After reading Kenton Kilgore’s words about axioms for his army (The Tigers of Veda) and playing for a while, I realized that I have some of my own. These are some phrases that I would recommend to anyone that plays or is beginning to play 40k. They cover all aspects of the hobby, from tactics to armylist choices to building an army and making terrain. Without further ado, I bring you my words to live by.
The more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war.
This means to practice and do your homework. If you are playing against the Dark Angels next week and you don’t know anything about them, look it up. Buy the codex and pore over it, look them up online and read all the tactics articles written about them. Talk to people that either play them or play against them. Figure out what they can take that would make you nervous and find a way to counter it. Heck, make up some armylists and see what you would do with the army. This also means you have to go to Carnegie Hall. (practice, practice, practice.) Set up some terrain and practice maneuvering your units, particularly through tight places and difficult terrain. Set up a board and practice guessing distances. If you haven’t used something before that works a little differently than you are used to, try it out at home first. For example, if you want to try a deepstriking unit and you’ve never done it before, set up a board at home with some terrain and some defined edges, read through all the rules involving deepstrike, then place the counter and roll for scatter. This will help you be familiar with the mechanics before the actual game starts, and may keep you from scattering off the board or missing something in the rules. (What do you mean they have to be in reserve?)
Remember, all games have an objective. It is usually not just “last man standing.” The way to win the game is not always by killing the opposing army. There is usually some terrain to be taken or an item to be found. Even with victory points, it isn’t just killing the enemy, it’s not allowing them to kill as much of you as you do of them. Sure, you shouldn’t ignore the other army and just do the mission, but never forget that what will win you the game is the mission, not the bodies.
Do you need to paint a huge army, but you just can’t get started? Do you have a tiny army and you can’t afford a bigger one? Start small. Sure, you’re not going to get that 2000pt army painted this weekend, but you could do a squad tonight and maybe a transport tomorrow, couldn’t you? I remember reading once, in a book about professional writing, similar advice. It said, roughly, that even on your absolute worst writing day, if you made yourself, you could grind out one page. The author then pointed out that if you did that every day, you would have a decent sized novel in about a year. He further added that novelists that put out a novel every year are considered amazingly fast… You play DE and you can’t afford that all Raider army? If you can spend $20 per month, it may not seem like much, but that’s $240 over a year. If you find a place with a decent discount, that’s about 12 new Raiders in a year, which is more than you could actually use in a single detachment without having to convert some into Ravagers. Basically, every little bit helps. If you spend just 5 minutes a day on painting something or basing it or making a conversion or building terrain, you’ll have a heck of a lot done at the end of a week or month! Most of us wait until we have at least an hour or two to do stuff for 40k. That’s why most of us take forever to get our armies painted. If you know you’ve only got 5-10 minutes, you can still get a little accomplished and you’ll feel good for having done it. You’ll feel even better when you surprise your regular opponent with that new, fully painted unit in next week’s game!
Sure, that super HQ unit with the big boss and all the wargear and the retinue all geared up and riding that souped up transport looks good and could kill a lot, but is it worth it? If you spend 600pts on your HQ in a 1000pt game, that’s a really big target. My friend Mike once took a massive Nurgle HQ against my Tyranids in a 1000pt game. He had some big, bad Champion and took a retinue of 5 or 6 Plague Marine Aspiring Champions, all with Mark of Nurgle and each one had a Plague sword. I played with a lot of big Tyranids, and those swords scared the heck out of me, since they had a good chance of taking down my multiwound creatures in a single swing. Well, he ended up charging into the open and everything of mine that had a weapon moved to get line of sight to that retinue. I totally ignored the rest of his army and went to town on the HQ. When the smoke cleared, there was nothing left. The rest of the game was a complete walk in the park, since I now had about 1000pts to his roughly 500. He hasn’t done that since. The more you spend on making something nasty, the more weapons will be targeted on it, reducing the chances of it actually getting used on the battlefield. Remember, quantity has a quality all it’s own. You don’t have to be an Imperial Guardsman or a Tyranid termagant to use that. The cheaper stuff will survive longer than the expensive stuff, because there’s more of it and it is less of a priority target. It’s the little guys that can win you the game, because they’re still around at the end! In the same vein, usually the best way to get lots of guys on the field is to buy Troop squads. Troops are generally the least expensive squads for a given army, and they have excellent tactical value. Even though I’ve never played a game that had a composition score, like they do for Rogue Trader Tournaments and the Grand Tournaments, I usually take 40-50% of my points in Troops. Those Troops can shoot or assault the enemy, depending on the options, they can claim quarters and seize objectives, and they can also prevent the enemy from doing the same back to you. They aren’t as sexy as the big guns, or as macho as the grunting guys with axes and swords, but they get you there in the end.