http://www.3plusplus.net/2012/11/the-importance-of-being-objective/It’s time once again for How 6th Edition Changed Things Theatre, with your host, the guy with two thumbs. Our theme this time around is objectives, because objectives are friggin’ important in this game. Five of the six missions revolve around objectives; that means that if your list can’t get its ass onto some little tokens and hold them in the face of enemy shooting and assaults, your list is probably not going to win.
“Duh,” you say; hopefully most of you have figured that out already. However, there are some pretty big changes to how and where objectives are placed, and those things are incredibly relevant to playing the game. Again: objectives are how you win in almost every 6th Ed mission. If you do not build your army to fight tooth and nail for objectives, you are not going to do all that well. More than just that, you need multiple different types of objective-claiming units as well as plans for dealing with such units in the enemy army.
The first thing to understand is that the rules for objective placement and claiming in 6E are very different. In 5th, you placed objectives before choosing sides; in 6th, you place them after you pick your side. This might seem like a pretty trivial difference, but in practice what it means is that each player will get to place “their” objectives in the manner that benefits them most, biasing them towards their table edge and using terrain so as to deny the enemy any sort of easy access. Again, I can’t overstate how important this is: you place all your objectives with full knowledge of where both you and the enemy are going to be. Just as importantly, the player to pick their table half gets an advantage in objectives in cases where there is an odd number of them. Again, this is HUGE; if you start with two objectives to your opponent’s one or three to their two, you start the game already winning- the pressure is on them to stop you from winning, not on you to pull out an edge.
Added to this is that objectives can be as close as 6″ from a table edge in all scenarios, allowing you to push “your” objectives deep into your own deployment zone where the opponent will be hard-pressed to get to them. The difference from 5th Edition may not seem like a lot (6″ vs 12″), but those extra few inches mean more options for placing them behind terrain and an extra turn of movement to get there- and, if you’ve ever played a hard-fought battle, you know that one turn can make all the difference. Along with the above it means that starting with an advantage in objectives can put the opponent at a major disadvantage.
The third component of the objectives themselves is that objectives are both harder to take (you have to be outside of your transport) and harder to contest (vehicles can’t.) While the first part is worth an entire article in and of itself, we’re not going to talk about it too much here because it’s a bit more a list-writing concern than anything else. Rather, the important thing to note here is that contesting an objective is a lot more tricky than it was before- you can’t just Tank Shock your transport into their base and laugh at the thirty guys standing around it, fuming. With the inability of vehicles to contest points, the job falls to infantry models to do so, and infantry are much more vulnerable to being killed, delayed, etc in ways that simply don’t affect tanks.
Lastly, due to the placement of objectives, owning midfield is no longer the godly position it once was. Pre-placement of objectives and easy Tank Shocks meant that controlling the center of the table- where objectives were generally clustered, due to neither player wanting to potentially screw themselves out of the ability to reach them in the case of losing the roll-off to pick sides- was a very good place to be, but nowadays it’s really more of a transitional ground that allows you to pull back (to solidify your own objectives) or push forward (to threaten enemy ones.) Rare will be the army that actually wants to place its own objectives towards the center of the table, although many players will continue to do so out of habit from the previous edition.
Okay, so we understand how we get objectives. So let’s look at the missions to figure out how they interact with all of this. Glancing at the rulebook, the first thing you will probably notice is that while there are technically six missions (five of them using objectives in one way or another), realistically several of them are pretty darn similar.
Crusade, Big Guns Never Tire, and The Scouring are all very similar to each other- they all feature multiple objectives to a side (bar a low roll on the d3) and are very likely to end up biased towards one side of the table or the other, either due to uneven numbers of objectives (Crusade/Big Guns) or the objective values (Scouring.) Scouring and Big Guns have some twists on things, of course, but at the end of the day those are subsidiary concerns compared to the actual claiming of objectives (though, like Secondary Objectives, they should hardly be ignored.)
Emperor’s Will is pretty much identical to the old Capture the Draw mission of 5th Ed, but thankfully tiebreakers this time around allow us to escape the monotony of someone who simply decides to sit their entire army on their own objective and defend it like a rabid badger. Like its predecessor, it requires the ability to push deep into the enemy’s territory to at least contest, if not score, their objective.
The Relic is the only truly “new” mission and while I certainly am not overjoyed with it, it’s there in the book, so I suppose we’ll have to live with it. The Relic is almost always a horrible meatgrinder mission for one or both sides as they attempt to pounce on the objective and drag it out of the enemy’s reach. Since the other guy rarely wants to let you do this, whatever unit nabbed the MacGuffin will almost certainly attract the majority of their firepower and ends up dying (or at least losing the model holding the Relic), which starts the whole process over again. The important thing to note here is that while it may be kinda shitty, you have to have some units you can get in there to grab that thing if given the opportunity- that means a resilient scoring unit of some kind.
Between these three “types” of missions a few things become abundantly clear. First of all, being static in 6th Edition is not even close to an option. If the other guy starts with superior objectives (number or value), you MUST be able to force him off of them, and very few shooting armies can guarantee doing that.
Secondly, and related to the first point, you need to be able to cross the table with a scoring unit. Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean walking- you might have a transport, you might outflank, you might get dumped there by a flyer or a special movement or god knows what, but the point is that you can’t really afford to sit on your table edge with all your troops and just hope for the best. Being able to ram a resilient scorer deep into the enemy’s lines can be a game-changer; it can not only take an objective away from them but also claim it for you, which will usually turn a loss into a win with that single stroke. This is, of course, a pretty stiff order for any unit, because the enemy is going to throw everything they have at that unit to stop it, but that can be an advantage in and of itself, forcing an unfavorable target priority on them.
Third, you’re going to have two distinct categories of scoring units- backfield and linebreakers. Backfield units are things that just want to sit on your side of the table and be near an objective; they might do something else (shoot, hide, whatever), but their main job is just to remain on your side of the field. In this sense they need to be either cheap enough (e.g. Cultists) that they can be justified for that purpose alone or shooty enough (e.g. LasPlas Razor squads) that they are still supporting the army at that range. Linebreakers, on the other hand, are designed to get across the field- quickly or slowly, depending- and harass the enemy. Some of them are true “linebreakers,” designed to smash the enemy’s face in and wreak havoc; scoring deathstars are one example of this, but even Guardsman blob squads or Grey Hunters can fall into this category, as they can cause a lot of damage if left alone. Other linebreaker units will be cheaper and simply designed to be delivered in the late turns of the game (most commonly via a flyer) where there is little time left to deal with them. And, of course, some units can potentially serve both functions, especially Marines, which tend to have a lot of flexibility in what they do.
These different needs for a list are one of the strongest reasons you want to bring allies to an army- only Grey Knights and Chaos Space Marines actually have access to good variety of troops within their own codices, because this generally means having access to both cheap-but-fragile bodies and more-expensive but resilient ones. Thus Marine armies will generally want to ally IG or xenos armies in order to get some cheaper backfield units, and contrawise IG and xenos want to bring some MEQs into their list in order to have something a little tougher to rely on. Occasionally you will want to match like with like because of some particular synergy between their lists (access to a unique psychic discipline or ability, unit combos, etc) but for the most part this is a poor plan because it denies you the all-important variety of troops for your list.
6th Edition is a game of scoring. Almost all of your games will be won or lost by holding onto particular points on the field and denying the enemy the ability to do the same. Building your lists with this in mind is critical to good list design- you should, of course, look to the many, many other roles and jobs that every list needs to fill, but it’s an easy mistake to make to skimp on troops in hopes of just blasting the enemy to death and end up playing for the draw or trying to win on secondaries (which is unreliable at best.) Always make sure your list has the ability to reliably hold at least two or three objectives and preferably the ability to also try and at least take one of the enemy’s as well, should the opportunity arise, and you may find that your games are suddenly going a lot better for you.
