Guest Editorial by Edwin

Thinking time

Greetings everyone. It has been a while and I have gotten a few games of sixth edition in under my belt. There are a few things I really want to talk about.

These topics are a result of both several games in this new edition all having the same trends and talking with lots of people who I know have done really well in 5th edition and know what they are talking about. I have gotten the chance to talk to people from new players, all the way to people who have been to the Ard Boyz national tournament.  As someone trying to get into the tournament scene more, these choices in topics are near and dear to my heart as I try to look for patterns that happen in my own games.  Chime in with anything you guys want to add. Think of this more as a discussion then me just talking at you.  With that being said, let’s dig right in to the core of the matter with a topic I have been thinking about quite a bit.

The importance of the good ole number 2

In my slew of games, I have found that often being able to play the primary is important, but literally every game I have played has come down to secondary objectives. From my very first game, to the game I played last week, Every single sixth edition game has been decided for those seemingly added on aspects to every mission. It has gotten to the point that I have started to build army lists with the ability to play any of the primary objectives, but they specialize in completing the secondary objectives while denying them to my opponent.  Let’s begin with a break down of each of them.

• Slay the warlord!- This secondary is often the most difficult to achieve quite a bit of the time. With the new Look out sir! rule, it is difficult to shoot such characters out of a unit.To make matters worse, I have found that people either keep a tough unit with him or they kit the unit to the teeth. On top of all of this, people are bringing melee based characters. This makes it to where you have to have an equally tooled melee character in order to kill him. This makes this objective often the most risky in my eyes to obtain. Shooting still withers, assault kills. This is why I personally have decided to not go for this objective and go about denying my opponent this one. my warlord will always have a 2+/3++ if I can help it. I wont risk putting him in melee often since I have started playing my necrons again.
• First Blood!- This is the disaster of secondaries. Often going to the person who goes first. All you can do is steel yourself against the onslaught that is turn one and hope your units are as durable as they can be. Assault armies suffer from this objective because you need some form of potentially long range shooting in order to try and take this one.  For me, I take doomsday arks and primarily av 13 vehicles and Solar Pulse to try to reduce the reach.
• Line breaker!- The easiest of the secondaries and potentially one of the worst ones to try and achieve. Nothing screams bad idea like running face first into where the enemy is. This secondary is a mobility check. Late game objective grab got a change. Now it is get within your opponents deployment zone fast enough to be there when the game ends, but not fast enough to get dead because you ran into your opponents kill zone. It really is a mobility check. If you can keep a vehicle alive to turn 4, you will find that this objective is easy to obtain.

 

Warlord traits and you

Its time to talk about the thing that is either the bane of people or their best friend.  The power of the warlord trait lies in that you don’t have to actually pick which tree you are gonna take until deployment. This means you can pick and choose which trees has the most potential for you. This is both good and bad. It means that you must make a decision before play begins. The bad part is that more often than not, these trees are either stupid or simply really too good for some randomly generated power. No one can really plan for any of this stuff. Games can be won not through play, but a simple dice roll. It is something that we must familiarize ourselves with. Here is my break down of the three trees.

• Command tree-The all around tree. This set of options is pretty good in general. certain options are rather pointless to some armies, but overall, its a good tree. Since the 12 inches for all of the traits extends from a transport your general is in, you are gonna want your general in some vehicle in order to make this as big as possible. With almost equal options for shooting armies as well as assault armies, this tree is the most all around of them. Intimidating presence can wreck people who need sarges for leadership especially for assault armies that get close. Target priority is really awesome for shooting armies. The only real option that isn’t very good is the coordinated assault. 1 inch has won and lost me many a game, but every time that such a thing has happened, it is because of my play and not because I got unlucky.
• Personal tree-The gamblers tree. Some people don’t feel that their warlords don’t need to contribute past their own unit. This fact got reinforced with the addition of the personal tree. I hate to say it, this is the most luck dependent of all the trees. Slots one and two of this don’t help many people. I most often see master of defense (counter attack in your deployment zone) is given to assault units that run out of their zone first thing. Master of offense is a tricky one. A lot of assault units already have Furious charge, so this is a tricky one. So far, I have only really seen this one rolled by Orks (Go figure). The two good ones are legendary fighter and immovable object. Tenacity is OK, but since not a lot of personal geared warlords want to sit on objectives, this is kind of moot. The reason legendary fighter is awesome is because this makes the response to such characters who want to punch peoples face of rather difficult to deal with. You can’t use melee characters to punch him back since it more often then not will result in victory points for your opponent.  Immovable object suffers from victory points for the same reason, you gain something for nothing. The other 4 options in this tree grant minor benefit while 4 and six are amazing for no reason.
• Strategic tree- The awkward tree that looks good if in the right light on the third of July if its a warm evening… OK, this tree is the most situational of all. If you are playing on a city board, conqueror of cities is the most powerful trait in the game no matter if you are shooting or assaulting, it’s a win. Night attackers gives you the option to pick when night fight happens, but since often you want to claim first blood, you won’t want to activate it if you go first and few armies can truly solve the night fight problem. Strategic genius is awesome if you are playing reserve armies. If not, you can weep at the missed potential. Same goes for divide and conquer. All of these require your warlord to be alive (except CoC), so if you want the effects, keep him safe. The last ability is the princeps of deceit which is only good if you go first. redeploying loses its charm when you just move someone to a spot you could have deployed them the first time.

My meta

What does all this boil down to? I have used what I have seen over the course of my experiences with sixth to try and develop a list that will hurt the meta and let me play how I want to. I built a list that was designed to play any mission. After that, I wanted to play the secondaries.

For warlord, I picked an incredibly sturdy warlord in nemesor zandrek. His 2+/3++ save and ability to help out the army without actually having to be in a risky position has allowed him to escape untouched for all of my games. On top of that, I have 2 death mark squads with harbingers of despair to try and kill any warlord squad as most of the personal tree (which I hate) sees its power last only as long as the warlord is alive and often coffers to his units as well. If you kill either, the powers are often useless.   First blood is often achieved through my pair of doomsday arks and ghost arks. If I go first, I have 2 long range killing pie plates to lay down the hurt. If I don’t go first, I have a solar pulse and av 13 to try and survive. You can’t count a jink save since you may not have first turn or a chance to move them. Line breaker is achieved through a combination of things from my vehicles trying to survive to my flyers coming in (of which I have 3). This also shows an interesting idea on how to deal with AA first as I think we will see an incredible amount in the coming 6th edition books. With 4 av 13 vehicles, you can safely target the anti air elements in someones list as they often don’t have the power needed to hurt your av 13 vehicles. Then, once your flyers come in, you will find the enemy doesn’t have the guns needed to hurt your flyers. All of this comes into a nice little total below 1750 points. The list looks like this.

HQ

Nemesor Zandrek

destruction tek solar pulse

Despair tek

Despair tek

Elite

5 deathmarks with night scythe

5 deathmarks with night scythe

Troops

9 warriors, ghost ark

9 warriors ghost ark

10 warriors with night scythe

Heavy

Doomsday ark

Doomsday ark

Now it is important to note that I will have this finished by Friday, but I haven’t got to test the list out in all its theory, but individual parts have been tested. Everything has worked wonders for me so far save the night scythes. I haven’t gotten to use any of them as I just got them. It was the only real way to squeeze in anti air into the list that wasn’t an annihilation barge (I hate them with a passion). Anyway, that’s everything. Happy gaming everyone.