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Where do you feel tactics matter most? Is it list building? Positioning of models/units? Fire priority? Deployment?

Technically, list building and deployment are strategy, not tactics. Positioning and fire priority are tactics.

Sadly, I believe choice of army and list are far more important than actual tactics.

Outside of List-building and pre-game strategy, I think Fire Priority is the most important thing.

By Fire Priority, I mean a lot of things:

-Recognizing and not falling for bait or distraction units

-Understanding when an assault is likely to fail [i.e. Tacticals without a Powerfist against a Dreadnought]

-Deciding whether to claim an objective/complete a card or whether to contribute fire on a nasty enemy unit

-Thinking turns in advance; how long it will take your units to get over to an objective/table quarter, and what your opponent is likely to do in the meantime


Exact model deployment and positioning is not as important as those things, I've found, during the game.

I hate to say it but I think list building a big portion of tactics/strategy that players use. I think overall strength of an army is proportional to the units that the army is made up of. But this is where strategy and tactics come in to make the best of those units that you are bring into the game.

You've actually missed one - deployment of objectives.

Assuming you're at an event where the table is set up for you, the only bit of control you have over the nature of the table is where the objectives are.

You can try to place them in the open or in cover, and try to place them in your half, or in the midfield, or your opponent's half.

What you want to do depends on a million factors to do with your list (which could be anything) and your list's strengths relative to your opponent's (so anything times anything else!), but the broad concepts are:

You want the bulk of objectives to be within easy reach. If most of your army is assault troops (daemonkin) then having objectives on your opponent's side is good, as you want to run that way, not skulk in your opponent's deployment zone. If they're the better assault army, then you don't want to advance to meet him.

Spreading objectives out is good for a fast army, or one with deep striking troops. Clustered up is good for slow, tough, hard-to-shift infantry.

Putting an objective in the open means that to claim it, the scoring unit also has to come into the open. Which is an issue for Mandrakes and Lictors far more than for assault centurions and rhino transports. By comparison, putting it in difficult - or even dangerous - terrain makes it risky for someone without move through cover to claim.

Finally, as you're deploying, also note where you don't want your opponent putting their objectives. Let's say there is a piece of terrain which is good cover to one side (a corner of a ruined wall providing a v-shape of chest-high walls not a million miles away from an aegis line, for example). Given his druthers, your opponent will stick an objective behind this defensible position, stick a squad or two on it, and sit there the whole game 'farming' victory points and occasionally popping off heavy weapon shots.

If you place your first objective a few inches in front of it, he can't claim it from behind the wall (it's too far), nor can he place another objective behind the wall (because it'd be too close to the objective in the open and/or his back board edge).

Result - if he wants to do anything on that flank, he has to come out of cover to do it.

You can't control an objective (in a 'scoring unit') sense from more than a few inches away, but if an objective is in the open with a good hull down position to deploy your vindicator/demolisher about 18" away, that objective is pretty damn controlled; the range of the demolisher is no longer a problem because targets have to come into range of the gun in order to claim that objective.



Essentially, there are 3 broad elements:


Army Strategy - this is list building. Essentially, do you have the capacity to earn enough victory points in any given scenario against any given opponent to have a chance of winning? In real terms, do you have scoring units, can you get them to any given place on the battlefield in a reasonable time, can they survive sitting on an objective being attacked, and is there any category of threat unit or rival objective holder you don't have the ability to destroy or at least slow down?

Battlefield Strategy - given this battlefield, where do you put the objectives, and given that, where do you want to deploy? The latter matters most for slow units who struggle to get to the other end of the board without aid but is important for faster units for different reasons - cover or blocking lines of maneuver to other friendly units. Note that this isn't just "at deployment" - it doesn't matter whether a unit is in cover on turn 1, it matters if they are in cover when the enemy starts shooting at them. If the enemy's main killer is medium range small arms (say necrons) then that's about 6-8" forward of your starting position for anyone going to advance; setting up such than you can move into cover is much better than setting up so you have to move out of it!

Mission Objectives
This is more 'tactics' because it's reacting to what happens on the battlefield. At the start of every turn, take a moment to think "what do I need to do to make victory points, and what can I do to stop them making victory points" - don't go for easy kills if they're not important. Most of the time, you know your opponent's objectives, so pay attention to those too. You can mess up opponent's plans very easily with the right units; if he has to spend a turn shooting his way through a cluster of spore mines, or half-a-dozen spawned termegants, they've made their points back. Board control with lots of models is a valuable tool if you're not super-fast. If you're super-fast and have lots of models (say; Skyblight Gargoyle swarms) then you can seriously cause trouble even if you never kill an enemy model.

Yep deployment of objectives as well. I actually had a game last night where my mistake in deploying the objectives made it easier for my opponent to get to them and try to push me off of them.

 Glitcha wrote:
Where do you feel tactics matter most? Is it list building? Positioning of models/units? Fire priority? Deployment?

This game does not have tactics. It has a strategy element, but that is simply:

-Take most powerful thingy
-Work out which order the enemy powerful thingies need to die
-Hope for T1

The game is won and lost in the movement phase, hands down. I've seen bad lists beat very good lists, as long as the player with a bad list knows what they're doing. Positioning is absolutely paramount, and any tournament player will tell you that.