40k Tactics – Saturation

5 Minute Read

Feb 16 2011

It’s not just enough being able to damage your opponent, you need to be able to survive your opponent’s output as well. Saturation is a key concept to this.

The Pink Fiend (aka Kirby) is back, and this time to discuss the concept of saturation. In our last two articles we looked at how one can balance the different types of firepower available to them to make a list which is both capable of dealing with tanks and dealing with infantry. Although we are operating under the premise that balanced lists exist and are capable of beating one another with a relatively good percentage (I generally say 40-60% all things being equal but that’s a ballpark), there are ways you can minimize your opponent’s effectiveness on the battlefield. The main way is saturation and basically overwhelming your opponent with targets of a specific type, thus make it impossible for your opponent to effectively deal with those units.

There are three broad army archetypes: foot, mech and hybrid. Foot lists are all infantry, mech lists are all tanks with every foot unit mounted in a transport and hybrid lists are a combination of both. You can see more information about these concepts here but for the moment these simple definitions will suffice. So let’s assume you’ve taken a balanced list (sourced from the Internet) and have played lots of other Internet lists as well as locals at your store, etc. You’ve done well, learned the army and been happy with how it works. You want to make your own army list however and you’ve covered the basics in having redundancy, duality and being able to deal with both tanks and infantry and basically dealing with opposing lists actively. There is however another way you can passively deal with opposing lists and that’s by ensuring your army has saturation.

This doesn’t mean you need to spam ten Chimeras or eight Wave Serpents. Rather, look at your list and identify what weapons are effective against which targets. For example: in a Tyranid list there is often a clear dichotomy between what shoots what. Anti-tank at the monstrous creatures and everything else at the gribblies. If you take Warriors/Raveners/Shrikes/etc though you’ve got another target which is ideal for shooting anti-tank guns at, but aren’t ideal targets for anti-infantry weapon. By adding in squads of these units to bolster your monstrous creatures you’ve provided saturation and forced your opponent to make a choice: what do I want to try and kill and what is the opportunity cost of leaving the other unit free?

This concept is particularly important in Hybrid armies as pure foot or mech armies are obviously going to be leaning towards a particular unit type throughout the army. Not much thought has to go into saturation when you’re running armies like these though careful consideration is still important (such as our Tyranid example). In Hybrid armies however it’s important to avoid token units. A token unit is where it stands out as being the only unit (or one of only a couple units) which is affected by a particular type of firepower. For example a single Chimera, Wave Serpent/Falcon/Fire Prism, Stormraven, Dreadnought, etc. in an army of mostly foot units tends to stick out like a sore thumb.

Whilst an army might be built around FNP (i.e. Blood Angels) and thus present some minor saturation in terms of anti-tank being effective against FNP units as well, taking only a couple of these vehicles leaves them highly vulnerable to anti-tank fire. The reverse is true of foot units. Even if they are super survivable like a Land Raider or TH/SS Terminators, when you are the only unit on the table with an armor value or high toughness/good save or not in a transport, all the guns which are effective against you and not so much against the opposing unit type will be aimed at you.

This is bad. It means your opponent’s target priority is easy and you want your opponent to have think deeply and make tough choices to beat you. By not generating saturation within your army list your opponent often has easier choices and less thought needs to go into how they are going to beat you. What then do you need to do to generate saturation in your army? Unfortunately there is no easy formula or even a ballpark as each army and list is different. Six Wave Serpents are a lot different to six Dark Eldar Raiders for example. In the end though it’s often about how many targets you are presenting to your opponent which can be dealt with by a particular gun.

Imagine yourself as running a list against the list you’ve created and how would your first turn go? Are your target priority choices easy or do you find yourself wishing you had more of gun X? If so then you’ve probably done a good job in the terms of saturation department as you’re overwhelming that player’s ability to deal with a certain unit type. Remember though, getting saturation for every unit choice is very nearly impossible. Instead the aim is to present as many difficult choices to your opponent as possible and thus increase the overall durability of your list.

Before we sign off though… This concept is of particular importance to vehicles and monstrous creatures and less so to infantry units. Whilst running token infantry units outside of all your mech can provide your opponent with perfect targets for all their guns from the get-go, these units often play a pivotal role and can accept that they are a token unit whilst still providing for the army as a whole. Here are three armies with a ‘token’ foot unit: Imperial Guard, Tau, Space Marines.

Classroom time; what do the foot units have in common for these armies and why does this make them viable army inclusions even though they are token foot units?

In the end saturation is a very key part to why tanks are so strong. Building a list which can deal with 15+ tanks is going to leave you handicapped against foot lists (which are still effective against mech lists when built correctly) and thus having a lot of tanks is going to simply overwhelm your opponent’s ability to deal with them. The same goes for infantry lists whilst Hybrid lists have to strike a delicate balance between the two to ensure they are forcing their opponent to make difficult choices.

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Author: Kirby

Kirby Enthusiasm is one of the well-known players in the Warhammer tabletop gaming community. He is the man behind the 3++ website, and a Warhammer 40K competitive player. He began writing for BoLS in 2011.

Tactics Warhammer 40k