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Three turn strats


4thstringer

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My understanding of the current tournament scene is that the games are often only going three turns.  That is particularly important to guild, because of 3 things that I can think of. 

1. Lack of leap and leap adjacent abilities.

2. An attrition and killing style of play for a large portion of our masters.

3. Pale rider is the best model in the faction, but he loses some strength if he can often only pulse once.

The fact is, even without trying to slow play, you are going to face some people that are going to often or never get past or even done turn 3.  Doesn't matter if you have killed off 80% of their crew if they score 2 points and you only scored one.

Things that I can think of that can help drag us out of this problem:

1. Undercover reporter- both can help denial by sending opposing uber-runners back to deployment zone and probably our best model at getting there for guild.  Kind of fragile so if you wanted to do this on later turns it probably wouldn't work but potentially great in a 3 turn game.

2. Traps- if you can trap your opponent in their backfield for a turn or two, it becomes harder for them to scheme in the meantime (I've been running a lot of trap spam recently and loving it, though I'm not on the tournament scene)

 

I'm sure there are others.  What are you doing to deal with this issue?

 

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1 minute ago, dannydb said:

If torderment games are regularly only going to 3 then slow play is involved. You should be able to get to turn 4 70% of the time 

I think at this stage people are still getting to know opposing models.  I'll say that generally I am a very fast player.  I played a game this weekend that we only got to turn 3, and while I wouldn't say that my opponent was slow-playing, there were two factors that led to a game that didn't get so far.  The first is that my opponent was playing Molly, who was so bananas that I found myself repeatedly asking to see the card for people in her crew.   The second thing was that with Molly, she just does so much, that things move slower.

Even if you know your own crew like the back of your hand, you aren't going to be able to know all the opposing crews.  So games are slowing down because  people are asking a lot about their opposing crews during the game.

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7 minutes ago, dannydb said:

If tournament games are regularly only going to 3 then slow play is involved. You should be able to get to turn 4 70% of the time 

Once people get the hang of M2e timing will speed up.

As for tricks to get more movement, I've been looking into some movement shenanigans.

  • Perdita's crew can discard a card to perform an action allowing them to either walk or concentrate to push 4" towards an enemy.
    • Enslaved Nephalim can push other models a few inches away from it, which can be useful.
    • Santiago pushes 4" at end of phase.
  • Hoffman can give out fast.
    • Guardian can throw models 10".
    • Hunters push 4" at end of phase.

So far those are the only crews I've played so there are probably more tricks out there.

 

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33 minutes ago, Hagisman said:

Once people get the hang of M2e timing will speed up.

As for tricks to get more movement, I've been looking into some movement shenanigans.

  • Perdita's crew can discard a card to perform an action allowing them to either walk or concentrate to push 4" towards an enemy.
    • Enslaved Nephalim can push other models a few inches away from it, which can be useful.
    • Santiago pushes 4" at end of phase.
  • Hoffman can give out fast.
    • Guardian can throw models 10".
    • Hunters push 4" at end of phase.

So far those are the only crews I've played so there are probably more tricks out there.

 

We did have a thread before about getting into the enemy fast.  I guess I should review that and see if it helps.

 

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34 minutes ago, Hagisman said:

Once people get the hang of M2e timing will speed up.

As for tricks to get more movement, I've been looking into some movement shenanigans.

  • Perdita's crew can discard a card to perform an action allowing them to either walk or concentrate to push 4" towards an enemy.
    • Enslaved Nephalim can push other models a few inches away from it, which can be useful.
    • Santiago pushes 4" at end of phase.
  • Hoffman can give out fast.
    • Guardian can throw models 10".
    • Hunters push 4" at end of phase.

So far those are the only crews I've played so there are probably more tricks out there.

 

A few more Hoffman tricks:

  • Watchers have high Mv and can fly (duh)
  • Models can use Transfer Power on themselves to get a free 2" push if they have a power token. That's enough to make even Warden a fairly capable schemer.

Totem tricks:

  • Mechanical Attendant is not insignificant and has Transfer Power.
  • Purifying Flame is not insignificant and has incorporeal and Howering Flame
  • Scales of Justice is not insignificant and has nothing better to do than run schemes.
  • Bernadette Basse is not insignificant and has nothing better to do than run schemes. She can also push friendly models toward her if need be.

Some of those totem tricks are better than others. 😂

Some expensive models that can reliably push out of melee, are fast and can help other models move around:

  • Mounted Guard
  • Sergeant
  • Grimwell
  • Pale Rider
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My guess is, its a question of people needing to get familiar with the rules. I recently attended my first tournament with only a couple of M2E games under my belt. First game only had 3 turns and then 4 for the two final ones. 

So once people start to get familiar with their crews - and some of the opposition, I’m sure, things will speed up. 

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1 hour ago, dannydb said:

If torderment games are regularly only going to 3 then slow play is involved. You should be able to get to turn 4 70% of the time 

Even if slow play is involved, the time you lose by calling a TO offsets the gain later, and that’s if there is a gain later (a TO can’t un-freeze an opponent whose brain has temporarily vapor-locked). Easier to work on what we can ourselves influence, and that’s moving quicker.

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4 minutes ago, Gnomezilla said:

Even if slow play is involved, the time you lose by calling a TO offsets the gain later, and that’s if there is a gain later (a TO can’t un-freeze an opponent whose brain has temporarily vapor-locked). Easier to work on what we can ourselves influence, and that’s moving quicker.

One of the reasons I wanted to bring this to a thread is, at least on a local level, after a while you start to know which people are going to go slower.  I can think of 2 or three players that off the top of my head I know aren't going to play quickly.  So strategically, I need to start thinking differently when I face them at the table.  Its not malicious, but if I'm not thinking about it then I'm doing myself a disservice.

 

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the first thing I would do is take schemes that can score faster!

 

for example Search the Ruins with right terrain placement can be scored very fast! same thing with Harness the Ley Line if you build your crew accordingly! Outflank is another easy one! Also a game who last 3 or 4 turns gives big advantages to certain schemes! In outflank and Claim Jump opponent have less turn to kill/dmg your models and you need way less actions to score than most other schemes. In a 3 turn game Breakthrough is really hard! you can score the first point but the second one is nearly impossible!

 

In my last tournament very few games made it to 5 turns! most finished at 4 and this really favor some playstyle and scheme selections! I know M3e is brand new and a lot of people are getting used to it. But this means that in tournament, if you want to win right now, you have to adapt to a game of 3-4 turns instead of a casual game that always finish their 5 turns even if you take 3-4 hours to do so!

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2 minutes ago, Cursed25 said:

the first thing I would do is take schemes that can score faster!

 

for example Search the Ruins with right terrain placement can be scored very fast! same thing with Harness the Ley Line if you build your crew accordingly! Outflank is another easy one! Also a game who last 3 or 4 turns gives big advantages to certain schemes! In outflank and Claim Jump opponent have less turn to kill/dmg your models and you need way less actions to score than most other schemes. In a 3 turn game Breakthrough is really hard! you can score the first point but the second one is nearly impossible!

 

In my last tournament very few games made it to 5 turns! most finished at 4 and this really favor some playstyle and scheme selections! I know M3e is brand new and a lot of people are getting used to it. But this means that in tournament, if you want to win right now, you have to adapt to a game of 3-4 turns instead of a casual game that always finish their 5 turns even if you take 3-4 hours to do so!

Search the ruins is an always take period until something changes.

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I've gotta hop on the train here. I've been doing tourney practice games (not actually sure what the timing is for tourneys so my group has been doing 15 min setup, 2 hours for gameplay.) We're doing fairly good at knowing the rules or solving rule disputes quickly, and we're decent players. We always finish turn 4 minimum. 

As far as adjusting strategy based on that, I wanna back up the idea of taking easy first point schemes.

Deliver a message is up there, so is assassinate. Claim jump is really easy with a guardian and his auto pulse. I am not as confidant with search the ruins as you, having had minimal success with it in the past, but that could just be down to poor play or good opponents or both. 

The Mounted Guard is the most mobile model in faction to my knowledge. If you set it up right, Dashel gives her FMM for Focused, Queeg turns it into Fast. She gets a free 3" push, 3 move actions for up to 21" and then she can use ride w me for a 5" push, coming in at a total of 29" of movement in one activation. Very easy to capitalize on that turns 1 and 2. 

Following the thread for more inspiration.

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