Fight Fire With Water, not fire! Don’t play their game, play your own game to beat them. One of my regular opponents commented the other day about the lengths he had to go to so that his HQ character could take on my Hive Tyrant. It occurred to me that it might not be the best use of his points to do that. Generally, if your opponent has something that you want to counter, the most difficult way to do it is to fight it with the same type of thing. Whatever it is that your opponent’s army does well, don’t copy them. If you play their game, they will probably have better units for it and have more experience with it as well. Play to your strengths, not those of your opponent. Even if you can get a unit that is as good as theirs and you can equip it just as well, their experience in using that unit or type of combat will probably give them better mileage out of it than you will get out of your unit. Even in the best case scenario, your two units will smack into each other and both will be shredded before one finally falls. This is known as a Pyrrhic victory, since it will have effectively cost you your unit to achieve it. Fight fire with water, not fire. If they have a psyker, don’t get a psyker to take him out, smack into it with a close combat unit or drop ordnance on it. Use something that you already have or can do well to counter it. That might be shooting instead of assaulting, it might be relying on crushing numbers, it might be powerful vehicles or psychic abilities, whatever. The point is, do it better and do it differently than the other guy. To use the example of my Hive Tyrant, there are other ways he has been dealt with in the past. He is vulnerable to Lascannons and Plasmas at long range, and meltas and the like at short range. He has also been reduced to ashes by basic weapons fire (everyone laughs at an IG grunt with a lasgun, nobody laughs at 40!) Although this has never happened so far, he might also be vulnerable to being tied up. Large numbers of cheap troops could hold him up in combat for a very long time, preventing him from making a major impact on the battlefield. The moral of this story is that there’s more than one way to skin a Tyrant, or whatever it is that you want to counter, just look for it in what you do best. If you enjoyed this, email me and let me know |