Missions one is essentially a classic Dawn of War, five-objective game where each player places an objective in their zone and the neutral zone. Nothing too crazy here. This will likely make the objective portion of the game one in which whoever controls the middle wins.

The mission score sheet also has bonus objective unique to this specific mission. They are:

Having 2 units on the center objective at the end of your turn (up to 4 points) Having no enemy units in your deployment zone at the end of the round (up to 6 points) Having a unit wholly within the enemy deployment zone at the end of the round

This missions rewards two styles of play, a highly mobile one such as Eldar and a brick style such as Iron Hands. Board control armies will do fantastically at dominating hold more as well as controlling the middle with 2 or more units, however they may struggle with getting units into their opponents deployment zone or keeping enemy units out of theirs. On the contrary, mobile armies will be able to reactively get a unit into their opponents deployment zone as well as brutally punish someone for trying to get into theirs. However, they will struggle to actually maintain hold more or the center objective, as that’s generally not where their army wants to operate.

This mission has a massive advantage for going second, which is good because if not for that going first could simply be too powerful as 40k can be an alpha strike heavy game unless incentivized otherwise by the mission.

At this point, I'm thinking Eldar is the strongest contender. Eldar has fantastic options with fliers, and Swooping Hawks to get line breaker every turn and rob the opponent of that secondary, while scoring it themselves. They also have Phantasm, which is terrific in an alternating deployment style as it lets them react post-deployment. They can threaten huge turn 1 alpha strike should they get first turn, or they can leverage their incredible speed for some bottom of turn 6 plays for the end game objective portion.

Let's see what the rest of the missions have in store for us.