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Losing is important. It helps us focus on which tactical choices led to a loss.

Most WHFB and AoS tactical discussions seem to focus on army list selection, but the battle is usually won or lost by tactical choices during deployment and the first turn of movement. Army list selection is usually not the culprit, unless using unbalanced armies or the choices were so extreme that you were playing rock, scissors, paper. Example of Rock, Scissors, Paper army list selection: One player selects all cavalry, the other player brings either all missile troops (loss) or all spearmen (win).

Some recent examples where tactical choices on deployment and the first turn of movement determined the outcome of the battle.

Deployment Example 1: Chaos player setup their forces to hit the enemy in waves (wave of fast moving troops followed by wave of slow moving troops). The fast moving troops were dead by the time the slow moving troops arrived. An even battle became instead two one-sided battles.

Deployment Example 2: Dwarf player knew the Green Knight was going to show up near his deployment zone and he still setup his organ gun on a flank where it was charged by the Green Knight. If the Organ gun had been setup in the middle of other units, the Green Knight could not have charged the organ gun.

Deployment Example 3: Dwarf player setup crossbowmen in a strategic tower that the battle would be fought over instead of setting up a melee infantry unit. Melee infantry then marched towards the tower. Result: crossbowmen spent a lot of time in melee. Dwarf melee troops spent most of the battle marching. It would have been far better to put melee troops in the strategic tower and have the crossbowmen march to the relief of the tower.

Deployment Example 4: I setup the Bloodsecrator on my flank in order to get cover bonus and to possibly move towards an altar that gave bonuses to a priest. The enemy setup his army to avoid that flank of my army, and the Bloodsecrator played only a small role in the battle. I compounded the error by not immediately rushing the bloodsecrator towards the middle.

Flanks are actually really important in Age of Sigmar. The key to age of sigmar (and many other war games) is to maximize the percentage of the troops in your army that are fighting and minimize the percentage of the troops of your enemy's forces that are fighting. If you look at the battle reports where one player has all of his army fighting and the other player has troops in reserve that are not fighting, the player who is utilizing all of his forces usually wins.

Your examples are very sound mate.

Tactics exist in the movement phase of Age of Sigmar, they are just different than the old Warhammer.

As for the flanks they do exist and a battle can be lost easily if one does not employ strategy in his movement...

Agreed, but to play devil's advocate, some examples you used were a bit obvious and simple. For example, the one with the organ gun. If you knew the opponent had a "deep-striking" unit, you would never put an artillery piece in such a defenceless state. You would put it in a more turtled position so the enemy would not be able to charge you with the DS unit as you said.

I agree that the examples may be obvious, but they are all from battle reports in the battle report forum. They were real games that happened recently.

The game is new, there are lots of rules (unit war scrolls, terrain war scrolls, randomly rolled terrain, scenarios, times of war, house rules being tried out, etc.), and people being people, tactical mistakes will happen. I've been playing miniatures since the 1980's, and I made one of the mistakes in the examples above.

I like the write up and enjoy seeing some love for the game to help folks out.

Some of these concepts are simple but for newer people this might give them something to think about as to things you have to think about during a match, my only suggestion is, give a little more detail on ways to solve these examples. Units that would have turned the tides if placed properly. Seeing these are all games you played, why not go over with your opponents after the game and talk about what could have been improved? Why did they deploy like they did in the first place?

I like where you are going with these but they just kinda fall flat without more of an explanation or solution. You mention utilizing all of your forces, well how would you utilize all yours in those scenarios?

 Solosam47 wrote:
. Seeing these are all games you played, why not go over with your opponents after the game and talk about what could have been improved? Why did they deploy like they did in the first place?

We do talk about it, both during and after a game. Can't write up everything in a forum post, though.

endur wrote:

 Solosam47 wrote:
. Seeing these are all games you played, why not go over with your opponents after the game and talk about what could have been improved? Why did they deploy like they did in the first place?

We do talk about it, both during and after a game. Can't write up everything in a forum post, though.

I get that, I just liked the post and thought it would add to it and inv more conversation if you gave some solutions to the deployments or opened it up to talk about what could be done in these scenarios to improve deployment when faced with these situations.