Warhammer 40K: Tabletop Tips & Tricks – Post Balance Dataslate
I learned a lot of valuable tips and tricks from my recent 40K tournament. Here’s what I’m paying attention to, post-Balance Dataslate.
Goatboy here. I got to play a local event this past weekend, and while I didn’t do amazing, I did have five great games. It was a lot of fun. I saw friends, met new people, and learned a lot from my losses. Overall, it was a good time, and that is really what makes events great. Today, I want to talk about what I learned from the game in the post-Balance Dataslate meta.
These days, events are usually how I get my play time. It forces me to play 5-6 games, deal with my choices, and forces me to get a bit better. Really, it is the ability to activate that competitive mindset that I crave from this game. I love painting models, building stuff, but really the drive I have is finding a competitive outlet.
Plan Ahead for Assaults & Counter Assaults
One of the tips and tricks I learned is paying attention to assaults, counter-assaults, and how you can move onto objectives. You could say this is three things but really it is all about knowing your playing field and keeping the eye on the prize – aka paying attention to the objective. A game I lost to a local buddy (Good job, Noah, you jerk! Can’t you let a Goat win!) had a few turns of “giving up” movement to my opponent by assaulting too close and letting a counter charge get a unit in. If I had assaulted a bit smarter, removed the counter-assault ability, and let me control what my army does best, I might have won the game. Or at the very least, kept it closer.
These tiny bits of movement tricks are things I don’t get to witness/experience too often as my games are limited outside of events. It comes from constant reps, understanding all the places on the table, and just making sure I don’t give up things easily to an opponent. I can say I learned a ton from that game as Noah really outplayed my assault phase while I was left wondering what I could have done to stop it.
Don’t Half-Ass Objectives!
The next lesson I learned is to do better guaranteeing completing an objective. A few times I should have “overwhelmed” an enemy to try and win a mission card. Too many times I failed in a secondary mission card due to not “using” all my strengths to overwhelm them. You could believe all the math you want, but sometimes a 4+ will succeed 75% of the time and you left wondering why you didn’t win that objective. I learned this in an Adeptus Custodes game versus Tim and how we knocked the crap out of each other.
Learn Tabletop Patience
The final bit of tips and tricks learned in all of this is… patience. You would have thought I learned that from my last event but this time I should have waited a bit longer to “expose” myself. A lot of it was due to failing just about every save thrown at me, but still I could have waited a bit longer in some of my games. Just chilling for a bit, scoring what I could score, and then pouncing as needed would have helped me a lot.
Heck – I think I went first almost every game which was a pain in the butt as I only rolled the “go big” Blessings roll once for the first turn. That is the whole +2 Move and Advance and Charge. I used it to go smack Blair and her shiny Votann as they were a bit to close. I think the plan on any blessing is to just go Feel No Pain and whatever else will let you get to an objective, stay hidden enough, and then cause as much pain as you can.
Onward To New Missions!
This even ended my Leviathan experience and I look towards the future and Pariah Nexus and its new 40K missions and cards. I think the next time I get to play beyond a test game or two would be the LSO later on in July and then whatever else I can get to head out too. Hopefully I can take these things I learned and let myself wreck some faces next time I show up – most likely with my Chaos Space Marines as my World Eaters Maulerfiends need a rest.
Good Luck On the Tabletop!
