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I'm a new player to 40k and I've got some tactical questions I'm hoping you older folks can answer.


Flanking. I know this is a very good thing, but I don't know why. I don't want to flank someone without knowing why I'm doing it
and what kinds of advantages it offers me to do so.

Thanks

thedarksaint wrote:I'm a new player to 40k and I've got some tactical questions I'm hoping you older folks can answer.


Flanking. I know this is a very good thing, but I don't know why. I don't want to flank someone without knowing why I'm doing it
and what kinds of advantages it offers me to do so.

Thanks

Ok, basic tactics: a good way to prevail in 40k (or other wargames) is to concentrate your forces. If you can fight 500 pts of his army with 1000 pts of yours, you will very likely obliterate his 500 pts without losing very much of your own force. Then, you can turn the remaining (say 800 pts) of your army onto the *other* 500 pts of his army - again, you'll inflict much more than you'll lose.

Flanking is a very good way to accomplish this in one of two ways:

1) Refused flank: If he's spread out, send your entire army up one flank of his army. His units on the wrong side will be out of range / have no LOS and have to move to bring their weapons to bear - by which time you should have wiped out the flank you aimed at. Obviously, this works better if you have more mobility than he does. Also, choose his flank that has more long-range weapons to be the one that you aim at - his other units' guns should be out of range.

2) Surrounding and separating: If his forces are concentrated, send a few choice quick and deadly units around one or both flanks. Aim them at his expensive and fragile units that he keeps at the back (ie send multimelta attack bikes against basilisks, etc.). He can either lose his expensive fragile stuff, OR he'll have to split up his main force and send some to deal with your flanking unit. Guess what? The rest of your army is now more concentrated against his main force. This tactic works well with deepstrikers too.

There's also the notion of "rolling a flank". Due to the way Close Combat blocks LOS, and the consolidation rules, you often only need to get a small amount of dedicated hand-to-hand specialists on the end of a flank of a static army which is poor in CC (classic example: Dark Eldar jumping on an IG gunline). The CC specialists should be able to attack a unit in their own turn, and either wipe them out + consolidate into the next unit, or stay in CC during the opponent's turn if they don't massacre. Either way, the rest of the gunline can't shoot them in the gunline's turn. Repeat next turn, chewing your way one unit at a time along the gunline. If you tried this in the center, a "spearhead", you might get swarmed by most of his army and outnumbered (even guardsmen can deal a fair bit of damage, if 40 of them charge, especially with "No Retreat" outnumbering wounds against Fearless / ATSKNF elites), whereas by attacking the flank, he can't bring as many guys to bear at once.

The spearhead can be great, and can shatter the center of a spread-out force, locking a huge CC which blocks LOS from one side to the other - but you have to make sure you dedicate enough of your own forces to hit all at once, or it can backfire. Rolling the flank is much less risky.

One final note on vehicles: many 40k vehicles have much weaker side armor than front armor. Being able to have anti-vehicular guns aiming from multiple angles, such that a vehicle's side armor is exposed to at least one, is a great way to improve your chances of popping them. See: lascannon or autocannon sentinel deepstriking.

Hope this helped!

Strangelooper more or less covered the basics. As for not letting your opponent know what's going on...there isn't really much of a way to do that. Once deployment is over it should be fairly obvious what's going on (at least to a good player). I suppose one thing you could do is deploy your slower units on one flank and your faster ones in the middle. That way the fast units can move from the middle to the proper flank to concentrate your forces. This should give your opponent less notice of what you plan on doing.

The best tactic I've learned is to always! support your units with other units. A squad on their own will most likely fail in their mission unless backed up by other forces.

Unless that what you want of course (eg fodder unit holding up enemy advance whilst you fority your lines.)

Strangelooper's covered it well. By ganging up on a flank, it's easier for units to provide mutual support.

Given that the topic's been well-covered, I think I might suggest some speculation about how this might work in light of the possible changes to Scout and Infiltrate rumoured to be part of the 5th edition.

To whit: If Scouting and Infiltrating units can enter play from the board edges, how might this affect the usual flanking tactics? Usually these tactics work because the board edge guards the units coming up it from one direction.

Flanking is funny in 40K. What was m entioned earlier is correct however I think it has more to do with the way hand to hand is in 40 k. If you charge on one side with a good assault squad, and IG or tau or somone who is slow and not good in hand to hand is lined accross the back, they are toast cause they will not be able to escape unless they run on enemy turn. It never seems to happen that way though.