Introduction

Last week, Nick Nanavati wrote a great article on how to deal with unexpected circumstances, how that impacts gameplay, and his personal attitude towards dealing with those situations. Without rehashing the entirety of what he said, the salient point it appeared that people took away was “plan to overkill things and that way you can reduce the odds that bad things happen to you.”

This was not my take away, nor was it I believe his message, and so I thought I would write a follow-up blog post to elaborate on my perspective on this way to approach games of Warhammer 40k. Who am I? Not multiple Grand Tournament winning Nick Nanavati. My name is Collin Watts, and I did recently win my first Grand Tournament at last year’s, at Warzone: Atlanta. I’m going to use that as my sole claim to why you should listen to anything I have to say about Warhammer 40,000.

Target Acquisition

Before you can stay on target, you have to figure out what your target is. I’ll pose to you that simple question: what is your target?

If your answer was “win games,” congratulations! You’re with me so far. If you said something else like “have fun” or “socialize with cool people,” you’re awesome, I’m really glad you’re in our community, and I have no useful advice for you.

So, we know what our goal is. You can win 40k games in a myriad of different ways, and our approach to staying on target will be very different depending on the mission, the opponent, and your list.

Considering those in reverse order, let’s look at two lists, to help elaborate on that point. One is my current one I’m testing for ATC this year, the other is a more generic Nurgle Daemon list.

Collin Watts ATC 2018 Current Revision

Thousand Sons Battalion HQ:

Ahriman

Daemon Prince of Tzeentch, Wings, Claws Elites:

Tzaangor Shaman Troops:

30 Tzaangors

10 Cultists

10 Cultists Heavy Support:

Mutilith Vortex Beast

Mutilith Vortex Beast Flyer:

Fire Raptor, 2 Twin Lascannons Thousand Sons Battalion HQ:

Daemon Prince of Tzeentch, Wings, Claws

Daemon Prince of Tzeentch, Wings, Claws Troops:

29 Tzaangors

10 Cultists

10 Cultists

Nurgle Daemon List

Nurgle Daemon Battalion HQ:

Daemon Prince, Wings, Claws

Daemon Prince, Wings, Claws

Poxbringer Elites:

8 Beasts of Nurgle Troops:

30 Plaguebearers

30 Plaguebearers

3 Nurglings Nurgle Daemon Battalion HQ:

Rotigus

Great Unclean One

Spoilpox Scrivener Troops:

30 Plaguebearers

3 Nurglings

3 Nurglings

These lists look ostensibly very similar. Each has large blocks of lesser daemons (or in the case of Tzaangors, pseudo-lesser daemons), 2 big T7 beasties, several daemon princes, some chaff infantry, and some supporting characters. The biggest divergence is the Fire Raptor in the former and the Beasts of Nurgle in the latter.

These two armies play incredibly differently. The former is a surprisingly potent alpha strike, while the latter is a disgustingly resilient (ha!) board control and zoning army. Their paths to winning, their targets, are very different. There are a myriad of other army archetypes, more than I can reasonably review here. Whatever yours is, know what your army is trying to do. Make sure you can answer the question “how does your list empower you to win the game?” Answers generally look something along the lines of “using tools X, Y, and Z, I am going to eliminate threats A, B, and C, while denying my opponent’s ability to respond using tools F, J, and K” or “leveraging units A, B, and C, I am going to control this part of the board, which will allow me to control objectives 1, 2 and 3 for turns 2 through 5.” If you don’t have an answer, take some time and think about how your army is accomplishing it’s goals before continuing.

Now that you know what your list does, let’s consider the the variables that you can’t know ahead of time: mission, and your opponent’s list.

For the sake of this post, I’m going to assume you’re playing inside the Independent Tournament Circuit format. If so, you have it pretty good as far as missions go. The Champion’s Missions are pretty good, and very consistent through their various iterations. This lets you reasonably plan for what you need to do. You need to score progressive objectives, and you need to kill your opponent.

I can hear you saying, “Well, but the secondaries too, right?” It’s a common theme amongst ITC tournament armies to try to limit your opponents ability to score secondary points. Let’s, as a quick aside, do a cost benefit analysis of that decision.

First, the benefits. In regular ITC play there are 24 points available in primary, 12 from secondary, and 6 from bonuses, for a total of 42 possible points. Of those points, 24 are positive-sum, meaning you both can score them without interfering with the other’s score. The remaining 18 are zero-sum, meaning if you score them, your opponent cannot. 12 in the primary, in the “score more” and “kill more” points, and 6 in the bonus points. These zero-sum points are twice as valuable as the positive-sum points, because every time you score one you are also denying your opponent one, meaning the delta is +2 in your favor, as opposed to the +1 of scoring a positive-sum point. When you optimize your list to deny secondaries, you are denying your opponent positive-sum points.

Now, the costs. If you can build your list to be as efficient and effective as possible without giving up easy secondary points, then great! You should absolutely do so. However, that means ITC isn’t doing their job well. They want you to have to make list decisions with the secondaries in mind, and I think they’ve done a decent job. In my view, this means you will probably be sacrificing some amount of efficiency in the primary and bonus points. You’ll notice that these are the zero-sum points that I identified as twice as valuable in the previous paragraph.

This perspective leads me to believe that denying secondary points is an overblown concept in the majority of ITC games, except in the very top tier of lists, where they can do so without losing efficiency. In any case, being aware of how your list interacts with the analysis above is critical as you go into the game.

Now, consider your opponents list. It’s the exact same as considering yours. What does it do well? What does it do poorly? What is their target in this game? How will they go about winning? Answering these questions will inform you as to your opponents decisions in everything from placement during deployment to their target selection. If you don’t have those questions memorized yet, that’s fine. Take a moment and scroll up if you need a refresher, and make sure you know how we’re analyzing your opponent’s list.

All of this, should lead you to the answers to several important questions:

Which list is better at scoring objectives? Which list is better at killing the other? Which list is better at surviving the other?

I’ll note that 2 and 3 are subtly different. Killing your opponent as a means of survival is only a valid strategy if you have the chance to do so. An example of this is two alpha-strike armies staring down the barrel at each other. Both are good at killing, neither is good at surviving. In that situation, whoever goes first has a major advantage. Whereas in the inverse, two very survivable armies, going first becomes much less important.

The intersection of theses ideas at any given moment in your favor is what creates the feeling of “Having Someone in Your Pocket.” If you’re unfamiliar with the term, I refer you to The Best General, a Warhammer 40,000 podcast by my friend Adam Abramowicz, where he discusses the idea at length with some of the 40k greats.

Architecture of Success

Now, that was our prep work. That’s the time you take writing your list beforehand, reading the missions, up to the first 5 minutes or so of the game where you’re asking your opponent about his list.

You have your information, you’ve done your prep, it’s deployment time. What do you do?

Step 1: don’t forget everything you just did! A lot of mental prep goes into playing this game at a high level; don’t immediately throw that out once models hit the table. All too often I’ll see a friend at my LGS (shameless plug for the wonderful Giga Bites Cafe if you happen to be in Atlanta) deploy a unit that looks way out of position. I’ll ask why, and the response I get is something along the lines of “Well I want to kill that unit.” Sometimes, that answer makes sense to me. Particularly if they have First Blood as a secondary, and their battle plan doesn’t involve killing any other units turn 1. However, sometimes I stop and ask “Well sure, but why do you want to kill that unit?” And again, sometimes their answer is, “I want to kill it on one because I think he’s going to reposition it to interfere with my assaults on turn two and I want to mitigate that.” Which is a great answer. Other times, the answer is “I didn’t really know what else to do with my unit.”

No! Don’t do that! Every unit has a purpose, every unit is a tool with which to accomplish your plan. You have a target, a goal you need to accomplish to win the game. Use all of your available tools to accomplish that goal.

Let’s talk about your plan. Based on your analysis in the previous section, are you evenly matched with your opponent? Is it a good matchup, or a bad one? Which one of you needs to be offensive, or you lose? Who just needs to hold on until the end of the game, and they win? It’s incredibly matchup dependent, but for the sake of elaboration, let’s consider the situation where you’re playing an offensively geared army, against a more hybrid objective scoring & combat army.

Your thought process should follow pretty closely along this sentence: “I need to kill these units on turn 1, these units on turn 2, and these units on turn 3. If I do that, then my opponent will not have enough tools left to stop me from scoring objectives on 4, 5, and 6, which combined with the points I earn from killing my opponent in turns 1, 2, and 3, will be sufficient for me to win the game.”

Maybe you need to kill stuff on 1 because it’s going to kill you if you don’t.

Maybe you need to kill it because it will tie up your expensive mega unit and your army will lose too much effectiveness.

Maybe you need to because your opponent is looking to score objectives early, and if you can deny that your objective holding units will start to accumulate you more points.

Whatever the reasoning is in your target, you’ve identified a set of units you need to get rid of. Do that. Do only that. I cannot emphasize how mind numbingly important that simple idea is. The most common mistake I see in 40k players, by a wide margin, is overcommitment. You see the win in front of you and all that has to happen is for this exceedingly improbable set of circumstances to happen. But you don’t see that, all you see is the win. As Robert Browning put it:

Man’s reach exceeds his grasp.

You talk yourself into what we in the programming world call the “happy path”, i.e. “if everything goes right, this is what will happen.”

Along the happy path, you will do some truly amazing things. That Rhino will be killed by your Lascannon Devestators, your Dark Reapers will finish off Magnus. Mortarion will survive a Manticore shooting him.

And I don’t blame you for this, because the 40k community is deeply entrenched in either the “I feel like it should work”, or more insidiously “math says…” perspectives.

Let me reiterate possibly the most important fact for 40k players to consider when developing their target: “on average”, means 50% of the time, you will fail. Think about it. “Average” means just that, the average of a set of possible outcomes. In half of those outcomes, you overkill your target, and in the other half, you underkill it.

Your goal when building a plan to win a game should be to maximize the probability that you accomplish your target. If you overextend, but say to yourself “well on average I’ll kill his whole army and win the game”, you have essentially boiled the game down to “if I win this coin flip I win, otherwise I lose.” You could instead say, “I have a 90% chance of accomplishing my goal.” Now, accomplishing your goal doesn’t auto-win you the game, but as previously discussed, accomplishing your goal every turn will. It’s a more methodical perspective to take the game one turn at a time, one goal at a time, with a high probability of success every time, than gamble on winning the whole thing on a coin flip.

How do you do this?

Overcommit to your plan. If the average is X, commit 1.5X to accomplishing that goal. That way, when things go sideways on you, you have the buffer built in to power through. Once you’ve done this, what happens if things go well for you? Have secondary goals. By way of example, “I need to kill X units on turn 1 to be in a good position to win the game. But, if I can also kill or injure Y units, then turn 2 will be much easier to execute on successfully.” These aren’t requirements, they aren’t part of the target. They’re gravy, just nice-to- haves that you want to be able to execute on. Setup your units such that they can accomplish your main goals, but can also accomplish secondary goals should things go well. If you take four units and put them in position to accomplish your goals, but then it only takes two, and the other two can’t work towards any secondary goals, then you’ve functionally wasted those units for a turn. There are only six turns in standard ITC games, wasting units for one is a massive loss of army efficiency. Repeat this process for tertiary goals, etc, all the way out until you’ve assigned every unit to every possible role it can have. You now understand the utility of your units. Play through the decision tree, and reevaluate.

Look Death in the Eye

From the esteemed Mike Tyson:

Everyone has a plan ‘till they get punched in the mouth.

Don’t let this be you. Accept the reality that you will be losing units. Your opponent goes first when you really felt like you needed to. They get hot on some dice rolls and wipe some unit they really had no business getting rid of. Whatever the situation is, when you get punched in the mouth, don’t immediately start flailing.

You’ve established a plan of action to win the game. Just because you have a lower probability of success doesn’t mean abandon the plan wholesale. The plan was the best way to win the game, or it wouldn’t have been the plan, right? Sure, you might need to reallocate some units, change the velocity of killing your opponent, or create a narrower margin to win. Getting punched in the mouth certainly sucks. But don’t go into reactive mode where whatever just hurt you is somehow priority number one. How does it fit into your overall game plan? Did it hurt you because you underestimated how good it was while planning, or just because the attack was improbably good? Knowing those answers helps keeps your focus towards accomplishing your goals.

Remember that you’re ultimately trying to get points out of the game. The secondary goals should be the ones that are giving you fewer points, either now or in the future. Primary goals should give you more points. If the board state changes where suddenly secondaries are yielding more points, of course you should pivot into those. Having a plan doesn’t mean rigidly sticking to it in the face of changing circumstance.

Predicting the Future

So you’ve built your plan, you have your target, and you know how to stick with it. That’s most of the game right there. But, as is oft said, this is a dice game. Many players consider the dice to be an opaque box of magic that will either favor them or not. So much so that we even have the term “dice gods.”

I would like to pull back that curtain, and talk about the way that I approach thinking about dice.

I said this previously in this article, but this is so important it bears repeating: “on average” means 50% of the time, this won’t happen.

In 40k circles we like talking about averages. They are a single dimension, a single comparable number we can reduce complex mathematical interactions into. It makes comparing things easier. Our brains are not intuitively geared towards thinking in probabilities.

Let’s start with averages. Which would you prefer, a d6 damage weapon, or a 3 damage weapon? More importantly, why do you prefer it?

A bad answer: d6, because when I get lucky on them they’re really good.

A better answer: d6, because it averages 3.5 damage, which is more than the 3 damage weapon.

The correct answer: it depends on the situation I’m in.

Let’s consider some situations:

It’s turn 6, your opponent has a Custodes biker on an end-of-game objective, which, if scored, is enough points to swing the game in her favor. 3, or d6? It’s turn 6, and your opponent has an Obliterator on an end-of-game objective, which, if scored, is enough to swing the game in her favor. 3, or d6? It’s turn 2, you had a good first turn and have a healthy lead. Your opponent has several vehicles threatening various parts of your force. 3, or d6?

And the correct answers are:

d6. A Custodes biker has 4 wounds. A 3 damage weapon just isn’t going to cut it. A d6 weapon gives you some semblance (1/3rd) of a shot at accomplishing your goal. 3. An Obliterator has 3 wounds, to the Custodes’ 4. Assuming both made it past the armor save, a 3 damage weapon is guaranteed to kill the Obliterator, while a d6 damage weapon has a 1/3rd chance of not killing it (by rolling a 1 or a 2). 3. But the why of it is harder here. My answer is that a 3 damage weapon is more reliable. I can count on it more than I can a d6 damage weapon to accomplish my goal.

While these scenarios might seem a bit contrived, and admittedly they are, they serve as easy examples to introduce the idea of variance. Wikipedia informally gives us the following definition:

[Variance] measures how far a set of (random) numbers are spread out from their average value.

Another way of saying it is that variance tells us how unpredictable an outcome is. The math is more complex than I would like to introduce, but a decent heuristic is this: constant damage weapons have lower variance than a variable damage weapon. The most variable rolls are d3, followed by d6, followed by 2d6.

Now why does this matter, and does it only apply to weapons? No, and it matters because the more you can rely on your dice to do what you want, the more reliably you can predict the outcomes of interactions, which ultimately lets you know what is going to happen before it does. You know, unequivocally, that you will never roll a 1 or a 2 and not kill that Obliterator with a 3 damage weapon. It doesn’t even give you the option, it just does 3 damage.

Similarly, and here you just have to trust me on the math a little bit, consider a 2+ to hit unit vs a 4+ to hit unit. With 6 shots, the 2+ averages 5 hits, and the 4+ averages 3. You could instead think about this as, the 4+ has a 50% chance of getting at least 3 hits, while the 2+ has a 95% chance of getting at least 3 hits. This is how I think about all the dice I roll. Not as an average number of hits, but as a probability of accomplishing my goal. Certainly I wouldn’t sit down with a calculator, but by paying attention, you can start to develop an intuitive feel for how reliable something is at accomplishing your goals.

How does this help you build your plan and stay on target?

If you think about accomplishing your goals as a series of composed dice rolls, that is, the probabilities are multiplied together, then you can start to base your decisions on what level of risk you’re comfortable accepting. If it’s a 2+ to hit, 2+ to wound, no save, and you need to kill 3 things with 3 shots, you have a 32% chance of accomplishing your goal with 3 shots. I bet you didn’t expect that number to be so low. We think of 2+s as a nearly sure bet, but they’re not. On the other hand, if you put 6 shots into the target, you have a 90% chance of accomplishing your goal. That’s a pretty sure bet. I personally would probably put 4 or 5, depending on how important it was that I accomplish that goal. Is it my #1 goal in my target, or my #3? Primary or secondary? The number of shots, and thus the number of units I dedicate to that is informed by my knowing the rough percentages I need to accomplish my goals, given the abilities of my units.

Conclusions

I hope you find this approach to the game enlightening. It’s a lot to remember, and requires a lot of upfront thinking. Trying to do everything at once can be daunting. Depending on where you are in your journey as a player, I would recommend taking facet of this article and focusing on it until it becomes second nature. Once you have that one locked in, start with the next, and continue that way until it’s all absorbed.

Just like with many other games, or really any other skill, at first there feels like an overwhelming number of things to think about. The first time you drove a car, you were checking all the gauges, watching in front of you, behind you, to the sides, trying to remember to pay attention to every little thing. Now that you’ve done it for 1000s of hours, it’s a very relaxed process. The same is true in 40k.

Hopefully, if you start to focus on this, your games will have a better outcome than Gold Leader here, who also tried to stay on target.