The following comes from the Warhammer-community page.
Stratagems are a key part of the new Warhammer 40,000 game.
These represent your army’s commanders marshalling their forces and vital orders coming down from high command (that’s you!).
Any army that is Battle-forged can use Stratagems, and as we’ve established already, it’s very easy to make a Battle-forged army. If your army is Battle-forged by the current rules of Warhammer 40,000, it still can be in the new edition.
Battle-forged armies earn Command Points based on how efficient they are likely to be at the logistics of war. Armies with a balanced mix of unit types and plenty of troops will tend to have more to play with, and every army that is Battle-forged gets 3 Command Points to start with. Some units are such capable and experienced commanders that they give you additional Command Points just by including them. Bjorn the Fell-Handed, for example, the oldest living(ish) loyalist Space Marine, gets you an extra one just for showing up!
As the game plays on, you can use these Command Points to activate a variety of Stratagems. Many of these will be specific to certain missions or factions, but there are three that every army can use:
As you can see, these abilities are nothing to scoff at. That Tactical Re-roll can be used to ensure a critical high-damage attack wounds a key enemy unit. But at the same time, your opponent could just as easily use theirs to re-roll that critical armour save. Or maybe you want to keep ahold of them to make sure you make that vital charge next turn?
Are you expecting to lose half of your biggest Ork squad to a punishing Morale test after taking heavy casualties in the Shooting phase? Not anymore! Auto-pass for 2 CPs.
The Counter-offensive is pretty huge too, with the ability to interrupt your opponent’s battlefield-wide charge to strike ahead of some of their units. It works best, of course, if your units are tough in a fight and at least one of the enemy units is going first, but used correctly, this can swing a game.
In narrative and open play, most missions will include a few extra stratagems too, representing things like preliminary bombardments, proximity mines and silenced weapons.
In matched play, these Stratagems have the additional restriction that the same Stratagem cannot be used by the same player more than once during any single phase. So, if you use that Command Re-roll to pass an armour save in the Fight phase, you can’t then use that same Stratagem to re-roll a hit later in the phase.
So there you go: Stratagems.
We’ll be back tomorrow with news from the Indomitus Crusade.
Wow, stratagems sound pretty awesome, right? What do you all think?
Shades of feats and mini-feats from WM/H. I can dig it.
Very curious to see faction-specific ones.
Yeah, no bull, Command Points and Stratagems are one of my top three favorite things in the new edition. So much fun, they really add to the game.
Stratagems are something I’m really looking forward to sinking my teeth into.
This is just a taste, and I’m pumped to have a re-roll to use wherever. Maybe even 1 big re-roll a turn could change so much.
The counter offensive might be the only way to swing first vs some units.
And the morale one is exciting for the exact reason stated.
Want to know real numbers of how many command points armies will get, and what on earth army specific ones will be. Mildly concerned those will turn into the dividers for armies like formations were. Just waiting to see. Love how it’s all looking.
The reroll alone is SO good. When you miss with that melta gun, or fail a charge, etc. it comes in so handy.
Be able to reroll something like the number of shots a battle cannon can make or re-rolling the to hit or wound die, or number of wounds suffered will be really interesting
Precisely! Having those when you really need them is mega useful. As more of the rules unfold, people will start to see more and more uses for the command points too, beyond just the reroll, auto-passing morale (Which is crazy good, too) or interrupting the combat sequence. Folks I think will have to play a game or two to see how useful that last one is. When you get charged by say, 5 units and you are sitting there realizing you’re about to get wrecked in melee, spending those 2pts can save the day for you. It is very, very good.
I think the article did a good job of illustrating that, but without context folks can miss how awesome these are. After everyone gets to play a few games it really starts to sink in.
Useful, but kinda situational. I found that anytime I have a single re-roll, most of the game can go by without needing it. Re-rolling more than one die was more common and useful. But then again, I never really tooled up with a lot of characters with abilities. I like the Stratagem idea in general, though. I just think they can get more creative with them than the standard re-roll/cancel/pass/fail cards. I’ll have to give it some more thought.
These are the most generic ones. I’m sure the faction specific ones will more interesting. It’s kind of like the force org charts. They showed three very basic ones.
Yes, these are the basic ones. But since they are the only ones revealed, they are the only ones we can comment on. I see posts telling people to ‘wait and see’ before commenting. Well, maybe they (GW) should give more than basic info if they don’t want people to form an opinion. A bit of a marketing ‘gotcha’ to anyone making a preliminary opinion.
Well games have been won and lost on Fateweavers reroll. You just need to know the best place to use it, and if you didn’t even need it, then you were stomping their face anyways. At that point spend the unused CP on a different stratagem that turn them.
Obviously mechanics are going to be very different in 8th, but as a Daemons player who got a once-per-turn re-roll when I brought Kairos I found it incredibly useful.
Failed Grimoire rolls, failed grounding tests, etc etc. There are plenty of times where a single failed re-roll on an important test or save can be very important.
Exactly. That reroll is stupid good, and that application of command points is just the tip of the iceberg, honestly. Excited to have more of it revealed as we go!
Yeah I’m excited to see how stratagems work out. My friends and I like the idea behind them but still a little cautious about how they’re going to end up playing out on the table. Just worried they could go on the level of some planetstrike stratagems and just win the game for you.
But with these three revealed they seem properly powerful where they aren’t 100% necessary to stock up on as many points as possible but also not totally useless.
Looks like from this article, charging units always act first. So if you charge with 5 units, they all act before your opponents’ units. Hmm that’s definitely different from the sigmar style of combat.
I mean that’s what they already said in the article about charging – we’ve known all charging units go first (apart from special rules that disrupt the chain) for a while.
Yeah, exactly. Melee is brutal, you really can clean the other guy’s clock if you time your charges correctly.
The disciples of She Who Thirsts care nothing for your silly charges!
Lol, yeah, their army wide ability is bananas! It helps a lot to counter their relative fragility. As more rules come out from GW, a lot of this will become more and more clear, but for now I think folks can put a lot of the pieces together such as seeing how good Slaneesh melee units can be.
The important question is, will Creed get 100 free cp like he should? Lol, jk before someone starts conplaining!
Nah. His cp were all in the arm that Abaddon ripped off 😉
I have only just considered the hilarity of Abaddon removing Creed’s arm, considering the memes.
The Slaanesh Heralds of Exalted Seeker Chariots are sooo insane versus hordes in Sigmar. You can wipe out a unit of 20 guys on the charge. I wonder what theyll do in 40k.
I am just trying to figure out the way factions are going to work then. If I have all these tzeentch daemon and CSM models do I now break battleforge if I bring Kairos + pinkies along with my Thousand Sons? These points look to be a pretty big dead and I may end up having to sell some models to be able to buy others to rearrange my army.
If it’s anything like AoS then there’ll be different ways to build out factions using the same models depending on what you put in. So for your stuff you’d be Tzeentch faction with Thousand Sons and Tzeentch Daemons (everything has keyword Tzeentch) and you’d get the benefits of playing that faction (which if it’s anything like the destiny dice in AoS I think you’ll be pleased with 😛 ), if you dropped the daemons you would have Thousand Sons keyword on every model and could benefit from any bonuses from being that faction.
Generally speaking there’s different layers of factions based off of what keywords your units have, a broad layer with general bonuses but wide unit selection (e.g. Chaos) a mid range layer with more specific bonuses (e.g. Tzeentch) and then sometimes another even more specific layer with even more specific bonuses to that army style (e.g. Thousand Sons).
That’s all assuming it’s like AoS of course, which given the faction keywords we’ve seen it’s likely the same broad idea.
TLDR: Don’t worry, you’ll probably be able to use all your Tzeentch or Chaos stuff as a single faction.
Thanks that is what I was hoping for. Now the question remains, where do renegade knights fit in?!