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People are going to think I'm crazy. What? But only troops are scoring right? Here's the thing:
It is much easier to contest than it is to score. I see other people maxing out on troop choices, but still, tactical squads dont' have the firepower of devestators, guardians are so so compared to the rest of the eldar army, etc etc. People are maxing on troops so they have more scoring choices, but they're losing games because their army has no teeth. While I agree that you must have more than minimum troops, I think it's terrible army design to max out on troops and then try to hold every objective with 1 troop choice, or to surround 1 objective with every single troop choice. All those designs are too easy to counter.

A balanced approach is still the best approach. At least 2 of your troop choices should be resilient ones with large squad numbers, but you need the firepower to stop enemy units trying to contest. For instance, against plague marines, considered one of the better troop choices in this edition, it is a waste of time trying to kill them. If they are on their objective out of range, instead of wasting firepower trying to kill plague marines, ignore them. If he moves the plague marines he won't be on the objective. Just contest on the last turn with anything and you've essentially taken the plague marines out of the fight. All 200+ points spent on the plague marines were wasted on troops that meant nothing. An army maxed on plague marines is woefully easy to defeat because of this trick. Lastly, maxing on troops = get your ass whupped in kill points against an army that maxed on killy stuff.

In general:
1. It is easier to hold 1 or 2 objectives vs. 3 or 4. You don't need that many troops to hold one objective.
2. Anything can contest, so if you have to deal with troop choices that are tough, ignoring plus contesting is the way to go.
3. It is an easier strategy to hold 1 objective and contest the other than it is to take all objectives or other objectives.
4. Destructive mobile firepower is necessary. If you cannot destroy fast elements of the enemy's army, you will lose or draw many games because of the fast elements. Nothing like a tank shock to make you lose.

You make an excellent analysis.

I think many beginning players should be forced to read this.

Most vets well if they haven't figured this part out yet...deserve what they get.

I agree with Stelek, nicely done.

I have certainly learned about the power of Plague Marines on an objective now, so just contesting against them is the way to go.

Cheers

Apone

Until they kill 3-4 of your troop squads and you can no longer win. Not everyone has something to zip onto the objective and even then you need to already be going last.

You can't win against some armies if you have 4 troops squads. Objective mission or not.

Everyone does indeed have something to zip around, and who said you need to go last? Who knows when 'last' is?

If you know, tell me the dice reading trick please. Is it something Old Ben can teach me?

Also tournaments are not decided by the player with the most wins but the player with the most massacres. Having a margin of victory forces you to be proactive, as does having Random game length. Even if you are going last you might not have a turn 6. If you hold one objective and contest another that would probably be along the lines of a minor win. Get 5 of those and you might be 5th place.

I'm just curious to what you mean by contest then. Maybe I'm just thinking of small objectives which are more common than large objectives(quarters, deployment zones.. and even DZ are usually 24 inches from where you started). Do you mean walk up and stand there taking the shots and blows? Why not just kill the other guy then and use your few troops to score? Why are you even thinking about spending the game trying to tie someone on everything but one objective?

really good points but what about troop choices that are good
i play a stealer heavy nids list and a nurgle chaos army so i would take lots of troops even if elites and stuff could score
but i get what you saying about how maxing out on fire warriors or gaunts ect. ect is not the best idea
people who do that have been getting crushed

@WC_Brian, I am not sure how RTT's are gonna be scored in 5th. I am not sure that massacres will be a factor anymore. I think it may move to more simple W/L/D. i hope I am wrong though.

Until they kill 3-4 of your troop squads and you can no longer win. Not everyone has something to zip onto the objective and even then you need to already be going last.

1. If you maxed on troops, your killing power and range suck.
2. Every single model, be it vehicle, heavy suppport, fast, whatever, can contest. 1 measly tomb spider can contest.
3. If you split your army amongst 2-3 objectives and every single troop of mine is holding 1, I will win every game, hands down. Why? Because my elites, fast and heavy's are much better than basic troops.

You need to kill every single last troop to make the troop choice not score. However, if I have a unit contesting, like terminators, you need to kill every last one of my models in that unit to stop it from contesting

As for tournaments, there are no minor wins or major wins. Extra points are decided by secondary objectives, ala hard boyz. You know ahead of time what those are. Adjust your strategies accordingly.

WC_Brian, reread my example about dealing with plague marines. There are multiple ways to contest something. There is only one way to score.

Let me give an example, so this might make more sense. Let's say my opponent maxed out on plague marines and rhinos. I take a couple of chaos marine squads and take devestators left right and center, a terminator unit, and a couple of rhinos. Let me assume there are only two objectives on the board. To win, I simply need more objectives than my opponent. My opponent's strategy is to try to take my objective while holding his own. My strategy is to completely ignore the plague marines on his objective and only kill the things coming after mine. Since I have few troops, I have more destructive firepower than he does. Secondly, since he has divided his force into two, one holding one objective and other part coming after mine, he has halved his force. It is a piece of cake to destroy what's coming after my objective. On the last 2 or 3 turns, I send everything that is not a troop after his objective. It doesn't matter if I kill his plague marines or not. He's not killing everything I send after him.

My opponent, wising up to my strategy, changes his strategy. This time, he sends every single thing he has while keeping one plague marine unit near his own objective. However, since I have destructive elites, I outmatch and outrange his troops. I have more firepower than him. Once I kill his rhinos, his plague marines are walking through a hail of fire.

My opponent changes his strategy again. This time he turtles on his own objective. Once again, after I kill all the rhinos, I send my force out on the last 2-3 turns. He can have plague marines on the objective. One terminator there and I contest the objective. I don't need to kill every last one of his models to win, but now he has to kill every last one of mine I'm attacking him with.

Once again, I am not saying go minimum troops. If you take two 5 man squads you'll run into a lot of trouble. I'm saying don't max on troops. A balanced approach is the way to go, and the above is why. Just to make the analogy more clear, if you have 1000 troops on one objective and I'm contesting with 1 rhino, but I only have 1 model holding 1 objective I still win.

scuddman wrote:Until they kill 3-4 of your troop squads and you can no longer win. Not everyone has something to zip onto the objective and even then you need to already be going last.

1. If you maxed on troops, your killing power and range suck.
2. Every single model, be it vehicle, heavy suppport, fast, whatever, can contest. 1 measly tomb spider can contest.
3. If you split your army amongst 2-3 objectives and every single troop of mine is holding 1, I will win every game, hands down. Why? Because my elites, fast and heavy's are much better than basic troops.

You need to kill every single last troop to make the troop choice not score. However, if I have a unit contesting, like terminators, you need to kill every last one of my models in that unit to stop it from contesting

As for tournaments, there are no minor wins or major wins. Extra points are decided by secondary objectives, ala hard boyz. You know ahead of time what those are. Adjust your strategies accordingly.

WC_Brian, reread my example about dealing with plague marines. There are multiple ways to contest something. There is only one way to score.

Exactly.

Well put, by the way.

I agree BUT there is one thing I see lacking in the analysis...

To contest or claim and objective your unit must be within 3" of the marker. If the enemy masses troops on the marker(s) you'll literally have to wipe them out to be able to get close enough to contest. While the enemy only needs one model left within 3" to claim it.

I think the above tactics to counter troop heavy lists work best if you go second or are heavy in assault capable units. Thus allowing your units to make the final maneuvers and attacks to get a scoring unit off the marker or to contest it.

Or if you just land a tank in the middle of everything, you're still able to contest it, assuming it hasn't been powerfisted to the warp.

And now with template/blast weapons getting a boost, you might want to be careful about castling your troops all together. I'm thinking submunition rounds, plasma cannons, heavy flamers, flamers, frag missiles, mortars etc. I don't care if you have a 3+ save, with 20 wounds on the squad, you're going down.

Lastly, maxing on troops = get your ass whupped in kill points against an army that maxed on killy stuff.

Maybe for marines and eldar. I think I can win with 6 mounted sister units just fine. It has the usually killing power the army usual has. I forfiet exorcists, but I've been moving away from them anyway.

6 mounted sister units, 1 mounted cannoness I think is pretty doable.

It really is a tough trade-off for Sisters, without rhino's objectives are hard to get to. With rhino's you give away easy kP's. I think you are right though, the mobility outweighs the KP's.

Darrian13 wrote:It really is a tough trade-off for Sisters, without rhino's objectives are hard to get to. With rhino's you give away easy kP's. I think you are right though, the mobility outweighs the KP's.

With sisters, mobility is king. Getting to where you want, when you want is better than the 58 x 6= 348 KP's for the troop rhinos.

No.

Kp's work differently than BP's. 1 squad = 1 KP. 1 rhino= 1 KP. All units are worth one KP per unit, whether it be a 400 point termie squad or the 150 point sisters squad or their 50 point rhino. Each is worth 1 KP. By adding a rhino to your sisters squad you have doubled your kill points.

Also beware assaults. If you've got 5 guys within 3" and 5 guys out and I assault along that side, you'll pile out of range of the objective and now it's nobody's and I have mine. Doesn't have to be a tank driving onto the objective.

imho there are 2 types of armies:troop-spammers and troop-hunters.

troop-spammers are the ones with great troops choices that spam these so they can have great objective-grabbing ability.such armies: Black Templars, Necrons, pretty much all lists that spammed troops even in 4th.

troop-hunters are armies that kill enemy troops, then send one unit in the last rounds to claim the objective.
these are mostly ultra-firepower armies:IG, Tau, some Eldar etc.

warriors suck in 5th. i take 20 max.

Pyriel wrote:imho there are 2 types of armies:troop-spammers and troop-hunters.

troop-spammers are the ones with great troops choices that spam these so they can have great objective-grabbing ability.such armies: Black Templars, Necrons, pretty much all lists that spammed troops even in 4th.

troop-hunters are armies that kill enemy troops, then send one unit in the last rounds to claim the objective.
these are mostly ultra-firepower armies:IG, Tau, some Eldar etc.

Let me add 'Nidzilla w/ Scuttling Genestealers' to the 'troop-hunters' list if I may!

It's not so much a balanced approach that's needed as an approach that understands the nature of the list, and doesn't just take 6 troops for the sake of taking 6 troops.

Some lists have Troops you wouldn't want to take 6 of. Necrons for example. Others have Troops that are great, like Ork Boyz.

Even then you might not want to take 6, but you certainly can think aboot it more if it plays into your overall strategy.

It still pays to try to think of ways to get 6 Troops choices oot of a list. It's not something to break a list over, but if you used to have 4, and breaking them up into 6 wouldn't ruin the concept, it's well worth doing.

It's worth asking, how many Troops choices are the minimum? Clearly two, by the rules, but is it safe to assume that you'd need at lest three or four to be reasonably competitive in objective based games?

Right now, I would not make a list unless it had, at least 4 troop choices in it.

I think 3 is okay if you have combat squads as an option. One mission has two objectives. One mission has 3-5 objectives. One mission is kill points. You can do the two objective mission just fine with 2 troop choices, but having at least 3 is helpful for the other one.

It depends on the troop. I'd say minimum is 3. You can get away with less if you have more mobile troops, but your average trooper's ranged attacks are move or fire.

On a side note about my assertion:
Sisters of battle is an exception. All the other units are just variations of basic sisters and aren't any more killy than normal sob's. In that case, yes, there is no reason not to max out on troops. Orcs is another one. The other units aren't incredibly better compared to basic orc squads.

All the other units are just variations of basic sisters and aren't any more killy than normal sob's. In that case, yes, there is no reason not to max out on troops.

Meh, somewhat. There are a couple squads that are more killy, mainly Retributors and Dominions, and it may be worth taking them if the lists needs it.

Retributors with HBolters are a great value, especially under the new rules.

Dominions with Meltaguns in an Immolator are one of the more foolproof antitank options in the list, again especially in 5e.

Still, I generally agree, you can toss some Combi-weapons in there to get the Melta shots, but when it comes down to it, those other options are significantly more useful for certain tasks.

For Orks, I'd agree, you can't beat Boyz point for point, and there's little in the Ork list to compete with them (Stormboyz are the only example I can think of).

scuddman wrote:
As for tournaments, there are no minor wins or major wins. Extra points are decided by secondary objectives, ala hard boyz. You know ahead of time what those are. Adjust your strategies accordingly.

Huh, what? I'm always thinking in terms of major events where a margin of victory is utilized. Are you talking about RTTs?

@Scuddman - You didn't specify which units you were talking about, I agree that an army of maxed Guants of Firewarriors doesn't sound very good.

I find your scenario you described to be very limited and optimistic. Not only is that an objective many will have trouble with but you seem to assume that you will always be able to contest their objective or that you will always shoot them down before they get to you. What is even the point of theorizing when from the start you assume the opposing list cannot beat you?

It's a new edition. There are no victory points for this edition. If you want an idea of how they're going to do scoring, look at how some of the hard boyz 40k scenariors are scored.
Let's say the golden ticket from the second round. You get a bonus point for moving the ticket to your deployment zone, another point if your opponent never touched the ticket, and another point if your HQ is next to it at the end of the game.

Like I said, adjust your strategies accordingly. It's going to vary every tournament you go to.

I think the Kill Points thing was thrown in there so that armies that are packed with troop units are not the be-all and end-all. I personally would have 2 troop units for every other unit I field in a conventional army set-up, but as a Guard player my only real choice is 100+ guardsmen anyway, so I get my firepower from heavy weapons teams and Basilisk tanks. I literately have no choice but to lose at kill points anyway, so I don't bother.