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Designing your army list to create opportunity
First, let's look at the principles of creating opportunity. Range: You can use long or short range weapons to create opportunities. Long-range weapons can fire on the enemy from beyond the range the enemy can retaliate. Short range weapons can be used to target specific enemy models. Firepower: High strength weaponry can be used to take down vehicles, which can sometimes give you a huge opportunity. S8+ weaponry can also be used to specifically target enemy characters. Even without breaking their armor save, the chance to instant-kill a multiwound character is quite an opportunity for both gaining lots of points and keeping a potential game-winning model from being used against you. Mobility: Moving units, especially quickly, can create lots of opportunities. You can put a unit somewhere that wasn't anticipated by the enemy. You can get away from pursuing enemies or use your positioning to threaten special targets. (Such as getting behind a vehicle to attack it's rear armor.) Basically, mobility let's you put your unit in a place where it's abilities will do you the most good. That might be tying up an important unit, it might be using it's weaponry to take out a key vehicle, perhaps zipping up and taking an objective from right under the nose of the enemy army, or keeping out of sight and range while you hold a table quarter. Note that you don't need to design your whole armylist around creating opportunity. If you do, your army may lose focus and you'll certainly never be able to take advantage of it's full potential. It requires a combination of units that create opportunities and units that either tie the enemy down or exploit those opportunities. With that out of the way, let's take a look at two very different armies and try to identify some units that can create opportunities in each of them. As the two armies that I am most familiar with, Tau and Tyranids will be my examples.
Tyranids Flyrant: Great Mobility, good- to great-firepower (that includes close combat) and hard to kill, the Flyrant can always create an opportunity for you. That much power in one place automatically makes it a focal point for the army and will almost always give you local superiority. With the mobility available to the Flyrant, it can really quickly change the focus of your assault or fake out an opponent, making them think your attack will be in one area, when it will in reality be in another. Raveners: The speed of Raveners, especially combined with the potential for Rending Claws, goes a long way toward creating opportunities. With the ability to cover 19-24" in a single turn, their mobility is almost unsurpassed and they can quickly appear in areas where the opponent does not expect them. That same speed allows them to quickly reinforce an area and shred an opposing unit much faster, creating an opportunity the opponent did not expect. Small units of Genestealers: Small units of Genestealers can easily hide behind terrain. This gives you the opportunity to use them to seize objectives such as table quarters. Even better, since they can hide behind terrain, it makes it harder to make them non-scoring from a distance, meaning the enemy will have to get close to dig them out. It's never a good idea to get close to Genestealers! Like all Tyranids, Genestealers also have the ability to move quickly through difficult terrain, which can surprise an opponent. Scuttling Genestealers: While it is expensive to give Scuttlers to Genestealers, it does provide a couple of very useful effects. The more obvious one is that their speed will surprise opponents and the threat that they pose will force the enemy to react to you, rather than the other way around. The other option is a little sneakier. If you place a unit of Scuttling Genestealers in an open area, the opponent will recognize it as a good target and may well place a unit to get a clear shot at it. If so, simply using the Scuttling movement to get behind some terrain before the first turn will leave that unit out of place for at least a turn or two. Alternately, placing them aggressively may also make the opponent react to your placement by keeping units away.
Lictors: With their special deployment, Lictors tend to automatically create opportunity. Being able to appear almost anywhere very close to the enemy positions means that have nearly unparalleled mobility on their deployment. They can quickly appear to support an assault or to suddenly attack an unguarded portion of the line. Their Rending Claws and S6 mean that they can easily damage medium vehicles or take down small, expensive units. They can also tie up larger units, as long as the unit doesn't include a powerfist. Lictors and Raveners work particularly well together as they can all suddenly appear at a single point that was previously not under attack. Gunfexen: Heavy Firepower and long range on a platform that can move and shoot. While that by itself isn't necessarily something that will create opportunity, the high Strength does. S10 means even T5 Daemon Princes have to fear your Venom Cannon, and a 36" range Assault weapon means never having to say you are sorry! With that kind of firepower and range, you can effect most of the board and can threaten the biggest tanks and characters. Termagants: (Termagants? Yes, Termagants.) One of the least-respected broods in a Tyranid army, they can be surprisingly deadly. Not because of their mass of bodies, (that's not surprising) not because of their 12" range, but because they are S4! This means that light vehicles such as Landspeeders need to give these broods a wide berth (6" move + 12" range in any direction covers a large part of the board, and the massive amount of shots almost ensures taking a vehicle down. In addition, most vehicles have AV10 on their back armor, so any broods of Termagants in the enemy deployment zone can be an extra threat.
Tau Empires Broadsides: These guys have a huge range advantage on almost anything in the game, and with S10 AP1 weapons, they are a threat to anything in the game from Landraiders and Terminators to Daemon Princes and super-powered characters. Crisis Suits: The mobility inherent in Crisis Suits really allows them to catch enemies by surprise. Although they don't have the speed that Jumppack troops have, being able to shoot and then move makes a huge difference. They can also deepstrike, depending on scenario, and their weaponry can typically do nasty things to the back armor of vehicles. Stealth Snipers: The combination of long-range weaponry and a Stealth Field is a very potent combination. It basically allows you to shoot at the enemy without fear of retaliation. In addition, the S6 of the weaponry means it can take down light to medium vehicles as well. Since they can damage the enemy without taking damage in return, that's a great opportunity, and their placement (early on) may well dictate where the enemy places units, which makes them react to you. Piranha: The Piranha is very fast, with the option to move 24" if it doesn't fire it's weaponry. It also mounts a pair of shield drones and is capable of mounting a Fusion blaster that can take down tanks. There are two particularly good ways to use a Piranha to create an opportunity. One of them is to utilize it's 24" movement to place it close behind an enemy tank. This basically forces the enemy to react by trying to kill the Piranha, since otherwise they'll lose an expensive tank. If you can arrange it so that there is another threat to the tank as well (such as Broadsides or EMP-equipped Firewarriors) then you'll have the tank in something of a checkmate, in that whatever they do, they will still likely lose the tank. The other great way to use a Piranha is to move up 12", deploy the drones up to 2" away and then assault 6" with the drones. That gives you an assault range of 20" to surprise a small enemy unit with. (Oh, and you might as well fire the Piranha and the Drones, since they have Assault weapons. Just make sure the drones shoot the unit they will charge!) Wrap up If you enjoyed this, email me and let me know |
