I was reading Fritz 40K's discussion of the Battle for Salvation GT. He discussed how most of the armies have moved totally away from assault and it was all about the firepower at the event. While there are still some assault units in armies those units either have exceptional survivability or mobility to be effective in these games. A good shooting unit can kill 6 units a game. A good assault unit probably is only going to get 2-3 since it has to spend a few turns getting into position and then after winning another whole turn getting to the next target.
This sort of relates to my post last weak where the list I saw had like 12 razorbacks and 12 psycannons. All shooting, paper thin troops hiding in the over tough vehicles for 5th edition. In 4th edition most vehicles were to easily destroyed but now it has gone to far the other way. To examine this in more depth, I built a Monte Carlo simulator which allows for all the variables in shooting at vehicles to be examined to see how many turns of fire it really takes to kill them. The results from that are coming soon.
He also noted that due to the every increasing model counts true tactics is really going out the window since the fundamental tactical element is movement and positioning but the whole board is full of units now.
Which is an interesting observation, because Nova Open (the tournament BFS models after) actually hinders shooting through massive amounts of centrally located BLOS terrain. From the commentary I've so far seen, BFS had similar terrain, but it the BLOS pieces were on the outer-edges so they didn't play a huge factor in preventing gunlines from doing their damage.
ReplyDeleteAfter playing at Nova Open, I am of the opinion that more terrain may become the norm...thus, shooting will take less of a role in games. That means that CC will take a more prominent role in games, as it will be the only reliable way to bounce units in cover unless you're able to torrent of fire them out. :)
At the moment 40k is definately a shooting game. As you said it takes about 2 turns to get into combat, and then probably another 2-3 turns of doing combat againn, if lucky against a different unit. Shooting is the way forward.
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