Redundancy and Overkill II : the revenge

"So these Jedi, they can see the future, can shoot lighting from their hands, have swords
which can cut through armour. Now where have I heard that before..."
Chief Librarian Leorge Gucas

Redundancy and Overkill II : the revenge

So for those of you who read yesterdays post, you may have seen a few things that may have lead you to rethink your current list building. Some of you would have scoffed and continued to build the same way because its been winning for you. Thats fine, keep doing what you like, I dont write rules for 40k I merely suggest changes.

Now some of you would have seen the latest from BAO tournament, seen the guy who won, and regardless of whether or not you agree to him cheating or not, noticed his bike list kind of goes against what I said in the last post.

For those of you who arent aware, the guy who won, used a white scars biker list. Basically Khan leads the way with a command squad and apothecary while the bike squads (now troops) load out with dual grav guns, dual melta guns, dual plasma guns etc. Notice he doesnt bother with flamers, as the bikes pack enough anti infantry as it is. The issue is that he takes an attack bike, with a multimelta in every squad. This includes the grav-gun and plasma gun squads. Which kind of contradicts what I was saying yesterday. However multimelta, plasma and grav guns all have the same range, so at least he has this going for me, the combination of grav-gun (anti monstrous creatures) with multimeltas (anti-tank) kind of goes against the idea of making your squad do the one thing and do it right. 

Personally I dont know why he used the upgrade option to buy attack bikes rather than just buy a squad of attack bikes, but not having looked into the Space marine codex in too close of a detail, I cant really comment, but the overall reason behind this decision is almost certainly due to with the lists he knew he would be facing. BAO allows for far more super heavies than your standard 40k game, due to the amount of forgeworld "unlocked" and really you need as many multimeltas as you can to take down the potential only titans list.

Thats one of the beauties of this game, is that the current meta can make or break a list that was strong before. D weapons have really hurt those deathstar units relying on rerolling inv saves to stay alive. Super heavy vehicles have also meant that certain star units now struggle to take down a tank that doesnt die to a single antitank gun with a lucky roll.

They do die to a million glancing hits so necrons are back in the game, if not just to keep the titans in their place.

Slipping in a 10 point multimelta into a bike unit is often a good strategy to spend those few extra points to give you an out against tanks. It also works nicely on a stormraven, as your speed negates the difference in range between the lascannon and the MM. And is usable on a Land raider, due to the split fire ability thanks to the machine spirit.

Bikers also have relentless, so if youre moving about to get your other guns in range you dont snap fire the heavy weapon in the same way a lascannon in a squad of tacticals would. So yeah there are some rules and those units and weapons which break them. Does this mean I was wrong, no. Does it mean you should listen to everything you read on the internet, also no. 

My posts on tactics are designed as guides not rules. I think you should make your army with the theme of either combat or shooting, and not a bit of both. Does this mean a half shooty half combat army wont work, no, but in general mixing and matching is hindered by the rules which disallow shooting into combat. Once again certain units, like bikes or oblits, serve as multipurpose and can shoot well and then provide decent close combat back up. Most space marine HQ choices cant shoot well at all and serve purely as close combat. But when you are using one of these units, like a daemon prince, Khan, mephiston, the nightbringer (sorry the generic shard of the nightbringer c'tan or whatever) you need to have the rest of the army support that unit. Usually by pushing up hard and fast with them. And 99% of the time, you must have a unit or 2 able to help it out in close combat.

So yeah, this is not gospel and im sure you will find a list somewhere that contradicts everything I write, but I believe, for the most part at least, that these tactics are fairly sound and apply to most lists, for most games. Deal with it.