Sneaky cover saves for marines against AP1, AP2 and AP3

My record in 6th edition is pretty shocking, and I am in no position to educate anyone about tactics (that is best left to Kirby and Stelek).

I have however spotted a nice way of combining three rules that allows marines to get a "free" 6+ cover save from AP1, AP2 and AP3 weapons. Here's how it works:

The Ultramarine combat squad is hit by the plasma cannon which scatters slightly so that it catches three marines, causing three wounds.

Power armour is no use to them, but if they use the Go To Ground rule they can get a 6+ cover save in return for giving up their movement and only firing snap shots next turn.

So the marines Go To Ground and throw one 6, reducing their casualties to two models, but still enough to force a leadership check. This is where Combat Tactics comes in. The marines can now choose to fail the leadership test, and will drop back 2d6".

After they fall back, they auto-rally on their next turn using the  And They Shall Know No Fear rule. The marines no longer have any restrictions on them and are free to move and shoot at normal BS in the next turn.

In this example the Ultramarines have fallen back 7", and are still plenty close enough to return fire on their turn.

So the 6+ save isn't really free - it comes at the cost of a fall back move, but if you've got a squad that's in midfield with plenty of space to fall back, it could save you a couple of models and leave you with a squad that could still have some effect on the game.

It's also worth pointing out that this only works when the number of wounds put on the squad is enough to force a leadership check. Of course, you could roll incredibly well and save enough models to avoid the check all together, but in that situation you'd probably be happy to pay the price of giving up movement and proper shooting for the nice healthy squad that you've got left!

The Wargarage and thoughts on 6th Edition

We've started writing up short battle reports of our league games over at wargarage.blogspot.com

Why Wargarage? Because we play our games in the Wargarage, that's why! The guy who owned this house before me was a photographer and the garage was his studio. Mrs Kastigaunt has very kindly agreed to let me set up a games table in here now, and it has become known as the Wargarage.

The Wargarage

Anyway, I'm not much of a tactician, but here are some thoughts on 6th edition so far.

The first thing I need to tackle is the terrain placement system where you take it in turns to place terrain in table quarters. Poot is not at all convinced.  He says that terrain placement shouldn't be tactical and I can certainly see that argument, but I think that it does mean that you play on more varied tables. In our 5th edition games we tended to play with pretty samey tables and probably used to overload the terrain. I do miss the battles over a nice central square of buildings with an objective in the middle. There's no much incentive to set up this sort of thing up now because everyone will be busy making a nice little base for themselves in their deployment zone instead.

We haven't had many flyers in our games so far, but we have tested out the rules using winged  hive tyrants. Snap-shot rapid firing to try and knock them out of the sky is really good fun. When you finally knock em down and fire the rest of your units with normal BS it is incredibly satisfying. 

Poot's winged HT... already painted when he bought it, currently waiting to be stripped.

However, I must admit that I feel there is some cynicism from GW behind the flyer rules...With no FAQ allowing any unit in my codex to purchase skyfire as an upgrade, to combat flyers effectively I need to either 1. Buy flyers myself or 2. Buy a fortification like Aegis Defence Line 3. Focus fire everything at flyers using bs1 while the enemy ground force advances unmolested. Now I know that it is GW's job to sell models, and they have mortgages to pay, but for me this is a cynical manipulation of the rules to sell extra bits of plastic. Bad GW!

I want to buy flyers because they are interesting units that work well in the game, not as part as some artificial flyer "arms-race" because the 41st millennium doesn't appear to have ground to air missiles.

One of my pet hates about 5th edition was that the rules made bullets go around corners. A single model in the open would mean that you could put wounds on the rest of the squad that often you couldnt even see. I'm really glad that this has been fixed now, and working out cover on a per-model basis seems to work well too.

40k Cat "helps" us get to grips with 6th edition.

The secondary missions that give a VP for first kill, linebreaker and slay the warlord are a really good idea and work well. There is one unfortunate side effect however. I run a Space Marine Librarian as my warlord in small games, and with toughness 4, 2 wounds and 3+ armour save he's not particularly hardy. So far in EVERY game I have played in 6th I've had to hide him to stop him from becoming an easy VP for my opponent after his retinue gets gunned down. Even when I sat him in a Terminator squad he ended up running away on one wound. This is probably just poor tactics on my part, but it doesn't feel great having him run away every time, and I don't expect that it's very much fun for my opponent either.

There's loads of other stuff in 6th that's worth writing about but that will do for now...