Thoughts on miniature game tactics and tactics articles

I haven't been talking much - haven't had much to say. Moved. New Job. Got fed up with Games Workshop's increased pace of product release and price points. Start with that, I guess.

So Games Workshop seems to have made it abundantly clear that they make their money off their miniatures. They are interested in providing the best, most expensive, miniatures to collectors and painters who are affluent enough to purchase them. Note: this does not include supporting the people who play their miniature games or even making the games any good. I think this is a poor philosophy, and not just because I am or was a player of said games. It has to do with a the concept in business of the price of a competitor entering the market and competing with you. You want to have things that are expensive for the competitor to duplicate to increase the cost of them competing with you. So lots of people can make miniatures. The game system, however, is more proprietary and has intellectual property protections. That means it is harder for other people to compete with the game system than with creating miniatures. So the resource you'd want to develop is the game system that drives people to collect your miniatures. But enough of that; on to the topic that I meant to post about.

I like tactics stuff. I've seen a number of poorly written tactics articles. I don't mean that they have poor ideas, I mean that they are not about tactics in the first place. Tactics, as I understand it, is how you maneuver and utilize your units to achieve advantages and goals. That's usually not what these articles are about. The champion miniatures gamer has two separate skills (aside from sportsmanship): the ability list build the most efficient and effective forces utilizing a given rule set and the tactical deployment/use of those forces. So very many "tactics" articles are the former, however. They are all about which units are "good/OP" and which are "trash" and which units you should use in an army, and nothing else. It is also true that so many players only think a lot about list when playing. If you don't do well, you need a better list. If your opponent crushed you, it was because their list was so much better. And most rule sets have the potential for one or two truly dominating list builds. Good to mediocre players really only get this far. Take uber-list, put it on the table and hope it is broken enough to steamroll anything else. I actually think it might be a disadvantage to be really good at list building early in your miniatures life. If you are, you can win a lot without learning the other side of the coin, and often never do. That other side is what separates the great (big tourney winning) players from merely good. They are great because they can list build AND also employ tactics. This is why the same lists can place first and bottom in a tournament.

Tactics to me is:

• Where and how you deploy.
• Where and how you maneuver your units.
• When and what you choose to attack.
• How you use terrain.
• How you pursue the objectives.

The latter may actually be strategy, something broader that tactics. Strategy is how you plan to win the game, and in a minis game, it means keeping an eye on the objectives. A lot of list builders seem to have only one strategy - annihilation. They don't worry about objectives because they win when the opponent has no forces left. (Which is why I see list selection as a part of strategy, not tactics.) But how you go about pursuing the goals, when you move onto objectives, etc. is tactics.

And here's the other side of tactics - it's not just what you do, it's why you do it.

So, to all the tactica writers out there, please discuss more than just briefly summarizing the units or providing an army list. Talk about how you think about deployment, how you use terrain, how you analyze the opponent's army, how you entrap your opponent into reacting to you, how you get inside the opponent's decision cycle, etc.

Thanks.