Hey everyone, Reecius here with my first impressions of the Dispositions I have tried with Astra Militarum so far!
So caveats first, obviously, this is early in and I have been playing off of the missions without the incoming points and Munitorum Field Manual updates we will be getting on Wednesday so my early impressions will not include those changes of course, but in broad strokes I do not think the way Guard play will fundamentally change. Here’s a summary from that article about impending changes:
11th Edition Points Drop Wednesday! Here’s What You Need to Know:
The new edition brings big core rule changes, and points are shifting to match. Here’s a quick rundown of what’s going up and what’s getting cheaper:
Going UP (Got Better):
- Mid-range Vehicles & Big Combat Monsters: Easier movement and firing lines.
- Fast Melee Infantry & Flyers: Way easier to navigate the board and reach targets.
- Titanic Units: Lethal at short range with Towering + Plunging Fire.
- Psychic Weapons: Now ignore many negative hit modifiers.
- Charge Re-rolls & Surge Moves: Way more flexible and punishing now.
- Battle-shock Manipulators: Morale matters more.
Going DOWN (Less Effective):
- Fights First: Not as dominating as 10th.
- 20+ Model Blobs: Nerfed by the new 9″ coherency limit.
- Infiltrate + Scout Combos: You can only pick one per game now.
- Stealth: No longer stacks with Cover.
- Indirect Fire: Weaker against unseen targets.
Two Big System Changes:
- “Spam Tax”: Taking multiples of highly competitive units (like Defilers) will cost more points for the 2nd or 3rd model.
- Granular Wargear is BACK (kinda): Certain wildly superior weapon upgrades (like the Macro Plasma on a Redemptor) will cost extra points again!
What’s next? Expect a highly active balance team. We’ll get monthly updates for the first three months (starting in July) to smooth out the new meta, before returning to the standard quarterly slates.
What I Have Tried so Far
To date, I have tried Take and Hold, Purge the Foe and Disruption. As Guard, I have played into Purge, not as, and played as Take and Hold and Disruption and I plan to try Recon this weekend for my weekly game. I have yet to try Priority Assets at all but for some reason it looks the least interesting to me from reading the missions. I could be wrong of course, maybe I will love it, but I have been really enjoying trying the various dispositions. I think the new mission system is a massive innovation in Warhammer 40,000 game design and so far have truly been enjoying it.
My plan is to try perhaps not every mission combo, but to at least sample them all before committing to a disposition for the early part of the edition. I think the new disposition system is going to be the most important part of the list building process as it impacts the game you are playing. It is my impression so far that many gamers in the community aren’t fully understanding the impact this will have (understandably as many have not had the chance to even try it yet) but this is a fairly fundamental change to the way we think about and play the game.
As a quick recap, you choose a Force Disposition of those available to your detachment(s) and the mission you play will be determined by looking at your opponent’s disposition and seeing the mission that pair gives you. This means you will have the option for 5 possible missions for each of the 5 Force Dispositions (including the mirror match).
On top of this, it also means you know which of 3 possible deployment maps you can be playing on.
So, for the prepared player, you can come into a game with an incredible amount of foreknowledge that will reward skill in way that we have not seen so far in 40K. The downside being you could end up playing the same mission every round of an event or repeatedly at game night but the inverse of that is if you are savvy to the meta, you can plan to face a high proportion of Purge the Foe matchups for example, and tweak your list and playstyle to prepare for that.
The key though, in my early opinion, is going to be really having a handle on the missions you will be playing for your chosen disposition. As such, I am trying to get reps in as much as I can to narrow down which of the mission sets I feel like is a good fit for the way I like to play.
If you plan on sticking with a familiar detachment such as Grizzled Company, Combined Arms or Recon Element, you will be locked into Priority Assets, Take and Hold and Reconnaissance respectively. These are solid choices and in my early opinion, I think Recon Element particularly looks extremely strong but we will see if they get any changes in the upcoming MFM update.
If you want to try some of the other 2DP (detachment points) detachments, you have more freedom as you can sprinkle in a 1DP detachment and have more options as to which mission set you prefer to play.
Take and Hold
What seems like the obvious choice for Guard players is Take and Hold. We have tons of OC, mobility, morale manipulation abilities (and Battleshock is much more punishing in this edition so far), as well as solid options to build for resilience.
The impression I have gotten so far from the internet community is a bit down on Take and Hold but having played into it and as it the most so far I can say that at this early stage I actually really like it. Simplicity in mission is a benefit in a complex game like 40K, not a detriment and Take and Hold has the least variability in scoring of any of the mission sets. The only mission you even have to worry about killing things (outside of secondary missions but most of those are also about board control) is into Recon and I imagine many Recon lists will be MSU oriented to fulfill their mission requirements. This should allow you to systematically focus on taking out their action monkey units. This allows you to think less about what you are trying to do and more about how you will do it. I think the reduced cognitive load allows you to play better Warhammer, particularly in the early months of the edition.
Take and Hold also has a solid mix of end of turn and end of Command Phase scoring options, weighted towards end of Command Phase. So, if you were able to score objectives in 10th with Guard, you should be able to do so in 11th as it is fundamentally the same.
The challenge with this disposition will be the same as it was in 10th in that you have to survive on the objectives for a turn to really max your Primary Score.
The other challenge I have experienced so far is that melee is quite a bit stronger in 11th ed. The extra movement you get with the changes to pile-in, consolidate, overrun and particularly Heroic Intervention means Guard, who can be quite vulnerable to melee as is, may really struggle in these matchups particularly against a skilled melee army player that understands how to capitalize on these new rules. As you are forced to duke it out for the terrain features, you will also be exposed to enemy fire. This is largely the same as in 10th but you at least will have a -1 to be hit and you can use the actual walls on the terrain to hide if you toe into the terrain and position your models intelligently.
If you go this route I think a combination of tough units like Bullgryn and tanks, plus LOTS of high OC units will be the correct path to take. You need to slow down the heavy melee threats while also being able to outscore your opponent. The nice thing is in the Take and Hold disposition for Guard I think you can get by with a minimum of action monkey units so long as you are cautious with them, and focus the bulk of your points on being able to fight well up close, score reliably and protect those high OC units. The mission lets you really focus on one thing, and doing it well. Compared to dispositions like Priority Assets, Recon and Disruption, which can be quite action heavy, Take and Hold lets you really focus your unit selection on killing and surviving.
Disruption
In the game shown above, I played into Necrons who were playing Take and Hold and as an aside, I think they will be an absolute menace in that disposition! A topic for another article but I found that to be quite a challenging battle as while the Guard out OC them, you run out of assets pretty quickly. I was playing Disruption into them and my takeaway from that game was that while Disruption was easy to score in that pairing I still had to commit almost my entire army to the central objective to stop my opponent from scoring it for their mission. My thought was perhaps it would have been better to be earning those points myself as a Take and Hold disposition while doing it as then I would not have had to spread my forces so thin doing actions on all the terrain pieces for my Disruption mission. Can you afford to have a big chunk of your army doing actions and not fighting? Do you have access to units that can do actions and still advance or shoot? Questions like these will be what you want to ask yourself when choosing a disposition to focus on.
Forgive the typo on the top, I was playing Disruption not Take and Hold. However, in this matchup as you can see, I scored a ton of points early game as the mission rewards you for doing actions on terrain features which with an MSU, speedy Guard army is really easy to do as you do. You do not have to control the terrain feature, simply touch it and do an action. The downside though, is that you can only do the action on each terrain feature one time so you run out of options quickly apart from your opponent’s home objective which can be tricky to get to. My scoring potential dropped as I took causalities and my ability to stop my opponent from scoring or moving plummeted as I ran out of assets (C’Tan and Wraiths are still a massive pain in the butt!). My scoring options dwindled to almost nothing and I had to hang on by my fingertips to a narrow victory. I also found myself sitting on a bunch of kill something secondaries I simply couldn’t get against Necrons, another reason I think they are going to be very strong this edition.
Disruption is currently only unlocked by Siege Regiment and I found that interesting.
Siege Regiment itself is very fun in 11th, the Artillery Support rule was fantastic to slow down key enemy units early game, strip cover from enemy units and provide cover to my own tanks pushing up the table in mid and end game.
They have some excellent Enhancements and Strategms as well, allowing you to Move! Move! Move! all of your Regiment units, re-roll misses for a Character unit (including Tank Commanders which combined with the ability to strip cover is very strong in this edition), add +1 to the number of shots of a unit, fight on death, etc. which in this new 11th ed context are very good abilities. Since a lot more of the fights are close range brawls, you get a lot of mileage out of these. Being able to give a unit scout, immunity to Overwatch or to always have Take Cover via enhancements again, are very strong this edition due to the nature of many fights being closer in range than in 10th.
Disruption missions themselves are quite complex and while I am still getting my head around them, my general impression is that you need lots of action capability and killing power and mobility. I think armies like Eldar will be great at this as well as factions that can do Actions while doing other things, but I am still on the fence as to if Guard are the right fit for it at this time. The sheer amount of cheap, fast units they can bring to the game makes me think it may be good at it and I will continue to dabble. It will take some more repetitions with the disposition to get a feel for it as in my experience, you really have to play the Disruption missions to understand the flow of them. I remain cautiously optimistic on this one as the Siege Regiment detachment is extremely enjoyable so far for me in 11th.
Reconnasaince
I have yet to play as the Recon disposition but I feel like this may be the best fit for Guard. By and large, Recon missions revolve around board position and actions with a light amount of kill something portions of the primary mission. Further, the matchup into Purge the Foe, which I get the impression is seen as a strong choice at this point by the 40K community, feels very winnable as the Recon player whereas for the Disruption disposition the Purge matchup feels more challenging as Disruption wants you to be doing a lot of killing against Purge. Recon, of all of the dispositions, feels the most unengaged from fighting the opposing force as a requirement for victory. You will still need to be able to fight, this is the Grim Dark after all, but Recon seems to allow the player to focus on their own game plan more so than the other Dispositions. Time will tell if my impression is correct.
That said, Recon Element looks to be to me at this early stage extremely strong for Guard players. The fact that essentially your whole army will be -1 to hit and you can have a 3+ save in cover for hordes of the Emperor’s Finest is strong unto itself, better than it already was and it was strong in 10th! If you are not wishing to play as Recon Element, you can simply splash in Designation Force with a 2DP detachment and gain access to the Recon disposition.
The benefits it provides are solid if not amazing. Hidden I have found to be impactful in the early and late game to prevent long range shots, and the idea of a turn one ingress blob squad of Guard sounds pretty spicy. I have found reactive moves to be extremely strong in 11th so far, allowing you to move further into terrain to remain Hidden, onto or off of objectives, etc. and the Triggered Alerts strat is a solid D3+3″ of movement making it quite reliable.
My next experiment was to try Armoured Infantry + Designation Force as a Recon Disposition force as I think that could be very spicy. I really love the strats and detachment rule of Armoured Infantry, there are a ton of combos in there we can dive into in a further article, but I think an army of extremely fast, light vehicles and infantry with access to a reactive move Order could be extremely effective.
So there are my initial thoughts so far, a bit stream of consciousness but I can say wholeheartedly that I am really enjoying 11th. The new puzzle of faction+detachment+disposition creates an amazingly fun puzzle to solve when list building. What are your impressions so far?
