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How do?

This is another thread related to my attempts to get Tournament ready this year. For those who haven’t seen the others (they are dotted around the place), that’s quite a project. See, due to a long commute and an intellectually exhausting job, I’ve not really played for around 6 years. Have either lacked the time or the mental capacity.

This time, I want to discuss my current thinking, and am looking to find out what else I may want to be considering.

To start, I’d like to explain that I think Netlists and Meta-gaming are a sodding god send. Yes, I know the lists are nasty, but they’re also very much known quantities. That means I know what to expect, what my opponent is likely to try on, and from there how I can about countering or mitigating that threat. Which is nice.

That thinking links into my GSC list (you can find the current iteration, as yet untested in my thread in the Tournament board). The concept is a hefty first turn flattening courtesy of three allied Manticores, and populating the objectives ASAP, married to multiple character disposal systems.

The trick here of course, is knowing what to shoot up, when to shoot it up, and the best toy for the job. Hence I need to learn to think like a Champ. My plan seems sound enough as a concept, but if I’m pod shotting Bill, when I should be pod shotting Marjorie, it’s just not gonna work out so well.

It may seem an easy task. But, is it? Is it really? I mean as I mentioned above, Netlists and the current Meta are meat for this grinder, as I can take one look at my opponent’s army and commence pre-planned deconstruction. But man. This is 40k. A game with near infinite combinations. No point making The Big Boys cry if I’m continually spanked like a red-headed stepchild by everyone else.

So what sort of threat assessment do you undertake during a game? How do you decide what to knack, when to hoof it, and what to bray it with? Do you think it’s truly necessary to buy and devour every Codex? Or do you think the archetypes and strategies tend to revolve around a number of common themes?

Any and all input welcome!

It depends on the list. In a gunline, I usually aim to poke a single hole in the line, and just start eating into the core from there, no point in trying to barge my entire force in through their entire shield wall.

Against an aggressive army, I try and character hunt. Pile into them, lock them in place, do anything in my power to knock them out. Most aggressive lists (Orks, Chaos, etc.) rely on characters to beef their troops to scary strengths.

A lot of dependencies based on the list you're using vs the list they're using. But as far as general target priority goes, I always think about in the back of my mind what can hurt me the most and deal with it from there.

If you're playing GSC and have masses of troops, you'll probably want to put a higher value on the oppositions anti-infantry units and ignore the lascannons for example.

It's really not necessary to own every codex to remain competitive. You just need to learn the flavour of the month and update your lists to keep up. The "competitive" choices from a meta perspective will be quite repetitive so you'll quickly learn the common units and stratagems that would be used.