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I also believe a mediocre list in the hands of a veteran player has a decent chance to defeat stronger list used by a novice.

But then again, how long does it take for a new player to grasp the potentials of the strong list?
To repeat the remarks which posters have left above, there are few layers of tactical depth in 40K.
Target priority, use of stratagems, positioning units according to line of sight, piling-in to tie up adjacent enemy units, and then there is nothing much left.
Few months of playing is enough for a player to become accustomed to these tactical elements, at least in my experience.

Once the new player becomes familiar with these tactics, dice is the only saving grace of a veteran player using subpar lists.

 BaconCatBug wrote:

 vaklor4 wrote:

 BaconCatBug wrote:
No, tactics don't matter. The game is won or lost in the listbuilding stage.

That isn't true. Just like any game where you build your army, deck, team or anything of that nature, you still have to actually be good at the game to win. Just netlisting the best build will only get you so far. If you give a top tier 40k player a list that is just start collecting space marine boxes, he could still make it work against a new player using a net list.

I'd love to see a mono-Grey Knights list come even close to beating Guard+Castellan+Dakkabots.

Did you even read the entire post? You're completely negating any level of gaming intelligence on the part of the players. People get better, and some people's skill ceiling is higher than others.

I did read the post, and I am telling you with ABSOLUTE 110% CERTAINTY, that given that both players are trying to win (i.e. one of the players isn't intentionally throwing the game), it doesn't matter if the Grey Knights player is the best player in the world and the Soup player is someone who hasn't played more than a week, it is more likely to have a proton decay in front of your eyes and cause all the oxygen in the room to spontaneously turn into Advocaat than for the Grey Knights to beat a Guard+Castellan+Dakkabots list.

You'd have to have the Grey Knights literally roll all 6's and the Soup Player roll all 1's for the Grey Knights to win.

 BaconCatBug wrote:
I did read the post, and I am telling you with ABSOLUTE 110% CERTAINTY, that given that both players are trying to win (i.e. one of the players isn't intentionally throwing the game), it doesn't matter if the Grey Knights player is the best player in the world and the Soup player is someone who hasn't played more than a week, it is more likely to have a proton decay in front of your eyes and cause all the oxygen in the room to spontaneously turn into Advocaat than for the Grey Knights to beat a Guard+Castellan+Dakkabots list.

You'd have to have the Grey Knights literally roll all 6's and the Soup Player roll all 1's for the Grey Knights to win.

You are entitled to your opinion, and you seem to have very, very unmovable opinions. I think you're wrong, but that isn't going to change anything.

Maybe for other armies it ain't true, but I have seen new players beat the living hell out of veterans with bad lists, and there is no worse army to play, specially in casual then GK.

In theory a well balanced game the outcome should be down to tactics, however even if 40k had this mythical "well balanced" factor that it currently lacks the vey rules themselves essentially will always dominate 'tactics' simple due to the volume of dice used. Yes you can use tactics to fiddle the odds to an extent but regardless there are some very bad matchups here.

8th edition has removed a lot of the tactics around positioning for example (removing weapon arcs, and vulnerabilities from certain directions that forced a player to make a call, a call a better player will get right more often) - and in return has allowed the game to scale up better and play faster.

pays your money etc.

I would suggest in smaller point value games though tactics start to matter more as the "point & delete" firepower tends to be less present so positioning for cover and similar starts to matter as there is less overkill.

in the end 40k is a game where you get out what both players are willing to put in, if you want to play "win in the list building phase" and both are happy with that then go for it, but last week had one of the best games I've had in ages playing 750 points on a 4'x4' table where neither player was a passenger and the choices we both made actually seemed to make a difference.

GK it would appear are a perfectly good army if your opponent is someone who like me is able to roll negative numbers on a D6 while you yourself are able to roll a 7, failing that use them in a specifically constructed scenario o something for now (I find with stuff like GK and DW to a level you can represent the whole "very special forces" thing by letting them muck about with the victory conditions - e.g. draw extra cards and discard some, maybe move objectives etc.

I think the question is a little self-defeating here. Big reason?


Army choice is part of your tactics. You build your army with the knowledge on how you want it to play.

 Melissia wrote:
I think the question is a little self-defeating here. Big reason?


Army choice is part of your tactics. You build your army with the knowledge on how you want it to play.

Plus knowledge of your local "meta", typical terrain etc

in 5th edition I started to get people to actually read the bit on table set up that suggested a terrain covering of around 25%, a mixture of types, as opposed to what had previously been a ruin in each corner and maybe a low hill near the centre.

In my experience, tabling tends to be a result of insufficient LOS blocking terrain. Without it, yes, tabling is a completely viable strategy that’s difficult if not impossible to avoid with a weak list.

I guess I’m fortunate in that most of my games are with like-minded people that want a battlefield with plenty of terrain, so that we do have to make meaningful movement choices. Our games tend to have pockets of action that move around the board as we attempt to outmaneuver each other. I haven’t played a “clear LOS board” in a long time, so in my neck of the woods tabling is quite rare.

With substantial LOS blocking terrain, we’re able to set up “traps” and “kill zones” for each other. Want your solo-Knight to do anything? It will need to move between those two buildings to get LOS to anything, and blocks LOS from anything behind... I plan to have all my boys able to open up on it, turn 2 when it moves to the expected location.

I agree in full that powerful lists will generally win against weak lists, assuming both players are of remotely comparable skill. If both lists are of close power level, I think the better tactician will usually win. The list creates an upper limit of potential, but the player still needs to direct the army to achieve that optimal potential.

This depends on your definition of "Bad list".

A "Bad List" could be spamming a bad unit, or writing a rock-paper-scissors army that is supposed to function as a Rock but doesn't do it very well. Spamming Grav Centurions, for example.

Or, a "Bad List" could be a retro Space Marines player who pines for the golden days of whatever their favorite edition was, and still likes running lists that are built heavily around, say, infantry and Rhinos. Or whatever.

In the former case, no amount of tactics are going to help. By writing an inflexible army list with no options on the board, the player has doomed themselves to a death of immmobility and having no options.

In the latter case, though, it's possible - albeit difficult - to play for the win. The retro player is using subpar units, but as long as he still made his army flexible and gave himself options, he has the chance to come up from the bottom.

...

Generally speaking, you need three things to win a game of Warhammer 40k:
A strong list
Luck
"Tactics"

In this case, "Tactics" involves responding to luck, mitigating the effect of bad rolls, risk calculation, and positioning. The role of tactics in a game heavily depends on the first two options, though - If you write a list that gives you no options, you can't respond to what happens on the board. Also, after a certain point it becomes impossible to compensate for bad luck.

Tactics matter enough to effect a win if your opponent is incredibly bad at the game, but assuming a base level of competence (remembering all the rules, not screwing themselves over or forgetting steps, and showing good target priority,) you're not going to be able to win against an A-tier list with a D-tier list.

Would suggest a "bad list" is one assembled without consideration of:

- likely scenarios, victory conditions and missions
- likely enemies, both faction and likely content
- likely terrain

some people are good enough to pick up a reasonably generic list and make it work, most are not.

Would suggest there are no "bad lists" as such, just ill-considered ones

 BaconCatBug wrote:
I did read the post, and I am telling you with ABSOLUTE 110% CERTAINTY, that given that both players are trying to win (i.e. one of the players isn't intentionally throwing the game), it doesn't matter if the Grey Knights player is the best player in the world and the Soup player is someone who hasn't played more than a week, it is more likely to have a proton decay in front of your eyes and cause all the oxygen in the room to spontaneously turn into Advocaat than for the Grey Knights to beat a Guard+Castellan+Dakkabots list.

You'd have to have the Grey Knights literally roll all 6's and the Soup Player roll all 1's for the Grey Knights to win.

As people have said, there is so little room for actual tactics in the game itself that listbuilding and the like becomes probably the most significant factor (barring extreme good/bad luck).

Unfortunately for GK players, part of getting better at playing 40k involves learning to not play GK.

I use real world tactics quite a bit in 40k, one of which is the Refused Flank in non-objective games (moving my entire force to one side while my opponent is spread out, which maximizes my firepower while minimizing his). Another good one Enfilade and Defilade positioning (maximizing my firepower into my enemy while minimizing their return fire via positioning and use of line of sight blocking terrain).

Sure, games are won in the list building phase, but they lost due poor use and/or lack of terrain. Satisfaction comes from playing smarter and making less mistakes than your opponent who is also playing an optimized list just like you are.

SJ

 jeffersonian000 wrote:
I use real world tactics quite a bit in 40k, one of which is the Refused Flank in non-objective games (moving my entire force to one side while my opponent is spread out, which maximizes my firepower while minimizing his). Another good one Enfilade and Defilade positioning (maximizing my firepower into my enemy while minimizing their return fire via positioning and use of line of sight blocking terrain).

Sure, games are won in the list building phase, but they lost due poor use and/or lack of terrain. Satisfaction comes from playing smarter and making less mistakes than your opponent who is also playing an optimized list just like you are.

SJ

Decent terrain certainly makes such things possible, the game rules work against it (weapon ranges relative to table size, movement of 'fast' vehicles etc), its wonderful when it works though - especially when one player has "castled" in a corner and you manage to deploy out of thier range and/or sight

 Stormatious wrote:
Do tactics matter enough to effect a win regardless of your army/race?, this is a follow up to people saying my army is gak and me thinking they're wrong no matter how much facts there are lollll.


Like for e.g could 30 troops face off against 120 troops and win?

I imagine you're somewhat directing this at me. I wasn't saying your army is the worst thing ever, just that it isn't an ultra-competitive list. You can still have fun with it, you just are unlikely to be winning tournaments with it. Tactics absolutely matter, but they're not the most important thing in the game. I'd rank the game's primary influencers of who will win a game in the following manner;

#1 - List Strength (60%). If you have a strong list, you're lowering the difficulty of the game. There are many models that are better for the points you're spending on them than an equivalent amount of points spent nearly anywhere else. Plasma Guns aren't expensive, but deal way, way, way more damage, and deal that damage more reliably, than a model with a bolter. Take 5 Marines, with one having a Plasma, and have them fight a unit of 6 Marines. The unit with the Plasma should win almost every time, regardless of other factors. The person with the 5 Marines + Plasma built a better list than the one who took 6 Marines. Maybe in another "meta" the 6 Marines would've been better (say, against Orks), but in this matchup, and indeed in most matchups, the 5 Marines + Plasma is better.

#2 - Tactics (24%). 8th Edition has a ton of these. By a "tactic", I mean a decision made that impacts the short-term result of the game. You just do what you're already doing, but differently. For example, you charge a unit into a tank. The player with weak tactical knowledge might just pile the models up to it. The tactically intelligent player puts a model at each corner of the vehicle such that the vehicle can no longer move out of combat and has "pinned" the unit in place. That's a tactic. A tactic can also be choosing which unit to charge in first with. Or the order in which you do shooting. Or remembering to use a stratagem. Etc. Point is, there's a lot of EASY stuff here, but it can be hard to remember it all because there really is just so much. Doing these things will massively change the effectiveness of your list.

#3 - Strategy (10%). If anything, I would say the actual strategy of 40k is the part that has the least depth. Strategy is your long-term, or even game-long plan that will influence your tactics. A good tactic may be to put a unit near 3 objectives so you can easily go to whichever one you need to hold. A good strategy is choosing to go for one of those three so that your opponent moves into a different position. List Building is, technically, part of strategy, and I would say that your choice of trying to plan against the "meta" here is where this is important. In other words, List Strength is 60% of your game, but you can make it 70% by correctly guessing the meta, or drop it to 50% by guessing incorrectly. Having a plan for your list is very important, but at this point you're putting a lot of effort into something that will only matter against people that have also nearly maxed out the other 84% of their ability through List Strength and Tactics.

#4 - Luck (6%). Yes, this is a dice game, but luck honestly has very little to do with it. At 6% you are, roughly speaking, saying that for every 20 times something happens, in the game, it happens in a way differently to what you expect in a way that actually matters. Sure, sometimes crazy things happen, but it rarely has that big of an impact, plus you are just as likely to have such a string of good or bad luck. The only way to influence this is to remove the luck element from your games by making things hit and wound on 2+ rerollables, and make things never get a save. That's possible to do, but you really start paying for it - it's not easy to do, and you leave yourself more and more open to being swarmed.

So, there you go. That's my breakdown. 30 Tactical marines should always lose to 120 Tactical Marines, regardless of strategy or tactics or even luck. 30 Rubric Marines, on the other hand, might be able to use Tactics and Strategy to defeat 120 Tactical Marines. 30 Obliterators will laugh off 120 Tactical Marines, and then eat another 120 just for good measure.

There's always someone that says Tactics are the most important thing, no matter how bad balance is.

FWIW, people said the same thing for 7th, the singularly most unbalanced edition outside 2nd. Make of that as you will.

I think the importance of luck is very proportional to the size of the game and the models involved.

In a 15000 point game, luck is unlikely to be a very deciding factor. On the other hand, if an alpha strike Ynnari build faces an Imperial army with a Castellan, the game is often outright decided on turn 1 - either they kill the Castellan (effectively chunking a third of the opponent's army and taking out their strongest source of firepower) or they don't (in which case they are horribly out of position and will probably be reduced to mashed jelly).

 Ashiraya wrote:
I think the importance of luck is very proportional to the size of the game and the models involved.

In a 15000 point game, luck is unlikely to be a very deciding factor. On the other hand, if an alpha strike Ynnari build faces an Imperial army with a Castellan, the game is often outright decided on turn 1 - either they kill the Castellan or they don't.

This, and tactics is the opposite.

Playing at 2000 points on a 6x4 doesn't leave much to positioning, due to excessive clutter on the field.
At 1750 movement choices become more critical, and at 1500 even more.
In general the higher the point limit, the higher the chance that the opponent will control the field with overwhelming long range firepower, and the game devolves into mathammer.

Do tactics matter....yeah.

If they didn't you would simply pack up your army when you played against someone with a better "Army". Dice add in a luck factor as well but positioning, target priority, and than a number of other tactics really factor into a game to determine a winner.

Case and point would be that I won a few tournaments in 7th edition with Orkz. If tactics didn't matter than I should never have broken even let alone won these events when I was playing against Net lists like Wraithknight spam, (Basically eldar of any flavor), The SM Gladius, Necrons Decurion etc etc.

Being able to use tactics can swing a game from a resounding loss into a close fought victory or even a landslide victory if you do it right. I recently had a game where my opponent speared my go to unit and somehow managed to kill it and all its guards, game over right? Nope, using tactics, locking up his shooting units in CC with throw away infantry, positioning units out of LOS, trapping characters away from units they needed to buff, i was able to pull out a solid victory.

The effectiveness of units doesn't change at varying point levels. It merely affects how many you can take.

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:
The effectiveness of units doesn't change at varying point levels. It merely affects how many you can take.

The effectiveness of units absolutely varies with point levels.

Take standard custodes for example. They are stronger and stronger the smaller the game. In small games they are likely to face mostly tactical marines and the like, and there they thrive.

Now look at a 2k game where said tactical marines have a castellan with them. The custodes are now an absolute waste of points.

 Yarium wrote:

#4 - Luck (6%). Yes, this is a dice game, but luck honestly has very little to do with it. At 6% you are, roughly speaking, saying that for every 20 times something happens, in the game, it happens in a way differently to what you expect in a way that actually matters. Sure, sometimes crazy things happen, but it rarely has that big of an impact, plus you are just as likely to have such a string of good or bad luck. The only way to influence this is to remove the luck element from your games by making things hit and wound on 2+ rerollables, and make things never get a save. That's possible to do, but you really start paying for it - it's not easy to do, and you leave yourself more and more open to being swarmed.

I strongly disagree with this part of your summary, mainly because you're only focusing on certain parts of "luck" and not others.
Getting first turn will massively influence the result of the game, and is mostly the outcome of luck. (Depending on game type, you can make yourself about 16% more likely to get first turn. That's it. Otherwise, it's a coin flip.) It's dependent on the matchup, but the difference between first turn usually leads to one side having a fairly significant advantage - It can mean the difference between getting hit with a Castellan's full shooting or not, the difference between getting charged after shooting once or shooting twice, or the difference between claiming a key objective or having it denied to you.

Large pools of dice may shake out consistently, but there are also a ton of abilities that rely on a single roll, where succeeding or failing can have a massive difference. Getting "The Passion" off on a squad of repentia will double their damage output, and with the right buffs to success it's still only a 50/50 shot. Making a long charge with a key unit is a crapshoot, even with tools to make it more reliable. If someone fails to get off Warptime or some other key power on turn one, it could mess up their positioning and change how the rest of the game goes.

"Back luck" isn't just the occasional crapshoot roll where you get three 1s on three dice, it's also major influencing factors that players have little control over.

List > Dice > Tactics

In order of importance in 40K.

It's a serious problem just how often dice are used in 40k.

They should be used, of course. Randomisation is necessary to add an element of unpredictability and avoid having the outcome of every match being possible to just calculate beforehand. Risk management is skill.

However, 40k takes this too far. If a weapon shoots d6 shots with d6 damage each, it's absolutely impossible to make any form of even semi-reliable assessment of what this weapon will achieve. At that point there's no skill, just blind guessing. And that is before you add in weapons with random strength and AP...

I'd rather assert they're all about equal. I've seen plenty of people with netlists copied off tournament players get their asses handed to them.

Waaaghpower wrote:
I strongly disagree with this part of your summary, mainly because you're only focusing on certain parts of "luck" and not others.

I can appreciate your point there; there are certain singular rolls that matter far more than others. The roll for first turn is definitely one of them. However, I think GW and tournaments in general have done a phenomenal job of balancing out the first turn. GW introducing the "all your stuff is in cover" stratagem for going second is a game changer for a bunch of lists. Having games where the last person to act has a big advantage is a real advantage. Having armies that are able to negate an opponent's first turn (like the new GSC blips can do), is a real advantage. It's getting easier and easier to make lists that don't suffer as much from going second, which makes the luck problem like the one you've given matter less and less.

Like I said; if you have a good build, good tactics, and a good strategy, then your opponent going first or not shouldn't matter terribly too much. Just had a tournament, and I went second in my first two of three games, which I won, then went first in my last game, which I lost. I won my first game because I stomped my opponent on my list, strategy, and tactics. My opponent even agreed that his luck was fantastic turn 1, and after that the luck just went statistical everywhere. I won my second game on my strategy and tactics, though probably not by my list. My opponent only had Morty alive by the end of the game, but she admitted that she had no way of stopping me from doing what I needed to do to win. I lost my last game because of my tactics, but made it a super fun game because of my strategy.

I could say that, oh yeah I got lucky rolling a 6 for an advance roll; but I get 3d6 and pick the highest to advance with Kraken, and I can move again with the Swarmlord, and I can move again with Opportunistic Advance stratagem, and I can double my advance roll with another stratagem... so really, it wasn't luck, it was that I had the tools to be where I needed to be. I could say it was luck that I didn't kill a Daemon Prince in close combat, but I forced him to fight a unit of Stealers at -1 to hit, so he only killed 3 Stealers, and it let me keep farther away from Morty that game because my opponent kept these units very far away from each other, keeping the Prince back while diving Morty in, allowing me to totally avoid Morty when I chose to do so. I could say that it was luck that my Hive Guard only hit with 1 shot on the Custode Bikers out of 10 with 4+ to hit, but I still ended that game with Swarmlord vs a Custodes Captain on Jetbike, and those were the only two models left on the board, and I totally misplaced my Genestealers on their turn 1 move. Point is, while luck may have flavoured what happened in all my games, the prime determinants of who won or lost were all the decisions leading up to those moments, rather than how those moments exactly played out.

 Melissia wrote:
I think the question is a little self-defeating here. Big reason?


Army choice is part of your tactics. You build your army with the knowledge on how you want it to play.

What if there is no good way to play your army, Then what steal an army from someone else ?

However, 40k takes this too far. If a weapon shoots d6 shots with d6 damage each, it's absolutely impossible to make any form of even semi-reliable assessment of what this weapon will achieve. At that point there's no skill, just blind guessing

But doesn't it depend on point costs. Cheap random stuff is acceptable. If the d6 shots d6D weapon was on a carrier that costs 8-10pts, and you could take more then 3 units of them, it wouldn't be bad. Or if the units were bigger then 10 dudes. If you roll enough dice the avarges in rolling to smooth over. What is horrible is high cost single shot or few attacks weapon choices that cost in their 10s or 20s as points go. Those make no sense.

 Stormatious wrote:


#2 - Tactics (24%). 8th Edition has a ton of these. By a "tactic", I mean a decision made that impacts the short-term result of the game. You just do what you're already doing, but differently. For example, you charge a unit into a tank. The player with weak tactical knowledge might just pile the models up to it. The tactically intelligent player puts a model at each corner of the vehicle such that the vehicle can no longer move out of combat and has "pinned" the unit in place. That's a tactic. A tactic can also be choosing which unit to charge in first with. Or the order in which you do shooting. Or remembering to use a stratagem. Etc. Point is, there's a lot of EASY stuff here, but it can be hard to remember it all because there really is just so much. Doing these things will massively change the effectiveness of your list.

2 things:

I would not consider piling in to prevent fall back a tactical choice. It's something you should always do if you charge units that are bad at melee and it doesn't take much skill to do it (luck is more important as you need to enough attack range to reach the far corner of the vehicle). There is no real decision making involved. Likewise the 'bring only one unit into melee range after charging' trick. You just do it if against non-melee units because you have nothing to gain from not doing it.

And I would not consider actions that break down to 'Do some math in your head and you find out which choice is optimal' tactical choices. This is something a poorly programmed computer could do.


It certainly is important though, just like other easy stuff you mentioned. But that's not really tactics and while I roughly agree with your importance percentages, if you split the 24% tactics into 'Remembering the easy stuff' and actual tactics, there is not much left for actual tactics.

Karol wrote:
What if there is no good way to play your army

Then I suggest you stop being a defeatist and come up with one? Change the parameters. Change your tactics. Change the terrain. Change points values, as sometimes points values favor some armies over others. And so on.

Just because you can't figure out a way to win doesn't mean there isn't one. It just means you, personally, can't figure it out.

If I can win something like a 30-40% ratio of games with my terminator-based blood angels army, you can figure something out with yours.

Armies should be designed in such a way that I wouldn't have to force people to play with odd rules. specially as no one is going to agree to play with house rules that are put there just so I can win. Am not even sure I would want to play such rules either, what sense is there in playing games one knows one will win.