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Ok, forgive me, how exactly are you able to only field one scoring unit with IG?

Don't forget about Dark Eldar, our troops are extremely useful. Looking at my 1500pt skimmer list, I have 900+ points of scoring units and a unit of bikes for Scouring and a Cronos for Big Guns. It was mentioned earlier that all you have to do is kill their scoring units before they kill yours. That would be a difficult feat against anything similar to what I try to run. Most of my games devolve into Purge though, regardless of mission.

I like my fire warriors. With an ethereal they can put out a lot of dakka. In fact, when I have non-vehicle stuff land behind me I usually rely on my fire warriors to kill it if I don't wipe it out by interceptor.

That said, I'm guessing one unit of outflanking kroot could be a reasonable troops choice for scoring.

This goes in my file of "interesting ideas I probably won't try".

Troops need to be both cost effective sources of damage. IA12 DKoK are great at this. 12 PPM for carapace vets with hotshot lasguns that dont take shooting leadership checks and are ws4. They provide a lot of damage for a small point cost and are reliably and tough enough to front line a push.

However, 90% of armies out there are using something other than troops to do damage. Most troops dont have the resiliency, firepower, or cost effectiveness to contribute to removing the enemy army before they are removed in turn.

This is why MSU troops win games. My favorite is 3x Windrider jetbikes and a cannon for 61 points. 5x of those are about the same cost as 2 full tactical squads. However, mine are much, much better at providing the objective capping and are probably tougher between the jink save, assault jump, difficulty of assigning enough firepower for MSU units, and have a LOT of firepower between them. 15x S6 AP5 rending shots is pretty good for 300 points, along with the 20 TL rending bolter shots.

MSU makes it multiple times as difficult to deal with your troops. Most things in this game are based around one squad doing something to only one squad, and if they do effect two its often to a lesser degree. If you direct one or two battle cannons at a marine squad, most of the time the squad is going to be left with only a few members no matter its starting size. If you had two squads, however, not only would the blast hit less, but the other squad could be on the other side of the map doing something useful as the other half of the squad is going to ground and being generally useless. Only KP, 1/6 of missions, penalize MSU.

I don't know how I feel about bringing only a single Troops choice. Bringing only 1 scoring unit means that your army was, the entire tournament, one Barrage shot away from having 0 scoring units. In tournaments scored by VPs, you actually want to have multiple objectives.

I guess I can see the argument for Marine players taking only the minimum 2 Tactical Squads, or a Tac Squad and a Scout Squad, but IG has pretty cheap scoring choices to add to things they were going to take anyway (i.e., Vendettas).

I agree with peregrine, but would take it even farther.

Firstly, as mentioned, not all missions need troops. On purge, you don't need them at all, and on big guns and scouring, non-troops also score.

Secondly, as Peregrine notes, you just need to have more objectives, not a lot more. Once again, I'd take this even further, though. I'd say that you don't even need more objectives than your opponent if you build your army to win the game on secondaries.

Because of the existence of secondary objectives, on ANY mission, you can win the game without having more objectives than your opponent. You just can't have fewer.

And that opens up a lot of possibilities. For example, you don't need to control a single objective on any game so long as you can always prevent your opponent from scoring, whether this be by applying enough firepower to kill your opponent's scoring units, or whether it's bringing durable or fast enough units to simply contest your opponent's objectives.

In this case, you can think of non-scoring fast or durable units as being just as useful as having scoring units. After all, a 10-man non-scoring terminator squad that's contesting an objective is doing just as much for your relative points totals as your opponent keeping that objective with you scoring one more.

To bring this to an abstract level, then, you have to ask yourself, what is stronger in 40k nowadays, the durability of scoring units, or the firepower of anti-scoring-unit units? Clearly, to me at least, 6th edition favors the latter than the former. If you sink all your points into killing stuff, you will have more killing power than your opponent will have the durability to resist it.

Or, to put it another way, it's more efficient to blow your opponents off of their objectives than to sink those points into defending your own.

Then when you consider the other advantages of the pro-firepower, rather than the pro-scoring. Pro-firepower means that you do better on those half of the missions that aren't REALLY objective missions to begin with (purge, will, and relic, or other missions with an odd number of objectives where you get to place first). It also means that you are going to kill off your opponent's stuff more quickly, which means he has less to kill your stuff with, a benefit that cascades down through the entire rest of the game after you make the kills.

And, of course, because you're more or less obliged to take at least a couple of scoring units, having more firepower is still better, because if you can shut down your opponent's anti-scoring-unit firepower in a giant salvo on turn 1, then you only NEED to have a single scoring unit or two, because your opponent will simply not have the means of seriously threatening them, because whatever they were going to use to threaten them is now dead.

Or, and I'm going to need to take a shower after saying this, it's like Sun Tsu said. You can defend with nothing but a line in the sand if your enemy can't attack you. In this case, if your opponent can't attack you because you killed their attacking stuff, then you can defend (or, in this case, score) with even the crappiest, flimsiest units that you spend the fewest number of points on.

So, combine objective missions that aren't really objective missions with the fact that you never need to score more objectives than your opponent does (because of secondaries), and the many benefits of just taking more killing power, and yeah, I wouldn't put much value, per se, on troops choices anymore nowadays.

Now, that all said, that doesn't mean that troops are completely pointless, it's just that you can't give them very much credit for being scoring. For example, imperial guard mechvets are still worth taking, in my opinion, because it's an AV12 vehicle that can take 3 heavy weapons and 3 BS4 melta/plasma guns. That kind of killing power means that they can still be worth taking in their own right, whether they score or not.

And there are a few other small examples I can think of, like thawn or SiTNW conscripts, because they fundamentally defeat your opponent's efforts to equalize on objectives and play for secondaries.

Otherwise, though... yeah. Not much point to troops. At least, not by means of being scoring.

My Necrons never leave home without 3 10 man squads of immortals.
There are far too many bodies for an army to take out, and the strength 5 tesla weapons are amazing against hordes.

This frees up my wraiths, barges, dlords and flyer to tank hunt and deal with other elite units that they match up well against. My troops are pretty much guarenteed to outshoot yours.

Interesting concept. I just played my Orks in an 1850 tournament and really my Nob Bikers were the MVP, and they barely qualify as troops. Meanwhile the Boyz mobs that I brought managed to not score and basically just die against cover ignoring fire from the new Tau.

See, now the funny thing is you can design a list that doesn't really concentrate on killling the enemy and still win by going after their scoring or more importantly being able to contest late game and survive a few turns.

This ties direclty into secondaries as mentioned which then become a game decider.
Secondaries are huge as said above which means giving them up is bad.

You do see a lot of lists taking cheap troops which have one job which is to score and survive through various tactics.

This most definitely means points are freed to spend on trying to make your opponent cry.

SlaveToDorkness wrote:Ok, forgive me, how exactly are you able to only field one scoring unit with IG?

Take the Armoured Battlegroup from IA:1 2nd Edition, allowing your main FoC to take Leman Russ Squadrons as Troops
Ally in Codex: Imperial Guard and take a unit of Harker vets as your min troops for the ally detachment.

Continuing on from the topic, maybe it is better if we phrase it this way:

We know that 5/6 missions are based on holding objectives.

The troops slot is in most cases the only way to get a scoring unit (The scouring and big guns never tire aside)

We know that at most, we only need 2 more objectives than our opponent to win (We have 0 secondaries, they have 3, putting aside VP - for kills warlord traits)

Knowing this, if the FoC did not require us to take any troops at all would it be worth taking troops?

It really depends on the army. I mean when I play Orks I rarely put down less thatn 3x 20boyz squads on the field. As DW I usually have atleast 3 squads of terminators (depends on points). As IG, I only have 2 troops choices technically, but I use platoonns so I can have like, 10 different scoring units from those 2 troop choices if I want.


Basically, it depends on the army, some are more reliant on bodies than others (like orks who need lots of boyz generally)

Krellnu wrote:We know that 5/6 missions are based on holding objectives

But that's not true.

6/6 missions are based on who has the most points at the end. Objectives are just one way of getting points. Given that you only need one more point than your opponent to win, that means it's very possible to win games without ever holding an objective.

If you need things in the concrete, then yes, consider purge, but also consider Relic (which I've only seen someone win by actually holding the relic at the end of the game once), and Will (which, likewise, almost always sees both players holding their objective or neither holding them, and it being resolved on secondaries). Furthermore, holding objectives isn't always equally difficult. For example, if we're playing Crusade with 3 objectives, and I get to place first, then all I need to do is contest a single objective on my opponent's side of the board, and he's pretty much screwed.

Then add in the fact that non-troops score on 1/3rd of the missions, and the question is when are you really at an advantage by taking troops? On one mission - crusade - and only when there are 4 objectives, or when there are an odd number and you don't get to place first. That's pretty narrow.

And even then, you still don't need troops because you can always force a tie on objectives (by several means) and win on secondaries.

My 1500 Tau/Ba list has 135 points of scoring troops. 3 units of 10 man kroot with dogs. They stay off the board as long as I can and only run on from outflank to contest/score. The rest of the game I spend taking my opponent off objectives and killing his killy stuff. Killy stuff gets targeted first 2 turns, and last 2 turns is troops and scoring units.

It doesn't work all the time though and can have it's draw backs. If your opponent has hard to kill troops (GK termies/pallies) or fast moving troops (jetbikes) then it's a little bit of a different game.

 SlaveToDorkness wrote:
Ok, forgive me, how exactly are you able to only field one scoring unit with IG?

Armored Battlegroup (FW list) has tanks as troops. So I had a primary detachment of ABG with two Leman Russes which were non-scoring troops, and an allied codex IG detachment with a single Harker veteran squad as my only scoring unit.

Breng77 wrote:
1.) is a 1-0 win really the same as a 5-0 win. IF we are just playing a game, or a tournament where only 1 player finishes undefeated and wins sure. If we are playing a battle point format, a 5-0 win is better than a 1-0 win as it scores more points.

Yes, I'm assuming that we're talking about the standard game. If you're playing in a tournament with weird house rules for scoring this is probably a bad idea, but I'm not even going to attempt to cover the full range of weird objectives TOs keep dreaming up.

MarkyMark wrote:
my troops which either have 2 plus cover saves (plague bearers)

See, this is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about. I bet those troops aren't cheap, and Tau don't care about your cover save. So you've got a lot of points spent in paperweights with no offensive threat and not really enough durability to guarantee that you'll hold the objectives.

 LValx wrote:
The issue is that smart opponents will just kill your scoring units as quickly as possible.

It's easy to keep troops alive with adequate terrain. You can hide and stay in reserves.

Isn't this kind of a contradiction? If it's easy to keep troops alive then how can the smart opponent just kill them? Especially when you're out-gunning them by a solid margin and forcing them to play defense?

 Krellnus wrote:

We know that 5/6 missions are based on holding objectives.

The troops slot is in most cases the only way to get a scoring unit (The scouring and big guns never tire aside)

This is kind of contradictory, since 2/5 objective missions have non-troops scoring. What we really have:

One mission where scoring is completely irrelevant (kill points).

One mission where scoring is almost completely irrelevant because holding the center objective against a maximum-firepower list is difficult at best (relic).

One mission where scoring is almost completely irrelevant because each player tends to hold their single "home" objective in a perfect castle position and fails to contest the opponent's (will).

One mission where scoring is relevant, but heavy support scores (big guns).

One mission where scoring is relevant, but fast attack scores (scouring).

One mission where scoring is relevant and only troops score.


So what we have is really 5/6 missions where either scoring is not all that important or you get additional scoring units from outside the troops slot. Only in one mission do you have to worry about scoring a lot of objectives with only your troops to do it. And even there you can still kill enemy scoring units and win with a single objective or secondaries.

I'm going to throw out the "it depends on your army" card as i see some people have. I play Tyranids and some of my most valuable units are scoring units so if i cut out genestealers, warrios, hormeguant, and termigaunts to field 6 carnifexes i may have a very unbalanced army. But when i look at my friends Dark Angels i could see cutting down on troops possibly being a benefit.
Hard to say for me though because i've only ever played Necrons and Nid's

The golden boy of the Tyranid's troop list is the Tervigon. There's no ifs and buts about that.

I really think it depends on the event. Some events are objective heavy and points are awarded accordingly. If the Relic is involved you need more troops(scoring units), but if an event is basically win/loss, you can generally get by with minimal troops as you need only to go for certain victory conditions. Honestly though I've seen more of a trend toward multiple scoring units and with IG armies I have seen many 90%+ scoring armies especially when heavies are scoring as Heavies are pretty solid choices in 6th edition. Elites across the board seem to be what people are willing to leave home without unless they are able to score.

 Kain wrote:
The golden boy of the Tyranid's troop list is the Tervigon. There's no ifs and buts about that.

Yeah but what does a Tervigon poop out? troops

I guess technically a person could say that all you need to do is take minimum troop choice of termagants to get two Tervies as troops and then they can make all the scoring units you need (barring he don't get plugged up). But then again if you do that you're taking 4 troop choices in the end anyways. Unless of course you take them as an HQ


Automatically Appended Next Post:
i think this all just comes back around to Tyranids being void from this topic. We're mostly troops

 NecronLord3 wrote:
If the Relic is involved you need more troops(scoring units)

I think this is actually the opposite. The relic is where you barely care about troops more than in a kill points mission. A single objective in the center of the table means that any unit attempting to hold it can take focused fire from your entire army, and even a single scoring unit protected until the end of the game can pop out and claim it at the end. Bringing lots of troops and throwing them into the midfield meat grinder to try to hold the objective is just a great way to get a lot of troops killed.

That i need to agree with. Drop a Hive Tyrant death star down on the Relic and you'll have some very unhappy players

Personally i find the "win condition system" in 40k to be rather...unpolished, if not extremly onesided and borderline bad.

5 out of 6 missions is about objectives with a "special" to it, and one killpoint, and none of the missions have any variation that makes them that different, and when there first is there is no "hybrid" one that isnt a houserule.

A few they could had is similar to Fantasy where you go point-by-point for every unit you destroy ( not 1 VP per unit, but rather their points total if they are destroyed ), or another one that is a mixture of the two that count both killpoints and objectives and the total wins ( and not "most objectives win and then kills is tiebreaker" )

So basic 40k in its current state: Spam troops, transports with troops, flyers with troops, troops on bikes, troops in reserve, troops that hide under a rock, troops that would be better spendt actually doing anything the first 3 turns, and then fill the rest with the flavor unit of the month and congratulations you have a "competitive list"

I might be a little Bias`d from fantasy, but in fantasy the variation you can put into a game is so much grander than 40k, and i think the current objective play is quite restrictive as you are forced to have "optimal" troops at all times if you really want to win, and i still kinda feel it as a hollow victory when he got 80% of his units alive, but i won because i had my 2 last half-dead troop units on the objectives when the dice didnt want another round...

 Peregrine wrote:

 NecronLord3 wrote:
If the Relic is involved you need more troops(scoring units)

I think this is actually the opposite. The relic is where you barely care about troops more than in a kill points mission. A single objective in the center of the table means that any unit attempting to hold it can take focused fire from your entire army, and even a single scoring unit protected until the end of the game can pop out and claim it at the end. Bringing lots of troops and throwing them into the midfield meat grinder to try to hold the objective is just a great way to get a lot of troops killed.

Your opponent can easily pick off your troops in a relic mission then ignore it and go for kill points. If you have multiple scoring units on the board and keep them graded you can make a grab for the relic in late turns with your scoring units and focus you attention any opposing units that may be denying the objective.

If you are solely playing book missions you have an entirely different set of criteria to design your army around. At most events there are multiple victory conditions, one of which can be the relic and in that you need something to claim or deny the relic and the other scoring units to go for other objectives like the Emperors will.

 Peregrine wrote:

 NecronLord3 wrote:
If the Relic is involved you need more troops(scoring units)

I think this is actually the opposite. The relic is where you barely care about troops more than in a kill points mission. A single objective in the center of the table means that any unit attempting to hold it can take focused fire from your entire army, and even a single scoring unit protected until the end of the game can pop out and claim it at the end. Bringing lots of troops and throwing them into the midfield meat grinder to try to hold the objective is just a great way to get a lot of troops killed.

With my Tau I honestly just play the Relic as a Mission where only the secondary objectives matter. I think it's just a poor mission idea all together. now if any infantry unit could move it, but only troops could score it, that would make for a different game.

I think your IA tank company is a poor example for this argument. It's all one-sided in your tanks favor. Even with my Tau, which only bring about 400-500pts of troops in a 2k battle, which i feels leaves plenty of point of firepower and still gives me 6 units which can go in reserves and come in a score later in the game. 1600pts of firepower in Tau can be very effective and Tough to kill. I still don't think it's good enough to go with min troops and expect to win all your games.

Having a very good rock/paper/scissor army can mask your lack of troops very very well.

My chaos army would be useless without my plague marines and CSM squads. I mean sure we all like a hell turkey or 2 but the plague marines are the ones who win me the matches and I usually only lose in the event that somebody kills all of them (which is hard as hell).

 Peregrine wrote:

 SlaveToDorkness wrote:
Ok, forgive me, how exactly are you able to only field one scoring unit with IG?

Armored Battlegroup (FW list) has tanks as troops. So I had a primary detachment of ABG with two Leman Russes which were non-scoring troops, and an allied codex IG detachment with a single Harker veteran squad as my only scoring unit.

Breng77 wrote:
1.) is a 1-0 win really the same as a 5-0 win. IF we are just playing a game, or a tournament where only 1 player finishes undefeated and wins sure. If we are playing a battle point format, a 5-0 win is better than a 1-0 win as it scores more points.

Yes, I'm assuming that we're talking about the standard game. If you're playing in a tournament with weird house rules for scoring this is probably a bad idea, but I'm not even going to attempt to cover the full range of weird objectives TOs keep dreaming up.

MarkyMark wrote:
my troops which either have 2 plus cover saves (plague bearers)

See, this is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about. I bet those troops aren't cheap, and Tau don't care about your cover save. So you've got a lot of points spent in paperweights with no offensive threat and not really enough durability to guarantee that you'll hold the objectives.

 LValx wrote:
The issue is that smart opponents will just kill your scoring units as quickly as possible.

It's easy to keep troops alive with adequate terrain. You can hide and stay in reserves.

Isn't this kind of a contradiction? If it's easy to keep troops alive then how can the smart opponent just kill them? Especially when you're out-gunning them by a solid margin and forcing them to play defense?

 Krellnus wrote:

We know that 5/6 missions are based on holding objectives.

The troops slot is in most cases the only way to get a scoring unit (The scouring and big guns never tire aside)

This is kind of contradictory, since 2/5 objective missions have non-troops scoring. What we really have:

One mission where scoring is completely irrelevant (kill points).

One mission where scoring is almost completely irrelevant because holding the center objective against a maximum-firepower list is difficult at best (relic).

One mission where scoring is almost completely irrelevant because each player tends to hold their single "home" objective in a perfect castle position and fails to contest the opponent's (will).

One mission where scoring is relevant, but heavy support scores (big guns).

One mission where scoring is relevant, but fast attack scores (scouring).

One mission where scoring is relevant and only troops score.


So what we have is really 5/6 missions where either scoring is not all that important or you get additional scoring units from outside the troops slot. Only in one mission do you have to worry about scoring a lot of objectives with only your troops to do it. And even there you can still kill enemy scoring units and win with a single objective or secondaries.

Not talking about house rules for missions, but often in 3 round tournaments the overalls champion is determined by wins + margin of victory because multiple players will be undefeated. So if this is the case and I win my game 5-0 on objectives and you win 1-0 I end up with more tournament points. Take war games con for example your final place in the event was determined by total vps scored throughout all your games, so if I win my games 5-0, 6-2 and 8-4, and you have 3 1-0 wins I win the tournament and take the prize.

BaconUprising wrote:
My chaos army would be useless without my plague marines and CSM squads. I mean sure we all like a hell turkey or 2 but the plague marines are the ones who win me the matches and I usually only lose in the event that somebody kills all of them (which is hard as hell).

But they are also an incredible durable special weapons platform so are no way scoring deadweight like for example cultists without an IC.

Tell that too my plague marines

 NecronLord3 wrote:
Your opponent can easily pick off your troops in a relic mission then ignore it and go for kill points. If you have multiple scoring units on the board and keep them graded you can make a grab for the relic in late turns with your scoring units and focus you attention any opposing units that may be denying the objective.

But look at it this way: if my opponent can easily pick off my troops and ignore the relic after spending hundreds of points on troops of their own then I can certainly do the same back to them with several hundred points more firepower. So regardless of troops the relic just sits in the middle of the table while any unit that tries to claim it dies before it can do anything.

If you are solely playing book missions you have an entirely different set of criteria to design your army around. At most events there are multiple victory conditions, one of which can be the relic and in that you need something to claim or deny the relic and the other scoring units to go for other objectives like the Emperors will.

Well, like I said, I'm not even going to attempt to cover the huge range of weird victory conditions you can make if you don't follow the book rules. Sure, there are missions with multiple victory conditions, but there are also events like the one last weekend where you can get tabled with zero VP your first game and then win the tournament based on the third game where it's kill points except each kill point is really three VPs.

(That's exactly what happened. The scoring for the third mission was kill points with additional VPs for the difference in kill points between you and your opponent and +1 VP if you killed the unit in assault. All-assault demons tabled MSU IG for ~45 VP in an event where each mission was supposed to be about 15 VP. So that would be the broken extreme where nothing you do with objectives matters because the kill point mission gives out the most points.)

@ Peregrine. It isn't difficult to kill 1 squad of troops. It's rather difficult to kill 6+ squads however.

I just think this is a terrible idea for anyone who plays competitively.

Look at lists that generally win events. Most will be troops heavy because it is very important to be able to secure objectives. The only armies that I believe can get away with not packing lots of troops are Necrons and Eldar. Both have very, very durable and very fast transport options.

Missions and what not also impact this heavily. Almost every tournament will have their own missions and most of the big events I can think of have missions that favor holding objectives.

If it works for you, then keep doing it, but I wouldn't recommend this strategy to most players.

Breng77 wrote:
Not talking about house rules for missions, but often in 3 round tournaments the overalls champion is determined by wins + margin of victory because multiple players will be undefeated.

But that's a house rule. 40k by the book is a straight win/loss/draw system, if you're counting margin of victory you're playing with your own house rules that change the victory conditions. So it's not surprising that if you change the victory conditions you also change the best strategy for winning.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 LValx wrote:
@ Peregrine. It isn't difficult to kill 1 squad of troops. It's rather difficult to kill 6+ squads however.

Really? Because so far I've found the exact opposite, even when I haven't taken the maximum-firepower list idea to that extreme. Troops that move out into the open die fast, and troops that GTG in terrain in a desperate attempt to stay alive aren't really doing anything (and aren't even protecting themselves against Tau) in exchange for dying a bit slower.

Look at lists that generally win events.

Well, that isn't really the best comparison since many of those events have non-standard missions which favor different armies and strategies than the normal ones. Obviously an event where you have table quarters (won by adding up the point total of scoring units in each quarter) will strongly favor giant blobs of expensive troops over token scoring units. But that's really no different than having a hypothetical event where it's nothing but kill points missions and troops are double VPs.