Wilkommen, bienvenue, welcome.

I want to shift gears and talk about one method you can implement to come up with a “game plan.” We all need to score primary and secondary, but how do you decide what to target in the enemy’s army? How should you judge giving up one of your units for your opponent’s? Sometimes it’s obvious – your opponent’s CP generating HQ got to big for his boots and you can get your boys in there to hack him down.  Sometimes it’s not – your opponent throws a unit of Scouts onto the center objective. You can deal with it by using 5 Legionaries or charge in there with Warp Talons, kill them, and fly away. How do you decide?

I think that there are many different ways to think about the game, but this is an easy way to give some shape to your play that you can apply without anything but some general game knowledge.

Here are our sample lists to frame our discussion:

https://pastebin.com/J0sSuwyR

Our protagonist Chad plays this stock standard WE list. One Exalted 8bound starts in Deep Strike for Rapid Ingress. Everything else does business. Chad shadowboxes with confidence.

https://pastebin.com/Mp58kRmy

Our villain Carl is here repping his newly buffed Banana Boys. He can’t stop talking about how bad his army is and that it’s terrible that he only hits and saves on 2s. How should Chad decide an approach to justifying Carl’s worldview?

Let’s try to identify imbalances between the WE list and Adeptus Custodes to figure out how to come up with our plan. We notice right away that a Blade Champ goes in each Warden Squad, amplifying their damage, and Kyria Draxis will be with the Guardians for those sweet, sweet rerolls. They have 3 scary melee bricks, 3 shooting threats, one little home obj sitter, and the random Dawn eagle utility captain, who rapid ingresses for free.

Each gravtank and Kyria can just delete one of our 8 bound squads so we need to respect firing lanes. Besides those though, they have to invest pretty significant resources in order to kill Angron. So this is our first opportunity to directly apply an idea of “envisioning a winning board state”. We identify a significant imbalance in our lists. So let’s say imagine we remove both Caladius from the board. If we still have Angron, then we would only need maybe the 1 big Exalted brick to help with the killing and 1-2 8bound to be able to complete Unbroken Wall and win that way, even if Angron gives his life up and doesn’t stand back up. Now we can try to force this game plan but I doubt Carl is going to make it that easy. So instead we will remember that in the back of our minds as the game goes that if we get an opportunity to sacrifice both our 2 small Exalted units and an 8 bound squad, we still probably end up with a winning board state.

So when we think about our profile matchups, it is very apparent that the 8bound are awful. Most of their attacks wounding on 5s means the damage is pathetic. In contrast, Exalted 8bound have real threat and demand the use of -1 damage when the 6 man hits. So when we need to play the game, we are going to prioritize using the 8bound as meat-shields and make sure the Exalted get to charge, rather than be charged. As in all our elite melee mirror matches, anything meaningful Angron can take with him to the grave is a win. It doesn’t need to be pretty, he just needs to force a trade.

So if do a little math, we can see that if Angron takes 1 brick with him to the grave, we can trade 2 for 1 with the remaining infantry bricks and still end up winning the game if Angron comes back. If he never comes back you need to trade better than 2 for 1.

So now we have our game plan. We are going to play primary and secondary like usual, but when we go to fight; we are looking to trade Angron or one 8bound and one Exalted for any brick of golden idiots we can get our hands on. If we get a chance to pick off the 2 Caladius while Angron is still healthy, that also puts us in a favorable board state.

I hope this is a helpful walk through of how we can analyze an enemy list, recognize what sort of resources we can trade with our opponent to our benefit, and utilize a list imbalance to have an alternative strategy we may be able to capitalize on if the opportunity presents itself.

Doug