Planning

A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow.
George S. Patton

So you're about to play your game. You have a list all made up (maybe there is more to go into there later). You have your models. You have an opponent. You even have a table.

What you NEED is a plan.

It's one thing to know that first you move, then you shoot, then you assault. But to know this without any idea of how it fits into your plan is to simply go through the motions. Plans can be notoriously simple (in some armies, they amount to, "we'll all run straight at the enemy and hope for the best"), or complex. They can rely on specialized units to perform specialized tasks (the Eldar way) or generic multi-purpose units to perform any task (the Marine way).

It is of no use to send a squad of 10 basic troops to go and stop a tank. Their weapons probably can't hurt it. In order to maximize the effectiveness of your army, you want to have the troops that cannot attack the tank attack something they can hurt. You want to figure out what you have that can hurt the tank. And you want to start doing all this before your units are on the table. From the first moment your opponent puts a model down, you should start planning on how you will handle it. These plans for defeating your opponent fall into two categories.

Strategy versus tactics

Strategy is your overall plan for winning the game. Tactics are how you will use your units to accomplish that strategy. Further along on this site, we will examine some tactics from both the shooting and the assaulting perspective. We will also discuss some strategies, as they relate to knowing which role your army is taking in the field.

Remember, "To fail to plan, is to plan to fail." If you don't have a strategy, (or if you have the wrong one) you're going to have a hard time winning the game.

However, before you have a plan, you need to know a few things. And that's what the next few articles concern. First, we need to establish that there are branches of mathematic, which, while unable to determine everything that goes on during a game, are certainly able to be used to predict, with some degree ofaccuracy, what the results of a single decision will be.

We're then going to examine the idea that using this math, we can decide on courses of action that are the most beneficial to us. And then, we're going to examine a bit about what we know about both our units, and our enemy units. And then we'll progress, using all this information, towards tactics, and then overall strategy.