Armies in 5th: Basics Part 3: Target Priority

I tried to write an article on deployment...but eh, it was getting lengthy and when I chopped it down it was so simplistic I thought it wasn't worth it. If anyone has ideas on that I'd love to hear them. But basically for deployment, know yourself and your opponent. What does their army excel at and where does your excel? What are their weaknesses? You need to maximise your strengths and minimise your weaknesses and vice versa for your opponent with your deployment. For example, don't clump up against blast armies, don't stay on the board against alpha strikers unless you have defenses for it, etc. Without going into detail...that's pretty much what you have to do. If you'd like army specific deployments, that I can do just post here or send me an email.

Anyways this is sort of simple (let's see if TKE does a better one) but often poorly done by opponents. So, we've built our army and deployed. Before we get to movement, we need to think about what we are going to shoot (sounds backwards right?). There is no point moving then deciding what to shoot. You could block your firing lanes or have given your opponent cover, you want to avoid this if you can. So first you need to decide what you are shooting and with what. You also need to have multiple options. If your prime target gets destroyed you need to be able to shoot something else.

Here's where a lot of people come unstuck. They plan their shooting but they plan on shooting the wrong things. Take your biggest gun and shoot it at what is most likely to be destroyed (this is generally in relation to armor). No, don't target those LRs. Sure you can stop it T1 but you're much more likely to have an easier game if you take things out every turn. Yes there is bigger gain to be had from taking out your opponent's biggest guns but what happens when you screw up? This is where suppression fire comes in. If your big guns can take out smaller AV or weaker infantry and your suppression fire stops the opponent's big guns from firing...well, cha-ching. If you fire everything on the big guns and just stop them shooting though, your opponent is still in the game so to speak.

However, a condrunum. Your suppression fire is often excellent at shooting AV10-11 whilst still being reliable and stopping AV12-13 from shooting, so what do you do? Here it comes down to discretion. If you have S10 guns it is quite likely you can still damage those AV12s whilst taking down the AV10 with suppression fire. You also have to take into consideration what does the damage on the opponent's army. Such low AV units like Land Speeders or Vypers can put out a lot of damage for their points so these should be higher on your target list than a Rhino with tacticals in it.

Furthermore, what is the best gun against your army differs per army. A jumper list is obviously more afriad of low AP and blast guns because they arrive via DS so they want to disable those ASAP and with guns like meltaguns were AV is often irrelevant they have much more choice in their targets on their drop. A mech army however obviously wasnt to limit anti-tank coming at them and might be able to ignore lower AV platforms who are more anti-infantry oriented for more medium armor but anti-tank guns (i.e. Manticores).

So, overall you want to try and do as much damage as possible, maximise your chances to cause some damage. Some damage on less important things is better than no damage. As the game goes on, the more important units of your opponent will move up the target priority as sooner or later you have to deal with them but trying to deal with the toughest units first is generally not a good idea unless the army around them isn't very strong.