Reliability in 40K

My attitude towards 40k has morphed steadily as I’ve become more and more focussed on generalship and tournament play.
I used to include things in my army that could work brilliantly but were also capable of failing horribly (warp spiders and farseers in particular, harlies w/ Maugan Ra and Eldrad also suffer the same issue) and their failure generally caused army-wide failure, or ‘system-failure’ as I like to think of it.
Nowadays I don’t. I have become steadily more and more risk averse. More focussed on armies that actually deliver exactly what your math-hammer tells you they will. My lists have become far more simple, which is a huge change for me.
In non-tournament, non-competitive play, I love to indulge the side of my mind that revels in unexpected combinations of abilities and tactics, particularly to try and exhaust the list of concept lists that I have in my mind from the various codices that I’ve read lots and only got to play a handful of times.
But for tournaments I want reliability. I want to be pretty damn sure that the tactics can be carried out by the army without a system-failure.
This is, I think, the primary reason I’m now playing double autarch.
Lots of people play Eldar with farseers pretty much just for the psychic defence (which I think is false economy, but each to their own, i still wheel out Eldrad from time to time), playing with either one autarch or none.
Yet those same players almost always state that their standard going second tactic is to reserve everything.
That doesn’t work for me. I hate the possibility of my entire game being ruined by a string of bad rolls on turn 2.
Even with a single autarch, it’s still quite common for you to only get 50% of your force (about a 14% chance of exactly 5 out of 10, the cumulative prob that you’ll get 5 or less is about 21.3% for those playing along at home, one in every five games). It won’t happen often but it’s still something that will pop up every tournament given the 6 game tournaments that are common over here (Western Australia) at 2000 points.
Really, I drew the line at 7 out of 10. I want to be getting 70% of my force in one go (or more) if possible. Then you can rely on getting 2 dragons, 2 walkers and several dire avenger squads. Using a single autarch, you’re sitting on about a 55% chance of getting 7 or more out of 10.....so every second game I would get less than 7. Not my thing. Particularly when the three things that don’t show up are all fire dragons.
Now, if you go to two autarchs the odds of you getting 7 or more out of 10 jumps up to 93% which is not even comparable with single autarch. So using two I get 7 or more of my 10 units in about 17 out of every 18 games, meaning one game in every 3 tournaments I don’t get 7 or more. That’s what I consider to be reliable. You can base your tactics on that and be pretty sure it’s not going to be the factor that screws you.
It’s the basis of all competitive lists in a way.
You don’t really spam because it’s always the best option, in fact it’s quite rare that what you are spamming is the best thing you can take at that role (Fire Dragons are the most obvious example). It’s often the most efficient, but sometimes it may not be the most efficient, it may just be the choice that allows you to have redundancy through being cheaper (not the same as more efficient) and accomplishing almost the same thing as the expensive version.
Is reliability the same thing as redundancy? No. However the two principles DO play into one another quite heavily.
The game is full of factors that are unpredictable, the terrain, mission, location of objectives, moves of your opponent, what the dice will serve up....all of these things are critical to a game and mean that you simply can’t be certain that your super-unit will be where it needs to be when you need it to be there. To counter that, you take multiples of the things you think you’ll need, even if it means downgrading each one.
This is IMPORTANT. Why? Because it means that the redundancy and ‘spamming’ you see in a lot of lists is actually a response to the environment that the composer expects.
If you change the environment then spamming and heavy redundancy isn’t necessarily the best response.
Do you need multiple moderate close combat threats on a 4’ by 4’ table with one central objective? Probably not, one REALLY good CC threat is probably more effective in this case since you’ll be pretty bloody certain of where it’s going to be needed and it’s unlikely your opponent will get the chance to stop it before it gets there. In that situation you may be better off with one big fuck-off unit since you can reliably deliver it exactly where you want it to go, you can depend on having that tool at your disposal when you need it.
If the board is spread out and there are going to be 5 objectives all over the shop, one big squad of terminators becomes a liability. You can’t be sure where you’ll need it, meaning you can’t rely on it being there when you need it, hence you can’t reliably base your tactics on its use.
There is more to be said on this topic and you’ll probably see this as a common thread in many different posts. Just keep in mind, that when I say reliable, it has a specific meaning in game terms.