Kill Team Movement: The Setup

Hello there Kill Team players! After playing Warhammer for years and Kill Team since the beginning I have learned a lot about how movement works and how setting up your models makes a very big impact on your ability to win or lose games. If you don’t know I started a podcast called Squad Tactica to talk about Kill Team and hopefully bring the community an entertaining show that we can listen to and then gather on Discord to talk about Kill Team no matter what experience, interest, skill level or whatever. Having said all that, we have had a lot of people join the community and ask questions about Kill Team and how to get better at the game. Over the last few months, I have personally begun to focus on getting tournament ready for Kill Team. In all honesty, I wanted to have fun and win games but I was not prioritizing becoming a “pro.” However, because I was podcasting weekly I had to do my homework. I was constantly talking to people about armies, the meta; I was playing games at my local shops and reading articles/ Reddit posts. I would like to believe that becoming saturated in so much data really helped grow my skills because like I said, I was not worried about winning games. I wanted to go to Adepticon, have fun, make friends, win one game and keep goofing off.

After tying for first place at Adepticon I was honestly shocked. I knew I was good at the game but I didn’t realize I could actually compete with the better players in the world. I went to the Dallas Open two weeks later and won a 7 player Kill Team event. Now that might not sound huge but the other undefeated player I had to play against in the finals was Surat. This guy is an amazing player and one super funny guy. But I didn’t know he was also the Warhammer Citadel 2019 Kill Team champion. In March, a few weeks before Adepticon, the Warhammer Citadel here in Grapevine TX held a 28 player Kill Team tournament and this guy was the winner. So I definitely had to earn this win and being able to play against a top-level competitor and strong tactician really showed me that I can actually play and win events. Ok, so bragging aside I wanted to write all that to establish that I believe I have the experience to back up what we are about to talk about here.

Movement. This is and has always been one of the most important parts of playing miniature games.

Kill Team being a small skirmish game means your movement choices and initial setup is so much more important. So why am I writing about this movement thing? Because I had a LOT of people ask me about it over and over and over. This is one of the top things people ask me about all the time. How does movement work? Why is movement important? How do I control lanes? What is a lane? Why does advancing matter?  So guess what? We are going to talk about movement right here, right now.

 

He’s Dead Jim…

Before you ever get to move, you have to setup. A lot of players want to know about movement, advancing, charging and how to maximize their movement choices on the tabletop. What a lot of people don’t talk about and seem to forget is setup. Before you ever move your first model, if you setup wrong you probably gave your opponent a big advantage. Setup is so so so important because if you don’t understand lanes or objectives you will just place models and not know what you just did. Setting up models tells your opponent what you kinda want to do on a specific side of the battlefield. Setting up your models also tells your opponent what you can’t or don’t want to do as well.

Competitive Kill Team is focused on objectives and not just wiping your opponent off the table.

Before you ever start the game you need to know what the primary and secondary objectives are.  You also get a chance to muster (based on Adepticon and NOVA mission packets) and pick the best models from your Command Roster to counter your opponent. All these things are critical choices that can really give you an edge or make this game an uphill battle. Now if you are playing casually or not using these mission packets, some of this might not apply to you. However, I do recommend trying out the tournament packets because they are really well balanced and focused on objectives not just killing models. The start of each game will always present you with three questions.

1) How do I score primary objectives?

This is usually the easiest question to approach at the start of the game. Objectives and deployment zones are clearly marked out on the mission packet and you have a clear explanation of how primary objectives are scored and if they are capped out. You still need to ask how you plan on scoring more objectives than your opponent though. A majority of these tournament missions follow these scoring rules:

– Score one point if you control one or more objectives +1
– Score one point if you control two or more objectives +1
– Score one point if you control more objectives than your opponent +1

Those scoring parameters can add up really quickly if you’re not paying attention. For example, I played a game where I controlled 2 points and contested my opponent’s objectives turn one. At the end of the turn I had scored 3 and he had 0. That is a big swing because going into turn two I still control two objectives and if I go unchecked I’ll score at least 2 more points and I’m probably stopping my opponent from scoring more than 2 points themselves. In theory that means at the end of turn two it’s my 5 points to their 2. Scoring points early allows you to control the pace of the game and gives you some wiggle room if you lose a point in round two.

The question always presents itself at the start of the game. How do I score these primary objectives? Placing the right models in the right lanes helps push your opponent out of the running or even take them off the table. You don’t want to overcommit, but you need to either setup to counter the opponent or punish them for not countering your placement. Setup is a dance where you and your opponent are trying to jockey for control of specific battlefield positions. If you want to get good at placement you need to play a lot of games to understand where you need to be and where the opponent wants to be.

 

 

2) How do I score secondary objectives?

This question requires more finesse than the first because each mission has different secondary objectives to choose from. If you notice in the Adepticon and NOVA mission packets, the primary objectives cap out at 9 points total. Once you hit that threshold you can’t score any more primary points. Good Kill Team players will usually be running pretty close to the 9 points by the end of the game. So what really pushes you into the top brackets of Kill Team players is being able to score secondary objectives as early and often as you can.

I am not going to go over all the secondary objectives available but they are important to getting you a win over a loss. Usually, a mission will provide five secondary objectives and you select three in secret. As cool as this might sound, usually only one of those is going to be actually easy to score and the other two will range from hard to really hard to score. Sometimes the cards align and two of the three are pretty easy to score, but the reality of these games is that points means wins. If you listen to a lot of these major event batreps, you hear how the top players are scoring in the 15-18 point range per game. That means (a very likely) 9 max points on primary objectives and then an additional 6-9 more points coming from secondary objectives. Split over 4 rounds, that’s about 2 points per round coming from secondary objectives. Now all this is taking into account the best players in the world, but the reality is that secondary objectives are just as important if not more than primary. When you look at your mission parameters and begin to imagine setup, both of these objectives play a huge role in how you setup models and approach winning games.

I don’t want to make this feel intimidating, in fact, if you’re not playing competitively this might not be for you. But, if you keep losing games and wonder why…this might be what you’re looking for. Settting up and understanding how to win the game is a very important part of actually playing tabletop wargames. Yes, it is a lot of fun to roll dice and blow models off the table, but the reality is that objectives are king and you have to score them to win games. Being able to look at the battlefield and see lanes, understand your weaknesses, establish where you need to go and where you can afford to lose models, what your opponent wants to do and how you can stop them. These factors and so much more have a very powerful ending result on your games. But this section is focused on those secondary objectives. What are they, how can you score them and how to deny the opponent their secondary objectives.

 

 

3) Where do I need to go?

This might be one of the hardest questions to ask because each game is so different. But the first two questions above will help shape this one’s answer. First off you need to see where you are going to score those primary objectives. Pick your areas to hold down and those you don’t care about. Use your models to contest your opponent’s objectives, hopefully in the areas you don’t care about. If the two of you are fighting over the same space, you might have to adjust your gameplan based on a lot of factors. We won’t go into every detail but some include weapons available. Do their weapons counter your models? Do your weapons counter their models? Who has more models to commit to the objective? Can they tarpit you? Can you tarpit them? So on and so on.

When you begin to set models on the table, you have to have a strong understanding of where you want to go. Then as the opponent sets up their models, read the room. Try to read their strategy and see what they are trying to accomplish. Depending on the matchup it might be to your advantage to counter their setup. Other matchups, it might be best to avoid their models and go somewhere else. But the point is that you and your opponent are jockeying for battlefield control as early as model setup. If you can understand what they are likely to do, you can outmaneuver them, score objectives and have minimal losses on your side of the battlefield. If you just setup models and don’t pay attention to what the enemy is doing, you are asking to get your butt kicked around.

Another aspect of knowing where you should be is knowing where NOT to go.

A lot of armies have traps they can set and you have to watch for those. Poxwalkers or IG Guardsmen are minimal points invested into a Kill Team. The models are fairly weak and their stats are not impressive. However, a good commander can use a single model to win a game because you make a mistake. I have seen many enemy commanders try to huddle 2-3 models behind a wall in an attempt to avoid getting shot during the shooting phase. But that’s the perfect time to send one weak model into melee combat with those three models and lock them down the whole turn. Trading out a 3 or 5 point model to lock up 20-40 points of models is completely unfair, but if you get the opportunity you had better take it. A lot of elite armies only run 4-6 models and being able to lock down 50% of an army with one model is a huge advantage. This is just one of the small details that good players can use to their advantage.

A lot of players look at these war games and think that winning games means using powerful weapons and big bodies to overwhelm the opponent. But the reality is that good commanders use whatever resources they have to the best of their ability. So watch what’s happening. Is your opponent moving a group of Poxwalkers towards your most powerful melee model? A good pilot is going to use those 3 models to charge you and lock you in combat all game. If you kill one they will charge you in the next turn. Or they can alternate between falling back and charging with a fresh Poxwalker each round. And now your best melee model is locked in combat with 3 point models…yuck. Another tactic is to completely ignore major threat models. In one game my opponent had a Kabalite Warrior with a Dark Lance as a sniper who was accompanied by a comms specialist. He put those two models on top of a ruin for maximum vision. However, I took a moment to look at those models actual visibility and was able to dodge them for 3 of the 4 turns of the game. He was only able to shoot and kill 1 Poxwalker the entire game. Now I will say I kept my models in melee combat so he couldn’t shoot them in the shooting phase. But I used some skill and battlefield knowledge to make his 20+ points effectively useless. This falls under the question of “where do I need to go?” I need to keep out of sight or play very aggressively so he can’t shoot me and I can walk down the field in little melee groups.

 

 

What Now?

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Setup has a lot of intricate details. Objectives and missions are always rotating to keep players on their toes. And your opponent’s army will never play the same. But there are things you can do as a commander to help control your situation. Use these questions and your experience to assess what’s going on when you see your opponent’s command roster. Get used to knowing which model and weapon loadout counters multi-wound models, horde models, T5 models or hard-hitting melee threats like the Dark Eldar and Harlequins.

Being able to read the room and determine what lanes and objectives your opponent wants to capture can help you form your gameplan. This can lead you to setup traps of your own and push your opponent out of lanes they want. This can also help you figure out what the opponent might have selected for their secondary objectives. Each round you deny points means one step closer to winning for you. So keep an eye out and watch what the opponent does and says. They can give away important information without realizing they even did it. But that requires you to be observant and cunning.

The best way to use these tips is to play more Kill Team.

And since it is so much fun and WAYYYY shorter than 8th edition, get as many games in as you can! If you enjoyed this article check out our podcast called Squad Tactica. We talk about competitive and casual Kill Team content weekly. We have a lot of fun with our community on Facebook and Discord as well and would love to add you to our growing family. Check us out here for all the most up to date information and content: https://www.facebook.com/squadtacticapodcast

-Keep on killin em’
Sugi