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A little bit of musing that I have been indulging in has led to me coming up with the following rough guide for things you need in a list, not things that are nice, things that are required. So pretty much heres a preview of the tactica segment on list building (or part of it at least), enjoy.
Scoring Units
Scoring units, or troops, are essential and not just the madatory amount to build a list. Two thirds of games are objective based and therefore having these units alive to claim said objectives is the only way to win. As games get bigger the more stuff will get killed. This is inevitable and as such you must make sure you have enough scoring units to cope with the changing conidtions of play.
Remember that a savvy player will target your scoring units when he can afford to ignore other threats to do so, or when doing so will ensure victory. Both these conditions are met when you have few scoring units or weak scoring units (read small squads) as a small amount of firepower diverted from a threat will remove them from play, making victory then a matter simply of keeping their scoring units alive.
So, what does this mean? In my extensive experience, and through alot of theory work, I have come to the not earth shaking conclusion that you require one substantial scoring unit per 500 points to reliably win games. Yes this means that a 3500 point game cannot possibly have enough points without using detachments.
Now these numbers are minimums, not optimums or maximums, minimums. That is to say if you want to take six troops choices in a 1500 point game, knock yourself out, but please, please don't take two. This shouldn't be too arduous, our troops are fine units aside from the fact that they are scoring so no one should be finding this rule too hard to follow.
tl:dr 1 Scoring Unit Per 500 Points minimum
Dark Light Weaponry
Dark lances are great, blasters are great, heat lances are fun. We like all these things, but we need to make sure we take enough. In small games the prevalence of vehicles is lower, in large games higher, so naturally we need more anti tank in larger games, but how much more?
Well there are two important considerations, Killing Vehicles (Wreck, Explode) and Disrupting Vehicles (Other results on the table). You need enough anti tank to destroy roughly one sixth of the vehicles on the board every turn on average and enough to disrupt one third to one half. So how much is that, well every time we fire a lance or balster we have a 7.4% chance to kill a vehicle and a one in three chance of disrupting it. So with six tanks on the board we would need a minimum of thriteen dark light weapons to achieve our goals. This works on the assumption that we are always firing at armour twelve, taking into account that that is not the case this number drops to about eleven.
Why did I choose six tanks? Two reasons, first one sixth of six is easy to work out to follow through my example, second six AV12+ tanks is about the right number to budget for in a 1500 point game, about two tanks per 500 points when facing a mech force. Sure some armies will have more, but they will tend to have less troops and each tank you disrupt will mess with there plans all the more as they tend to be overly reliant on armour. Additionally against such armies movement and target priority can often effectively nullify extra vehicles.
With an estimate of two tanks per 500 points we then come to the crux of this section, for every two tanks the enemy has you need four anti tank weapons, when he has six you need twelve, for example. This is once more a minimum. I would suggest that an optimum is clsoer to five per 500 points, but anywhere inbetween the two is workable. I'll talk about maximums and optimums in detail at a later date this section is on minimums.
tl:dr 4 Anti Tank Weapons per 500 points minimum
Scoring Units
Scoring units, or troops, are essential and not just the madatory amount to build a list. Two thirds of games are objective based and therefore having these units alive to claim said objectives is the only way to win. As games get bigger the more stuff will get killed. This is inevitable and as such you must make sure you have enough scoring units to cope with the changing conidtions of play.
Remember that a savvy player will target your scoring units when he can afford to ignore other threats to do so, or when doing so will ensure victory. Both these conditions are met when you have few scoring units or weak scoring units (read small squads) as a small amount of firepower diverted from a threat will remove them from play, making victory then a matter simply of keeping their scoring units alive.
So, what does this mean? In my extensive experience, and through alot of theory work, I have come to the not earth shaking conclusion that you require one substantial scoring unit per 500 points to reliably win games. Yes this means that a 3500 point game cannot possibly have enough points without using detachments.
Now these numbers are minimums, not optimums or maximums, minimums. That is to say if you want to take six troops choices in a 1500 point game, knock yourself out, but please, please don't take two. This shouldn't be too arduous, our troops are fine units aside from the fact that they are scoring so no one should be finding this rule too hard to follow.
tl:dr 1 Scoring Unit Per 500 Points minimum
Dark Light Weaponry
Dark lances are great, blasters are great, heat lances are fun. We like all these things, but we need to make sure we take enough. In small games the prevalence of vehicles is lower, in large games higher, so naturally we need more anti tank in larger games, but how much more?
Well there are two important considerations, Killing Vehicles (Wreck, Explode) and Disrupting Vehicles (Other results on the table). You need enough anti tank to destroy roughly one sixth of the vehicles on the board every turn on average and enough to disrupt one third to one half. So how much is that, well every time we fire a lance or balster we have a 7.4% chance to kill a vehicle and a one in three chance of disrupting it. So with six tanks on the board we would need a minimum of thriteen dark light weapons to achieve our goals. This works on the assumption that we are always firing at armour twelve, taking into account that that is not the case this number drops to about eleven.
Why did I choose six tanks? Two reasons, first one sixth of six is easy to work out to follow through my example, second six AV12+ tanks is about the right number to budget for in a 1500 point game, about two tanks per 500 points when facing a mech force. Sure some armies will have more, but they will tend to have less troops and each tank you disrupt will mess with there plans all the more as they tend to be overly reliant on armour. Additionally against such armies movement and target priority can often effectively nullify extra vehicles.
With an estimate of two tanks per 500 points we then come to the crux of this section, for every two tanks the enemy has you need four anti tank weapons, when he has six you need twelve, for example. This is once more a minimum. I would suggest that an optimum is clsoer to five per 500 points, but anywhere inbetween the two is workable. I'll talk about maximums and optimums in detail at a later date this section is on minimums.
tl:dr 4 Anti Tank Weapons per 500 points minimum
