There are many different aspects of strategy that contribute towards doing well at a game of 40K, many of which we’ve published articles about, but when you get right down to it your core goal as a player in any competitive strategy game is to absorb information about the game state, process it and use it to make good decisions. One of the things I love about 40k is how vast the array of situations that will arise over the course of a game can be, constantly testing both players ability to come up with the best solutions to the problems in front of them, and (generally) rewarding the player who makes the sharper choices.

Today I want to talk about what’s generally the first challenge that faces you in any given game – reading your opponent’s army list. Looking at what you’re facing and working out how that should feed into both your initial actions and overall game plan is a hugely important skill, and one I have a particular affection for – the three cool lists series is one of my favourite things to work on because it lets me flex this particular set of muscles. Oddly, however, the actual process of how to appraise an opposing army list isn’t something that’s been too heavily covered in the great body of strategic work out there. That’s honestly kind of weird, for two reasons:

It’s tremendously important – you will literally do this in every game you ever play and doing it well is hugely advantageous. It’s an area where you can actually develop a consistent process with some reasonably solid rules.

The latter makes this area stand out a bit in 40k, because the flip side of how wide the set of possible situations is in a game is that it’s incredibly difficult to produce universally applicable rules and advice for many important aspects. The closest we’ve ever come before is in discussing picking your ITC Secondaries (which yes, will get an update for 2020 at some point once the Coronavirus actually lets me play some games), which makes a tonne of sense because it’s very much a specific application of the more general principals we’re going to discuss today. What sets this area of the game apart from others is that there’s a much more consistent set of parameters within which you’re operating. Obviously there is still variety game to game and list to list (there wouldn’t be much to talk about otherwise) but when what you’ve got is two evenly pointed armies poised pre-deployment there are some consistent questions you can start to ask about how they’re likely to interact, and today we’ll teach you how to answer those and turn the resulting knowledge to your advantage.

Levels of Information in an Army List

Writing about strategy is often extremely helpful to honing my own skills because it forces me to take automatic thought processes I’ve built up over many, many games and actually examine what I’m doing so that I can distill it and explain it to the audience in meaningful terms. Here the first thing that needs to be outlined is what levels of information exist within an army list.

On paper an army list is a bland collection of words and numbers, but that’s not much use to us. That information is only useful to us when we apply context and knowledge to elevate it into something we can make use of, and when I talk about levels of information in a list I’m referring to the key stops along that route. Leaving aside philosophical rabbit holes about bootstrapping your understanding of language I basically think there are three meaningful levels of information in a given 40K army list:

Quantitative information – on a most basic level, how many of each model and unit is in the army list? Qualitative information – what can each unit do? Strategic information – taken together, what does that mean for the game and your plan?

Those sit on two neat sliding scales – they go from most to least obvious, and least to most useful.

Understanding that lets us define our goal when reading an army list – we want to take the quantitative and qualitiative information from it, and extract the juicy, strategic goodness hidden within. Then we use that to brutally crush our opposition, obviously.

Making those strategic leaps is going to be what we focus on today. Quite a lot of the articles and guides out there that do talk about army lists get very focused on qualititive information – specifically, they deep dive on what “gotchas” you need to look out for from various armies. We are going to talk about how to make sure you have all the qualititive information you need to make strategic decisions, but if you’re looking for a big list of all the nasty movement tricks various armies can pull, or how the latest awful combo works you should take a look at our faction specific Start Competing guides instead.

Key Unit Facts

So what do we need to know about the units in our opponent’s lists? Furthermore, in the hypothetical scenario where you aren’t a weirdo internet guttersnipe who has read every codex and expansion book, how do you make sure you ask the right questions about units you aren’t familiar with?

Broadly, I think you need to know the following about each of the units in an opponent’s list to build up a strategic picture:

What can it kill? Is it a threat to everything or can it only efficiently hurt a sub-set of the units in your army?

Is it a threat to everything or can it only efficiently hurt a sub-set of the units in your army? What can kill it? Can a light peppering of bolter fire blow it off an objective in an emergency, or does it need lascannons pointed at it when you want it dead?

Can a light peppering of bolter fire blow it off an objective in an emergency, or does it need lascannons pointed at it when you want it dead? Where can it do stuff from? If it’s a shooting threat, does it need to get in position to line up shots, or does it ignore LOS and have a range of “the table”. If it’s a melee threat or a tough unit that wants to hold objectives, how fast can it get where it’s going?

The capabilities of every unit are made up of a combination of its statline, weapons, special abilities and army-level abilities that can affect it, but once you mix all that together the above three fundamental facts are what you need to be getting out. If you’re looking at a unit that you’ve never seen before this is the knowledge gap you need to close. An important thing to stress is that this isn’t the same as needing to know the entire statline of every unit in your opponent’s army, and indeed trying to pick that up on the fly at the start of the game is going to slow things down a lot and probably overload you with information you don’t need.

The same applies for special abilities, and I’m gonna be real here – I couldn’t tell you off the top of my head the full set of abilities that combines to make the Nurgle possessed bomb work. What I do know is that if my opponent has a fully buffed up squad then essentially anything in my army that it touches dies. It doesn’t matter to me whether the exact combination of exploding damage abilities means that it can wipe my units twice or three times over, as soon as it crosses the threshold of “reliably obliterates any of my units” I can just stop caring and focus on the more important questions of how fast they are and how I kill them. You can hit similar points with other capabilities too – once a shooting threat has a range of 48″, for example, it’s really hard to avoid being shot by it on a range basis alone, and once a gun’s range is at least 48″ the exact range above that stops mattering nearly as much.

In a situation where you’re not familiar with an army I’d strongly recommend not getting your opponent to list out the statlines of every single unit. Instead ask high level questions about most stuff and save the deep dive for units that cost a lot of points (like 200+) or your opponent has brought multiple of. Even then just reading the statline might not be your best option. Ask:

What can it kill in a turn?

What are its defences like?

What’s its threat range?

Do you have any abilities that can significantly change any of that?

The last one is our final important lesson for this section, because it hits on what special rules we need to think about from our opponent. At this point in 8th armies have an eye-watering number of special abilities and it is flatly impossible to keep abreast of all of them. Luckily you don’t really need to. Opposing abilities that make stuff incrementally better at their existing roles don’t super matter from a strategic point of view because they don’t change any of those three key characteristics. Re-roll hit auras are a good example of this – they’re great to have in an army sure, but their impact is “everything is a bit better at its job”, and the consequence of that for your opponent’s plan is probably limited (unless they have a way of removing the aura).

The kind of abilities that really matter are:

Abilities that allow for a big spike of damage within a unit’s normal role. Double shooting is the canonical example here – if an opposing shooting threat kills a unit every time it shoots, and has a way of shooting twice, then I’m motivated to change my deployment or movement to try and only expose one target to it at a time. More out there examples would include psychic powers like Infernal Gateway that can delete multiple units in the right circumstance.

spike of damage within a unit’s normal role. Double shooting is the canonical example here – if an opposing shooting threat kills a unit every time it shoots, and has a way of shooting twice, then I’m motivated to change my deployment or movement to try and only expose one target to it at a time. More out there examples would include psychic powers like that can delete multiple units in the right circumstance. Abilities that substantially affect a unit’s speed – redeploys and double moves, mostly.

Abilities that change the category of what they can kill or get killed by. If a unit can normally only kill infantry, but a buff lets it punch out a tank, that’s important for your strategic planning, as are defensive boosts that can no-sell certain types of attack. Tear Them Down allowing Bloody Rose Zephyim to shred tanks is a good example on the offence while Grot Shields is a good example on the defence, essentially switching off shooting attacks.

allowing Bloody Rose Zephyim to shred tanks is a good example on the offence while is a good example on the defence, essentially switching off shooting attacks. Anything that massively breaks the normal rules of how and when units interact. Objective Secured is the most common, special case Heroic Interventions or counter-charge abilities are probaby the next most frequent.

All of these impact on our strategic assessments of units, so knowing about them helps when we try and take our understanding to the next stage.

Admittedly that can still be quite a broad set of stuff, and ultimately some of this can only be learnt by repetition, but even with complicated armies chances are good that only like a third of their possible strategems and tricks are going to be relevant in a given game. If you’re struggling to keep on top of all of it, you can also just focus in on the capabilities of the more expensive units in your opponent’s army – it’s pretty likely that knowing the full set of what a 300pt Centurion unit can do is going to help you more than understanding every trick an Intercessor squad has up its sleeve. All of this is about making sure the information you’re acquiring is the important stuff, and sometimes that means discarding less relevant facts.

This level of understanding of our opponent’s units does start to have real value. Knowing what defences a unit has lets you apply probability to assess how much stuff you probably need to shoot at it, while knowing threat ranges lets you, turn to turn, make sure your juiciest targets don’t get smashed. However, the real prize from going through this process isn’t this qualitative information – it’s bringing it all together into a strategic view of what you’re up against.

Strategic Considerations

Army Capabilities

When you start a game of 40K what you’re up against is more than just a collection of units – it’s an army. In a competitive environment, your opponent is likely to have put at least some amount of care and consideration into how they’ve put that army together, with the goal of making a whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts. Over the course of the game, as both sides experience attrition, the game might devolve into a struggle between units, but over the first few turns you need to contend with the army. By this point you’ve been through your opponent’s list and made sure you know the key capabilities of their units – the next step is to build those all up into a picture of their army’s capabilities.

Units can have lots of different exact roles on the table, but the role of an army is to win games. In pretty much all forms of competitive 40K, you win games by holding objectives and killing stuff in order to acquire a victory point lead. With that in mind, when I’m evaluating armies I’m broadly trying to rate them on three different capabilities, and asking four followup questions that will affect my planning for the game.

The capabilities I’m assessing are basically scaled up versions of unit capabilities, often arrived at by roughly summing up the power of the individual units. Overall, I want to know:

How well does this army kill light units? What volume firepower or horde-clearing melee do they have?

What volume firepower or horde-clearing melee do they have? How well does this army kill heavy units? How many lascannons are they packing. Can any of their characters rip a tank apart?

How many lascannons are they packing. Can any of their characters rip a tank apart? How well does this army control objectives? Can they flood objectives with bodies? How much ObSec do they have? Have they got units that can grab a point from 20″ away?

Most all-comers lists are going to be able to do all of these to some extent, but will often be particularly good at one, and maybe a bit weaker in another. It’s also useful to understand how broadly based the army’s capabilities in each area are. If an army has a decent amount of anti-tank punch, but it’s all concentrated on a few vehicles that has a big strategic implications.

Strategic Questions

Once we know an army’s capabilities and where (if applicable) they’re concentrated we can extract these strategic capabilities by asking some key questions about it. Knowing the answers to these will affect our strategic priorities in the early turns of the game, and this is where going through the process of understanding your opponent’s list really starts to pay dividends.

Can I Table this Army?

It’s hugely, hugely important to go into a game knowing whether blowing your opponent clean off the board is a realistic goal. If it isn’t, you need to make sure you’re being a bit more conservative with your units, as you need to be planning for a full length game.

Be realistic about this – there’s no shame in having to make a plan other than “just kill everything”, it just tends to need to be a bit more considered and long-term. If your answer is “yes, if I roll well” you’re usually going to have a better chance of winning if you plan as if the answer was “no”. You should probably also assess whether there are any conditions that would change your answer to this – you might be able to table your opponent if you go first, but is that still true if they win the roll off?

How Can I Meaningfully Reduce the Army’s Capabilities?

This is the critical strategic question you want to be thinking about as soon as you’re on a plan more complex than “table them in a few turns”., and will have big impacts on your target priority. The capabilities listed above are, ultimately, the things armies need to do to score VP and win games. If you can stop your opponent being able to do one of them, then that will slow down their VP accumulation and boost your chances.

Do I Want to go First or Second?

In ITC, which is the most common competitive format, going first has the advantage of giving you the first crack at hurting your opponent’s army (and consequently, reduce their capabilities), but going second tilts the scales of how well each army can control objectives thoroughly in your direction. In raw terms, you should assess which of these is more valuable in service of you building up a winning capability advantage and prepare to pick accordingly, or adapt your plans when your opponent picks the one you wanted.

What Does a Big Play Look Like From this Army?

Most armies can operate effectively all the way through the game, but many will have one or more big plays they can pull, key points where a bunch of abilities can come together to land a devastating blow. Examples of these would be a Genestealer Cult army bringing in the big hitters from deep strike on turns 2 and 3 and the brutal shooting phase a Tau army can pull off using Kauyon when the foe is in range. Usually these big plays can be mitigated, so understanding when your opponent is trying to land them is crifical.

What Does Game Over Look Like For Me?

You can’t win them all – but by thinking ahead to how you might lose a game, you can attempt to put mitigating factors in place to reduce the chance of it ending that way. Obviously there’s frequently going to be a risk of “they high roll and kill all my stuff” but here we’re looking for more match-up specific ways that a game can go terminal for you – non-standard game overs, if you like. Often this is related to the big plays your opponent can pull – returning to the example of Genestealer Cults, letting them bring in deep strikers and wrap units on multiple flanks on turn 2 will often very quickly take a game out of your hands. It can be a bit less specific than that, and lean more on how much force each player is able to bring to bear. If you’re up against a mechanised force with a shooting army, them getting close enough to just consistently ram your shooting units and stop them firing probably locks you out of the game, even if you’re still moving models around for the rest of it.

Strategic Implications

Our answers to these questions plus the picture of their army’s capabilities build our priorities going into the game. 40K is a game of almost infinite variety, but you could do worse as a general statement of what a winning game looks like than “I removed a capability their army needed to win and prevented them from doing the same thing to me”. ITC primary missions are a great way to think about this more specifically. Most armies at least somewhat favour the killing or objective primary, and we can think about what their winning narratives might sound like.

A Tau army heavy on guns might be aiming for “I out-shot them, and killed enough of their objective grabbers early that they couldn’t pull ahead”.

An Ork army planning to flood the board, on the other hand, might say “I grabbed all the objectives early, and tied up their anti-infantry guns for most of the game”.

The specifics might change, but I’d wager a lot of winning games for both factions could be boiled down to these rough descriptions. In both, the army does the thing that scores it points, while removing the capability the opponent needs to fight back. In the Tau’s case, the latter is a case of target priority – the Tau player can be confident they’ll win a gunfight overall thanks to all their big shooting units being surrounded by shield drones, so it’s more meaningful to remove the enemy’s objective secured units. For the Orks they can’t so trivially reach out and kill the things troubling them, so instead they focus on other means of degrading the key capability, here just swamping the units that might shoot them with Ork bodies, perhaps aided by Da Jump.

In an ideal world you can reach out and degrade whatever capability is most troublesome to you, but that won’t always be possible – if your opponent is playing an Expert Crafters Eldar list, for example, it can be very tricky to take out their anti-tank capability without almost tabling them. At that point, you instead need to flip things around and ask whether there’s a capability you can meaningfully attack, and adapt your game plan accordingly. The dedicated Expert Crafters lists tend to be very low on objective secured troops, have a limited number of push threats (some Wraithseers, maybe) and be less efficient at clearing infantry than heavier threats. That means that by removing a relatively small number of their units you can have a big impact on their ability to hold objectives, and they’re less well set up to do the same to you. Even if your army doesn’t go into most matches expecting to try and win the objective game, here killing off their board control units is the easiest level you have to push, so you should adapt your plan and target priority accordingly.

This is also something you can re-evaluate as the game proceeds, and it’s particularly important to do so after a notably bad or great turn from your opponent. If they roll red hot and blow a quarter of your army off the board turn one, it becomes super important to make sure you’re aiming at their army’s weakest point, as you have less killing power and fewer bodies to accomplish stuff with. Conversely, if your opponent moves a bunch of stuff up into engagement range then rolls awfully you might find yourself with a much broader set of realistic goals, and a chance to put them out of the game entirely by eliminating some key threats and giving yourself an insurmountable advantage.

All of this comes back to a simple understanding – you and your opponent are both trying to play through a series of events where you utilise your army’s capabilities to win the game. Your goal when assessing their army is to work out where you can shove a massive wrench into their plans, allowing your preferred version of events to be the one that comes to pass.

Putting This Into Practice

One of the big advantages of talking about this topic is that the bulk of the strategy here happens pre-battle based on army lists alone – so we can actually show how we’d put this into practice by evaluating a few lists.

Obviously there will always be more factors than just what’s in your opponent’s army – what you’re playing can affect how important some capabilties are, and the missions you’re playing will affect your planning. Here, we’re going to carry out our evaluations on the basis that we’re playing a relatively balanced list with a mixture of targets and that we’re playing ITC missions. To gather our test subjects I’ve reached out to the rest of the Goonhammer team, so without further ado let’s bring on our first contestant.

Contestant 1 – Naramyth’s Training Army

The List