The Pillage Mission (Battle Missions)

With 1 point per objective secured per turn, the pillage mission published in battle missions make for an interesting scenario. I've played this mission a couple of times now (including before battle missions was even published!) and I wanted to share my thoughts with you about it.

The first thing to note is that this mission does not entirely see the end of the tactic of swooping in on objectives on turn 5 that many of us are used to employing. It can help here, as I discuss below, but other considerations apply. The inference of that thought is that we need to re-think the objective placement to begin with. Personally, I'm used to concentrating objectives in my opponents half of the board (following Fritz's advice posted on The Way of Saim-Hann) and that has succeeded for me a good number of time (see my daemons battle report). Now, this may still work if you're playing daemons, or another 100% deep-striking army such as Death Wing, but in general, I'm not sure it is going to be productive.

Whatever army is in use, I would urge you to think of this mission in the same way that you might a standard capture and control mission. That, I find, is the key to pillage.

All we have to do to win pillage (or capture and control for that matter) is score more points (have more objectives) than your opponent. This means that you must match (at minimum) the same points as your opponent up to the final turns. Or deny them the same number of points from strategic placement of your advanced (infiltrating? fast?) units.

Hence, if your opponent is using lots of scouting, infiltrating units, placement of your objective close to your board edge may not be terribly helpful if your opponent is simply going to contest it early. Conversely, it would pay us dividends to do this to your opponent. I personally like to use a unit of chaos chosen in a rhino for this - they come on the board and deny my opponent a few objective points every turn. With that in mind, placing a few objectives close to the opposing board edge (or corner) will help this stratagem.

Assuming we roughly keep up with the number of objective points, then turn 5 can be played in the usual manner of swooping in on all the objectives. By making sure we deny the opponent the extra points in the final turn (and having at least one objective of our own), the game's outcome should be in hand.

I'd be interested to hear how you handled this mission if you've had a go at it.