Sunday, October 17, 2010

Building an Uber-army

I'm sure all of you (as long as you aren't extreme noobs) have heard of such deadly army lists as the Alpha-strike, the Leafblower, and The Kult of Speed, and I'm also sure that some of you have no idea how to construct an excellent tournament list. Well, today, I will help you on your way to becoming the next Phil Kelly, aka, being able to win games at will. There are three schools of thought on how to make a competitive tournament list. The first one is the way that most gamers in Europe tend to use, which is achieved by getting, in every unit, the best value for your points. Such as, if you need tank killing, and you can get a land raider, or a squad of devastators with missile launchers. Both would be about the same in effectiveness (using mathhammer), but the Land raider is considerably more expensive. There, problem solved. The second way is a tactic used mostly by players in the US, and is much more straightforward. It relies on getting about a million super units, to act as wrecking balls, that tear through the enemy army in an unstoppable tornado of las-bolts and chainswords. These types of armies rely heavily on such units as Nob bikers, Thunder Hammer/Storm Shield terminators, and the like. The third and final way to do it is my favorite, and probably the best, as well as being the most fun. The third choice is to find a special character in your army list who gives your army some special ability or other, or makes certain unit types better, or troops, and them milk him for all he is worth. I have several examples for this. Take Sammael, from the Dark Angels codex, for instance. He is a pretty good character, and can be put in a 14 14 10 land speeder for free. But his main ability is to make all Ravenwing attack squadrons become troops. If you choose to base an army around him, you will have a small but elite force of bikers and attack bikers, all able to capture objectives, and all able to make use of the Outflank rule, thanks to the Scout special rule. It will also be extremely hard to kill, with each of the scoring models having toughness 5. Another example is another Space Marine character: Vulkan He'stan. By taking him, all flamers, heavy flamers, meltaguns and multi-meltas become twin-linked, and all Thunder Hammers become master-crafted. Due to the amount of mech in 5th edition, having all meltaguns twin-linked for free is practically to good to be true. The rest of the army them becomes very easy to build: Thunder Hammer/Storm Shield terminators, melta-maxed tactical squads, and multi-melta/heavy flamer land speeders. So you see, not too hard to make a good army list. Even if you aren't Space Marines, there are plenty of other characters that benefit your army, such as Epidemius for the Chaos Daemons, Wazdakka for the Orks, etc. Well, that's all for today, see you all soon, and may your dice ever roll 6s!

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