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I was making a proposed rules thread, about designing missions for factions that emphasize their skills and are more accurate to what they'd be doing in the lore... But I realized, the only one I had a solid idea for was Marines.

Obviously some factions are great for pitched battles (Guard, Nids, Orks) but of the factions that probably SHOULDN'T be fighting like happens on the tabletop, what should they be doing instead?

This already exists.
We call it Kill Team.

What factions shouldn't be fighting pitched battles?

And how do you define "pitched battle" - as it applies to the tabletop?

In my (probably unpopular) opinion a lot of factions should not even be full armies to fight pitched battles, but just a squad and/or character allied into a main force.

Kill Team is the obvious answer for doing things not on the epic armies clashing scale.

Crusade is another option. With agendas you have army-specific reasons for what they are doing there. Taking slaves, bioforming the planet, twisting the strands of fate. You are not just standing in circles to gain points, or meatgrindering the enemy. You have a plan.

 Nevelon wrote:
In my (probably unpopular) opinion a lot of factions should not even be full armies to fight pitched battles, but just a squad and/or character allied into a main force.

Kill Team is the obvious answer for doing things not on the epic armies clashing scale.

Crusade is another option. With agendas you have army-specific reasons for what they are doing there. Taking slaves, bioforming the planet, twisting the strands of fate. You are not just standing in circles to gain points, or meatgrindering the enemy. You have a plan.

...and your plan doesn't necessarily line up with the mission objectives which, for the record, I'm okay with. Sometimes, the battle isn't the point. Maybe it's a distraction to cover for taking slaves, for example.

 KingGarland wrote:
This already exists.
We call it Kill Team.

Kill Team doesn't really fit the vibe I'm going for. I do get your point, but Kill Team is still symmetrical-Marines, as the most well known ones, would have a decapitation strike mission. So you'd have the other side have a decent chunk of models, with a VIP that the Marines have to take down. Bonus points for the Marines surviving long enough to be extracted.

I think you first have to specify which factions you're thinking of to get an idea of what story/structure might work with them.

I can think of a few outliers; but often as note GW has already rolled them back into main forces. It also ignores the fact that most factions we see, even small ones, are still Galactic Small; which means they can still operate a huge standing army by modern day Earth standards.


Even the Eldar - the classic dying race - still have untold billions in population and that's before you get to their wraith constructs that they can call on.

If you drop down to Imperial Agents and Harliquins I can agree but they've also (at least right now) rolled back into being subfactions of main factions. Both still rely (typically) on allies from their core faction to build full armies; with it being rarer/niche to field a pure army

While GW suggests that 500 point games are exclusive to Boarding Actions, I've had fun with regular 40k at 500 points.

That said, I am a Crusader, and those are the missions I use. Agreed about the mention of Agendas above BTW- Agendas are one of the best parts of Crusade- they absolutely can be used as the building blocks of campaigns.

Map based campaign play (whether matched or Crusade) can be sweet with multiple 500 point armies- especially 500 point armies that can ally.

ccs wrote:
What factions shouldn't be fighting pitched battles?

And how do you define "pitched battle" - as it applies to the tabletop?

I believe JNA is referring to factions that generally avoid "fair fights" or battles where they're likely to take a high number of casualties. So for example, craftworlders would rather operate through cat's paws, manipulation, etc. And when they do have to use violence, they'd prefer to throw an overwhelming force against a horribly out-matched enemy to ensure victory and minimize how much it costs the eldar. Alpha Legion also come to mind. Sure, they'll take to the field of battle as needed, but ideally the enemy should be at a massive disadvantage, starting the fight with half their tanks demolished by booby traps, half their soldiers killed at the "top of turn 1" by a well-executed ambush, etc.

I think it's hard to represent most of these scenarios in a game of 40k even with a modified mission because it's hard to make it fun for your opponent to take on your 2k army with their 1k army because your eldar successfully outmaneuvered them or because the alpha legion sabotage efforts went off without a hitch. Those sorts of interactions can be cool, but people don't want to spend 2 irl hours getting their butts kicked to resolve them. Those sorts of things maybe make more sense as part of some kind of campaign-level quick interaction. Like playing your "Alpha Legion Sabotage" card and spending 10 seconds resolving it instead of 2 hours.

So with the above in mind, I think on-the-table representations of those sorts of things have to avoid being represented as some sort of massive points advantage or some other benefit that makes the game un-fun for one side. Instead, you have to focus on making the game play *differently* while still giving people the core experience of pew pewing eachothers' armies in a relatively even fashion.

So for eldar, maybe you do the BFG thing. That is, you give them missions where they're trying to engage the enemy and then withdraw in a hit & run style offensive. So they show up, have to kill specific enemy assets (warlords/characters/the most expensive non-character unit, etc.) and then have to get off the table, and you compare how many points of designated non-eldar were destroyed vs how many points of eldar were destroyed.

Or maybe you frame the mission as being innately one-sided in the enemy's favor with whatever asymmetrical tricks the "tricky" army has up their sleeve merely being a way to even the odds to give them a chance in the first place. So maybe the Alpha Legion army needs to kill a VIP at all costs. So maybe they start the game with some advantage (mass scout, weakened infiltrate, turn 1 reserves, whatever), but the enemy gets infinite respawns for their units. So the AL *must* fight their way through to an extremely defended VIP unit and end the game before they're inevitably drowned in reinforcements.

Basically, whatever cool trickery you give the tricky army has to be less or equally as advantageous as whatever huge benefit you give the non-tricky player. The starting premise has to be that the trickky army is using tricky tactics because they can't afford to just bully the enemy with overwhelming power.

I think Jake is right to call out Agendas and campaigns in general. Some Agendas let you accumulate some kind of resource or advantage that can be used to make future battles easier. And in the context of a style of campagin that allows armies to "power up" over time, this can essentially translate into short-term disadvantages for long-term advantages. So my sneaky alpha legion can spend a few missions focusing on harvesting blackstone, effectively keeping some units out of the fight as they hide and perform actions to achieve some of the pariah nexus agendas. And then once I'm ready for my efforts to pay off, they can show up sporting some big, flashy relics or other advantages and suddenly have a marked power advantage over opponents who weren't focusing on the long-game as much.

Campaigns that have a decent injury and retreat system can achieve something similar. If we're playing an attrition campaign where units can become permanently removed from your roster over time, then having my eldar show up, go for some easy kills, and then run away off the table before they take too many casualties in return can be a winning strategy in the long-term without any special mission being needed. It still makes them feel like they're "avoiding" a pitched battle in that they're just sort of poking at the enemy and prioritizing their own safety, even though they're bringing a 2k army to fight a 2k army.

I think a big reason it’s hard to represent this in 40K is that terrain is so awful rules wise, and the current game has stripped a lot of tactical depth to trip up on.
40K was never particularly good at it, but it could be used.

Most of this edition has been for us redoing our home rules to make it far better for narrative. But it becomes a point where we just are not playing current 40K half the time at all.

But I think every faction has the ability and when forced too play the pitched battle at the scale 40K is at.
And it can represent a lot of battles that come from attempts at gaining the advantage.

I actually wish apocalypse had been given a better chance, rather than turned into a joke event to just put everything on the table.

I suppose my problem with this sort of thing is that every military force is always trying to give themselves these kinds of advantages, so I can't really see why it should be limited to just some factions.

Old School Kill Team, where you had a protagonist Kill Team up against antagonist mooks and bosses was a good model for this sort of thing, and a game mode that resolved quickly so you could swap sides and let the other person be the protagonist for round 2.

But in reality most battles in history and the present are heavily asymmetric, and stand up fights are rare.

If we went back to the roots of wargaming, fighting with unbalanced forces is much more common in Historical wargaming.

Another answer is to have these games run with a GM who designs the scenario and can tweak it in play to ensure a fun experience for all involved.

But doing this in the pick up game environment where both players expect a fair shot at winning and they also want a pre-written scenario that will structure a fool proof game of that nature - I just don't think it really works all that well.

That said, you can also look at some of the missions in older editions of 40K. 3rd edition had awesome Raid missions that represented the sort of thing you're talking about - but hard to do it in modern 40K with no force org.