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Played my first game of 8th edition on Thursday and it was only an intro game 2k I used Deathwatch and my opponent brought a relatively balanced death guard force. What struck me was how low in numbers my troops were against the opposition and how hard they were to kill.

I ended up spreading plenty of my force out around the board to try and engage on all fronts and I found my forces slightly strtched. So how do people use smaller armies? I have started thinking that I need to concentrate forces to overwhelm certain parts of the enemies army and then re deploy ?

Welcome to 40k. First off I would suggest that jumping in at 2k points is like jumping in the deep end of the swimming pool and being told to learn to swim. Try some smaller games to start with.

Secondly Elite armies suffer in the current ruleset a little bit for exactly the reasons you're already seeing. You need bodies or essentially wounds to get you through or you need to focus on having the firepower to be able to take away your opponents masses of chaff units. So when you're list buiilding think about higher rate of fire weapons for a few squads to clear chaff.

Because you naturally have less you want to focus on protecting and hiding your squads. You need to learn to love terrain and stay in it a lot. Area terrain will boost your 3+ to 2+ saves.

Head over to the tactics section where you will find a big thread on deathwatch tactics. Read it ALL then ask questions.

Try a smaller game. You will get a better grasp of rules & tactics. 1,750pts is the standard tournament, try a few games at 1000pts and work up.

Actually, big problem with DW is the fact it's trivial to massively overspend for little gain in offensive power. Well optimized DW should absolutely have similar numbers to DG, especially after last points cuts, unless the opponent spammed tons of zombies or something.

And hard to kill? With DW? You have storm bolters with special issue ammo, did you remember to use it? You can put so many wounds on enemy units even DG will struggle to save them all...

I’m building a tricky army at the moment. Militarum Tempestus, have you heard of it? Toughness 3, 4+ saves, with lasgun that are -2 AP as the standard weapon. Each unit has the option to deepstrike. It’s an elite army, but less elite than Space Marines, but more elite than guard. It’s supposed be very fragile. My suggestion when you have more experience is to specialize everything to the max. Have units that are going to do one thing against a certain kind of enemy or two. Also, have your tougher unit be your big work horses.

I was a regular 40k player during 3rd 4th and 5th so it's not like I'm totally alien to it but the game had changed a massive amount!

In regards to damage and numbers I was splitting my fire alot which was a rather large mistake I feel, next time I'm going to concentrate on a unit until it is either eliminated or totally crippled. My opponent was very helpful but he did suggest splitting fire alot which didn't help me much!

With CA changes, the DW will get quite a boost

Rogerio134134 wrote:
In regards to damage and numbers I was splitting my fire alot which was a rather large mistake I feel, next time I'm going to concentrate on a unit until it is either eliminated or totally crippled. My opponent was very helpful but he did suggest splitting fire alot which didn't help me much!

Are you using bolters or storm bolters? Every single DW model that doesn't have some sort of special upgrade should have a storm bolter, it's quite cheap and provides big offensive boost.

The elite army, assuming its points were well spent, will have a massive advantage in force concentration. They can focus more "points" of combat power into a smaller area than a less elite foe.

In theory, this means they should win by pitting their entire 2k against 1k of the enemy army at a time (concentrate into a smaller area than the enemy is capable of, then fight man to man where your superior dudes come out ahead).

There are some things that dick with this, such as indirect fire weapons and terrian placement, but generally spreading out as an elite army is just inviting an even fight, which is not what you want.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
The elite army, assuming its points were well spent, will have a massive advantage in force concentration. They can focus more "points" of combat power into a smaller area than a less elite foe.

In theory, this means they should win by pitting their entire 2k against 1k of the enemy army at a time (concentrate into a smaller area than the enemy is capable of, then fight man to man where your superior dudes come out ahead).

There are some things that dick with this, such as indirect fire weapons and terrian placement, but generally spreading out as an elite army is just inviting an even fight, which is not what you want.

Solid advice thanks