alive. high toughness is great but a good armor save is even better, most players know this and use it in their armies. you need a way to get past that armor. Heavy destroyers do that, and in a pinch you can run them in to contest a point. One squad will do just fine, try and protect them though. Destroyers and heavy destroyers are tough but not invincible.

3. My final tip goes for everyone non-necron players included

Don't put too much faith into any one unit. Trying to run a list based solely around an amazing super unit is a losing tactic. At best you will end up killing of one or two units with your unit. when other players see a unit like that they will light it up. If your not trying to be sneaky or you think your "super" unit can take the fire of a whole army you will be sorely disappointed. I've tried using my destroyer lord in this way and he kills things but he ends up dying too quickly. play defensively, play smart, and don't think that any one unit will win you the game. Winning will always be a matter of making the right choices. Starting with what units you take and ending with the final culmination of the game. The winner will be determined by who kept their cool and made the best choices and who took the safest risks.

hopefully I haven't ranted too much and good luck to all players in the upcoming 40k day.