Take & Hold! Keeping control of your primary points in competitive Warhammer 40,000

Primary points are the simplest way to win a game, so why is it so DAMN hard to keep a hold of them? Toby breaks down the easiest ways you can ensure to get the best primary score and deny your opponent from getting too many.

Every battlefield set up has a centre, an expansion and a “hostile” objective, defining which units are going to be able to contest each one is critical. Understanding why a unit might be good at holding each will allow you to take or at least contest the primary objectives which at the very least will deny your opponent critical points. 

Your expansion objective is the objective closest to your deployment zone or where terrain protects the objective better for you than it does your opponent. The key to holding this is locking the objective down early with a unit that is hard to shift. Seems easy right, but a lot of the time these units are slow and have to make a dangerous trek across no man’s land first. So you need to get a unit on the expansion objective early to cover that advance and distract your opponent from approaching tanky unit. The de-facto best way to do this is with an infiltrating unit. You block off your opponent’s ability to deploy in your safer area of the board with counter infiltrators and you stop scout moves getting closer than 9 inches to the area of the board too. If this option isn’t available to you, think about your own scouting or fast moving unit. A great example of this comes from jump pack units, it’s why you’ll see so many Warp Talons, Jump Pack Assault Intercessors and Storm Boyz featuring in armies. The ability to skirmish onto primary points early with a quick move, usually coupled with a nasty charge to follow up allows around 19 inches of movement which becomes even longer if there’s access to advance and charge. In the dream world where you just roll 6s, your jump pack unit can go 32 inches with an advance and charge, which is nothing to be sniffed at. The downfall of these units tends to be that they aren’t very good at surviving, so the best way to use these units is to lure your opponent into charging them to either deny your primary or to just kill a scoring unit which will then allow you to slingshot your durable unit up the board with a charge. So that also gives away the fact that if your tough unit can punch and shoot or just punch real hard, that’s the better option for making sure you secure your expansion objective. Bonus points if you set up a heroic intervention with your slower unit to help your poor jump packs not get squashed too hard! 

An example of map from UKTC marking the different type of objective.

Now, the hostile objective is one of the harder objectives to breach but if you do, you’re likely to be able to break your opponent’s back. So the first question you need to ask yourself is “can I feasibly take this from my opponent or do I just need to deny it?”. Of course, the ideal is to take it off your opponent and score from it, but that’s extremely difficult for most armies to achieve. So let’s talk about denying, as this is far more achievable. Using cheap, fast infantry units can help you stage, launch quick countering moves to either block your opponent’s expansion or just keep putting equal or more OC onto the objective so they are unable to score it. Remember you don’t have to kill your opponent off an objective to stop them scoring it, just don’t let them control it by standing on the objective. Sure, they kill your unit the next turn, but they have to commit a unit to kill what is likely a very cheap chuck-away unit and you’ve still denied their primary points for that objective for a turn. This is where your cheap battleline / 2OC units are great, things like Assault intercessors, legionaries or gretchin absolutely thrive in this role, just causing far more problems than they deserve to for the points you spent on them. Seizing these objectives and holding them is far more difficult but it can be done. We won’t devote too much time to this, but if you have a brutal fights first unit or an extremely tanky and high OC unit, then this is where they might thrive. These units come at a premium though and you’re placing them in an incredibly vulnerable position, so be aware how you approach this and don’t risk losing a high value unit just to deny a turn of primary, your opponent might be trying to bait you! 

Finally, trying to hold the centre objective… this tends to be quite a tough one, in most games it ends up being a brutal war of attrition mixed with a little bit of luck. This one is a bit of a mix of both expansion and hostile, as you want to make sure you’re denying the middle, but the problem is there’s so many gun lines to the centre of the board you’re likely to get peppered with shooting. So, a great way to do this is to set up a small cheap unit on the centre, your opponent will be forced to commit if they don’t want you to get easy points which forces them to use a resource to deal with a unit you aren’t overly bothered about losing. Once again, units like Assault intercessors, gretchin or Catachans are brilliant at acting as a cheap chuck-away unit that forces a response from your opponent. You really want to follow up though with a more durable unit or two to then secure the middle after the coast is a little more clear. That moment being after most units have utterly torn each other apart. Deathwing Knights, Vindicators or dreadnoughts fit this role exceptionally well. 

So there you have it! Hopefully this short guide on scoring primary points will help you improve your scores. If you want more in-depth tailored support on scoring, then you can apply for Battle Brother coaching here.