How to Win at 40k Tournaments Part 1: Terminology

This will be the first in a series of articles where I will flush out my ideas on how to win 40k tournaments. I've gotten alot of advise on this subject over the years, some good, some bad. I'd like to share alot of it with you, and more importantly why I think the advise was good or bad.

So why should you listen to what I have to say? I've won most of the local small tournaments that I've entered in, but I have never won what I consider a major tournament, although for the past few years I've consistently scored in the top ten. Part of that is because I don't listen to my own advise, and part of it is because I run one of the two major local tournaments so it's a bit hard to participate.
So why listen to the advise of someone who hasn't won a major tournament? because I run one.
Operating behind the scenes I get to see what it takes to win these tournaments and within 15 minutes of the door opening I can tell you with good certainty who will be in the top ten and who's got the best shot at winning.
I can tell because these guys have the nicest armies, the best lists and have the right attitude. But most importantly they are well prepared. Once I figured out what it was that made these guys better than the rest I changed my army and my style of play and sure enough I went from being in the middle of the pack to being a top ten player and a contender for the top spot. So I think it pays to listen to what I have to say.

Ok before I start with this article I just want to give a disclaimer to say that all of these articles are written based 90% on my own opinions on how to win 40k games. Opinions that you may or may not agree with, and others that may offend you. If you don't like my advise, then don't take it.


So now that that's out of the way today I'm going to start off with the fairly general subject of terminology. Below is a list of some of the terms that I will frequently refer to in my articles. Once you get up to speed with what I refer to you will be able to understand the subjects that I talk about.

Linchpin - A linchpin is what used to hold the wheels on axles on carriages. The point being that it was very important and to lose one would cause the whole thing to fall apart. I often see armies that rely on a single unit so heavily that one could consider it a linchpin. It holds the army together and if you destroy it the army will fall apart.

Bio - Biological, An army that is based primarily on infantry models

Mech - Mechanized, an army that is built primarily on vehicles and transports.

The Behemoth Principle - The Behemoth principal refers to a military super weapon. "An incredibly powerful weapon so large and expensive that commanders can't use it effectively, because they can't afford to lose one." The classic example being the Japanese battleship Yamato.

Recovery - Recovery is a players ability to turn the game back into his favor after taking serious losses during a game.

Sledgehammer -  A sledgehammer unit is a single expensive unit, typically with characters and a transport that can form the center of an army. Armies that include sledgehammers will typical use almost half there points on this single unit and you can often consider the rest of the army as 'filler' or a 'sledgehammer delivery system'.

MTG - Magic the Gathering. It's a card game that you should at least be familiar with by name. I was an avid player for a time and I often draw comparisons between the two games and there respective tournament styles.

Card Advantage - This is an MTG term referring to the advantage a player has by having more cards in hand than his opponent. Essentially having more options they can use. However this can also refer to cards in play and any other card that might be immediately playable. I like drawing from this principle in 40k because it can teach you alot about getting the most out of what units you have and makes you think about what units to use for what tasks and when.

Net Decking- This is another MTG term. At Magic tournaments Players are required to submit a written list of there deck compositions. After the tournament the deck lists are published online. As a direct result many players will duplicate a winning deck list or make minor changes to it for use at a subsequent tournament. This has a serious (and arguably negative) impact on the tournament scene as is not uncommon for 50% to 75% of decks at tournaments to be unoriginal copies of a successful deck or original decks built specifically to counter the duplicates. This kind of practice is also common place in 40k but not so much copying tournament winners so much as utilizing army lists copied or derived from forums and websites.

Comp - Short for composition. This is an occasionally used scoring system at tournaments that specifically scores a players choices in there army list. It's main goal is to deter 'power lists' by penalizing players for taking choices that are inherently powerful with varying degrees of success. This score is often used to determine initial placement at tournaments ie deciding your first round opponents.

RTT - Rogue Trader Tournament, the old format for official Games Workshop tournaments. It's defining characteristic was a scoring system that scored roughly 30% for Gameplay, 30% for Sportsmanship and 30% for Painting with 10% misc points. It is the style of tournament that I prefer to run and play in.

US Style Tournament - US style tournaments tend to follow what I call the Magic the Gathering style. The point is to play games and win as many times as possible. Sportsmanship and painting doesn't factor into it. The sportsmanship system (if it even exists) is often nothing more than check boxes "Did your opponent show up on time?", "Did your opponent bring his rulebook and codex?", "Did your opponent remember to wear pants this morning?" etc. I'm not going to discus this style of tournament much as winning them is not nearly as complex (or interesting) as a Canadian style.

Canadian Style Tournament - Canadian style tournaments typically fall under the traditional RTT format. Players must balance gameplay, painting and sportsmanship scores in order to end up on top. This is the style of tournament that I run and typically play in. So this is the kind I will mainly discus in my articles.

BITZ!

Remember back in the glory days of GW when you could order any metal bitz or complete sprues online for only slightly exorbitant prices? Yeah I miss that too...

Luckily a bunch of retailers have taken it upon themselves to flood ebay with bitz, not so much on the metal ones but tons of parts from the new plastic sprues. And the prices aren't that bad, even with shipping! Especially if you compare $10 worth of bitz to the cost of buying the whole $40 or $50 kit.

Usual ebay rules apply, only buy from reputable vendors etc.

Why am I posting this advice?

Because I just bought $50 worth of gunz, engine blocks, power relays and props for my weekend project...
By the time they arrive my wallet should have stopped hurting and I will probably have forgotten why I bought the bitz in the first place! ;)

I love it when a plan comes together

Courtesy of Christmas I've had a bit of downtime lately
so I started putting together a new 'armored trukk' from the plans I sketched a couple weeks ago.


The rear will have a raised section for the krew. The Front will have a heavy weapon mount, possibly a Zzap gun, possibly and Kannon I'm not sure which will look cooler yet! I'm trying to sort the engines in my head right now.

It's still early in the building phase but you get the idea. I added the rollbars to keep it consistent with the other trukks


I've built smooth surface Ork vehicles before and was always disappointed with the result so I'm working to improve on that! A couple more body plates to get the general shape together and then I can start adding textured plates, glyphs and other such to give it a nice form.


For those of you you want advise on scratch building your own vehicles I'll leave you with 3 tidbitz.

1. Don't be afraid to rip off pieces when the don't look right or don't fit. Otherwise the it throws the entire fig off. Sometimes pre-made pieces just don't fit, and one side doesn't quite match the other. Adjust and move on.
2. Work from the ground up, get a general shape then worry about the texture and fine details later when the model is easier to work with.
3. Plan ahead, draw a to scale sketch of what you want and work from it. When your trying to figure out how it should look when its coming together you can always go back to the drawing for reference.

And as a bonus bit of advise, take your time. Do a bit each day. These projects for me always end up being like a 'jigsaw from hell' so its best to take your time so you don't get frustrated.

The Sketch

My first step to any complex conversion is always the sketch. I'm not an artist or a good drawer by any regard but I find it really helps to sketch out a few ideas before hand, even if its just a few stick figures. It helps flush out the ideas and get a better idea for the scale and work involved in your head.

That being said I put this together tonight. I'm always curious to see how close the finished product is to the original concept art. ;)

Consider it a preview of things to come.

yeah...

So I walk into GW thinking I'll just buy a box of boyz and instead I walk out with this.
Yeah that's a battleforce and yes my wallet is hurtin.
At least I'll have plenty to assemble over the holidays.

I'm also scouring ebay for bitz. There's plenty available for low low prices but why do I get the feeling I will have dropped another hundred bucks by the end of tonight?

Army Extras

One of the most common questions I get asked about my con is "What are some quick things I can do to get my score up?"

The easiest way is to make some non-playable figs! In addition to boosting your appearance score it will help to add that wow factor to your army and they can help make gameplay alot smoother.

As a couple examples:

Spell Markers
- These figs represent that certain spells or effects are active. I know one player that has figs to represent Guide, Fortune and Doom when cast onto a squad. Even some custom made counters can look really cool with little effort. I like to use a fig as a targeting marker for blast templates, that way I can easily identify what I'm targeting when I have to measure scatter. I've also seen figs to remind players that squads need to take moral tests. You could also make up custom markers to show damage to vehicles or any other status effect that needs to be identified.

Wound Markers
- these are markers to represent that a model has taken a wound. The easiest one I've seen is glass beads representing spirits stone for eldar. I've also heard of players using small gravestones! I've personally been using continual fire dice since their GW issue and useless under the current rules anyway.

Crashed vehicles
- I made up crashed versions of many of my tanks. In addition to looking cool when destroyed they are also practical as unlike my tanks they are designed to have figs piled onto them for cover and make moving figs around them in assaults alot easier. You could also make up a number of small craters to show where vehicles have been annihilated. This is a part of the rules most players ignore, when a vehicle is annihilated the rules state you can replace them with a crater if available. This could give your guys much needed cover, within reason of course.

Tokens
- Like the spell markers above but alot more primitive. These are plastic or card tokens that have status effects written on them in bold text. You can buy the pre-made ones from Gale Force 9 or GW or you can make your own. I made these up in Powerpoint while bored one day. I printed them off on card stock and cut them out individually.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/darkalman/2798260111/

Custom Dice
- Chessex offers a service for making custom dice that's worth checking out. The instructions are on there homepage, all they need is a reasonably clear line drawing to work with to make a custom ingraved die facing. They even have alot of pre-generated 40k symbols already pre-made you just have to ask. Best part you can pick the colors and they cost only double that of a normal dice cube for the same number of dice.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/darkalman/3678790448/

Basing 101

I had a good talk with some friends this week about basing. My current Orks use a combination of GW issue gravel and brown flock which is pretty basic stuff to be honest.
Since then I've gotten into the habit of painting the gravel as I did on my deffkoptas and my plane and it gives a much better effect. Still I've been looking for ways to up my game.


I picked up some new flight bases for my trukks. I used to cut my own out of plywood (plastic ones aren't big or sturdy enough) but this time I bought pre-routered oval bases at Michaels for $1 each. They're less hassle to work with, fancier looking and they're more in line with 40k style then the rectangular ones I used to use.

Ratboy recomended I use liquitex products. They have a gel product that's impregnated with sand and resin particles that gives a cool sand / gravel effect when dry. He used it on his Eldar and I was impressed with the result. He did an ash world black/grey scheme on his bases so to be different I think I'll stick to my familiar brown earth and sand with Green flock. Either way its worthy of a test fig or two. I also got the idea to use some Epic 40k figs on my flight bases to give the illusion that they're flying high up! I saw it used on a grot bomb diorama in White Dwarf and I loved it so much that I'm going to steal the idea.
I also picked up one of the new Vallejo pigment sets. (who uses GW paint anymore?) I haven't been happy with the ink and drybrush based rust effects I've used in the past and I've heard good things about the pigments so I thought I'd give it a try. The worst comment I heard is that they can look too realistic but again that's what test figs are for.

Old Army Pics

I figured since I talk about my old army alot I would be a good idea to post some comparison pics.

Check out my flickr!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/darkalman/sets/72157606959218413/

The Army Build: It Begins!

  

As what normally happens with me I try to plan out a bit of my army before I go until the build phase but it all gets thrown out the window the moment I have a bit of inspiration. ;)

I knew I had to replace all my trukks so I bought a couple of the new Ork trukks a few weeks ago to tinker around. Yes I know I said ages ago that I would never buy the new trukks but that was because I knew that if I bought one I would have to replace them all. Well now that I decided that I have no choice but to replace them all, why not upgrade to the new model? Another of my precious paycheques just handed over to GW, but what the hell!

I was planning on staring at the kits for a while to figure out what cool blimpish conversions I could do but after a 10 minute conversion with Crazy K. I got all inspired and such and voila! the first blimp is roughed out.

I started by building the cab section utilizing some extra armor plates to beef it up. By placing it on the chassis I was able to get a general idea of what the final product looked like and decided the best thing to do was basically build the entire kit backwards. Putting the motor on backwards on the wrong end of the chassis and building the rest of the kit around it making it look reminiscent of a WW2 beach landing craft.

I even managed to nab an old prop from a deff kopta, using one of the kits drive shafts as the prop hub. I wasn't going to use the Tires anyway!
I'm suddenly thinking of channeling Doc Brown "Where we's going we don't needz roadz!"
I've always been disappointed at the fact that my old trukks didn't have engines and props, I had always planned for them to have some but I could never get the right bitz so now is my chance to fix that!

The blimp is a styrofoam standin for now. I much prefer the egg shape for the balloons over the round ones I used before and the plasticard fins really adds to it. I'm trying to develop a process for making the balloon look like brightly colored vinyl when finished but I have yet to find something that works. Luckily I started the project early and I'm in no real rush.

There's plenty more work to do but I'm already really happy with the initial results. No time to waste waiting to figure out the missing details, time to get moving on the next trukk!

Da Cunnin Plan

So you have to ask the question, why are you building this army?

So I'm sitting at the BP after Astro Winnipeg 2010 chatting with the other players and checking my score as I always do after a tournament and realizing that I did alot better than I expected.
So I look at my overall score to see what I could improve and realize that my appearance score is much lower than the average in the top ten.
As I review my army to see what I can improve I realize my problem. The majority of my army is now 10 years old and painted and model to a much lower standard than I am capable of now. I look at my hoard of blimp riding Orks and lately I'm dissapointed with them because I have learned so much since I built the first ones. I even had comments from the judges during the tournament that my newer figs are much higher quality than before. So of course now I've resigned myself to the thought of building a completely new army from scratch.

I thought about changing things up and playing a new army but Orks really are my army. I love to play them, I love that I can get away with so much for conversions. I just find them so much fun, and they're never boring.
Besides I don't want to play marines again, hoard armies like guard and nids aren't my style. I can't play Eldar and Tau because I don't want to do the same thing as the rest in my gaming group. Necrons need a new codex before I'd consider it and I already have a non-competitive chaos army. Anything I didn't list I don't find interesting enough to even mention.

So the cunnin plan isn't a new army so much as a serious facelift to my existing army. Which I'm ok with.

So Da Rulez:
1. Everything must fit into one case, my current rendition of the army isn't portable enough to travel and I need to fix that. I would love to try going to tournaments outside of Winnipeg like Astro Vancouver or Toronto but as it stands its too much of a logistical nightmare.
2. No stock figs, everything needs to be converted
3. Everything needs to be painted at my current standard or better. No fig in the army should be more than 2 years old. Everything I painted for Astro 2010 can be used, everything else must be flushed and replaced.
4. No two units should be the same, every fig should be unique in some way.
5. I need to build units that I've never tried before.
6. I also need a fresh armylist and display board to go with the army and the theme

So by my count I need 4-6 new trukks, 1-3 looted wagons, 60 odd boyz and whatever else I feel like building. I'd better get cracking...

Post the First

So the first question to ask is "Why am I here?".

The obvious answer is "because A big Clown hit me!". If you get that reference I would be impressed.

The ACTUAL goal of this blog is to follow me as I go through the arduous process of designing, building and painting my brand new army for the 2011 GW tournament circuit! Specifically Astronomi-con Winnipeg 2011 and whatever else I decide to play in next year.

My goal is to walk you through the entire process of designing a tournament class 40k army. From inception, through design, assembly, painting, play testing, modification and the tournaments themselves.

I want to showcase all the time and effort that's put into an army and it’s much more than most people realize, even to those that have built one. My hope is to be inspiring to a point where you might learn something and hopefully raise the standard of armies and players out there.