Balancing Your Army

[Guest Article]

When you’re going for a tournament, you will not know what you’ll face beforehand on that note it is important when building your army to make a “jack of all trades” army. You need to be able to counter almost anything, Hordes, Mechanised, Heavy Infantry whatever your possible opponent may throw at you, either in Warhammer or in 40K.

Every codex or army book has something to counter anything. Template weapons are excellent for hordes or deepstriking armies. Unit affecting spells do the job too (dwellers below and purple sun in a sense). On the other side every army also gets something to kill elite units. Power weapons, meltaguns in 40K are a perfect example of this while in Fantasy high strength units, no armour save spells and multiple attacks are suited for this. When you face an opponent with high armour saves there are 2 things you can do, 1) negate his armour save (low AP/high strength) 2) let him/her make enough saves, even on a 2+ there will be some fails when you have to take 10 saves.

In 40K some things you need to keep in mind when building your army are:

Do I have enough troops to claim objectives at the end of turn 5? This is the whole point about 2/3 of the games of 40K to claim objectives

Have I got enough ‘punch’ in my army to finish off my enemy. You can’t claim objectives when your opponent is still covering the field with his troops, and in kill points games you will need to finish his units off.

Did I put my eggs in one or multiple baskets? It can work if you spend a lot of points in 1 unit (say terminators in a landraider) but this is risky, since once this unit is gone you’ve lost a big part of your army. That’s why the multiple small units tactic works very well, it is a blowback of you lose the unit but not that bad since you got 7 more of them and it was only 150 points (for example).

Would I enjoy fielding this army? After all it stays a game and you have to enjoy the game, that way your opponent will enjoy it more too and you’ll both have a fun experience.

In Warhammer the things you should keep in mind differ, because the game is constructed differently, here are some of the most important items:

What are my strong and weak phases? Some armies just are stronger in some phases than others, Dwarfs for example are weak in movement and magic offense, while they’ve got a very good shooting and combat phase. Daemons do well in the magic phase but lack ranged. And then there are armies that can do every phase well, High Elves and Empire are the perfect examples of this. With the right build they got something good for everything.

Have I got enough magic defence? Magic is a big part of the game, you can choose not to take any mages yourself but in that case you should think about what you’d do if your opponent takes some mages and starts throwing all these spells at you. In my experience you can certainly dispel without mages, it’s just harder especially when facing lvl 4 mages (which everyone like so much now). I always take a lvl 2 in my army, for a it offensive power and just the little boost when defending.

Are my victory points (especially general and BSB) well protected? Since both of these can deliver your opponent some easy victory points if sniped they should be well protected, put them in a unit, give them some armour, make sure they can take the “Look out sir!”.

Did I put my eggs in one or multiple baskets? It can work if you spend a lot of points in 1 unit (say a horde of chaos knights) but this is risky, since once this unit is gone you’ve lost a big part of your army. That’s why the multiple small units tactic works very well, it is a blowback of you lose the unit but not that bad since you got 7 more of them and it was only 150 points (for example).

Would I enjoy fielding this army? After all it stays a game and you have to enjoy the game, that way your opponent will enjoy it more too and you’ll both have a fun experience.

And the golden tip when you’d like to go to tournaments, take some friends with you, practice a lot beforehand (versus different types of armies), listen to advice and feedback of others on your army list and as always enjoy.

Martijn

BTP Correspondent from the Netherlands.