Power
We all strive to get more power out of our armies. Tactics is one way to achieve this, but this is not a tactical article. (I will write that article and link it here when I do.) Instead, I want to focus on the part involving building and evolving your list. When setting up a list for an army, there are three places that you can improve your power. Effectiveness, Efficiency and Utility. Note that I have written a pair of articles that cover similar ground: Coordination and Coordination 2. This is meant to cover the topics in a little different way and can work as a complement to the previous articles.

Effectiveness
Effectiveness is a measure of how well each individual unit does whatever job you want it to do. A Predator with one lascannon is fairly good at taking out heavy tanks. A Predator with 3 Lascannons is significantly better. While this will sometimes result in overkill, it can also give you a number of important improvements. First, it offers you reliability. If you want a heavy tank dead, you can generally bet that a triple-las Predator will be able to take care of business every turn. You don't have to allocate other units to the task, as you won't need them. This brings us to the second improvement: time. With a very few exceptions, each unit can only kill 1 enemy unit per turn. If you have a unit that can reliably kill an enemy unit every turn, you've got something useful going on. The third advantage is space. On most battlefields you have a limited amount of terrain to cover your units. If you have a lot of units, it can be difficult to give them all cover. (See below, however)

Generally the way to achieve more effectiveness is to find the best weapon or unit for a particular task, then give it any improvements that it needs to work better. The example above of the triple-las Predator is a straightforward use of this. Another example might be the laser tank I came up with for the game Centurion (Grav Tank combat game.) Looking through the rules, I realized that every weapon had limited range except for the laser. It was only limited by line of sight. I then found that a grav tank in high hover mode had almost unlimited line of sight. Finally, I found that a grav tank in high hover mode could only be hit on the turret and underside armor. My idea was born: a high-hovering grav tank with armor concentrated on the underside and turret and the maximum number of lasers that I could fit. It would have line of sight to almost anything on the board and could hit anything it could see, and those lasers would punch through most armor very, very quickly. In addition, if I deployed it correctly, very few enemy tanks on the board would be able to fire back (since I would be out of range of almost everything except other lasers.)

Efficiency
This is the art of getting the most bang for your buck. Basically, you want to pick the best weapon or equipment possible, then try to find the least expensive way to get it. Go through your army list and write down every unit where you can get the particular weapon or equipment. The first time I can remember doing this was with my old Dark Eldar, years and years ago. I was trying to include as many Dark Lances as I could in the list. While I could get a number of them for 60pts each, I found I could get quite a few for 50pts, and even a good number of them for only 35pts. There were only a few units that could give me those, so I took as many as I could. After I exhausted those options, I went to the next cheapest options. The only time you need to use a more expensive option is when the cheaper ones have run out, or when it would preclude you from taking something that is otherwise necessary to the list. (That could be a mandatory HQ choice, or it could be a unit that can handle a different kind of target.)

Efficiency can also involve using the least possible force to take something out. For example, using a lighter weapon to stun a tank so that you can free up a heavier weapon to take out a different target. Another example might be using a small squad to tie up a unit for a turn, rather than trying to crush it with several squads. If you less force to take out one target, you'll have more available to strike another target or even multiple targets.

A razorspam army is a great example of the first kind of efficiency. Pick a couple of weapons that are the best at what they do (Lascannon for ranged antitank, meltas for short-range antitank.) Then find the least expensive ways to get them (Razorbacks are about as cheap as lascannons come, plus they offer some armored protection and the potential for mobility.) Similarly, back when I played the old FASA Battletech, I looked at the list of weapons and decided that the PPC had the best combination of range and damage available. I then played around with the numbers and found that I could fit 2 onto a medium 'Mech along with the maximum armor and enough heat sinks to fire them continuously. It made for a slow, powerful 'Mech with the firepower of much larger 'Mechs. A single PPC would fit on a light 'Mech, but you'd be wasting too much on the 'Mech itself. 3 PPCs would fit on a heavy 'Mech, but to get enough heat sinks, it would cost you armor. 2 on a 50-tonner worked much more efficiently. A Rifleman Dreadnaught is a great example of the second sort of efficiency. It has 2 Twin-linked Autocannons, so it hits with about 3 shots per turn at S7, which will do bad things to light transports. It is fairly inexpensive and can bang away at light transports from long range all game, freeing up your heavier weapons to hunt the big tanks.

Utility
The final part of squeezing more power out of a list comes from giving more utility to your units. My favorite chef, Alton Brown, always says that there are a lot of great kitchen gadgets, but you can only have so much kitchen to store them in. Thus, he tries to avoid unitaskers, items that only have one purpose. He prefers multitaskers, items which can be used for several things. If you think of the points in your list as being comparable to the space in a kitchen, you can see how it can be really useful to have units that can perform more than one task. For starters, having more units that can shoot tanks is a pretty handy thing. More units gives you more flexibility about where and how you can apply pressure on the enemy. If the first unit doesn't kill the enemy tank, you've got other units ready to fire. If it _does_ kill the enemy tank, you can then use your other units to target something else. With more flexible units, it gives you a better chance of having the right weapon in the right place at the right time. If you've only got one antitank unit, it will be fairly easy for the enemy to avoid. If you have 10 of them, they won't be able to dodge them all. Finally, having multiple units complicates enemy target priority. With a single antitank unit, an enemy that depends on tanks will have to kill it first. With multiple antitank units, they don't have a clear priority to engage one target over another, and your antitank capability will degrade more slowly. (If you have 10 units with lascannons and 1 unit with 10 lascannons, the 10 units will be able to absorb a lot more damage and still be effective.) And speaking of clear shots, you can usually use one unit to give cover to another. Put something inexpensive or expendable in front of your first unit, but try to leave it's firing lanes clear. (This often works well with various tanks, which can fire their turrets over the top of other tanks while still being hull down.

Some of the best utility units are ones that can easily have their multitasking ability built right in from the outset. An easy example would be a squad of Dark Eldar Trueborn in a Venom. They can get multiple Blasters for antitank duty and the Venom has twin Splinter Cannon to handle any infantry that fall out of the tanks or otherwise get in the way. Other units can have some utility given to them through various wargear options (a power weapon or a combiflamer on a sergeant, for example. It might not give them a huge capability for their second mission, but simply having the option makes a difference.) Another way to add utility to a unit is to add a character. The most obvious version of this is in close combat, where most characters excel, but other characters will provide important additional options to a unit as well. (An Archon with a Blast Pistol and Haywire grenades can give decent antitank to a unit that is otherwise anti-infantry, for example.)

Another thing to consider for utility is mobility. The best unit in the world can only make a difference in the battle if it can get to the target. In addition to being able to shoot or assault things in battle, units with mobility can be used to delay, funnel or block off opposing units, sometimes without firing a shot. Units with inherent mobility, such as Tau Battlesuits or Assault Marines are particularly valuable, as they cannot have their mobility removed without wiping out the whole unit. On the other hand, even just adding a transport to a unit makes a big difference in it's utility. The further a unit can move, the easier it is to get it to the right place at the right time. How to determine that right place and time and what to do when you get there will be the subject of a follow-up article on tactics. When I have written that article, you may find it here

If you enjoyed this, email me and let me know

Return to Warpstorm!