Fodder units to absorb Unleash hell before your main forces crash into a particularly lethal ranged unit, or screens to protect your forces from your opponent may be better drawn from the non-battle line portion of your roster. The existence of this Battle Tactic means that cheap minimum battle line units used to screen or fulfil minimum requirements become somewhat of a liability, presenting at worst a tasty and easily achievable 2-3 VP for your opponent. You’ll find often that this is a strong consideration from turn 2 onwards, where attrition starts to wear down units and you’re likely to have multiple units capable of making the decisive strike. There’s an argument to be made for picking this early game, but to be honest it’s not *too* often a battleline unit will be presented to you as such a juicy target early game, unless your army is particularly mobile and smashy enough to make this a reliable turn 1 play. As a consequence, it’s important to ensure overwhelming force is available if you’re picking this tactic, as it can be rather costly to miss out on. The requirement to nominate a unit means your opponent has knowledge of your plan for the turn, and can use command abilities like Rally, Redeploy or All Out Defence to frustrate your efforts. You’ll want to sequence activations in combat to weaken with another unit and finish with your monster in situations where you have multiple units engaging the target. It’s worth noting here that the bonus point is *NOT* scored if the monster used a spell to finish the unit off, or battleshock caused the remnants to flee from battle. If that unit is destroyed by an attack made by a friendly MONSTER or an ability of a friendly MONSTER, score 1 additional victory point. You complete this battle tactic if that unit is destroyed during this turn. When you reveal this battle tactic, pick 1 Battleline unit from your opponent’s starting army on the battlefield. Just because a battle tactic is easy to score turn one, doesn’t necessarily mean it should be the battle tactic you select, because as the game draws out into later turns your options get more limited, and you want to give yourself flexibility late game rather than get forced into near impossible to achieve battle tactics because of lazy choices prior. This also presents a second level of challenge when selecting your tactics – sequencing. There are eight battle tactics to choose from in total, and over the course of the game you’ll be expected to pick five of them, with no repeats – this means if you attempt a battle tactic and fail it, you can’t attempt *THAT* battle tactic again on a subsequent turn.
As I discussed in my previous article on the subject, Battle Tactics matter a great deal in third edition, and while you shouldn’t be expected to prevent your opponent from scoring all five of theirs, stopping one or two could be pivotal in turning a minor defeat into a major victory. I’ll be covering the quirks of each of them, as well as what opportunities there are to play around with, lean into or otherwise frustrate your opponent’s efforts.
Today I’ll be taking a look at each of the eight battle tactics available when playing Pitched Battles (the standard game format) in Age of Sigmar third edition.