How to Win at 40k Tournaments Part Five: Dealing with Douchebags

If had a quarter for each time someone came up to me and said "Did you see what this guy has in his list? How are you suppose to deal with that!?" my army wouldn't have eaten up nearly as much of my paychecks as it has!

This is a common problem. You get to a tournament and you end up fighting someone with an armylist that seems over the top and you have no clue how to deal with it or you make some simple mistakes, like trying to fight it like any other army, and you get your ass handed to you. Although I still lose to these guys on occasion I don't run into the 'having no way to deal with this' situation anymore. It all comes down to careful planning and analysis of the situation.

In Magic they refer to this as control. It's about being in charge of the board and making sure things happen the way you want. You can't control the other player (as much as you'd like to) but you can manipulate him into doing what you want. Don't try to force your opponent to do things, let him do what he wants but do it under your own terms. You may not be able to control the enemy force but you can control yours which means you can set the stage and position things in such a way to force your opponent to react certain ways.

So let me give you a few real-life examples of what I'm talking about and hopefully I'll get those ideas moving. I'll put up some more scenarios in future articles.

I like to call these Scenarios: 'Noberific'
- The crazy assault army with a unit you can't crack
Situation: Players army includes Ghazkull, 4 ten man nob squads with power klaws, docs (feel no pain), and cybork bodies (5+ inv). Of course all mounted in Trukks.
Just in case you were counting that's 2000 points worth of nob squads and yes this is a real army. It was one of the armies to beat at the 'Ard boyz. Which was 2500 points fyi.

So to make this clear you have 4 units each with
- 10 guys
- 2 wounds each
- 4 power klaw attacks a piece, 5 on the charge
- weapon skill 5
- Feel no Pain
- 5+ invulnerable saves
- In Trukks
- And no doubt some tweaks so that this guy can pick and choose his wound allocation.

Basically if those units hit your lines its going to hurt. So how do you deal with this? Well let's look at the break down. His units are very strong in assault which means he's going to do everything to get there. Once they're in assault you are not going to be able to reasonably stop them.

So how do you beat it?

The automatic response is to blow up the trukks and shoot at them while the walk towards you. This in my mind would be a mistake because they are most vulnerable while still in there trukks. So you do the one thing he isn't expecting. You let him come towards you!

Let's assume that he's foolish enough to keep his trukks together during the drive towards you. Observe the figure to the right. The left hand side shows 2 red Ork trukks (I apologize for the crude diagrams) and a squad of fast moving troops like assault marines and a fast moving vehicle like a land speeder. With a bit of careful positioning you can easily maneuver them to cover as much of the enemy trukk as possible. At which point a couple well placed shots will easily kill the trukks and everyone inside. If you can't cover the entire trukk like shown on the right this can also be to your advantage as dealing with 3-5 Nobz in a tight group is still alot better than dealing with 20 ready to assault you. If your lucky you'll even pin them. The all you need is a well placed battlecannon shot or some good firepower to bring them down.

Now lets assume he's foolish enough to keep his trukks seperate during his advance towards you. (I like to think that any attempt to approach a trap is foolish)
As shown on the left side of the diagram he keeps one trukk in reserve to counter attack if anyone attacks his guys. You sweep in, surround and blow up his trukk but the as shown on the right, he can then easily sweep in and wipe out your squad. In this case I would just let him do it. By placing my own light vehicle in the way he will either have to take the long way around forcing him in a bad assault position or he'll have to kill the trukk. Either way his 500 point unit eats a 100 point unit or a 50 point light vehicle that has already killed 500 points worth of nobz, no big deal. Then what? His nobz are left dicks to the wind so to speak and you can deal with them how you see fit. If your far enough away he might even jump back into the trukk and you can do this all over again.

So what if you army lacks mobility? well hopefully in that case you have more firepower than god and you'll be able to kill the trukks at a far distance and whittle the squads down before they hit you. The fun part about battlecannon's is the Str 8 guns ignore feel no pain. But considering the durability of the squads and there sheer number its quite likely that a sizeable amount will eventually get to you. This is where the shield wall comes in.

Review the crude diagram to the right.
The left hand side shows a shield wall of slow but tough vehicles like rhinos or chimeras. These vehicles can sit in front of your line like a shield blocking LOS and acting like a deliberate speed bump. All the while shooting at the incoming Nobz. Even in death they can be useful. The explosions can wound the nobz more, they can't consolidate after killing a vehicle in assault and they act as difficult ground slowing the nobz down. This all helps you gun them down for as many turns as you can. So long as you're careful with your lanes of fire and line of sight so that you don't hinder your own shooting.

The right hand side shows a similar tactic with infantry. In this case the Nobz are green, your forces are blue and a sacrificial squad of yours is red (red shirts!) the point of the front squad is to shoot everything they got and then die! They are a deliberate speed bump. After shooting with the front rank remember to go to ground if possible, being in cover will help you strike first! I realize if they all have power klaws its not a big deal but If they don't it can really help you. Remember to keep a good distance between your wall and your precious troops as you want the nobz stuck in the open for at least a turn after chewing the 'red shirts' so you can shoot them with everything you have. And hell, ensign Ricky might even get lucky and kill the Doc with wound allocation. ;)