Recently I talked about Securing The Midfield, but this week I'm going to talk about not getting caught in the Kill Zone. So what's the difference between the Midfield and the Kill Zone? Well, it depends entirely on what army you're facing and how badly you're getting shot up.Space Marine armies tend to get stranded once their transports go up in flames. There's also an art to knowing when to stay in your transports. Screw up with either of these and your army suddenly has to foot slog and if that's through difficult terrain, then you won't be going anywhere fast.
Old Shatter Hands from the Tau Of War blog commented on my last strategy article, saying "my Tau army works really well when my opponent moves into the kill zone, erm, I mean, midfield."
As a former Tau player, I can see what he means and I learned what he was talking about the hard way in my next game against James.
I drove forward in my transports, got everyone out and spread them out in the terrain, effectively saying "Ha! Come get me."
You'd have to be mad to tackle that up close. So James' Thousand Sons opened fire with Battle Cannons, Plasma Cannons, Autocannons and Inferno Bolters instead!
However, due to the way I'd spread out my forces across numerous objectives while being within range to claim, contest or charge on to another I was in a very good position -even though I was taking casualties and couldn't return much long ranged damage on the enemy (mostly due to Going To Ground). But James also couldn't risk moving any of his units within 12", because some of the Space Wolves might just roll high enough to rush out of the ruins and into close combat.
Obviously, in an Annihilation game, I would never have done this. But the point I'm making is that you can lose the battle, but still win the mission.
In this instance, I'd really made a mess of getting all my guys out of their Rhinos and when I tried to get them back in, they all got stuck in the Difficult Terrain!
So will James' Thousand Sons finally overcome the feral ferocity of the Space Wolves? Find out in the next post!
2 comments:
June 15, 2010 at 3:49 AM
That Killzone is the reason why I tend to play an agressive army and give multiple choices of high priority targets(TWC, Dreads...) for my ennemy which in turn leaves the Grey Hunters pretty much free from harm until they are properly deployed!
June 15, 2010 at 4:10 AM
Well I play Tau myself, admittedly amongst many other armies, and was aat a tournament with them this very weekend, and I kinda see both sides of this argument.
If up against guard, I'd love to see the guard player drive his chimeras into the middle, because then it's very easy to circle around for av10 side armour shots.
If up against your Space Wolves, the front and side armours are the same, so it doesn't have such great significance. Instead you can lash out in a greater number of directions. In this case I'd much rather have you in a corner or doing a refused flank, in which case I can fall back to the other flank, instead of taking control of the middle.
If my opponent plays a CC-heavy army and especially if the front and side armour values are the same, I'm much more afraid if he's in the center, but with an army like mech guard I'll happily take those side armour shots.
I think what OSH was meaning was exactly these side or rear armour shots. He has made a couple of good videos about this recently using baal preds as example targets, but in the case of Adam's Space Wolves you'll be getting the same av11 from the sides.
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