Threat Rating

This article goes hand in hand with the article I wrote earlier this month about Threat Ranges.

This part concerns what threat rating you assign an enemy unit and essentially what priority it is dealt with in. Some players may go for a traffic light system where red is high priority, orange medium and green low, some may number them one through three but it is essentially the same thing. Even the newest players can grasp that targeting a unit which is demolishing your army is a good idea.

With this article I hope to add some structure to players thought processes to ensure they deal with things in an efficient manner. The first thing to do is to take note during your opponents turn where his units are, and what his threat ranges are. If you have the first turn, look at how he has deployed and base your moves on this. You will need some familiarity with his units capabilities. Don't be afraid to ask if you are unsure on what his units can do, he should explain relevant rules that are affecting his unit as well as the weapons statistics should you not know. This can be more common when playing against an army for the first time, as even reading the book doesn't always commit everything to memory.

This may sound like you are playing a reaction game, and to a certain extent you want to be doing initially. You can make bold moves to force the enemy into making mistakes and reacting to you, but first you need to have an understanding of their capabilities. If you don't your glorious charge towards an objective can be cut short very rapidly. What you need to do first is check on every enemy unit. You need to ask yourself these questions.

1. What threat range does it have?
2. What capabilities does this unit have?
3. Where is it likely to move?
4. What is this units key strength? Is it likely to be shooting, assaulting, objective grabbing, force multiplier etc?

The most important question is what threat range does it have. If the unit is out of threat range of all of your units, you can choose to more or less ignore this unit for now. Now some exceptions can be made, if a unit is very tough, or incredibly lethal in hand to hand, that you might want to shoot it down earlier on, but essentially it can't affect you in your opponents next turn, so you should target something that can as this will keep more of your models alive and this in turn keeps your numbers up to achieve your objectives.

After working this out in your head, start assigning target priorities to your own units. You should hopefully have a good idea what you can expect your unit to do. Unless things are absolutely desperate, a single shot from a tactical squads missile launcher against a Landraider is a waste of resources. The rest of the squad are unable to contribute at anything, and the missile launcher has only an 11% chance of a glancing hit, and no chance of penetrating the tank.

I find the best thing to do is to assign your three top targets for your turn and concentrate on wiping them out. After these have been dealt with, work on the lower priority units, again sorting out another three targets. Doing it in this order should also prevent you accidentally forgetting to move or shoot something critically important.