40Kings

I am pretty sure most of our readers have a rough idea of what “Yes the truth hurts” is and if not, for your own amusement you should go ahead and visit the blog. It often makes for a fun read and most certainly keeps new ideas coming, although admittely, most of them are pretty bad when it comes to strategy and army composition. Lets say it is just the way he (Stelek) roles – and wins at his local gaming club.

With the ETC hype taking grip of the general 40k public in the US, Stelek obviously couldnt resist to rip apart each and every ETC army list sent to him and make a mockery of the general setups preferred by most European countries. A fair criticism of ETC rosters could have been quite enligthening, to be honest. Too bad Stelek had to stick with his usual “you fail, because you fail” sort of argument. After the second set of critiques, I stopped bothering with his ramblings, something I usually dont do, even if I disagree with what has been said. But this was just too poor.

Now YTTH has come up with a fair try to design a strategy, in correspondence with the rules of the ETC, that would lead to victory only by its ingenious composition of armies. That is something worth looking at I guess.

To sum up the rough idea, Stelek prefers having an all mech composition of 8 mostly identical army lists, that make the most out of a combination of transports and units (with special weapons) and a large shooty component. His favourite 8 armies consist of Marine based armies: Space Marines, Blood Angels, Space Wolves, Black Templar, Dark Angels and Imperial Guard based armies: Imperial Guard, Demonhunters and Sisters of Battle. Fair enough. One can imagine how to create pretty exchangable rosters for these armies, only that some work better (SM, BA, IG) and some are worse (DA, DH).

To understand what the plan with this setup is, lets quote Stelek:

This means you have 8 MSU shooty mech builds, as identical as you can make them across Codices, giving you a much more solid build for your team.

Your choice is then reduced to:

MSU shooty mech. Pick the flavor, and let’s go.

It greatly reduces the magic card deck concept of ETC, to the point where it’s a pointless exercise for teams not following this generalization/amorphization strategy, the anti-box for this tournament, but if you feel you have an advantage you can, of course, select one of your own armored variants to slap a particular army around with.

Balanced lists can be had from each of these combinations, and balance trumps all.

Especially MSU shooty mech.

So I hope you are paying attention, I fully grasp your entire tournament system.

Alright. Lets get things straight now, although this might get a bit complicated. His general idea is, albeit not phrased very clearly, to overload the enemy team with a repeated configuration of armies, to which, in the end, your enemy will not have answers anymore. I have to admit, he did indeed understand the concept of a team tournament faster than you would normally expect, given the fact he himself has probably never even thought about the idea of a team tournament before. Kudos to you, Stelek.

His idea is pretty straightforward. Would it work? I dont think so. There are a number of incoherencies in his though process. Lets pick it apart.

1. His idea is from 2007.

First and foremost, the idea of massing up on a particular build is pretty old itself within the evolution of the ETC army setups. Basically, after the first edition, everybody had understood that there is a need to arrange your overall setup in a way to create a pairing advantage which reaches further than just having a counter to certain popular armies such as, at that time, Iron Warriors. Now, the second step in this though process was that an overload on a particular aspect (Stelek overloads on balanced mech forces) will devoid the enemy captain of proper counters pretty fast. But really, how hard is it to face a balanced shooty mech force, a balanced demon hunter or dark angel mech force on top? It is not too frightening at all. So having no counter to a balanced mech force does not lead to having proper matchups on Steleks side, rather, it makes for a number of  balanced mech forces getting hard-countered and a number of overall balanced matchups. This equals a loss in my book. Fortunately, European gamers were smarter than that and developed the idea of overloading on unbalanced forces. Unbalanced forces are much harder to counter, keeping in mind that 40k indeed is a game of rock-paper-scissors (although some ppl seemingly still deny that). So with the second edition of the ETC, countries came up with the idea of having some 6 armies with multiple – around 4 or 5 – landraiders (that being only one possible example). At first glance, this seems awkward. But in a team tournament, there will only be so many counters to landraider armies in your own setup. Once tau and dark eldar are gone (no Imps at that time), you start to sweat. So in the end, Stelek had the right idea, only his execution was poor. Too bad his idea still is pretty much 2007…

2.His choice of strategy is poor

Since then, frankly, the more whitty countries started to understand that only having an overload of a particular style will not win you the tournament because your design might result in having a couple of good pairings for you, which you might win 13:7 (be honest, 4 landraiders does not really KILL the enemy, even if he has no darklances), but in the end you might also loose a couple of games 1:19 or even 0:20 (because darklances or railguns WILL kill your landraider army). So after the counting is done, you still are not ahead because compensating a number of high losses is VERY hard in a team tournament when you setup does not include “killer” armies with a massacre potential. In the end, overload setups are not possible with killer armies, but only with fairly standard builds, such as a balanced mech force. Massacre type armies most often are one of a kind, not to be replicated with a different codex book. After all, overload of any kind thus only gets you so far because the overall power of your rosters declines.

3. Balanced lists are poor in general

The latest step of this evolution can be witnessed over the last and this years edition of the ETC: People have now understood that are more suitable composition of armies contains a high number of rosters that will, ceteris paribus, kill a particular type of army reliably, that is: very specialised rosters. In addition, the balanced force has left the stage almost entirely. So, taking a look at for example the lists of team Sweden, you might be surprised to see a number of roster not too suitable for “normal” 40k play on a single player basis, because they run into VERY hard counters every once in a while (20 bike-nobs, 20 bike-locks etc.). But lets look at what would happen if Steleks balanced forces would clash with Swedens unbalanced, very one sided builds. Without going into detail too much, it is very easy to comprehend that 20 Nobs on bikes WILL kill a balanced demon hunter mech force. The same is true for around 6 of the overall Swedish army lists compared to balanced marine/IG mech forces. Their specialisation will ensure that the certain aspect they are concentrating on is developed to such an extend that an allround army will find itself unable to cope with it. It will simply have around 50-70% of its army not contributing to the fight, because a rhino with 2 meltaguns ISTs does jack shit to lets say 180 foot orks. The couble of countermeasures (heavy bolters or CC counters for orks) available to a balanced army will be unable to cope with a whole enemy army crushing in on them. That is why 40k is a game of rock-paper-scissors. Balance will help you against balanced forces, but it will lead to defeat against specialised opponents (and it doesnt even matter what their specialty is). So “balance trumps all” might work if you are more skilled than the other player, but on an equal footing, it simply is nonsense.

For this kind of unbalanced setup, you obvisouly need to be very clever at arranging the pairings, but with a good preparation, this sort of “aggressive” countering all through the board instead of a defensive overload on a particular asepct will allow you to win on the overall score.

4.ETC uses los-blocking terrain

Lets take a last aspect into account, considering Steleks love for mech armies. From my point of view, the surge of mech armies in the US has very much to do with the terrain they are playing on – which is close to none. In Germany, the same mechanisms applied and made IG and shooty marines very popular. Altough we dont play desert combat only, we dont have a lot of big los-blocking terrain either. The situation is different at the ETC. Respecting the wishes of countries that are used to play with a LOT more los-blocking terrain, the ETC organisation tries to ensure that at least the criteria from the rulebook are matched in terms of terrain coverage. Plus, at the ETC there are always differences between the individual tables in terms of density and design of the terrain, leading to some city-fightish tables, a number of well covered tables and some more open tables. In consequence, a high number of shooty mech armies will not only be unable to use the terrain to their advantage (vehicles dont benefit from cover as much as footsloggers do) but they will also find themselves overwhelmed by aggressive armies approaching in the cover of los-blocking terrain (and even more so on cityfight). How much help is a predator with lascanons when it is only offerend one round of shooting before people are in his face? Taken together, balanced mech lists seem even more of a road to failure than any other composition.

Around a year ago, during the preparations for the last ETC, I invited Stelek to arrange for a team from the US and to participate. He couldnt make it (does he visit bigger tournaments ever?). Maybe the truth would have been hurting too much anyway…