Gregor Samsa wrote: However in my few games played with friends and based upon the battle reports I am watching, I have this idea in my head that a lot of the movement in
40k is fairly unimportant to the outcome of the game.
It's not unimportant
IMO. Movement is very important and one of the main ways that
40k has skill expression. If you include deployment (which limits your mobility if you do it wrong) then it's the most important part of the game. Some armies can mitigate the importance of movement, for others it is everything.
Of course you need to move and the consequences of moving (or not moving) do indeed exist. But what I mean is that for a tabletop strategy game, the positioning and maneuvering of units on the board is largely procedural and easily predictable.
My opponents often get surprised by my manouvres, YMMW, most people on Dakka play with groups that are at least slightly better than the best people in the world, I don't, I make mistakes my opponents make mistakes and a lot of those mistakes are made in the Movement phase and as part of deployment.
This is somewhat different from a lot of wargaming that I remember which tended to heavily emphasize units relative positions to one another. Classic Battletech is a great example of that.
Never played battletech so I can't comment on that, but in previous editions of
40k the game literally had AI for pile-in moves and deep strikes were randomized, now there's a lot more skill expression even if everybody on Dakka is so good at the game that nobody ever makes mistakes and always fully utilizes the value of charges and deep strikes.
The tactics of positioning and maneuvering seem to mostly revolve around a deep understanding the various ranges of your opponent’s army and being careful to skirt those edges as a way of securing an advantage in target priority or charge.
Sure, what else is there? You talked about flanking, that still exists in
40k, if you focus on a flank and your opponent cannot bring their full force to bear on you then you've made a flanking manoeuvre. You can even "flank" a unit by hitting it from two sides and forcing models to stay in coherency and therefore out of range to fight in melee.
40k is a shooting game though, the games where it's melee on melee is rare so you won't see those tactics pop up like they did in
WHFB for example. Shooting has been vastly simplified and cover is hard to get so that does remove some importance of good positioning, but on the other hand most armies didn't get move and shoot at more than half effectiveness in previous editions, that meant that large numbers of units were punished very hard for ever moving.
This edition feels almost like a simulation of list-building statistical outcomes because it is so shooting heavy.
Play a different faction, there are good melee factions. If you play in a casual setting you can ask your opponents to spice up their armies with some more melee. You can also use house rules to nerf shooting T1 if you want to see more melee.
Most movement seems to be directly forward and because of the LoS rules, flanking is not a critical component to victory. Deep striking does indeed serve a pseudo-flanking role, but the advantage of deep striking is not really a flank as much as it is keeping models off the table until a certain moment.
If you can move directly forward straight across the battlefield your table needs more terrain. On a flat board I'd agree movement is entirely invalid, only castles are going to have any sort of chance in that scenario and they won't need to move. I just went and skimmed through a Tabletop Tactics battle report for 8th and then did the same for 7th, surprise surprise, there weren't any less Zerg rushing in 7th, one player literally just hid as much stuff as he could and then Zerged out when he got his turn in the 7th ed battle report, completely standard 8th edition tactic. I don't play 7th ed anymore and I can't stomach watching three full length battle reports, but I don't think there's much weight to the notion that 8th has removed the tactical aspect of Movement from
40k. If anybody wants to link 3 non-video battle reports with clear visualisations of Movement from 7th and 3 reports from the same creator done in 8th then I could look them over and I might be convinced.
If we take a lot of the topdown maps a lot of BR use to show what happens turn by turn, a large theme seems to be that both armies simply advance towards one another, if they bother to move at all. Yes factions like nids do have to move quite a lot, but even the gene stealer sling is still essentially a rush straight ahead.
Genestealers rushing straight forward is a result of bad terrain rules which don't properly benefit Genestealers, same with Orks and Guardsmen which barely benefit from terrain.
I am not really meaning for this to be a critique, as I do enjoy 8th edition a lot. 5th was a ton of a fun and I feel had some more strategic elements I enjoyed (vehicle facing etc). But it was admittedly very finicky and could make things drawn out (which wasn’t always bad!)
I do think drawn out was bad, so in that way I like the new system but vehicle facings is something that I do miss from time to time, not the drawn out aspect but the manoeuvring aspect and especially the melee aspect.
GW has said tanks will be able to shoot in melee, that'd be fair enough if they became as vulnerable in melee as they used to be, I fear that it's just going to mean there's no counterplay to parking lots other than to play a faction with more pts-efficient shooting.
I guess I am looking for some insight on how I should view the strategizing of movement phase? What are the tactics of positioning and maneuvering that one should take into account in a way that helps really influence the game to the same extent that a massive round of shooting has?
Staying out of
LOS, staying out of threat ranges, moving infantry through ruins, charging through ruins, going wide for when you want a single unit to tie up multiple enemy units, going deep when you don't want a bad advance roll to slow down any units behind the first, conga-lining for buffs, pre-measuring buffs and considering procedure to minimize chances of dice screwing you.
