How to Play Warhammer 40k 9th Edition | Pt. 1 - Core Rules Playthrough | New Player Tutorials

what's up folks welcome back to tactical tortoise my name is trevi and today we are going to be talking about how to play warhammer 40 000 an overview of the core rules basically how you set up and play a game of 40k we're going to be approaching it from the standpoint of a gt 2021 mission that is the most common format used for 2 000 point matched play games but that really just affects the scoring and some of the special mechanics that the system uses most of the time i mean the core mechanics are all going to be identical and the scoring mechanics are for missions and stuff like that is going to be basically the same across any format that you play even if you don't play gt 2021 this video should still be helpful for you obviously the core mechanics of the game don't change as the points change so you can use this video as a reference for any points level of warhammer 40000. in a future video i'm gonna talk about some more mission specific stuff how scoring works how secondary objectives work all of that stuff that you need to know how to play uh scenario in warhammer 4000. but today we're just going to be covering the core mechanics my hope is that this video is useful obviously if you're a new player coming into the game but also if you're a veteran player and you know maybe you need a run-through of some interactions hopefully this will still be a pretty good reference for you before we get into the game a couple quick shout outs first off i want to give a shout out to the advanced tactics series that's getting some new videos this week that's a series where i deep dive into some very specific and esoteric tactics topics for warhammer 40k so if you're looking to really expand your understanding of the game that at a competitive level then i highly recommend you series that's available for patrons and for channel members in addition we're going to be running a youngbloods style casual new player friendly tournament that's designed to allow people to get used to the gt 2021 format and 2 000 point games so that's going to be run on tabletop simulator in our discord a link for which is down below the video in the description so if you want to come join and learn some games on tabletop simulator then um i don't know come hang out it's gonna be sweet it's gonna be fun time we'll give away prizes for people showing up there's no particular rewards for winning so your win record doesn't matter we just want to encourage people to play games and experiment with lists and play some zany stuff but anyway let's get into this core rules breakdown and i'm here on tabletop simulator with my friends the ultramarines today to show us a little bit of how to play warhammer 40k now obviously the rules i'm going to be talking about today are not tabletop simulator specific if you do want to learn how to get started on tabletop simulator there is a video in this series or new player tutorial series on how to do that there's a couple videos on how to install it and tips and tricks on how to play and use all of the tools available to you but certainly the core mechanics of 40k do not change whether you're on tts or in real life it's just a really good learning tool at its basal level your armies in warhammer 40000 are represented on the table by individual models a model is just the figurine that represents a character or trooper or something else in the 41st millennium and each individual model is organized into a subdivision called a unit now units can be made up of multiple models for example this tactical squad here is five models or a big vehicle or a powerful character like this chaplain or this land raider may be a unit of a single model each unit is governed and all of its statistics can be found on a data sheet that tells you what their capabilities are now we won't talk about exactly the stats in the data sheet and what they mean right now because those become apparent as we talk about doing different things but those are gonna be the references for each different unit that you've included in your army now units in 40k each operate independently so these five tactical marines will operate together as a group whereas this chaplain who would be a unit of a single character would work all by himself while he does benefit and gain benefits from nearby units often he's not able to join units and he doesn't act with a unit he's his own man if a unit is made up of multiple models it is restricted by something called coherency which is the distance at which each model has to operate from the remainder of its unit if your unit is made up of five models or less each of your models needs to be within two inches of at least one other model in the unit so for example we see here each of these models is within two inches of at least one other one and that model has to be within two inches of a different one so you're not able to chain two models together and just run off by yourselves you will have to you know chain them if your unit is six or greater models so if we had a tactical spot of six marines here the coherency rules get a little bit more restrictive you have to keep each of the models in the unit within two inches of at least two other models so typically how that looks is that you'll have to sort of train make these little triangles with your unit so they instead of being able to string out laterally they'll have to clump together a little bit more if the units are a little bit larger now another important aspect of warhammer 40 000 is that it is a true measurement game that means that unlike a traditional board game like chess or checkers where the relationships between your two units is based on arbitrary markings on a board instead it uses the actual distance between the different pieces in the game now in an in-person game you would typically use a tape measure or a ruler to measure that distance on tts obviously we have this cool little measuring widget here where we can measure the distance between models or the distance along the table but basically the the essential premise is the same where all of the ranges and movement values and relationships auras and things like that are all going to be measured in actual inches that gives you a lot greater freedom on how you position your models you know a a model hiding behind a a building could choose to try to hide completely behind the building or poke out a little bit to you know benefit from cover but also gain some line of sight around the corner and that gives you literally an infinite amount of flexibility in how you pursue your game plan the game of warhammer 40000 is divided into rounds turns and phases there are a couple steps that occur before a game begins the players will decide on a mission to play which will also include a deployment zone that they'll use so we can just set one up arbitrarily here and that will determine the starting positions these areas on the table are called your deployment zone generally it's basically where you can set up your models when the game begins but also it can have some scenario implications once we get to talking about that stuff now when you go to set up your game of warhammer 40k both armies are going to start off the table you and your opponent will both make a roll off to determine who is the attacker and who is the defender the winner of the rolloff in this case the tyranid player would select to either be the attacker or the defender the defender gets to choose which of the two deployment zones the mission has described to you to deploy their army in but then has to deploy the first unit this step only really matters if you're playing boards with asymmetric terrain i.e the terrain features are different on both sides so one may have an advantage over the other one a lot of times you'll see boards being symmetric or relatively symmetric but that's not 100 the case in this case this is actually a u.s open tournament set up the games workshops official gts are going to be using this layout tends to be symmetric but like i said not every single layout is with that the defender then selects one of their units and places them completely within their deployment zone anytime a multi-model unit gets placed or moves at any time during the game it must be placed in coherency and it must end that movement incoherency so at no point could i place models outside of two inches of one or two other models in the unit depending on how large the unit is once the defender places one of their units the attacker does the same thing in the opposite deployment zone put these attack marines down over here then the defender does the same placing another unit in their deployment zone and we go back and forth like that until every single unit on the table has been placed once the deployment step is complete we go on to play the game again the two sides are going to roll off and the player that wins the roll is automatically going to take the first turn in the first battle round after that the game really begins in earnest from here the game is broken up into five battle rounds of play during each battle round both players will get to take a player turn in that player turn all of their models will move cast psychic powers then shoot charge and perform melee attacks in that order these are called phases of the turn and each turn starts with a command phase during the command phase assuming your army is battle forged which most armies should be in most formats they do require a battle forged army and that just means that all of your units come from a legal faction and are organized into detachments you'll generate a command point we'll talk about command points and how you can use those in a future video so we don't have to worry about that right now but there are often many abilities that trigger during the command phase this is sort of a general upkeep phase of your army he typically can use his litany's a battle during this step of the turn so it's important to take a look at the abilities on your data sheet and make sure that you don't have anything that's going to trigger in the command phase once you've done your command phase it's time to go to a movement phase once you've completed your command phase it's time to move to your movement phase now one general concept i'm going to talk about a lot in this video is the concept of activations every phase in 40k is broken down by units performing their actions during that phase this is normally referred to that unit's activation during the phase although again it's not an actual game term so you won't find any rules that reference that in particular but for example during the movement phase i will choose a unit to move i will perform all of the moves with that unit then i'll stop moving that unit and move on to the next one and that unit can move no further that phase most people refer to this as the movement phase activation of that unit so one thing that's important to remember is that while your army's all going to be moving together during the same phase that movement has to be broken up by each individual unit so in this case the space marine player taking the first turn here is going to start their movement phase by moving this tactical squad and then once they have completed their movement we will move on to the other units and we can move them one at a time as well now when a unit activates to the movement phase it has four options of types of movement that it can take the first is the easiest it's a normal move you take a look at the movement value of the unit described on their data sheet and you move each of the models in the unit up to that distance along the battlefield when you move a unit you'll essentially grab it one model at a time and slide that model along the table until it moves that total distance no part of the model can move greater than that distance so for example measuring from this tactical marine who has a base i could not measure to the front from the front of the model and then make that movement to the back of his base that would net me about an extra inch of movement and that is not legal the entire base can only move six inches in some situations models can actually climb or clamber over terrain generally speaking that's actually pretty easy you will just move vertically up and down the terrain until you find a place where you can fit your base such that you won't fall off so for example if this tactical marine wanted to climb to the second level of this building we would measure from the top to the bottom which is about three inches to where this guy is so it would take three inches of movement for him once he's up against the wall to move vertically up that wall and climb onto the second level generally speaking you do have to be in contact with the piece of terrain in order to move up and down it in order to climb it you can't like teleport yourself through the floor of the building it's also important to note that a lot of the train we're talking about in this situation has a special rule that allows infantry to move through it that's not the case for every terrain but for ruin terrain it has the breachable keyword you can actually see that in their little tool tip here which allows infantry to traverse through the walls and floors they're assumed to either be able to find gaps in the wall or they're just gonna drop a grenade and blow themselves up a hole to get through that actually makes units that can make use of the breachable keyword which is infantry beasts and swarms some of the most maneuverable in the game simply for the fact that they are unobstructed by a lot of these types of terrain now there are three other types of movement that the unit can choose to make in the movement phase an advance remain stationary or fall back an advance represents the unit running or trying to move more quickly instead of moving just their movement value you will grab a die and roll it then add whatever number you get to their movement value for that move so in this case they would be moving 11 inches during this movement phase it's important to note that that actually adds to their characteristics so if you have anything that allows them to move further or interacts with their movement value later on in that movement phase their movement will actually be considered 11 for this phase because they are base move six plus five for the number that i rolled remain stationary is basically what it says on the tin you just stand still aren't allowed to move but sometimes benefit from some additional buffs in the shooting phase lastly we have falling back which only applies if your unit is currently engaged in melee with an enemy unit two units are engaged in melee when they're within one inch of each other and it's important to note that outside of the charge or fight phases you cannot move into engagement range of another unit so even if these space marines were right next to the hormagans here they would not be able to move in too close they would have to stay an inch away if they start their movement and aren't within an inch they can choose to fall back in which case they just move their movement value but there are typically some heavy penalties applied to units that do fall back while ultramarines do have a special role that allow them to counteract this to some extent you can't shoot in the shooting phase cast psychic powers in the psychic phase or charge if you've fallen back that turn so it's a pretty hefty penalty to leave combat it's important to note that in addition to not being able to move within one inch of enemy models enemy models will also block your movement and you are not allowed to move such that your base crosses over top of an enemy model's base like that this can create some interesting situations especially when a unit is trying to fall back where you'll find your opponent is able to surround one of your models with their models meaning that it cannot move if you are unable to complete a fallback move such that all of your models are not within an inch of enemy models you actually cannot complete the move and the unit stays still so in this case this tactical marine squad would actually not be able to move at all you can't choose any of the other types of movement when you are engaged with an enemy you can only fall back so this would actually pin this unit in place until one of them is destroyed it's also important to note that a lot of types of terrain will generally block your movement things that do not have the breachable keyword will sometimes stop you from moving through and in addition a lot of terrain has the difficult ground keyword like these grates here in which case that moving through them such that you touch it with any of your models bases even if you start within the terrain will reduce the total distance that you move by two so this model's move would basically become four and if he advanced he would move nine inches instead of 11 or four inches if he was just making a normal move so once this tactical marine squad has completed its movement we'll go ahead and do the next squad which will make the same choice and make its movement in this case five inches for the terminator and the big vehicle here would do the exact same thing once the movement phase is completed we move to the next phase of the turn which is the psychic phase in which psychers will cast powers now we talked about how the chaplain has particular abilities used in the command phase the librarian is a space marine unit that uses psychic powers in the psychic phase so we'll just pretend that we have a librarian in our army today now the psychic phase is also essentially broken up into activations just like the movement phase is you'll choose a psycho and cast all of the powers that you can with then then move on to the next cycle in your army space marine librarians can cast two powers we'll go ahead and say that we're gonna cast the might of heroes power on this terminator librarian when you cast a spell you're gonna grab two dice and roll them together this is called a psychic test and you will compare the sum of those two dice to the warp charge value of the psychic power you're attempting to cast in this case might of heroes has a warp charge value of 6 you need to equal or beat the warp charge value in order to pass the psychic power and we've done it we've rolled a 6 which means the psychic power will go off now before the power takes effect your opponent has the chance to try to stop it in this case if you have an enemy psycher within 24 inches of the siker casting the spell they can attempt what's called a deny the witch test this is not a psychic test in and of itself but it's treated basically the same you roll 2d6 and you have to beat the number that the cycle rolled to cast their power so in this case in order to deny the psychic power we would have to roll a seven on these two dice in this case we roll a six so the power would not be denied and just barely go off if a seven was rolled on the deny the witch test the power would not be manifested and none of its abilities would take effect in this case because it did go off successfully you will then go ahead and choose a target for the power and it will take effect as normal now a pretty common psychic power that almost every caster has access to is called smites this is a psychic power like any other it's not typically listed in your codex because it's in the core rules smite has a warp charge value of five that but it's a little mutable so if we roll a five plus it would go off and if it does go off the nearest enemy unit within 18 inches and line of sight suffers d3 mortal wounds now there's two new concepts that we have to explain here first off line of sight is a very important concept in warhammer 40k it determines whether or not your units can see enemy units and target them with things like shooting or psychic powers well there's a couple rules governing line of sight essentially how it works is that a line is drawn from anywhere on your model to anywhere on the opposing model and if that line does not pass through obscuring terrain then you have line of sight to your opponent obscuring terrain is typically things like ruins and big buildings that could potentially block your line of sight and supersedes normal line of sight however if either you or the target is inside a piece of obscuring terrain you ignore the obscuring keyword on that piece of terrain so in this case this is a big ruin that all has the obscuring keyword my librarian drawing line of sight to these guys is able to draw a line we can see from you know basically this half of his body to several of the hormones so he's able to draw a line of sight normally to them and because they're inside the obscuring piece of terrain it's not innately blocking line of sight to them now this would change if this unit was completely behind the piece of terrain because they're no longer within it if you're trying to draw your line of sight across the piece of train like this unfortunately the obscuring keyword would block you you do still have to have normal line of sight which is just drawing a line from your model to their model so if the librarian was for example standing here he would not be able to see the hormagans because even if they're both inside the obscuring terrain there's a big freaking wall in the way so that that's kind of hampering him a little bit now it's important to remember that line of sight is a three-dimensional measurement you can see through things like windows and gaps and walls underneath models and you know between arms things like that those all are just fine for line of sight and you measure from any point on your model not just the base when you measure you only use the base but you can draw a line of sight from example from the tip of his storm bolter from his sword from his little iron halo here any of those are legal starting positions for your line of sight so now we've determined we are in line of sight we also have range because it is an 18 inch range we're going to deal this unit mortal wounds now we'll talk about how to conduct attacks when we come to the shooting phase but mortal wounds are essentially wounds that automatically hit wound and pass through any of your target saves ormagans each have a single wound and for each wound they suffer whether it's from a regular attack or from a normal moot wound would reduce that model to zero wounds which means it's really it's removed from the table now rolling a d3 is something that happens pretty often in 40k sometimes people have custom d3s that literally just have three numbers on them that you can roll the easiest way to determine the result of a d3 is to take a d6 and divide the result in half rounding up so in this case a five or a six would deal three wounds a three or a four would deal two wounds and a one or a two would deal a single wound looks like in this case the smite would have resulted in a single hormagan being killed assuming that that psychic power doesn't get denied now the one weird thing about the smite psychic power is that its warp charge value increases the more you cast it during your psychic phase each caster can only choose to manifest the psychic power once a phase and normally any psychic powers that you attempt to cast earlier on in the phase you cannot attempt with later psyches later on smite is the exception so every single one of your casters can attempt to manifest smite every psychic phase but each subsequent one that does so has to roll one higher to beat the warp charge value of this might so it's a base warp charge value of five which means the first smite to go off would need a five the second one would need a six the third one would need a seven the fourth one would need an eight and so on and so forth until it gets impossible to cast this means that armies that have a ton of psychers aren't going to be able to cast smites a billion million times for free but it is something to keep in mind if you do play a lot of psyches with access to smite so once all of your casters have attempted to manifest your psychic powers and your opponent's casters have attempted to deny them we move on to the next phase of the game which is where a lot of damage in warhammer 40k is dealt the shooting phase now the shooting phase is broken down into activations very much like the movement phase in this case you will choose a unit to shoot with resolve all of the attacks with that unit then move on to the next one now from here it's important to talk about rolling out attacks and inflicting damage this is probably one of the most important concepts in 40k and it works identically the same for both shooting and melee attacks first off you'll find that each of your models has a weapon skill and ballistic skill characteristic that's the number that they have to equal or beat in order to hit with an attack in the shooting phase for ballistic scale characteristics where they fire ballistic weapons or in the fight phase when they use their weapon skill characteristic when they use melee weapons now normally units cannot be chosen to shoot in the shooting phase so they cannot activate if they have advanced in the movement phase proceeding or they fell back in that preceding movement phase so only units that performed a normal move or remain stationary are gonna be able to fire their weapons there are some exceptions to this however and that depends on the type of weapon that you're firing now each weapon type has its own special rules assault weapons allow the unit to be chosen to fire in the shooting phase if they advanced that turn the downside is that any assault weapons that you fire with are minus when to hit so you're going to need to roll one additional higher on your ballistic skill than normal in order to score a hit with these each of those attacks even if you have an assault weapon and you are chosen to shoot you can't shoot any of your non-assault weapons so you can't for example put a single assault weapon into your unit and then fire all of your rampant fire weapons heavy weapons allow you to shoot if you have moved in the movement phase however like assault weapons you take a minus one penalty to hit if anyone in your unit moved that turn so essentially unless you remain stationary in the movement phase you'll be minus one to hit with any of your heavy weapons rapid fire weapons essentially function as normal you can't shoot them if you advance or fall back and you can shoot them at your normal ballistic skill if you remain stationary or you normal move but there is an additional caveat which is that if you are within half range of your target so in this case for a space marine bolt gun with a range of 24 if you're within 12 inches of the target then you will double the number of attacks that you make with that weapon the number of attacks that you make with a weapon is the number listed after its type so for example a heavy three weapon is a heavy weapon that fires three attacks during the shooting phase in this case a bolter is a rapid fire one weapon which would shoot one shot out to 24 inches or two shots if its target is within 12. grenade weapons take a model's entire shooting activation to attack with so normally if you are carrying multiple weapons you would be able to fire all of them at the same time grenades you can only shoot with the grenade weapon if you've done that and only one model in each unit can throw a grenade and pistol weapons which is a type that excludes you from shooting any other type of weapons if you're firing your pistol so you cannot for example fire your bolt gun and your bolt pistol at the same time but it allows you to shoot at units that you are engaged in melee with normally a unit that's engaged in melee cannot be selected to shoot unless it has a particular special role or is equipped with pistol weapons now one of those special rules is the big guns never tire rule which allows vehicles to fire while engaged in melee they can either fire at the unit that they're engaged with or they can declare that they're going to make some of the tax on units out of melee and if during that shooting activation the enemy unit is destroyed they can make those other attacks on the units that they declared they were going to attack that's a specific rule for vehicles and monsters however infantry and most other unit types cannot do that once they're engaged they can only fire their pistols all right now we've talked about the types of weapons let's talk about actually using them the first thing you're going to do is when you select a unit to shoot for example this tactical marine squad is you're going to select the targets with each of its weapons your unit doesn't have to target the same thing so if you have a heavy weapon like in this case we have a melt a gun which has a pretty short range but can deal some significant damage if a big enemy unit is close by you could elect to shoot that at the swarm lord over here and then take all of your bolt gun shots which are better against infantry at the hormagans hiding in the cover back here you can only select targets that your model has line of sight to so you're just going to do the same check that we did with the librarian earlier to see if the model can draw a line from any point on their model to any point on the target model without that line crossing over obscuring terrain that in this case would count like we mentioned before because the hormones are inside the building they would not be benefited from that obscuring terrain but if you were naturally had your line of sight blocked like this marine over on the side here he would not be able to target them because they're hiding so in this case we have five models in the tactical marine squad and they can allocate their attacks into whichever unit they have range in line of sight to in this case we want to shoot the melt-a-gun at the swarmlord here because he's going to be close so we'll call that the melted gun attack and then we'll call each of these one of the bolt gun attacks from the remaining models we'll shoot the sergeant's bolt gun and this model on the sides bolt gun into the hormagans here and the other two bolt guns who we determined don't have line of sight to the hormagans into the swarmlord now because the bulk guns are rapid fire weapons those attacks would double and this is going to be the allocation of our attacks during this shooting activation now before we get to roll some dice there's one important thing that i do want to mention here the core rule book describes all of your attacks as being resolved independently but that's not actually how warhammer 40k is played so there is a technique called fast dice rolling this is actually allowed by the rules but it's not very well described because some copies of the rubric actually don't include any of the rules for fast ice rolling in this case i'm going to assume that we're fast dice rolling throughout the course of this tutorial because that is normally how the game's played but the thing to keep in mind is that your rules are assuming that each of your attacks are rolled sequentially so for example if you have an ability that says each time a model in a unit makes an attack it can re-roll a hit roll of one that accounts for each single attack that you're making which means your unit is going to be able to reroll all of its ones to hit so for example if we had this not very good role here of four attacks with two ones to hit we could reroll both of those it's a little bit confusing but ultimately it does make the game play much faster now when we resolve attacks using fast ice rolling what we're gonna do is resolve all of the hit and wound rolls for all of your attacks in your unit that have the same profile and target the same enemy unit and roll those together so to start with let's roll off our two space marines firing their bolt guns at the swarm lord over here we've doubled their attacks because they have the rapid fire profile so each of them is going to make two attacks now we take these dice and we have to roll equal to or higher than our ballistic skill to score a hit with those bolt gun shots so we'll roll the dice and see what we get in this case we have a six two threes and a two they are ballistic skill three so the two would not beat their ballistic skill so that would be removed from the pool now we have to compare the strength of our weapon to the toughness of the target to see if we are able to score a wound with those bolt shells if your target's toughness is higher than your strength you're gonna need a five or greater to score a wound unless your target's toughness is doubled your strength in which case you'll need a six if your toughness and strength are the same you're gonna need a four plus two one which makes it a coin flip and similarly if your strength is higher than your opponent's toughness you're gonna need a three two wound if your strength is double your opponent's toughness you're gonna need a two it sounds a little complicated but the chart's actually very simple once you wrap your head around it in this case the swarmlord is toughness seven versus the the pitiful strength four on the bolt guns here so we are gonna need a five plus two wound let's see what we get two sixes is a pretty good start so that will score two wounds on the swarmlord so now an important thing to keep in mind here is that while because of fast dice rolling we're able to roll all of our attack and wound rolls together each of your saves and any a damage that's inflicted still happens sequentially on the surface this doesn't look like it would matter but if you have rerolls or reactive abilities that would come into play because each of your wounds is going to be dealt individually so in this case the swirler is going to go ahead and roll one at a time for each of their saves now if you don't have any abilities that you use in between so the sequential nature of the saves doesn't really matter it's not going to make a difference the swarmlord's save value is a three plus which means any wound roll gets discarded on a roll of three or better a one is not going to do it for him so the damage of the weapon is going to be in removed from his wound pole the swarm lord starts with 12 wounds a bolter is a damage one weapon so he would go from 12 down to 11 wounds we'll do it again with this dice see what he gets for his save another failure you suck swarmlord and that is gonna drop him down to 10 wounds now we can go ahead and start resolving the other weapons in our unit so for example we have our big melted gun shot here represented by the red dye we'll see if it hits it does let's see if it wounds it's strength eight versus a toughness of seven so because the strength is higher than the toughness we're going to need a three to wound let's see if we get the three we do so that's a statistic that a weapon has that determines how good it is at penetrating armor in this case the defender would subtract the ap value from their dice roll meaning that a melted gun with an ap value of four is actually going to entirely bypass a three plus save since even if the swivel had rolled a six to save minus four to that roll would put him down to a two which is not a three plus or greater which means he would not shake the wound now there is a difference here the swarmworld has what's called an invulnerable save which is a save that cannot be reduced by ap values in this case a four plus most things don't have an invulnerable save it's usually reserved for special characters and particularly resilient monsters or vehicles but we'll go ahead and take his four plus invulnerable save and he rolled a one which means he's going to take the damage of the melted gun a melted gun is a d6 damage weapon so again one at a time we're gonna roll the d6 value to determine how much damage the melting gun inflicts from this attack we got went ahead and rolled a four which means that after this shooting phase the swarm ward is going to be reduced from 12 wounds down to only six it's a pretty good shooting phase from a tactical squad i'm not going to lie last but not least we're going to go ahead and take this these two guys bolters over into the hormagats we are not in half range so we don't get to double the number of attacks but the suitcase is essentially the same we need a three plus to hit because of their ballistic scale two six is a pretty good roll because the hormones are only toughness three we're going to need a three plus two wound because the strength four on the bolter is greater than the toughness value of the hormones let's go ahead and roll that and unfortunately a one or a two won't do it now assuming that we did successfully wound here the hormagans because they're in area terrain that has the light cover benefit as we can see from our tool tip that's actually going to improve their save by one and there's a couple ways to get different kinds of cover dense cover will subtract one from attacks if they target you while you're in or behind a piece of dense cover obstacles will also usually give you some types of cover and in this case area terrain like ruins or craters or rubble or something like that will give you that light cover benefit which improves your save characteristic by one normally a hormone has a six plus save which means that with that plus one it would be saving on a five which it would not get and that will kill one of the hormagans because they only have a single wound so the one damage will reduce that model down to zero now it's up to the defender to allocate the saves that they take on their units if they have a multi-model unit one at a time so if this unit was taking multiple saves the attacker doesn't get to choose the models that are removed the defender will this also means that in some situations where for example a unit is halfway in cover and halfway out the defender could choose to start taking the saves on the models in cover first to be a little bit harder to kill and then start taking them on the models outside in this case you would just start rolling for the five models in cover and see if they pass so one would be dead another one would be dead a third one would be dead but that one would save well the defender has a lot of freedom to select who can take the saves as soon as they select a model to receive saves that model has to continue to receive them for the remainder of the phase until they're dead and in addition if you have a multi-model unit composed of models with multiple wounds in this case the space marine unit each of the tactical marines has two wounds once one of those models is wounded you will have to continue to allocate wounds to them until they're removed so in this situation if this marine were to take a damage he would continue to have to take armor saves from future attacks until he fails another armor save reducing him down to zero booms and removing him from the table now once that unit is finished shooting like we said before we're going to move to the next unit in the army and fire with them and then continue to move on until all units in your army have been selected to shoot with once that's complete we're going to go ahead and move to the next phase the charge phase in which your units will try to get into melee combat with their targets in this case your units will activate one at a time very similarly to the other phases and when they're selected in the charge phase they can declare a charge on an enemy unit within 12 inches of them they can't declare a charge if they've fallen back or advanced earlier in that turn and there are some other abilities that prevent you from declaring charges as well so it's important to keep those in mind but generally speaking as long as you haven't advanced or fallen back and have an enemy within 12 you can go ahead and try to engage them in glorious melee combat so today these tactical marines are feeling pretty chuffed they did so much damage in the shooting phase and they're gonna try to get in to charge the swarmlord over here now when you select a unit to charge and you select the target of the charge or somebody within 12 inches so once we've selected a unit to charge within the charge phase and we've selected a target within 12 inches of them they're gonna roll a random distance which will be their charge distance for this turn in this case we've got a seven inch for this tactical marine squad if there is a position where this squad could move up to seven inches and end in engagement range of the enemy unit that they declare as their charge target while not in engagement range of any other units they then make that charge and they go ahead and move their seven inches if their charge roll was not enough to get them within that one inch range then they would have failed the charge and they would just stand still and not do anything now your unit is allowed to declare multiple units as their charge target so for example if the hormagons were also here we could declare both of them as the charge target you are required to end engaging all of the the units that you declared as your charge target so if for example you were in range with that seven inch charge to make it into melee with the swarmlord but not in range to make it into melee with the hormone guns that you also declared you would end up failing that charge and standing back here looking like a dope it's also important to remember that you cannot engage units that you didn't declare as a charge target so for example if the hormones were standing around protecting the swarmlord and you did not declare them to charge then you actually would not be able to get into melee with the swarmlord because you couldn't move within an inch of him without moving within an inch of the hormagans in this situation the tactical marine squad did roll enough to get into melee with the swarmlord so they have successfully charged they'll move their seven inches to get at least one model within an inch of their target to engage them and that will be the end of their charge phase once you've charged with all of the models in your army that you'd want to you don't necessarily have to charge with everyone if you don't want to once all your charges are complete we'll move to the fight phase which is where your models actually go ahead and attack now the important thing to note about the fight phase is that unlike the other phases of the game where you are selecting your units to do things your opponent also gets to act in the fight phase although to a lesser extent now the fight phase is essentially broken up into three sequences of activation the fight first step the fight normally step and the fight last step there are a lot of abilities in the game including charging which allow you to fight first or make enemies fight last during the fight phase and if you have one of those abilities active on you you will be fighting during that step if you have abilities of both kinds on you then you would be fighting during the fight normally step and if you didn't charge or don't have any other abilities that allow you to fight first in the fight phase then you would end up fighting during the fight normal step in this case because the tactical marine squad charge they would be fighting during the fight first step during each of the steps you alternate activating with units that fight during that step of the fight phase so for example because the space range charged and they are fighting first we get to select them during the fight first step of the fight phase then if your opponent had a unit that had a fight first ability they would get to choose to do one then you would continue to do your other charging or fight first unit once you're done with all those you go back and forth with your opponent selecting your fight normally units to fight the difference being that unlike the fight first and fight last steps where the active player selects the first unit to fight during the fight normally step the other player gets to select units to fight so if for example the tactical squad and the swarmlord had been in melee previously and neither of them had charged this turn then during the space marine turn the tyranid player would get to select swarmlord to fight first but because in this case the tactical marines charged they're going to be swinging at the top of the phase when you select a unit to fight there's a couple movements they perform and this is where a lot of the interesting parts of the fight phase and fight phase interaction happen during the fight phase your units will perform both a pilot and consolidate and both of these moves are performed in the same way they allow the unit to move three inches such that each model moves closer to the nearest enemy model in this case it's pretty easy because the swarmlord is the only model nearby but it does get a little bit complicated if for example you have a hormagant unit also engaging you in that case this tactical marine over here with the melting gun would have to end closer to swarmlord because that was the closest model when he started moving but this marine with the bolt gun over here would have to move towards the hormagans because they were the closest when he started keep in mind that it's on a per model basis so you measure from each of your models to each of your opponent's models not from unit to unit and you don't necessarily have to be traveling closer the entire time you just have to end closer which allows your models to perform some interesting maneuvers to move around or to make other models closer for their subsequent movements once all of your models have performed a pile and move they will get to attack with their weapons each model can target a unit that's either within an inch of them or within a half an inch of another model in their unit that's within half an inch of them so in this case for example this tactical marine with the bulk guns within an inch of the hormagans which means he could attack them with his melee attacks this tactical marine is not within an inch of the hormone guns however he's within a half an inch of the bolt gun model over here who is within half an inch of the hormones which means he could allocate his attacks to the hormagans alternatively he is within an inch of the swarmlord which means that he could attack the swarmboat if he wanted as well similarly the space marine sergeant in the back here is within half an inch of this bolt gun tactical marine who is also within half an inch of the swarmlord which means he could allocate his attacks to the swarmlord now the allocation and sequencing of attacks in the fight phase phases almost identical to the shooting phase as long as you satisfy one of the qualifiers that we talked about previously you're within an inch or within half an inch of half an inch of a enemy unit you can allocate your attacks to that unit you do not need line of sight but the attacks are performed identically to the shooting phase otherwise some types of cover will benefit you in the fight phase heavy cover for example gives you plus one to your save if you did not charge in that fight phase although light cover does not so keep in mind that things that often provide protection in the shooting phase will not do so in the fight phase now unlike shooting where the weapon will tell you the number of attacks you make with that particular profile in the fight phase you have a number of attacks with a model that you can allocate to make with any of the weapons equipped with that model if a model doesn't have any weapons equipped on its data sheet it always makes what's called a close combat weapon attack which just uses its normal strength with no other bonuses no ap value and just a single damage in this case the space marines aren't equipped with any particular special weapons which means they'll just be using their normal close combat weapons except the sergeant will assume that he has a chain sword which will give him an additional attack and have a point of ap now space marines get to make two attacks when they charge and we can allocate them thusly the model back here as well as the sergeant can attack the swarmlord whereas the three models over here if they want to could attack the hormagans each making two attacks for a total of six again we can fast ice roll the hits and wounds together so against the hormagans we would be rolling needing a three plus to hit because of the space marine's weapon skill a pretty good roll there they would all hit and because their strength is higher than the toughness value of the hormagans we would need a three two wound in this case two of them would fail to wound which means four wounds would be allocated to the hormagans the defending player would then choose which models would be taking the wounds in this case we'll just start with the models in the back and they will take their six up save so this model would succeed he would have to be allocated a second wound because he was already allocated a wound this turn they only have a six up save in the hormones so that would kill this model we can move to the next one remove that one and then the last one remove that one as well that finishes the attacks against the hormagans we do have six attacks coming from these models into the swarmlord now we said that the sergeant has a chainsword so we use the red dice to represent him when attacking the swarmlord here and because we have different weapon profiles we do need to roll them separately so the chainsword attacks against the swarmlord will all hit needing three plus to hit on that weapon skill of three needing a five or a six to wound because of the swarm lord's high toughness which is higher than the space green strength of four means only one wound would go through the swarm mode would be taking that at a minus one ap value for the profile of the starte's chain sword which means his normal save of three plus would need a four plus to pass the test go ahead and do some rolling here and he would end up passing that we have two normal attacks from the last remaining space marine that will fast roll together one of them will miss not being a three plus and then a five or a six to wound with that attack pretty good we do wound no ap value on that hit though so we're gonna try to roll a three plus to save with the swarm alert and he doesn't and now it's actually going to bring him down to five wounds now after all of the attacks in the fight phase get rolled out each of those space marines is going to be making a consolidate move this it works exactly like the pile in move we just did which means they get to move three inches as long as they end closer to their target so you can see that the fight phase is a really good way to get additional distance up the table if you want to move to objectives engage enemy ranged attacks anything like that the fight phase is a really good way to do it since not only do you get a bunch of extra distance from charging but you can actually move each of those models up to six inches now that your charging units have gone your units that fight normally will go starting with your opponent so in this case the opponent could choose to either fight with the hormones or the swarmlord it is pretty important to choose which ones to fight first because in this case if the swarmlord fights first and he's able to kill any of the space marines the defending player could choose to take the wounds on this space marine and kill him which means that the hormagans would no longer be able to attack you can only choose models that either have charged or are currently engaged with an enemy unit to attack and because the hormone guns didn't charge it not being their turn and assuming the space marine died they would not be within an inch of any space marines they would not be in melee and therefore not be an eligible target so you do have to keep the potential results of your fight phase activations in mind when you're selecting which units to fight with now one thing to keep in mind is that if you charge during the charge phase like these space marines did you would not be able to select units you did not charge as targets of your attacks so even if for example the space marines had charged the swarmlord but piled in such that they engaged the hormagans but had not cleared the hor declared the hormones as a charge target they would not be able to attack the hormones the hormones however have not charged the stern which means they're under no such restriction and could go in and attack the space marines if they wanted to another thing that's important to note is that if you are eligible to fight you actually cannot choose not to you are required to make your attacks even though you aren't required to pilot or consolidate if you don't want to in addition if you have any melee weapons on your profile you have to use those profiles you're not allowed to use a regular close combat weapon attack if you are carrying a more powerful weapon once your fight phase is complete and the fight phase is over we'll move to the final phase of your turn this is the morale phase the morale phase is when we see if anybody runs away either from not having anybody's near him or the unit having taken casualties and their nerve just breaking starting with the player whose turn it is so in this case the space marine player each player will take a morale check for units that have received any casualties this turn when taking a morale check you roll one d6 and add the number of models that have died this turn to it so in this case we would roll a three with plus one because a space marine died meaning we would get a four the goal is to have that final result be equal to or under your leadership characteristic now fortunately space marines are pretty tough to get rid of so they have a leadership characteristic of eight as long as they have a sergeant which means that a four is going to be significantly below if the result is below your leadership characteristic then the check is passed which means that unit doesn't take any additional casualties and we move on to the next unit in this case we'll take a leadership check for these hormones now i will note because i know there's going to be a comment that tyranids normally have an ability that makes them immune to morale but for the purposes of demonstration here we're gonna take a leadership check for these hormagons now their leadership is terrible being little spindly beastly boys only a leadership value of five and they lost three models which means we're gonna have to roll pretty low in order to pass our check now in this case we would actually pass a two plus three models being removed would be a five which is equal to their leadership value which means we'd pass now if we drove a three here that would have beaten their leadership value in which case they fail the check now this is where things get bad assuming that they fail first off as soon as you fail a borrow check one of your models runs away it doesn't matter if it has full wounds left doesn't matter if it hasn't been damaged at all that turn they just their nerve breaks and they flee the scene after that we take what's called a combat attrition test this is where we roll individually to see if each of the remaining bottles in the unit is going to stick around in this case you roll 1d6 all together for each model remaining in the unit and for each result of a one one of those models is gonna flee if your unit is below half string so if we were down to only five models you would add one to your die roll which means you would run away on a one or a two instead of just a one but in this case we're just looking for ones so we're gonna roll two ones in a roll which means two additional hormones are gonna run away you can see for low leadership relatively high all account armies these combat attrition tests can be pretty brutal but obviously for things like space marines they're kind of brave so they shall know no fear and all that now this takes into account every model that was killed not just models killed during the fight phase you would add all of the models that you removed for that the entire turn for your leadership check that turn now at the end of the moral phase where it's we're going to do what's called a coherency check now i mentioned before your units do have to stay within coherency and you can't intentionally move them out of coherency if there was a move that would take them such that the unit is no longer within that two inches or two inches of two models then they simply cannot complete that move they would basically be knocked back to wherever their last legal position was however you are not required to take casualties on models that wouldn't put you out of coherency so for example if i was going to take all of these casualties on the horicons i could choose to pull them like this in which case we would have a hormagan not within two inches of a buddy in this case we're going to do a coherency check and we're going to remove models from the unit until they are remaining in coherency if the unit is really strung out that means that you will just have to remove them down to a single model in which case he has no buddies to draw coherency to so he's going to be okay so in some situations if you pull casualties in a funky way you could potentially be dealing a lot of additional damage to yourself and in some situations you just have your units strung out really far and a bad coherency could be pretty brutal for you for example if we have a unit of 10 models strung out like this in order to cover more table space and we have buddies for the guys in the end here but not necessarily the guys in the middle they can still draw their two-inch coherency to two other models in the chain but if we lose this one model then suddenly this guy's out of coherency which means he's he's going to have to be removed which puts this guy out of coherency which means he's going to have to be removed and we keep doing that until we're down to just five models in which case we use the two inches of a single friendly instead of two inches of two rule for coherency that you use for units of six or greater so generally speaking it's good to keep most of your unit in these tighter formations so that those coherency checks don't brutalize you if you lose one too many models but once that coherency check is complete your turn is done you move over to the opponent's turn and they will do the exact same sequence of actions starting with their command phase and doing all their command phase stuff moving on to movement then psychic shooting charge fight and morale in the exact same way after your opponent does all of their activations just like you did the battle round is over and you will move to the next battle round at the end of five battle rounds the game will be over and whoever has scored the most victory points based on the mission you're playing will be the victor so that is a not so brief rundown of all of the core mechanics in warhammer 40k that's essentially how you set up and play a very basic game of warhammer 40k without taking into account some of the more specialized rules in future videos i'm going to cover like i said some of the more specific rules we're going to talk about some of the special rules especially pertaining to units like characters who have a lot of special abilities over and above normal unit types we're also going to talk about missions and exactly how scoring and getting vp's work choosing secondary objectives scoring primary objectives all of that stuff is going to be in future videos of the series go ahead and let me know down in the comments down below if you found this style of video helpful and if you would like to have more tutorial content on warhammer 40 000. if you'd like some more deep dive content another quick reminder to check out the advanced tactics series that we have both on patreon and as a youtube membership benefit and you can check out both of those if you want to support the channel as well i really appreciate everyone who's jumped on there anyway i hope that you found this video useful stay tuned for the next one remember to keep it classy folks and have happy wargaming

Channel: TacticalTortoise

Views: 16,626

Keywords: warhammer, warhammer 40k, 40k, warhammer 40000, tabletop titans, tacticaltortoise, auspex tactics, how to play, tutorial, learn to play, how to play 40k, how to play warhammer, space marines, astartes, tyranids

Id: ULe_iHiCFgc

Length: 51min 45sec (3105 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 19 2021