Finding your Weakness
For those of you that don't know, I'm a martial artist. A big part of training is finding the areas where you are weak and strengthening them. If you don't, you can bet that a smart opponent will find them for you and hand you your head on a platter. The same can be true in 40k. That being said, how do we find our weaknesses?

The primary way we find weaknesses in 40k is by losing games. When you lose a game, you usually spend some time trying to figure out what went wrong. If you can get past the dice hating you, you will often find a weakness in either your army or your tactics. If you can nail down what it was that hurt you so badly, you might just be able to find a way to beat it. For example, at one point many moons ago, I was having trouble with my Dark Eldar. Looking back at the games, I decided that what was really damaging my army were his Daemon Prince and his Dreadnought. At the time I had very little in my army that could deal with two heavy targets before they got into my lines. I reworked my army with more heavy weapons that could handle AV12+ and T6 with multiple wounds. Once I did that, I could easily handle those two, and almost anything else that anyone could throw at me. Take a good, hard look at what's been eating you and see what you can do to stop it. Is it mechanized forces? Maybe fast assault units? Is it Monstrous Creatures? Armies that sit back and shoot from long range? Is it that you are unable to kill Space Marines fast enough?

Even without losing, it's possible to find your weaknesses. It requires a bit more analysis and thought, however. If you aren't having problems losing, you'll have to look deeper. Are there any particular armies or units that give you some trouble? If not, you may have to look further afield. Your local opponents may not have the armies or units or tactics that would give you trouble. Check the internet, look at tournament results wherever you can find them. Understand those armies and units that you rarely see, or rarely see used well. Also look further inside. Every army has built-in weaknesses. Some of these are obvious. Tau have very little combat ability, which makes them very vulnerable to fast assault units. Rock armies (those that focus most of their power in a few, small units) are vulnerable to having their units tied up or held back. Focus on the basics of your army and try to understand not just the strengths, but also the weaknesses.

Understand your Weakness
Once you know what your weakness is, it's time to truly understand it. Knowing that a Tau army is vulnerable to fast assault units is not the same thing as seeing a few Chaos Space Marine bikers zipping through their lines in an unstoppable whirlwind of death. Similarly, it is one thing to know that Genestealers have a ferocious reputation in close combat. It is an entirely different thing to lose a unit of 10 Terminators to a Genestealer assault without the Terminators being able to hit back. Knowledge is power, so use it to help strengthen your weaknesses. After you have determined your weakness, learn as much about it as you can. Once you've hit the books, then try to apply that knowledge. Explain your army's weakness to someone else. (Or tell an opponent about it, and see what they do to take advantage of it.) Try turning the tables and playing as the army or unit you are weak against. (You can learn a lot about what makes a Tyranid army tick by playing against one. The same goes for Imperial Guard or any other army.) If it's an enemy unit or army, you'll learn much more about it by playing as it than by playing against it. Among other things, you'll learn that it's not as easy as it looks and you'll learn what it really needs to succeed against your army and you'll learn the steps you can take to keep it from doing so.

Becoming Stronger
Once you have determined your weakness or weaknesses, it is time to improve them. You want to increase your capabilities in an area or reduce your vulnerabilities in another. You might be able to improve them by a simple change of tactics, or you might have to add some different equipment, or you might have to reorganize your whole army. The more you need to change to shore up a weakness, the more careful you have to be to avoid tearing down your strengths or even creating new weaknesses. As an extreme example, consider an army that determines it has a hard time killing Space Marines quickly enough. In response, it replaces all the heavy and special weapons it has with plasma. Now it can kill Space Marines in droves, but it has no answer to hordes and has no weapons that can deal with heavy tanks.

Simultaneously the simplest and the most difficult way to strengthen your weakness is tactics. Sometimes making minor changes in the way you play your army can make big changes to the battlefield. The pieces are the same, but you get better use out of them. My Godzilla army had major problems taking on an Armored Company once upon a time. While this was partly due to a Tyranid weakness (lack of tank killing power) it was exacerbated by my tactics. My typical tactics were to put what antitank creatures I had up front to shield the troop-killers behind them. This worked fantastically against non- or partially-mechanized armies. Against a whole army of tanks, it meant that the few weapons that I had that could damage them were the first to be taken out. By simply reversing the order, it made a vast difference to the results of the game. Likewise, I never really understood why Tau players used Kroot in their armies, until I saw them used as screening troops. It wasn't the firepower the unit had compared to the price, it was the price compared to the number of bodies on the field. Reducing casualties from shooting by providing cover was part of it, but the big thing was providing an extra turn for the main damaging weapons (primarily the various suits) to shoot. Making an assault army take 3 turns of shooting instead of 2 is a huge deal, and it really could turn the tide in a lot of games. (The same reason that I always liked Hormagaunts and fast scuttlers for my Tyranid armies.)

Equipment is the second way to strengthen your weakness. It occupies sort of a middle ground in changing your army between tactics and reorganization. I remember talking to a top tournament Tyranid player about his army. At the highest level of play, there were only a couple of armies that really threatened his Tyranids. Given that the same solution helped against both of those kinds of armies, he decided it was worth a slight reduction in his general effectiveness against most armies to improve his chances against those two. My story about my Dark Eldar falls into this category as well. I didn't make drastic changes to what units I brought, I just changed a few weapons out. You do need to be careful that you don't sacrifice too much of a strength (like the Space Marine-killers and their plasma) while you reduce your weakness. Think of it as a balancing act.

The final step is reorganization. You may need to change what goes into your army or redesign it. For example, my original Dark Eldar were very much a static shooting army. Once I started adding in more than token assault elements, though, I recognized a need for mobility. Once I started adding in Raiders, I saw how useful that mobility and firepower was and soon turned my static shooting army into an almost entirely mechanized force. The change made my force much more fragile (AV10 kites are even more vulnerable than T3 bodies.) I made up for it with the extreme mobility and combat power it afforded me. I had a few less guns, but it was more than made up for by the shock and awe effect of squads and Raiders firing into enemy units and then assaulting them. Having a third or more of your army die in a single turn is something that few enemy armies can stand up to. That is an example of a successful reorganization, primarily by accident. I didn't plan on it working that way from the beginning, I just tried something and it worked, so I started trying more and more of it and making changes to make it work even more efficiently. It was successful because it didn't give up too much of the firepower that made my original army work. If changing heavy weapon squads into Raider squads meant dropping too much firepower, my more fragile army would have wilted.

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