Warhammer 40K: Pariah Nexus Adds New ‘Strategic Footings’ To Spice Things Up
Warhammer 40,000: Crusade is great for a campaign play and more. The new Strategic Footings step also adds extra spice to your games as well.
Crusade: Pariah Nexus is the latest Crusade book for Warhammer 40,000. It’s the second Crusade book for 10th edition after Tyrannic War and it going up for Pre-order this weekend. It’s going to have a bunch of the stuff you’d expect from a Crusade book. New missions/scenarios to play. More plots, blessings, agendas, relics and battle traits. But there’s one new thing that I’m looking forward to seeing in action. That’s the new “mini game” that will mess with you and your opponent’s mind: Strategic Footings.
“A disquieting technologic miasma known as the Stifling covers the Pariah Nexus, and its effects make battlefield communication fraught and chaotic, translating into the Strategic Footings step, which happens just before you read your mission rules.
Each player secretly selects either the Aggressive, Balanced, or Defensive Strategic Footing for the battle before comparing the results in the following table. This can shift who is the attacker, who gains advantage, or in the case of both players picking the same, throw fate to a dice roll.”
Strategic Footings For Crusade Games…And More?
Strategic Footings are a way to change your standard attacker/defender situation up a bit. Instead of just a regular roll off, each player chooses one of three options: Aggressive, Balanced, or Defensive. Based on what you picked you’ll get one of the nine options above. This can determine which player is the attacker/defender. But it also can bestow an advantage as well. And there’s still the chance you could just end up with a roll off, too.
While this could just be used to determine attacker/defender in the mission it’s really that whole “Advantage” part that I’m most interested in. Theoretically, you could use these for your typical game as well…but let’s look at an example first to see if that’s a good idea.
The Advantage in this case is that one unit in the army gains the Infiltrators rule. And they still have some limitations as well. Is that going to completely throw the game over to the player with Advantage? I don’t think so. It could potentially help a bit, but I don’t think it’s game breaking. There is another example as well:
“In Quantum Siege, a unit can have its Objective Control characteristic increased by 1, once per game. “
I think that could be fun. It would allow for a unit that might not be able to snag an objective suddenly become a whole lot better at it. It’s a once per game ability as well so there’s some limits. While we haven’t seen all of these GW did tease out a few more:
“Other advantages include unique interactions with mission rules, such as letting units ignore board-wide debuffs and modifiers.”
I’d be curious to see what those other advantages are and if they have other limits as well. Regardless, these are supposed to be used with the Crusade rules and specifically for these missions in the Pariah Nexus subset. But could they be used in other game modes?
Personally, I think the extra step of Strategic Footings could be fun. It reminds be a little bit of the old Strategy Ratings from much older editions — only with a bit of a minigame twist. Having some bonus for “winning” the minigame is a nice reward as well. I’d also like to know what all the Advantages are before I give this the green light however. But, with that said, this could certainly be used in friendly games and could be a fun way to change things up and add some spice to your next game.
Could it work for Matched Play? I think with some leg work and some planning the Strategic Footings step could be adopted for Matched Play. If you’re a Tournament Organizer you’d certainly want to make your players aware of these rules before your Tournament. It would be a nice way to change things up if nothing else! I say give it a whirl (once we see all the rules of course).
What do you think? Would you want to play in a three game tournament that used the Strategic Footings rules?
