by Peter Atkinson

Edit 18/06/24: Updated for the second Destruction Battle Tactic being leaked

AOS 4 is starting to be played out in the wild – well if not quite the wild, maybe the equivalent of an open range zoo. People have been able to play the game in a controlled environment, which of course means they’re sharing the rules they’ve experienced. As such we’re starting to get a pretty solid picture of what they look like, and in particular, we’ve now seen most of the Battle Tactics we’ll be using.

Our writing team has a ton of experience (and success) at Age of Sigmar; we also have knowledge now of either 7/8 or 8/8 options that will be available to each army (depending on which GA you’re in), which gives us pretty good coverage of what this Handbook will ask of you. So we believe that we’ve got enough of an idea now to explore the nuance around these Battle Tactics and offer some early thoughts on how you might approach scoring them – and denying them.

We’re here today to analyze what we’ve seen so far: how achievable they each look, but also which way they steer army construction and how they could impact the flow of the game. Ready? Let’s go.

The Background

By way of context, the original article from WarCom laid out how BTs will work in broad terms. They also specified that there will be six Universal tactics plus two per Grand Alliance, and in the article they showed us precisely half of them (three Universals plus one from each GA):

Image credit: Games Workshop

Adding in the rules that have been shared we now have eyes on all six Universal tactics and both Order and Destro options:

Brilliantly, the two BTs covered by that strategic thumb had already been revealed anyway. Subsequently, we’ve also had the second Destro Battle Tactic revealed:

So this is the state of play at 18th June 2024:

Let’s figure out what we think of them.

Analysis: Universal Tactics

Spoiler alert: We’re going to be talking about the Redeploy and Countercharge command abilities quite a bit here (in the context of battle tactic denial), so I’ll drop them in once for reference:

Credit to Games Workshop. Note that Counter-Charge costs two CPs, so it ain’t cheap!

Seize the Centre

Even us crayon-eating Destro players are smart enough to push a couple of units into the middle of the board, so it’s an often going to be an early-game gimme if you go first. In terms of list construction, it might be worthwhile having cheap throwaway units that you can plonk in the middle and trade with. Your opponent sends up a combat unit to deal with them, then in turn you deal with their combat units, as the game quickly builds to a crescendo of violence.

Counterplay: The obvious thing to do is to do it first yourself. If you’re already there, especially with an anvil unit, your opponent won’t be able to get there without being in combat. So it rewards going first. If your opponent is going for this one, you can always attempt a countercharge to force them into combat, so it might actually be harder (or at least less automatic) than it looks at first glance. This BT also punishes people for backboarding a gunline because they give away the opportunity to countercharge and hence lose an opportunity for denial. Seize the Centre could also incentivise you to put a deathstar unit on your own frontline to score this one: the kind of unit that you can ram up the guts that no countercharging unit will want to tangle with, and will clear house if they do. Either that or tank a big hit, and prevent your opponent from scoring this one straight back if they go after you, because they’ll be bogged in combat with you.

Overall ease of scoring: B+. This will sometimes be harder than it looks in practice, given that your opponent can “force” combat with the universal Counter Charge CA. Will they want to spraff 2 CPs for the chance of a long-ish charge though? I’m looking forward to hearing stories of 3D6 countercharges messing with the efficiency of this tactic. Still an easy late-game banker to score out once you’ve tabled your opponent, though.

Take the Flanks

Note that it’s within 6″ of the short board edges (not “wholly”), so pie-plate units can now score this. Deep striking units cannot contribute though, so the Skitterstrand Arachanrok is still stuffed. The scoring unit cannot be in your own territory at all, which is obviously harder on maps which are half-red, half-blue and easier when there’s a neutral zone. The “within” part means that you can string out a screen and just tap the edge of the 6″ boundary – you don’t need to send a cheap unit off on its own to stand on the perimeter, it can be fulfilling a useful purpose and still keep in touch with the rest of your army.

Counterplay: Pushing up on both flanks will make it harder for your opponent to have that space to move into, and while there is no stipulation that they can’t be in combat, you might be able to push up far enough that they can’t get past. So again, the best Counterplay might be going first and holding a high line yourself.

Overall ease of scoring: B. Structurally very similar to Seize the Centre, but a little bit harder because you have to get a little bit further. Could get easier if we get some more favourable maps than we’ve seen so far.

Slay the Entourage

“Kill a specific unit” always favours shooting, because they can just pick it out from across the table without getting there the hard way. Ah well.

Counterplay: If you’re not up against shooting, screening your relevant units is the obvious way. There should be more line of sight blocking terrain around in 4th too which will help protect you from the Dakka. You can make this one tricky by taking a tough General in a Battalion of his own, which pushes up your drops but denies them any soft peripheral targets. And if your general is a small hero you might be able to hide him from most shooting, and with the assistance of terrain, even from sniper units.

Overall ease of scoring: C. This will usually be a win-more Tactic that rewards you for smashing through your opponent’s army until they’ve got nowhere left to hide. If you’re already on top it clearly gets way easier, but in terms of trying to play strategically for Battle Tactics and objectives, this one doesn’t really offer you much of a pathway. You just get there by brute force. Easier for gunlines of course.

Analysis: GA Tactics

Order: Reclaim the Realms

This one has a heavy Stormcast theme, and it suits them down to the ground. You can score Reclaim just by dropping a couple of units out of deepstrike and into the backboard. You can also just walk across the halfway line, of course.

Pedantry Corner

I think we all know that “quarters” are envisioned as per the image on the left, but one could argue that the image on the right also represents quarters of the board:

If so, on wide maps you can just deploy directly into each quarter and Badda Bing. Now I can be a bit of an asshole, but not even I would have the chutzpah to argue for this one in a game. Just an observation. And if the devs have had the foresight to include the definition of “quarters of the board” into the core rules, I’ll be even more impressed.

Counterplay: It’s tough to stop them simply walking up the board at any point in the game. You can at least make it a tiny bit harder by 9″-zoning the corners of your deployment zone, so they have to drop in front of you and you can clean them up in response, without having to send your stuff heading backwards:

Overall ease of scoring: A. Piece of piss. Even if you don’t have deepstriking, you just have to walk a couple of units across halfway.

Order: Slay the Tyrants

Kill an enemy Hero in combat. Another one that rewards melee or mixed arms over gunlines. I like it. Look out for opportunities to score this one by softening them up first: knock off a few wounds with magic or limited shooting, then orf with their head.

Counterplay: You’re looking at screens and lucky Redeploys, until you run out of screens.

Overall ease of scoring: B-. You’ll occasionally see someone crack off a bunch of unlikely armour saves or fortuitous Wards, setting up the classic “It came down to that prick surviving on one wound” stories. Occasionally the bastards just won’t die and it is what it is. You also have to get there the hard way, which is fine by me. Fighting your way through chaff, then delivering the coup de grace by decapitating the dickhead leading them is just the absolute essence of Warhammer.

Destro: Time to Get Stuck In

Yikes, that’s a lot of criteria. Start wholly within your territory and end wholly outside it and fight with all of them and it has to be 3 separate units. Honestly, this feels like the kind of jumping-through-hoops garbage Kruleboyz got saddled with. Compare it to the Universal option “Do Not Waver”, and not only do you have to get an extra unit in fighting, but you also have to move a big chunk of your army a significant distance… it feels pretty stiff. You do at least still get the quality-of-life that completing a charge is enough to enable the Fight ability later that turn (as noted above).

Counterplay: Well they have to fight for starters, so old mate Redeploy to deny the charge can cut that off at source. It’s got the same denial of board-domination possibilities (move up yourself, hold a high line and stop them moving up the board) that we talked about in the Universal options above, plus you can deny charges, plus you can stop them fighting by smashing their teeth in before they do. Fight First could give you an easy denial if you smash one of the three units that charged you. But because there’s three of them, you should get to activate second even in a normal activation sequence (they’ll go first and third) so you have another chance to pick up one of the three (!) charging units at that point too.

Overall ease of scoring: D+. Vince on Warhammer Weekly thinks this is easy, and I think he’s insane. The positional aspect alone is comparable to an entire Battle Tactic’s worth of work. The additional denial possibilities around preventing the charge (or killing one of the charging units before it swings) just make it even weaker.

Destro: The Kunnin’ Approach

Can the latest leaked tactic pick up the slack from Time to Get Stuck In? Partly. This one seems a bit wordy at first but when you read back through it and visualise what it means, it’s a lot less conditional than it seems. The enemy unit has to be in combat; you have to pick one of your units, and your unit cannot be in combat itself. So you either have to charge a unit that is already tagged (or 6″ pile-in with the likes of Yhetees, if they keep that rule), and kill it.

It’s very open ended how you kill it and with what – the friendly unit you pick does not necessarily have to strike the killing blow, and you can’t cuck yourself out of it by accidentally rolling too high on charge mortals or something like that. For what looks like a heap of pre-conditions, quality of life is actually reasonably high here.

Counterplay: Well the Destro player has to name their unit, so you can ruin their plans by killing it on their own turn. Counter Spell, Counter Prayer, Counter Shoot. All the kind of stuff that makes the player doing it think they’re really clever, but of course there’s counterplay to that counterplay, starting with picking a friendly unit that can’t be popped cheaply, and continuing through managing the “closest unit” for Covering Fire.

Covering Fire can’t move up to 2 CPs quickly enough

Overall ease of scoring: B+. Yeah I don’t mind this one. You’d usually want to declare this against a unit that is already tagged, because that prevents your opponent popping a big Redeploy to blast your 3″ charge out to 9″. You’d have to really be in Desperation Station to pick this one when Redeploy is on the table. Of course the other time you’d use it would on the Alpha Strike: zoom across the board, hit the screen at the front of a packed deployment zone with little room to Redeploy, and smash it off the board. Nothing could be more Destruction thematically than that, but sadly that ain’t gonna happen.

The main limitation in practice is the timing window: you can’t score it early, because you won’t have them tagged in combat yet, and you probably can’t score it late because your units will be getting thin on the ground and you need at least two (one to tag, one to charge). It’s pretty close to a mid-game banker though, so I’ll take it.

Chaos: Ordained Charge

Charge with two units, and at least one of them has to get onto an objective.

Counterplay: Well they can’t take an objective you don’t hold, but “just never take any objectives” is a plan with obvious downsides. Similar to Attack on Two Fronts though, it’s something to think about for the early game – it might not be worth capping that objective Turn Zero.

Overall ease of scoring: B. Just a better version of the Destro one. Only needs to be two units instead of three, no positional requirements in terms of territory and less chance for one of your units to get jagged in the middle of the activation sequence. Yes you have to get onto an objective, but you’ll kinda want to do that anyway. Standard provisos around your opponent hitting big Redeploys apply.

Death: Marked for the Grave

Kill something. Includes blasting them with shooting and magic – it’s all gravy.

Counterplay: I dunno, get tabled? Other than extreme target denial through having your own army annihilated, you might be able to protect that one specific unit by….drum roll please…Redeploying it once your opponent moves up close. I’m going to assume your opponent is not stupid enough to pick a target unit that’s already backboarded behind multiple screens, but hey, a new Edition could bring an influx of Space Marine players so you never know.

Be aware as the Death player that if you do end up fighting against only your opponent’s heroes (which allows you to target them instead of any other unit), you can pick this tactic in the middle rounds when you’ve already tagged those heroes in combat, and therefore they can’t Redeploy – thereby denying their denial.

Confused? Don’t be. It’s a gimme.

Overall ease of scoring: A. Easy, and you’re getting VPs for doing what you would do anyway.

Broader Analysis

Flow of the Game: Will the Path to 28 VPs be Ruptured?

Thinking ahead to the ebb and flow of Battle Tactic scoring in 4^th Ed – we’ve been talking a lot about scoring and denying tactics in this article, but there will be times when you don’t actually want to.  The underdog mechanic is already looking pretty strong:

• You get an extra CP.
• Each Battleplan has its own additional incentive to come in with a lower score, giving a bonus ability to the player who is trailing.
• The two you’ll see below are +1 to hit on the charge, and D3 damage to every unit standing on a chosen objective.

So when we’re talking about Seize the Centre being a great option if you go first: will you actually want to go into Round 2 with a lead?  It’s going to be driven by the army matchup plus the particular twist in each mission, but I can imagine a situation where some games play out a little like Nexus Collapse in the current Handbook.

Experienced competitive players know that the optimum situation here is to see what your opponent scores first, then come in just 1 VP under that yourself, so you control the board state.  What you’ll see is that people will usually deploy in little circles around the perimeter of the objectives, avoiding capping it Turn 0, and retaining precise control over what they score and when. 

Is the underdog mechanic as powerful as detonating one third of the primary objectives every time?  Perhaps not, but it doesn’t have to reach that nuclear level to incentivize similar behaviour.  What’s more, if there are no book tactics, you might not have the same expectation and requirement to max-score yourself every round, because most people will be dropping one or more along the way.

Anyway.  Long-term readers will know that I’m hardly afraid to stick my neck out when I’m ready to make a call on something, but I’m afraid I don’t have a complete flowchart I can hand you right now to walk you through optimum scoring strategies on every Battleplan (not yet, at least).  The conclusion this time is purely that the flow of scoring through 4^th Edition is likely to feel very different, and your objective in list construction is not necessarily building a shining path directly between deploying your army and hitting Maximum VPs (which will be 50 in new money). 

There’s still great value in this kind of analysis because you do want to have the tools and knowledge to score and deny tactics when the time is right. What you may well be doing is building flexibility in your army to switch gears and score at your own rhythm. 

Well either that, or just smash your opponent off the table and score out from there, which let’s be honest is how a lot of 3^rd Ed games really ended in practice.

Final Thoughts

I want to shout out the pro-combat tilt in a couple of these (Slay the Tyrant and Do Not Waver, plus the underdog bonus on Border War below). Easy tactics, but only if you’re good at fighting, and I’m rapt to see it. And even if the ruleset as a whole favours combined arms over true combat builds, I can live with that. In 3rd Edition terms: give me a few Longstrikes plus some Fulminators prowling around over an army of full double-tapping Shootcast any day.

Will we see faction tactics? Damn I hope not. I’m perfectly capable of memorising that kind of information, I just don’t want to, and I don’t see any value in it whatsoever. The article linked above made it sound like we wouldn’t have to deal with faction BTs at all:

But on streamed demo game, they appeared to backtrack on that and mentioned faction BTs at one point. By the power of Gork I hope that was just a slip of the tongue, and they meant the Grand Alliance ones. Faction Battle Tactics can get in the fucking bin.

Finally, I just want to note that the missions we’ve seen so far are heavily weighted to half-red, half-blue maps:

Note however that the first map is just from the “Core Rules” missions, that nobody will ever play

We’ll see the full set soon enough. Just bear it in mind when you think about tactics like Take Their Land or Time To Get Stuck In that those Wholly Outside and Wholly Withins are shaping to be tough – which in turn supports the proposition that it could be less common to hit the full 5 BTs in most games.

Anyway, I hope that helps to get the cogs whirring. We’ll update this one when the last handful of tactics are out in the public domain: until then, feel free to let us know if you spotted any nuance there that we’ve missed, or if you think I’m miles off with the grades. Catch you soon.

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