[Response] Resilience of Scoring Units
I was over reading jwolf’s recent post on BOLS about basic army concepts. Mostly I wanted to focus on his section on ‘Resilience of Scoring Units’ as the above title suggests. Now I think there is a more general way to look at troops from a starting point and that is Survivability of Troops. Now you may be reading this and thinking that’s basically the same thing and in some cases it is.
Go Ahead, Hit Me!
What we need to consider is over the course of the game as long as there are objectives to score you will need at least one unit of troops to survive the battle. One easy way to do so is by being resilient as in the case of Plague Marines (PM) with their high toughness (T) or Storm Shield (SS) Termies with their 2+/3++ save.
The thing that makes PM especially good is what I will call the fantasy benefit. This is because you get two saves and not that you have options, in the fact that unless you were wounded by AP1 or 2 or a Power Weapon, you get both an Armor Save and a Feel no Pain and that is how Regeneration works in fantasy. Any time you can get two saves in a row or re-rolls ala Eldar/Fortune things start becoming much harder to kill.
Not Now, Not Here
Another way troops can survive is by not being around to get shot up. Reserves work well for this and some armies can use characters to dictate that things come in later, such as Guard or Marines. With that comes ability to get to the objectives, this usually means vehicles, though bikes such as Marines/Ravenwing and Eldar are great for this, especially combined with reserve tactics since you can turbo boost on to add to your survivability.
If you are going the vehicle route, you get another bonus, which I will refer to as the Matryoshka doll effect where you kill the vehicle and there is still something inside like those cute little dolls. If you are playing with and of the space elves, Dark or regular Eldar and even Orks, you get fast vehicles which are able to get you where you are needed really quickly. You gotta love being able to move really fast to get across the board towards/away something then claiming a cover save for your vehicle and still having the Matryoshka effect.
I Gots More Den You Does
The next thing to consider for your troops is quantity, both in unit size and in how many you field. Orks with tons of units of 30 boyz are an impressive mass on the table and can be hard to deal with. They are cheap and don’t care if they lose a few or 50. Spamming any troop can help you here as you then have throw away units who can score and if they die it does not matter because they have backup, look at CSM Lesser Daemons which have no upper limit to how many you can take and while you may have a hard time with vehicles and they die fairly easily, there can be tons and used on top of filling your 6 troop slots.This Here is My Big Brother…
Finally with a look at your whole army comes a question…can you bring more immediate threats that you opponent has to deal with such that troop killing loses it’s priority? Sometimes there is such an threat in their face that your troops could be 2 man units with no armor throwing rocks (well maybe not quite that frail)
So let’s sum this up. you need troops to win many games and to do so you need them alive. We do this by:
- Resilience
- Reserves
- Movement
- Quantity
- Threat Shifting
Enjoy, now protect those troops!