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Was thinking about it, the way to maximize blood tithe points would be to always try and go second.

If you go first, then you either have 0 or 1 point if you have a slaughtercult.

If you go second then you can hope to have a rhino pop or cultist squad or spawn get destroyed and possibly start with 3 or 4 points.

Going first means you are always behind a full turn on collecting points?

Thoughts?

There are definite advantages to going second. But as ever, there are a lot of factors in play, and it'll depend on the situation.

Gaining points is a nice bonus, but won't win you the game if all your transports get wrecked in your deployment zone.

I would argue that there are advantages to either. If you go second you will get very little use out of your blood tithe the first turn when you cannot charge and the opponent has already acted so FnP is only affecting the second turn.

On the other hand if you have first turn you can gain some movement from your transports before they get destroyed and take advantage of any shooting you have to lower the opponent's return fire.

I have noticed people get so into trying to generate blood points that they loose track of the cost to benefit ratio. If you sacrifice 400 pts in models to get 8 blood points was it worthwhile? Probably not. Blood tithe is only good when your units are accomplishing something while dying.

 ansacs wrote:
I would argue that there are advantages to either. If you go second you will get very little use out of your blood tithe the first turn when you cannot charge and the opponent has already acted so FnP is only affecting the second turn.

On the other hand if you have first turn you can gain some movement from your transports before they get destroyed and take advantage of any shooting you have to lower the opponent's return fire.

I have noticed people get so into trying to generate blood points that they loose track of the cost to benefit ratio. If you sacrifice 400 pts in models to get 8 blood points was it worthwhile? Probably not. Blood tithe is only good when your units are accomplishing something while dying.

I agree with this 100%. No point summoning a bloodthirster that has to then stand around for 2/3 turns whilst costing you half of your army. Blood tithe points are an absolute bonus, but shouldn't be your primary goal.

Going second also means your opponent gets two full turns of shooting at your units plus overwatch.

So no, I will always be trying to go first. FNP isn't worth it if all your units are dead. It also isn't worth the losses taken on the first turn of shooting.

It seems to me to be a way to mitigate some of the ass whooping of going second in a SAFH meta as opposed to an actual incentive to give those armies what they want

You can even make a list and deploy planning on going second. Like a bunch of easy-to kill units like cultists and min khornedogs/bikers, solo spawns up front. However, it ain't gona be easy to lure the opponent in killing enough. You'll need quite some number of BT points as only fnp and summoning will really matter early on. And, i think it's not worth sacraficing your troops and slots for a quick boost.

If you really want BT points early on, take shooters to pop tanks and kill small enemy units.

But i think that you're better off with a regular list. BT system just helps you to out a bit more when you go second but it's not really all that reliable. As the opponent can just not fully kill enough units T1 to allow you summon stuff t2.