Phasing Operations

Introduction 

The ability to score battle tactics (or secondary objectives in Warhammer 40K) for factions varies considerably across the board. Some armies enjoy tremendous mobility or killing power or otherwise have a veritable toolbox to consistently achieve their battle tactics. While it is unclear what will happen to "book" battle tactics in AoS 4.0, we do know a fair amount of what is to come for universal battle tactics and grand alliance battle tactics. Today we will discuss how to develop a strategy to achieve these more methodically through the military concept of phasing to develop a scheme of maneuver. 

Some members of the Sparkle Motion team will be unveiling an exciting new forum to discuss strategy and several other wargaming topics on a new podcast, so stay tuned for that. In the meantime, let's don our tin foil hats to speculate about the new edition, and then conceal that tin foil hat under our Field Marshal's campaign hats so we can retain the initiative with the new edition. Follow us, share, or just talk with your gaming group about what you learned today about phasing and planning a scheme of maneuver.

Background

The US Army operates by issuing lawful and/or direct orders, that is probably not a surprise. But what you may not have heard of are Operation Orders, or OPORDs. These regimented documents are universal throughout all formations of the Army and give consistent guidance on the commander's vision to accomplish the mission. These OPORDs are also nested within echelons so that they are all working to a common goal and enabling one another for success. 

There are five paragraphs that appear in every OPORD, in the same order each time. They are situation, mission, execution, sustainment, and command and control. Each of these provide a detailed but concise format to disseminate information throughout an organization in a very rapid fashion. Today we will focus solely on paragraph three: execution. 

Execution

The third OPORD paragraph begins with the commander's intent, a simple statement that summarizes how the commander wants the battlefield to look when the dust settles. Our commander's intent will vary somewhat on our opponent's capabilities, but generally it will be oriented on scoring as many points as you can while denying points to your opponent. Your intent needs to adjust from matchup to matchup. For armies that are particularly durable, it is generally not worthwhile to destroy them. The only path to victory may instead to not become decisively engaged, retain key terrain to score primary objective points, and achieve battle tactics while you set conditions to make it impossible or at least difficult for your opponent to achieve theirs. Essential to all of this is deploying in a fashion that makes some of the battle tactics easier for you and understanding what is feasible and achievable as the situation develops.

Let's take a look at what we know for sure is coming in terms of battle tactics for 4th edition:

These are three of the promised six universal battle tactics to be released at launch in the upcoming General's Handbook. We see two tactics, Seize the Center and Take the Flanks are spatial in nature but also diametrically opposed. Some armies will have a predilection to one or the other, which is the sort of analysis you need to do when you're developing your commander's intent. Are you an Ossiarch Bonereapers general that has access to (at the time of writing) some of the highest durability and melee debuffing in the game? Spreading out to achieve the Take the Flanks battle tactic would likely not be conducive to your overarching intent of maintaining a tight formation and dominating a concentrated part of the board with your resources. Alternatively, a Tzeentch general may happily pursue both Seize the Centre and take the flanks almost simultaneously because of their ability to rap
idly summon durable (or rather, gibbering and splitting wound sinks) units. 

The point is that without some semblance of a plan, there is a good chance your approach to the game will be disjointed and you'll find that you deployed your forces in such a way that you'll be hard pressed to accomplish what you intend to. Having an idea in mind of which tactics you can aim for each turn as well as alternative branches your plan can take when the situation changes. This plan is called your Scheme of Movement and Maneuver.

Scheme of Movement and Maneuver

We'll refer to this as your scheme. Your scheme is how you plan to array then move your forces throughout the battlefield to achieve battle tactics, control the board, and defeat your opponent's forces. Sometimes defeating your opponent means destroying their units. Other times it is simply a matter of isolating or containing them. Whatever the case is, we take what we learned from our IPOE steps to understand how the environment will impact our operations as well as the enemy.

Let's create an example scenario. We will play as the Ogor Mawtribes army from our previous discussions and walk through how we analyze the battlefield and make a scheme that has tactical flexibility. In the early game, we do not want our forces to be arrayed with a wide breadth because that makes it more difficult to capitalize on our greatest strength: the ability to inflict large amounts of out-of-combat phase damage that gives our opponent even less agency in dictating the fight. We need to be in a position that we can reliably close with and engage with the enemy in melee. That being said, take the flanks in the early rounds is not advisable. Your units would be maybe 50 inches apart or so. That means they are not getting into the fight or are being taken away from valuable screening or attack by fire roles (e.g. your Gnoblars and Ironblaster, respectively).

You also lack information on what the enemy course of action (COA) will be. You have hopefully narrowed it down to a couple of COAs but you likely won't have perfect information. A good rule of thumb is to have one battle tactic in mind for the upcoming turn based on the current board state and at least one other alternative if your opponent takes a more unexpected route. This is why armies such as Kruelboyz (at time of writing) have had some recent success. Their battle tactics are very achievable, flexible, and leave little room for the opponent to interact with them. 

This leads into our next point. It is not enough to be pursuing your needs in the scheme of maneuver, you need to simultaneously be disrupting your opponent at every opportunity. It is easy to fall into the mindtrap of solely focusing on what your battle tactics (BTs) will be. Consider the raw points differential of denying battle tactics. If you can achieve a battle tactics while your opponent scores an additional point for primaries, you can start to make up some ground.

Round	Battle Tactic	Primary	You	Battle Tactic	Primary	Opponent
1	2	2	4	2	3	5
2	2	2	8	0	3	8
3	2	2	12	2	3	13
4	2	3	17	2	2	17
5	2	3	22	2	2	21
Grand Strat			25			24

In this example, even though your opponent controlled more objectives for 3 out of the 5 rounds, denying just one battle tactic of theirs made it possible for you to win by 1 point. This may not appear to be much at first glance, but let's consider the benefits of going down on primaries for part of the game. Spreading out and controlling fewer objectives allows you to concentrate and mass your forces more while your opponent has spread thin to gain at least one more objective than you. It also allows you to have a specific point in time that you know is your "go turn," where you need to aggressively engage with the enemy to turn the tide. This is our decisive operation, and in this instance it occurs at round 4. 

Conclusion

This is what we have been talking about, controlling the tempo, phasing your operations to achieve exactly what you need, no more. This sacrifice of points, trading that space on the battlefield, has given you more time and tactical flexibility to choose your engagements on your terms and ensure that you can set up for battle tactics without making yourself vulnerable. Many times before I have lost sight of the bigger picture in pursuing a battle tactic, not realizing that I did so at the expense of the game. Getting those two points is not worth getting yourself into a bad position. This is why giving away the double turn is so powerful. It keeps putting the onus onto your opponent to get out of position and spread themselves too thin. When you can be in a position that you are indifferent to the double turn and recognize when it is time to capitalize on it to deal a decisive blow, you'll realize that you're doing it right.

Thank you for joining team Sparkle Motion on this part of the journey today. Hopefully you'll leave after reading this article with a better understanding of how to phase your operations, select BTs that allow tactical flexibility, and how to control the tempo of the game. We'd love if you gave us a follow, shared this article with a friend, or gave us any feedback on how to get better information to you. Until next time, stay sparkly.