As the recent Goonhammer analysis of Secondary objectives showed, Grind them Down is picked in a relatively substantial 14% of games, but has the second-lowest average score of any generic Secondary. It’s not especially close either: the next lowest is RND, and even that averages a whole extra point per game. For context, Grind has a lower average score than most of the Custodes-specific Secondaries, and I don’t even know what those do! So what is it about Grind that makes it simultaneously alluring and ineffective? Put another way, what makes Grind a trap?
To explore that, let’s start with what you have to do to
score points on the Secondary. It’s pretty simple really: at the end of the
battle round, you score 3 VPs if more enemy units than friendly units were
destroyed that round. We can immediately see some real positives to this
Secondary. Firstly, it maxes at fifteen, which is always excellent. Secondly,
it gives us points for doing what we want to do anyway: kill stuff and not die.
There’s no mucking around with tricky actions, no giving up shooting or spells
or combat, you just kill stuff and score points. Awesome! Even better, there’s
a clear matchup and build that benefits the Secondary. When your opponent has
lots of vulnerable units and you have fewer, tougher ones, then in any close
game you should be killing more of their units than they are of yours. That’s
great! So why does the scoreline not seem to work out that way in practice?
The most fundamental reason that Grind is harder to use than you’d expect is that it doesn’t give you points for killing more
enemy units than friendly units overall, but on a per battle round basis. To
explore why this is a problem, let’s look at a game I recently played with
Imperial Knights v Drukhari. I took Grind, and for good reason: my opponent had around 20 units, while I had 7. As I said above, in any close game I should be killing
more of his units than vice versa. The challenge is that I’m not necessarily
trading one of my units for two of his every turn. Instead, I’m likely only getting
shots on as many units as he can kill for a turn or two, then he’ll go hard and
accept that I’ll outkill him for the rest of the game. As it turns out, I
scored nothing from Grind in Turn 1, wildly outkilled the Drukhari on Turns
2-4, and then got nothing from it in Turn 5 for want of targets. In terms of
units killed, an Imperial Knights player can generally expect to end up ahead
against Drukhari. But if a heap of those kills happen over only one or two
turns, then you may not get the reward you’d expect from it.
This effect can be felt in a bunch of ways, all of which
tend to translate into lost points for the Grinding player. If you end up going
first with Grind, then you’re very unlikely to score anything from it on Turn
1. If the game is extremely tight, then there’ll likely be one or two turns in
the mid-game when your opponent equals you on kills, especially if you’re
playing a trading game (and especially if they got to go second and can
carefully kill just enough units to deny you points). On the other hand, if the
game snowballs in one direction or the other— as often happens with armies
that don’t have many units— then there’s a decent chance you won’t be scoring it in the endgame either! To have a real chance of maxing
Grind, you need to go second, then have a tight trading game in which you keep
managing to take out two of your opponent’s units with one of yours, and have
no one be totally crippled by Turn 3 or 4. And even if you can align all of
those things in a matchup, dice are fickle. Units regularly die when they
shouldn’t, or survive overwhelming odds because your opponent’s dice showed up.
Even the perfect matchup is likely to see at least one turn where you
unexpectedly don’t score Grind even though you planned for how you’d do so.
None of this is to say that you should never take Grind. Sometimes
it will legitimately be your best option, or at least in the three best
options. What I am saying, is that Grind requires a much more specific
matchup than players commonly credit. It’s not just a matter of having
less units than your opponent. That’s normally essential, but it’s only the
start of the story.
To score big points from Grind, you also need to have a plan
for how you’ll kill at least one unit Turn 1, and ideally more. Can you reach
into your opponent’s zone and do some damage without exposing enough units for
them to just equal your tally anyway? On the flipside, are you capable of
hiding enough on Turn 1 that you won’t give up a critical early kill if you go
second?
On top of this, you need to have an expectation that both
sides are going to have stuff left on Turn 5. If your gameplan is ‘score points
early, get tabled, win anyway’, or if that’s probably your opponent’s
plan, then Grind likely won’t get you anything at the end. If you can fulfil
these two criteria, as well as having less units than your opponent, then you
should be able to score decent points from Grind.
However, there’s one final reason that Grind can be a trap, even
in games where it scores well: Grind requires you to kill stuff to get
points. More specifically, it requires you to kill things every single turn, in
large quantities. If you and your opponent hide behind your buildings all game
long, then you’ll get a 0 on your Secondary and will lose. So by taking Grind,
you’re effectively handing the strategic advantage to your opponent. You have
to make something happen, they just have to stop you doing so.
As a result of this, we have one final factor to add to our
list: we should only take Grind when we’re already planning to play an
aggressive game. To summarise, that means that for Grind to be a good
Secondary, and not just ‘I guess I’ll probably get a 9 and I don’t have
any better choices’, we need five things to be true:
- 1. We have less units/more durable units than our opponent;
- 2. We have a way to kill something Turn 1 if we go first, and without exposing enough units for our opponent to just equal us;
- 3. We have the ability to hide enough that we won’t lose much Turn 1 if we go second;
- 4. We can expect that both sides will still be on the table in Turn 5; and
- 5. We need to be fine with playing aggressively.
That’s… quite a list. Of these, only the first and fifth are totally necessary, but if you’re lacking any of the others then you shouldn’t be expecting more than a 12 from Grind at the absolute most. Even for a classic Grind army like Knights, this list is a bit scary. Knights can struggle to hurt stuff behind terrain, they often won’t be able to hide everything Turn 1 if they go second, and generally either the Knights player or their opponent will be dead by Turn 5. Grind is still a decent choice for Knights, but mostly because the rest of the options for a third Secondary are really bad. Even then, the previewed changes to Secondaries in Nephilim may make this less true than it used to be. And for everyone with a less skewed list, look long and hard at other options before deciding Grind is the answer. It might be, but the stats seem to show that it generally isn’t.
There's a decent chance that this whole article will become irrelevant in a week's time as Nephilim drops and the Secondaries are tweaked. I certainly have my fingers crossed that Grind is improved in a meaningful way, although I'm not really sure what that would be. The simplest answer is just to make it worth 4VP every turn you pull it off, which would turn a lot of concerning 6's into acceptable 8's. Even that wouldn't fix some of the fundamental problems of the Secondary though, like it being vastly better if you go second than first. I'd be more inclined to make it worth 5VP but not be scoreable in the first round. That sounds pretty powerful, but the average Grind pick only actually gets points once or twice per game. If that was worth 5-10 points then the Secondary would be a lot more balanced then in the current game.
I hope you enjoyed this different style of article, delving a bit more into analysis instead of just battle reports. With any luck GW is aware of Grind's issues and will have fixed them in Nephilim, but if that's not the case then remember: it's a trap!
Until next time, may your Secondary picks always be the good ones!
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