Attrition, Assassination and Scenario

I'll start by talking about Kreoss3 (Threeos?). The model releases today but literally the only picture of it is this one from Matt Wilsons's twitter.

Weird. 

EDIT: As of 4:15pm still no pictures of the model anywhere on the internet. The Menoth forums are pretty funny at the moment, quite a few people have the model but no one has posted a photo of it together yet. 

There are really only two ways to win a game of warmachine: assassination and scenario but there is a third way to approach the game and that is attrition. This post is going to be part of a series of posts, I'm going to go into detail about the three styles of play, I want to organise my thoughts on the subject as much as I want to share them. This first post I want to give a broad definition of the three different types of playstyle so you can understand why they are different.

Assassination

An assassination playstyle is focussed solely on killing the opponents caster. Generally in order to get an assassination to work you need to sacrifice models the turn before (you often have to bait out other models or make a caster spend their resources) and then if you fail an assassination the models you used for that will generally die too. You can generally build an assassination with a high chance of success but if you fail you have lost the game. At the very least your games are quicker. Distances are very important for assassination players. If I ask you to tell me how far your caster moves turn 1 (something I am allowed to do) there is a minimum number I'm looking for, anything more than that and the assassination is on. There are quite a few casters who will assassinate on the first turn if they have gone second. This is really not my playstyle but it is a lot of fun. Probably not so much fun for the other guy.

Scenario

There are some similarities in playing for scenario to playing for assassination. The biggest is that you are willing to throw away your own models without killing things. In an assassination game you do that to increase the odds of assassinating, in a scenario game you do that in order to score a point. Invariably if you are playing for a scenario win you will lose the attrition war. You almost always sacrifice the alpha strike in order to control the zone and often you're using significant resources just to hold a point when they could be killing enemy models. Attrition players will often let you score a point in order to kill more of your army rather than wasting models contesting. Control casters are particularly good at scenario, anything that allows an opponent to slow down your models, or stop them from moving to or to allow you to move your opponents models is huge for scenario. While I can play assassination and do really enjoy it my attempts to play scenario style lists have thus far quickly degenerated into attrition. When I have won by scenario it's been because my attrition list is also good at scenario play (this may be why I have problems with Grim Angus).

Attrition

This is the way I generally play. To play attrition you need to keep in mind that you need to win via assassination or scenario so you need to keep those options on the table, you list must be able to do as least one of those. Generally though what you are doing is looking each turn to concentrate your force, remove important models and stop your opponent from doing as much damage as possible on their counter attack.