what ups your game?

[Jack Shrapnel]

Just throwing it out there...

what makes you a better player even that little extra bit? is there something you've done that has changed your game in a positive way? made the win column grow a little bit bigger than before, or even bigger than the loss column???

share something that ups your game, so we can all steal your ideas learn from your experience

I'll start off with the one thing I learnt that helped me alot:

Target priority.  knowing what is most dangerous to your army, what you can kill later and what you need to kill now. Oftentimes if you can remove one critical threat you can swing an almost guarenteed loss into the win column, while other times you spend a whole bunch of resources firing away at something with little effect because you're either using the wrong tools for the job or it's just not a unit you SHOULD be firing at.  Many of my losses I could certainly spend time blaming the dice, or luck etc. but if I actually look at how the game turned, often it's just simply I got outplayed by not taking out the right unit at the right time, and my opponent was cagey enough to make me pay for it! (oftentimes with said unit, which makes me go "ooooh right... THAT guy...")

Just a little thing I try to concentrate on that changed my game when I started thinking about it every time (well every time I remember to do it!   )

So... what ups YOUR game??

[canadianguy]

Reading and rereading scenarios. I often would lose focus on the specific win condition and bonuses. I find that keeping the sheet in your hand or putting it in a highly visible spot helps a lot.

[voodoo]

Sept 17, 2014 8:20:44 GMT -5 Jack Shrapnel said:

what makes you a better player even that little extra bit?

So... what ups YOUR game??

My game? Not being afraid of assaulting. Do my Thousand Sons want to be in assault? No. Will I assault with them to avoid a charge? You bet your ass I will. It comes down to trying to seize the game every turn. Using the board and my army to try to lever my opponent into making hard(er) decisions. Sometimes it comes down to ignoring some units altogether and/or offering one of your own as a sacrificial lamb.

It took me a while to do this but don’t be afraid to condemn a unit to certain death so as to get what you want one or two turns down the road.


Sidenote: What ups my painting game?

Ze French...

[Hizack]

By listening to what other people view of my army, what they are afraid of in it. Taking their views and critiques under advisement helps me grow considerably.

I am not sure what else though.

[nekekami]

Beer.

[Jack Shrapnel]

lol... that usually messes up MY game....

but if that's true you should easily stomp us all October 4th... given there's a bar on site after all

[LizardTau]

Practice. When. I played all the time i was getting a lot better at the game. Now that i haven't played in a bit i loose a the time

Sent from my GT-I9100M using proboards

[Frosty the Pirate]

Here are some of my tips for improving as a player:

1) Know your list

I call this "being comfortable" a lot of the time. Basically, play a list you are familiar with, or one you enjoy playing. You will become more comfortable with it over time. The "core' (the first 1200 or so points of a 2k list) that usually contains your auto-takes and troops and such you should be so familiar with using, that you know almost exactly how many of unit X, Y or Z you can reasonably expect to kill, when unit A and B should have sufficient fire-power to clean up that high-priority threat, etc etc. You also get a feel for the durability of the list, how fast you are, etc, etc. By knowing all of this about your list, you've mastered the basics, and that's what allows me to pull off some of those clutch moves that snatch a W out of a game that looked over on turn 3. Because I'm not spending time trying to calculate if my half-strength unit has enough shots to mop up unit X or remembering my unit X is BS3 or BS4.



2) Goal Setting and Playing to Fail

This goes hand-in-hand with the target priority skill Shannon mentioned above. Basically, using Target Priority, I always outset a series of small goals each game turn, and then see if my available resources are in a position to support those goals. (That enemy Riptide is a high-priority target, but its hiding in the back corner atm and all that's available to fire at it is some low AP str 6 shots. Meanwhile those Crisis Suits are hitting me and my unit X is in range to remove the shield drones, allowing my big-firepower to double them out easily. So I might set a goal of removing those suits)

The next thing I do, after setting my goals. Is assuming I'm going to fail at them. I always ensure that even if unit A is 99% likely to murder enemy X, that unit B is standing by to mop-up or act as a fail safe, and once enemy X is gone, then unit B is freed up to throw free firepower down range. Some of my most-devastating turns are a result of my goals I'd set were accomplished early via some lucky rolls (Wraithknight ID'ing that scary MC I was about to sink 4 units of firepower into) and as a result, I simply threw my firepower at secondary targets. The opposite is that you never end up in a situation where you really needed to kill unit Y, and assumed unit B could do it alone, and threw your firepower elsewhere. This is especially punishing against certain armies like Necrons, where failing to wipe a unit means they get we'll-be-back rolls. If you want to learn how to play-to-fail, play a few games against your local friendly Necron player.



3) Avoiding High-Risk > Low-Reward

This sounds really obvious. But I see this all the time. How often do you see someone deep-strike their super-awesome-favourite-mega-deathstar right next to a big scary unit to "deal with it"? All the time. Well, before you do something like that, you need to think "is it really worth it?". Yeah, you can DS that 600 point warlord + termie unit in and combi-melta that monolith, but is that monolith in a position where it's threatening your entire gameplan? Even if you do drop in and kill it, what will happen when your turn ends and your fairly-unhappy opponent gets to return fire? I watch people do this against me all the time. They throw their mega-awesome unit down, kill 1 unit, and then get blown away by return fire and say "normally that unit survives pretty well". Yes I certainly believe that your 5 Man Termie Unit and Belial usually survives really well against 120+ twin linked re-roll to wound rending shuriken rounds.

If a unit isn't directly threatening your plans, or isn't an immediate threat, don't throw away your (sometimes best) unit(s) dealing with it immediately. It's much more valuable to put those units in a position where they can survive, keep their firepower in the fight, and be a threat.

[thesanityassassin]

Multiple redundancies. From list building on. Never trust one unit to do a job if you don't absolutely have to. Now, this doesn't mean spam, but simply being able to have more than one thing able to do a given job at a given time, and ALSO having more than one job available for each unit. The goal is that barring catastrophic dice failure/overwhelming dice success I shouldn't ever have a job sitting on the table that I can't accomplish, or a unit on the table that has NOTHING to do. Even if the secondary target is low priority, it's not wasting shots.

Pre-measuring helps this immensely, knowing exactly what each unit can be in range of, so if your first random lascannon shot somehow kills that Land Raider, your multi-melta can at least shoot a Rhino rather than nothing. In this same line of thinking, if any of your units ever find themselves with only one target, fire them first no matter how low their chances of success are. Sure those 2 Autocannons are really unlikely to glance out that Vindicator, but they have NOTHING else to shoot at,and the attack bikes do, so shoot the Autocannon first just in case. That also gets you rolling dice while you're calculating the rest of you're updating target priorities, so you spend less time staring and wondering what to shoot.

Also, willingness to sacrifice units is huge. Too often I see people try desperately to keep things alive when they're much better off delaying with them. Even in a kill point game it's often worth it to do something like jamming attack bikes right in front of the enemy once they've done their job...They can really force your opponent's hand in terms of target priority. The more YOU choose what parts of your army die, the better things will go for you. Believing that you'll get through a game without taking casualties is unreasonable...the more you plan for what those casualties will be, the better.

[Stephen]

A stompa

[Jack Shrapnel]

...see stompa vs. lord of skulls video I linked