The good folks over at Goonhammer have been publishing some excellent articles recently on the concept of unit roles in Warhammer 40k. While obviously there aren’t that many similarities between the two game systems, the idea of breaking units into their respective roles still has a great deal of value for MESBG. In particular, it can be a valuable listbuilding tool, enabling us to look at a force and figure out what it is missing in terms of what it can actually do, not just what models it happens to have. Even better, it enables us to look more broadly at what sort of models can fill these gaps. Warg Riders, Isengard Berserkers and Demolition Teams might not seem to have much in common, but if you’re looking for a few more Damage Dealers in your list then any of these could work well.
With this in mind, I’ve tried to come up with a rough list
of 8 unit roles into which I think all models can be classified. Of these, the
first three—
Frontliners, Damage Dealers and Objective Grabbers— are the core roles. You can
certainly try to build a list without ticking these three boxes, but an
absence of one will always constitute a weakness in an army without a
very specific game plan. The remaining five— Skirmishers, Flankers,
Backliners, Multipliers, and Counters — are then the special sauce that an
army can use to supplement its core gameplan and hopefully build a well-rounded
list. Of course, these roles are not fixed and immutable: a model can easily
fit within multiple roles, depending on the context in which they find
themselves. Riders of Rohan are classic Skirmish models, make excellent
Objective Grabbers, can be cheap Damage Dealers when charging near Théoden, are
solid Flankers in larger lists and can even play a quasi-Frontliner role if you've got a lot of heroes along. Generally, a model that’s good in one area will be
worse or less efficient in others, but there is a lot of overlap between some
roles, and some models are just plain good.
Without any further ado, let’s jump right into our first
unit role…
Frontliners
This role needs little explanation, and the models that can
fill it often earn little praise. The humble Orc Warrior or Warrior of
Minas Tirith certainly doesn’t look special, but they are nonetheless critical
to most armies’ game plans. The job of a Frontliner model is simple: they hold
ground, engaging the enemy force and pinning it in place. Ideally, your
Frontliners should be durable and efficient enough to slowly grind down your enemies and win a war of attrition against them, but that’s not really their
job. Instead, your Frontliners are principally aiming to buy your other models
time to win you the game by killing the enemy and seizing objectives. Without
Frontliners, it can be really hard to maintain the sort of battleline that
keeps your squishy models safe, prevents Traps and blocks the enemy away from
important areas of the battlefield. This is part of why all-hero or all-monster lists can be so hard to
run; you probably have heaps of Damage-Dealers, but you don’t have the
Frontliners to back them up. There are some skew builds that can get by without
these, like extremely Skirmisher-heavy Elven lists or the Black Riders, but
these are well and truly exceptions to the rule. For anyone else, a good
Frontline is the top priority in making a workable build.
Famous Frontliners: Iron Hills Dwarves, Morannon Orcs,
Goblintown Goblins.
Damage Dealers
Of course, very few Frontliners are much good at
killing things. Even the most efficient and dangerous Frontline is still best
suited to a war of attrition, and wars of attrition tend to progress very
slowly. But what about if you need to amp up your killing power and slaughter
some models fast? Well, that’s where the Damage Dealer comes in.
Unlike the Frontliners, these models aren’t aiming to take
up space and pin down the enemy, they’re aiming to kill them dead. This means
that things like durability and a low price, while still useful, are less
essential than raw offensive power. Again unlike the Frontliners, Damage
Dealers don’t need to fit into any particular genre of model. As mentioned
earlier, they can range from elite and high-output infantry like Abrakhan Guard
or Hunter Orcs, to cavalry aiming to smash some quick kills on an initial
charge, all the way up to esoteric war machines, powerful characters and
hulking monsters. In a game that places a lot of emphasis on killing enemy
models, there is an unsurprisingly vast array of ways to do so, and any model
that can kill stuff quickly can tick this box with gusto. Almost all forces are
going to have a number of Damage Dealers, and the question is less whether to
include any and more about balancing their inclusion with the fulfilment of
other roles. Would you be better off with another combat hero or 10 more Orcs? The question will always depend on the given army, but it is important to
remember why you’re looking to include either. There are armies that can go
without dedicated Damage Dealers: The Shire, Arnor and certain Angmar lists
come to mind. These will tend to go hard on Frontliners backed with a variety
of other tools, aiming to shut down the enemy Damage Dealers and grind out
their Frontline with overwhelming numbers or resilience. This can be an
entirely valid choice, but it does mean that you never have the ability to
point at a model and say ‘I’m going to kill that guy, this turn.’ Sometimes your
Orcs or Hobbits will do the job, but it’ll almost always be a slow process
without a few Damage Dealers to speed things up.
The final thing to note with Damage Dealers is that normally
a large percentage of their value is going to be tied up in their killing
power. As such, the principles I looked at back in my very first article on this blog are particularly relevant. If your Gil-galad or Boromir is struggling
to kill his points worth of enemies, then chances are that your Frontliners are
having a rough time of it and you’re falling behind in tempo. Killing their point’s
worth isn’t the only way a Damage Dealer can earn value, but it’s definitely
the default option.
Deadliest Damage Dealers: Boromir of Gondor, Warg Riders,
Cave Trolls, Gundabad Berserkers, Battlecry Trebuchet.
Objective Grabbers
This talk of killing stuff is all well and good, but most scenarios don’t actually offer many Victory Points for
dead models. Instead, the game tends to be determined by who has the most
models sitting happily on the objectives, or who is hanging onto a Relic, or
who managed to cross the field with the most models. You can have a brutally
efficient Frontline backed up by lethal Damage Dealers, but if your enemy
steals all the objectives then you still aren’t going to win. This is why any
army needs Objective Grabbers. The primary qualification these models need is
mobility; if you have to get to an objective before your enemy does, then
you’re going to find it much easier if you move 10-12" a turn. Abilities like the Ambush special rule of Goblin Mercenaries can play a similar role if you need them
to, getting you where you need to be at pace. But even these rules aren’t a
true substitute for being able to zoom around the map at speed when you’re on
the field.
However, capacity to get from A to B isn’t the only thing
we’re looking for here. Other beneficial characteristics are Courage value (so
they don’t abandon a valuable objective when you Break), a ranged weapon (so
they’ve got something to do as they hide out on isolated objectives) and a low
price tag. This last factor often gets overlooked, but it’s a key one; Knights
of Dol-Amroth are undeniably fast and brave, but if you’ve invested 120 points into a
devastating cavalry contingent you really want them to be crushing enemy
Frontliners and leveraging their status as premier Damage Dealers. They’ll do a
great job of running off the field in Reconnoitre, but a Knight of Gondor would
have done the same job for 2/3 the price. That’s obviously not to say that a
fast, expensive model like Gûlavhar should never be used to claim an objective:
if that objective wins you the game, then it doesn’t matter how much you
paid for the model that seizes it, they’re earning their keep. But if you’re
investing points into dedicated Objective Grabbers, then you’re ideally best
off when you don’t have to invest that many.
On the other hand, can an army function without investing
any points into this role? Here, the answer depends a lot on matchup and
scenario. Many Dwarf lists run with few to no Objective Grabbers, often because
there’s just nothing in their army that can really fulfil the role. When these
lists end up playing something like To The Death or Lords of Battle, they can
be absolute nightmares, as anyone who’s tried to crack an Iron Hills shieldwall
can attest. But if you happen to roll up Reconnoitre or Domination, then their
inability to threaten far-flung objectives can place them in an almost
impossible position. So while the answer here is technically yes, it’s a yes
with a lot of qualifiers attached.
Objectively Superior Objective Grabbers: Riders of Rohan, Goblin
Mercenaries, Wild Wargs, Crébain.
This brings us to the end of our three core
roles. Next week we’ll be looking at the
remaining five roles, in Skirmishers, Flankers, Backliners, Multipliers, and Counters.
None of these roles are essential to a list in the way that the core ones are,
but all of them bring valuable capacities that can elevate a decent army into
something more dangerous.
Until then, let me know what you thought of this article
below or on Facebook, and may your list always have the roles it needs!
Great article - I would add Warg Marauders to objective grabbers, since in a pinch, they can become 3-4 models just by dismounting. They are also one of the cheapest 4A models in the game when on the charge (and 3A when not on the charge). Oh, and they cause Terror and are F3/S4 with the ability to shoot twice (albeit poorly) after performing a full move. :)
ReplyDeleteI absolutely agree, and I didn't intend for my example lists at the end to be read as exhaustive: there's obviously dozens of good objective grabbing models out there, I merely wanted to highlight a handful. I love me some Marauders, and definitely agree that they fill the role in an excellent (if unconventional) way
DeleteI was wondering why, in your analysis of the frontline and damage dealers you divide them up as in the games I've played I tend to think of my armies as a frontline made up of what i think of as bunkers models or groups of models with at least 4 attacks and high defense and thugs models or groups of models with a minimum of 4 attacks and high strength. The division of the line into models and groups of models give mobility to the army and allow to challenge for objectives. I think you leave out a level in mobility or at least convey a lower level of mobility by having a theoretical frontline, I love your articles and I am just asking because I think maybe I missed it in your article.
ReplyDeleteHi mate, you definitely raise some good points. Certainly, you can break up models into lots of other groupings than the ones I've chosen, and I'm certainly not advocating for actually using your army, on the battlefield, as one big Frontline supported by various auxilary models. As you say, that might work well for some games but it will produce weaknesses of mobility and objective play.
DeleteInstead, I'm more talking about models from a listbuilding perspective: i.e., when you're designing your list, you need to make sure you have a certain amount of these specific things. You're almost always going to want some models to stand around grinding out enemies and keeping their scary stuff from killing your important models, and I've chosen to call that a Frontline. You often won't want to stick all of your Orcs/Warriors of Minas Tirith/whatever in one big line, as you say, but they're always going to be fulfilling that role of taking up space and tying up enemies. In that sense, what I'm calling Frontliners could just as easily be called Bunkers, I just like the term Frontliners because it doesn't imply that they're particularly tough