Armoured Clash: Tactical Tricks


This is a list of some small tricks or edge cases that the ruleset allows that might help you get incremental advantages or order activations to your advantage. I haven’t noticed anything particularly strong or necessary here, but every little bit helps.

It’s possible that I missed a rule somewhere preventing these things, in which case I’m sure it’ll be pointed out shortly. Alternatively, perhaps some of these interactions are unintended and the devs will fix them. I’ll try to update this if so.

Reserves, and the use thereof (No one expects Field Guns)

Field guns bring decent range and good shooting for cheap on a slow, tissue paper chassis. Not exactly a winning combination, especially when killing light units is one of the main priorities of the game. So leaving them in reserves to pop out when needed and safe until then is the perfect combination to make them work.

Determine initiative is also before deploying reserves, so you’ll know if you have the first activation before committing your reserves.

Reserves have to touch the edge of the table and be in your deployment zone, so even without flank attack you can deploy well forward along the table edge, which works well with the medium range on field guns. One very gamey approach might be to deploy your close formation unit coming in from reserves in a single file, with the officer at the head. This would get you quite a bit of extra distance up the table, especially for midtable deployment. I'm just the messenger!  Looks like this will be getting errata'd. From what the developers said on the Markov's Dossier Podcast, you'll still be able to get around 4" up table, or ~7" from a flank. Still quite useful.

You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like

Melee units (particularly slow ones), other fragile shooting units with medium to short range, and spare objective holders could also benefit from reserves and flank attack.

Fish of Fury

Not exactly the same as the old 40k strategy, but the bones are there. You can choose the order coordinated units activate in, and units and their transports are coordinated. So you can activate the carried unit, disembark, and shoot. Then activate the transport, drive through your own unit to obscure the enemies LoS, and shoot with the transport.

If you need extra distance you can of course drive the transports forward first, then deploy the infantry behind to stay safer, but you’ll take the concealed penalty as well on their shooting (or take cover for extra defence).


More Fun with Coordinated

If you want to skip an activation, you can activate a transported unit without the transport. This could be interesting to let you react to more of your opponent’s actions, though note that usually disembarking is a Maneuver for the embarked unit, so they won’t be able to take an objective afterwards. The opposite also works, activating the transport but leaving the unit unactivated to act later. This is interesting to grab an objective after the opponent has activated their counters while the infantry waits in safety (more or less).

Close Quarters Combat

This section is more theoretical at the moment, but I think Enlightened will really need to make some plays here to be viable. 

The core part here of course is removing an enemy from an objective and immediately getting to place yourself on it (if there was room at the front edge of the objective, so it pays to push your units forward). There aren’t many options that can do that in one activation, transports shooting and then disembarking being the other big one.

There’s also all kinds of possibilities for shenanigans here. Loser needs to move 3” directly away, so in a tightly packed formation you might just wipe a unit that loses combat. With some setup, you might also be able to force this on a unit that otherwise wouldn’t be vulnerable (move a fast unit to flank, then charge the other flank). Keep in mind you can soften up a unit beforehand that would otherwise be too tough for your melee unit.

There might also be some fun to be had with multi-charges. While you do eat extra retaliation attacks, each unit has to withdraw, letting you potentially push back a large section of the front.

Easily Overlooked

I'm throwing this in here just because I missed it till it was pointed out on the discord. You lose access to commands and abilities if the commander of that battlegroup dies. Have your toughest commander leading the battlegroup with the most important ability and so on. Potentially hang back with infantry command units. On the other hand, consider taking out an enemy commander if you want to turn off a battlegroup ability.




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