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Maneuver Warfare Maneuver Warfare Local Superiority Concentration of Force
Hitting them "where they ain't" roughly means hitting them where they don't expect it or cannot effectively hit back. In real warfare, there are parts of every army that are more vulnerable than others, such as communications relays, artillery bases and resupply convoys. No army has enough resources that it can protect everything everywhere with the same amount of power, so areas that are away from the main area of fighting have less protection. If you can get past the main enemy lines, you can attack some of these less-defended targets. While this is harder to do in Warhammer 40k, it is still possible. For example, will your assault specialists have an easier time attacking enemy assault specialists, or attacking a squad of support weapons? A Lascannon in close combat is just a big, expensive club. You can use your mobility to make sure that you are attacking weaker units, or units that are weak in the area you are strong. You can also use your mobility to sidestep their strengths, thus minimizing them. So let's take a look at mobility and Movement and how to make the most of it. We'll begin in the beginning. Deployment
You can also achieve similar results by using a feint in your deployment. Basically, you place one unit out away from where your army will be placed, preferably as early in the deployment as possible. This should decoy your opponent into thinking you'll have a firebase or something over there. I recall Kenton Kilgore (Go Fighting Tigers!) doing this in one game against Pat's Orks. He placed an artillery piece way off to one end of his deployment zone, so Pat placed a bunch of Orks there to charge it. Kenton then placed the rest of his stuff all at the other end. His artillery piece still had the range to pound most of the table, and even when it died, it essentially kept all those Orks out of the game, since they were too far away to do anything to the rest of his forces. A very inexpensive trade, all in all. Sometimes you don't even have to fake out your opponent. Either due to the respective sizes of your armies, or different philosophies of deployment, or the vagaries of terrain, you may find it easy to set up your force into a small wedge formation, while the opponent is spread out over a lot of the table. This may leave you out of range of the guns or assault troops on the far end, which will have to take time to move to reach you. In the meantime, you can maul the chunk of enemy right in front of you with a nice advantage in numbers!
Mobility So how do you slow down an enemy? Difficult terrain can be fairly good for this. Impassable terrain is even better, since then they have to go around. 'Tarpit' units can hold up some of the enemy army while you deal with the rest. In fact, a 'tarpit' unit might hold up one enemy unit in a long assault, while it also slows several units behind that one since they have to go around the assault. Knocking out vehicles is another way to keep the enemy units from supporting each other. Remember that Range is part of Concentration of Force. If the enemy army has a lot of ranged weapons that can fire halfway across the battlefield, it'll be harder to keep them from supporting each other. Unless of course you use terrain to your advantage, blocking off their line of sight. Then you can keep gobbling up their army one unit at a time while they just stand there, waiting their turn. All of this only works if you use your mobility, however. When it comes time to move, make sure that you do move and do it decisively. If your army doesn't come down like a hammer, you'll have lost your advantage. If you have units with Heavy Weapons, consider whether moving them this turn or firing them will be more beneficial to you. While they might have a decent target right now, they might have more and better targets if you move them, or they might be able to affect more of the board with their fire. On the other hand, you may be better off leaving them there and letting them support from a distance, if doing so will cut down on enemy mobility by giving you a chance to take down a vehicle or something. Decide where your main effort is going to be and decide how much of your force is going to take part in that effort. If there is something outside that area that supports the main effort, decide how you will take care of that as well. Finally, be decisive, if a unit isn't supporting your main effort, ask yourself why and what role it plays. If it isn't helping out, it might be hurting you. (For example, in a 1000pt game, having a 200pt unit just sit on the sidelines suddenly changes the odds, giving you 800pts vs the enemy's 1000. I know which way I'd bet, thanks.) The Demons made me do it While it is harder to achieve this in Warhammer 40k, the concepts are still there. It is easier to deal with one enemy than two, and two are easier than a dozen. So, how do we set it up so that we only fight one or two at a time? Well, much like happened in my Diablo II game, you can use enemy units and vehicles or terrain to get in the way of or slow down an enemy unit that you don't want to get to you right away. This can be as simple as moving diagonally to charge the side of the squad away from the other unit like this
You can achieve similar effects by using terrain to block off one side of the unit and force the other unit to go farther around.
The same effect can be achieved by using a "tarpit" unit to hold one of their units back while you deal with the other. You can potentially also set up similar effects even against members of the same unit. You can start by making sure you are bunched up when you assault and try to limit the number of enemies that you contact. This gives you more models fighting than the enemy gets to have. To set this up, you may need to adjust how your unit moves in the Movement phase, since it must charge it's full distance in the Assault phase. Depending on the formation of the enemy unit, you may need to move diagonally so that you can apply your unit to a corner of the enemy unit. You may also want to form something of a wedge shape with your unit, leaving only a few models that will be able to make contact with the enemy, while the others will be piled in behind them.
Even during the assault phase, you can make some adjustments by choosing which model will move in what order. To limit the number of models you get into contact with, you can start by using the leading models to get into contact and not leave much room around them for the following models. If there is no enemy model within their charge range, your following models must pile in behind your leading models. This will let you have a densely packed formation and give you a powerful advantage in the first turn of the assault. For subsequent turns of that assault, it is much trickier to pull off, due to Pile in moves, but there are still some ways to do it. The easiest way is to take advantage of terrain features. Note that only Impassable Terrain will be of help here, since Pile in moves ignore difficult terrain. You could potentially use friendly models or vehicles as well, as long as the enemy doesn't want to charge them or you don't mind them being charged. If you can get your back or side to a wall or something similar, they won't be able to surround you. In addition, as long as all models of your unit are engaged in combat, you don't have to use the Pile in move to get into base contact. If you are outnumbered in the combat, but you can get your whole unit engaged, but keep the enemy from surrounding you due to a bottleneck, you'll be in much better shape. Mopping Up If you liked this article, you'll find some of the concepts explained in different ways or more detail in some of these articles... If you enjoyed this, email me and let me know |
