The Three Triads of Victory

This is a tactical article with an unusual background. I really like the game Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. While playing it, I ran across a number of interesting phrases and quotes. (Every time you make a new discovery they give you a quote relating to it in some way, it's a nice effect that draws you more into the storyline and world.) When I achieved the doctrine of Air Power, this quote was given, attributed to the Spartan Battle Manual, "Air Power rests at the apex of the first triad of victory, for it combines Mobility, Flexibility and Initiative."

This sounded pretty cool, and the phrase stuck with me. I started thinking about what it meant. First off, if there is a FIRST triad of victory, it stands to reason there must be others. Also, by implying that it was the first triad, that would suggest it was the best way to achieve victory. Now, having studied a bit of Sun Tzu's Art of War, I remembered that he classified different paths to victory. A victory of strength vs strength or material vs material was the least effective, because it destroyed so much of your strength even if you won. A victory using mobility and pitting your strength against enemy weakness was much more effective, as it conserved your power. Finally, he mentioned the idea of mental victory, sapping the will of the enemy to fight and winning the battle or war with few, if any losses on your side. The more I thought about it, the more it made sense, but I had to change one thing. I had to make Mobility, Flexibility and Initiative the second triad of victory, to leave room for the mental victory.

The third triad of victory The third triad of victory, then, would be that of the purely physical. It would be something along the lines of Manpower, Material and Firepower. This would represent either having more stuff than the enemy, or having better quality stuff. On the other hand, it would also represent a "smashmouth" approach to combat. This is the type we see most often on 40k battlefields, as two opponents line up their armies and just smash each other right in the mouth. This tends to lead to Pyrrhic victories, where the battle can be described very accurately as 'The last man standing.' These are the sort of battles people think of when they say, "War determines not who is right, but who is left." Although it is not the ideal victory, it is still victory, so it is worth studying and breaking it down.

Manpower Simply, how many models do you have on the board? The more models you have, the more the enemy will need to shoot or chop up to achieve victory. It doesn't matter how well-disciplined they are, or how highly trained, just how tough they are and how many of them can be lost without losing the battle. To a certain degree, armor or high Toughness mitigate low numbers in this brute force approach: it takes 14.5 Dark Eldar Warriors shooting to take down one Space Marine. On the other hand, it takes just 2.25 Space Marines to take down one Dark Eldar Warrior.

Material Material is the non-living (usually, remember that I'm a Tyranid player, too!) stuff that helps your force fight effectively. It may be tanks or machines or Heavy Weapons, but it's the physical stuff that keeps you going in the field. In real situations, it will also be supplies of ammunition and food and water, among other things. Again, the focus here is either on having lots of stuff or having high quality stuff. If you've got better tanks than the other guy, or more of them, you've got an advantage. Remember, "Quantity has a quality all it's own."

Firepower This is the stuff that you use to take out the enemy in droves. This can refer to shooting or assaults, it's just a raw gauge of how much you can dish out, as opposed to the other two, which describe how much you can take.

The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet. Okay, so it seems that this approach to warfare is not the best way, since it leaves the winner in no shape to fight again, so why would anyone use it? Well, it may not be the best way, but it's the easiest way and the most obvious way, particularly in gaming simulations that don't always take other factors, such as Morale and long range movement into account. It's also the most straightforward. If you are planning on outmaneuvering the enemy and foul it up, you may not have enough firepower to shoot your way out, or enough manpower or materials to survive it.

The second triad of victory Now, the second triad is Mobility, Flexibility and Initiative. This represents catching the enemy off-guard. This might be getting there "firstest with the mostest" or simply being where the enemy isn't. In a nutshell, this is Maneuver Warfare. You get around the flanks, you get behind the lines, you take out the supplies they need, but you don't stand still and let them shoot at you. When you do need to directly battle the enemy, you do it with local superiority, so you have multiple units attacking a single point, or you hit weak units with strong ones, giving you a high margin of victory, and thus fewer casualties. To make more sense of this very effective triad, I'll break it down.

Mobility The more you can move, the less the enemy can tie you down and the better chance you have of dictating the battle. (More on this later.) Mobility is not necessarily just fast movement. An army that can infiltrate in different areas of the board can be effectively mobile, even if they don't move much after that. Kroot, or fleet of claw Gaunts are very mobile in wooded terrain, since they can move more freely than other units. Skimmers and jump packs ignore most terrain, even if they only have a move of 6", they can still move effectively.

Flexibility The option to use your forces in different ways or to change a plan mid-game is very useful. I have heard people praise Space Marines because they are very flexible in game terms. Every last Marine can be effective at either shooting or assaulting. They can generally outshoot the assaulty types and out-assault the shooty types, giving them a potential advantage in every combat. So why don't Marines win all the time? Some of them are not outfitted to take advantage of this flexibility, others do not use them in flexible ways, attempting to shoot at Imperial Guard or assault World Eaters. Finally, remember that it's a triad, you have to have all the vertexes or it's just a single point.

Initiative This can be summed up by saying that it's acting rather than reacting. If you let the enemy pick where all the fights will be and who will fight whom, how do you think the battle will turn out? Even if the enemy has a highly mobile force and engages a small part of your army with most of his, you still choose what to do. Perhaps you can maneuver the rest of your force into a position of advantage over his. Alternately, perhaps you can throw in a tough unit to keep most of the army occupied while you run roughshod over the rest of his army. Even better would be to sucker his forces into converging on one area of the battlefield, then withdraw, using superior mobility, and break the rest of his army.

So, how do I work this? Okay, I've got faster units and more mobile models. I've outfitted my army in general (and possibly some specific units as well) to be effective in both shooting and assault. I've got a couple of battle plans. Now what? Now use them. Try to achieve unfair matchups between your forces and the enemy. You can use feints to sucker the enemy into moving where you want. (If you put that big tank on the high hill, the enemy will move into the forest, impeding his own mobility, and will probably attempt to maneuver something to take out the tank.) You can deploy units with good mobility in one area, then move them elsewhere, ignoring the slow enemy units that were placed opposite them to hold them off. You can have your units shoot the enemy assault units, then assault enemy shooty units.

The first triad of victory The first triad of victory, then, is that of the mental, or the spirit as Sun Tzu said. Morale, Command and Information. Of the three, two are less relevant in 40k.

Command and Information These refer to the ability of the enemy commander to understand the battle and command the army to act in certain ways. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately, since it would make the game much more complicated,) these are rarely problems in 40k, since there is (typically) a single commander and the individual models and units do not think for themselves or wait on orders. There are a few ways to use this, but they can be difficult to set up, or simply be situation specific. I've heard of a player that wanted to paint his army in sort of a camouflage so that, hopefully, opposing players might sometimes overlook a unit. Other times you may distract the opponent with one unit while another unit is ignored. These problems come up more frequently, however, in megabattles where there are multiple players on a side. Getting all the players to understand their part in the battle and do what is best for the team, not just their own armies can be quite a challenge. Similarly, in map-style games where players may form alliances, Command and Information can be quite problematic.

Morale Sun Tzu spends a lot of time talking about Morale and how to use it best. Morale is the will to fight and the ability of troops to do what they are told. Some of the things he recommends are not particularly well reflected in 40k, but others are. As an example of the former, he recommends placing your troops with their backs to something that won't let them escape, while the enemy force has easy escape options. The idea is that your forces will fight fiercely because they have no choice, while enemies that are pressed will take the option to escape, so they will fight less fiercely and, when they do escape, they will further diminish the rest of their force. On the other hand, you can use the effects of Morale to combat the enemy in other ways. By using pinning weapons or weapons that cause units to break or make them more likely to break (Sniper Rifles, Grotesques with Fearsome Charge, or Dark Angel Librarians with Weaken Resolve, respectively.) This gives you the possibility of taking enemy units out of action without having to fight them. Without that fight, you've just made the enemy army smaller without any weakening of your forces. Morale can also be that of the opponent. If a player walks up and sees a brilliantly painted army, he may be intimidated by it and due to that distraction, not make the best choices as he plays. In the same vein, knowing that your opponent is, for example, a tournament winner or other type of proven general can leave you making mistakes and simply telling yourself that there is no way that you can win.

If you can keep the enemy guessing about your intentions, and make some of his units fall back without a fight or simply not do as they are told, you may win a nearly bloodless battle. Such a battle would need to be incredibly well planned and orchestrated, however. You would have to focus on such an idea throughout the planning of your armylist and keep your focus in deployment and movement throughout the game, but it could be a big payoff.

So, which triad do you currently use, and do you want to change that? Alternately, do you have a different philosophy of tactics? Email me and let me know

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