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Alright, today I played a 1750 seize ground game with pitched battles. I decided to try the strategy that Beasts of War talked about in this video.



Its a great tactic, and I found ti works great. But thats not my point. The point is, that to move my army, I build a "box out of two razorbacks and a vindicator, and kept up a consent rate of fire as I moved up the table, making sure that the infantry were never too far outside the box. Once an infantry squad, like my lasscanon devs, reached a good firing position, they would stop while the rest of the box moved forward. This worked out to be an AMAZING tactic, because not only was my opponent spread to thin to rapidly counter, anything they could muster as wasted on tanks. Once the tanks reached the front line, they split up to tankshock, fire and let the infantry squads that had run up with them mop up. My friend said this was an awful idea, and that a single blast template would have ended it. But what do you think dakka? Is using your tanks as a shield a bad idea, or was he wrong, and I should continue with this strategy?

Sounds like a great reason to take a Manticore, or really any Barrage weapon.

I agree with Nurglitch. even if shots scatter, they're probably going to hit something if they're centered on the "box".

Perhaps the single biggest problem with 'giving' your opponent objectives is that you allow them to entrench inside objectives and they have first choice. Personally, I think it's a decent idea, but I have no reason why your opponent would put an unguarded defiler (or any nonscoring unit) right on top of an objective.

Any decently fast army (Space Wolves, Blood Angels, Eldar, Dark Eldar, Tyranids etc) can easily hold one or two of the objectives that they have on their side of the table and dedicate the rest of their non-scoring units to redeploying to stop your advance.

Additionally, by giving your opponent multiple objectives, you allow them to deploy their heavy-weapon troops on the objective and pester you the whole game. IG or Marines would have no trouble parking some troops with a missile launcher on one or two objectives and then dedicating their non-scoring units to killing off your troops.

Finally, this strategy only works if you're deploying second. If you deploy first, your opponent is going to deploy to stop your advance. If you're deploying second, chances are your opponent will get to bombard your 'box' with artillery (manticores, hammerheads, fire prisms, maybe even vindicators and leman russes). Ideally, you want to deploy second and seize the initiative. Otherwise, you want to outflank your whole army.

This strategy outlined in the video is essentially how Chaos Daemon, MechEldar, and Dark Eldar players play every single game. Let your opponent go for objectives and dedicate their entire army to spearheading their targets one-at-a-time.

I think the bottom line is that its a very situational tactic. You need to have more speed & more mobile ranged weapons than your opponent to prevent him from quickly redeploying to meet the new threat posed by your spear head and your opponent has to have a lack of blast weapons so that clumping together doesn't hurt you. It can be very effective against foot orcs or Tyranids that are generally slow and don't have alot of ranged AT. Its quite suicidal against Guard or deff rolla heavy armies. It could work ok against MEQ armies depending on their weapons load outs.

So what seems to be the general message is to not pack them in so tightly, and not to do what the video suggests, but still use the tankshock/ mop up tactic?


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Absolutionis wrote:Perhaps the single biggest problem with 'giving' your opponent objectives is that you allow them to entrench inside objectives and they have first choice. Personally, I think it's a decent idea, but I have no reason why your opponent would put an unguarded defiler (or any nonscoring unit) right on top of an objective.

Like he said, it was to represent a unit on the table. None of those units were what they really were, they just represented an army split in groups.

I think the general message is to fight against how your enemy deploys and what his capabilities are rather than trying to fight with a pre-conceived plan and failing to adapt it.

PanzerLeader wrote:I think the general message is to fight against how your enemy deploys and what his capabilities are rather than trying to fight with a pre-conceived plan and failing to adapt it.

Precisely. Trying to base your army around one "tactic" fails as soon as your opponent doesn't play into your plans.