TACTICA: 5th Edition Games – Retooling
So our LGS got in the 5th Edition preview copy and what a time we have had! As you can see from those pics, we’ve rolled out some of our favorite toys (included mkerr’s new Macharius Vulcan) and put the new rules through the ringer.
Continuing on the heels of my earlier thread of 5th edition thoughts, I figured you would want to hear some more about my impressions after seeing and playing several more games.
1) Maneuvering: I touched on this last time, but lets go over it again in detail. Learning to maneuver to minimize intervening friendlies to maximize your firepower, while presenting as many interleaving units to your opponent (including his own troops) is a key skill which must be learned. You are going to force yourself to relearn how to move your units to give the enemy as few 4+ cover saves as possible while maximizing your own armies 4+ saves. Its a delicate dance and is much trickier than it seems.
Right on up there in this department are tall units blazing away over slightly shorter ones (such as fire support dreadnoughts firing over rhinos they are advancing behind), as well as the tricks that you can pull off with any unit which can move in the assault phase like eldar jetbikes, and tau jetpacks. Running with key units at the end of the your armies firing phase can also help.
2) True Los: This one is easy to learn but hard to master. You get used to it after only a few games, but boy are most LGS’s going to need to do a “terrain week” pretty soon. Most places I’ve been to have way to little full LoS blocking terrain to give vehicles something to get obscured behind, and a way to much area terrain that now doesn’t block LoS. The results are tons of cover saves for infantry, and dead vehicles. I predict a tidal-wave of tall hill, solid impassible forest/hedge, and zigurrat production in the near future.
3) Cover Saves: These are just everywhere now, and as such, have given a huge boost to anything that can ignore them. Things such as crack shot, and template weapons and the like are vastly improved. Tau airbursting flechettes, heavy flamers, and the like are to be feared. I would like to make a special note of the IG Hellhound which is the new bane of the open/area terrain tabletop. It only takes one game of a Hellhound firing through multiple forests to incinerate groups of Aspect Warriors on the far side with no cover saves allowed before folks start working on solid walls and other such impassible cover.
4) Speed: The game is much more freewheeling now, with run giving lots of units a new lease on life. Lots of dog slow units which had to plod across the table or just were useless if caught out of position like Striking Scorpions, IG Heavy Weapon Teams, and even Ogryns can now get in there much faster and reposition with minimal loss of time.
5) Assaults: Fast, brutal, and deadly as all get out. Dedicated high quality assault units such as Assault terminators, banshees and the like will routinely completely destroy their target units ans sweep them with huge negative Ld modifiers (we saw several -9 Ld tests just tonight). The skill is not getting the key units into assault, but to hit an area of the enemy army en masse so they cannot effectively recover and easily blow the assault force away as it is caught in the open. Unsupported assaults are short lived and doomed to ultimate failure.
6) Missions: The new scoring units status really shines a light on Troops. Their ability to contest down to the last model is spectacular, and lots of maligned units such as guardian jetbikes, full sized IG infantry platoons and the like are now worth their weight in gold. Secondarily the flanking ability gained by any infiltrator or scout unit turns a lot of average units such as sentinels and war walkers into much more flexible and threatening foes.
~All in all we hare having an absolute blast, rediscovering our armies, opponents, and building completely new armies we would have never thought of in 4th. As usual, questions, comments and thoughts are welcome. How are your early 5th games going?
