Planning your Turn

Some things I also do are to prepare all of my spell tokens (with how much fury it costs to cast) and animus in advance. As the enemy Turn is going on I will reorder them in front of me to help me recognize who needs to be activated and when.

I'd like to see a notes section in War Room that would allow me to take/save notes before and during a war. If it could drag and drop bepending on what order I need to activate it would be even better.

Until then... I've been making and saving notes of my expectations for my most popular armies. It sounds strange but having a thought out and written expectation of what I might do beforehand helps me dramatically during the game.

For instance... in my Calandra list I want to activate her last so she can cast soothing song and take a fury of each beast. I still want my runebearer to go before her of course, but if he's befuddling something into range I want him to go before my beasts. I have a separate note for feat turn. I want Calandra to activate first so everything has access to her feat that turn (including the runebearer if befuddling).

Well, celeb, I guess I'm jealous of you because I've been playing the game for about two years and I'm still slow as a wheelbarrow on the freeway with my turns. I do prepare tokens and try to plan during my opponent's turn, but more often than not, his final move will change everything, requiring me to re-plan anyway. I think I'm basically doing your 1/2/3/4 technique, and in doing so, I'm deciding which models need to activate in which order. If I don't think my jack will be able to get to an opponent, why would I max out its focus? Allocation by its nature requires some degree of planning ahead. I'm actually planning less than you lay out, but it takes me longer. I just wish I knew how to do it more quickly. Thanks for the tips though.

I'm in the "plan during your opponents turn" camp as well as "play some timed games". You've let yourself play slow because you had the "luxury" of doing so. Forcing yourself to play a couple deathclock or timed turns games will make you play faster. Nothing worse than being a player who is used to playing on clock and your opponent taking 40 minutes on one turn.

How did the game go?

He was a cool guy, and I got to see Ret on the table for the first time. I brought Nemo1 in Heavy Metal and he brought Issyria. He conceded after his turn 5 because I'd taken out so much of his army and I still had four heavies on the table. I got to learn how badass two units of House Guard Halbardiers are, and ended up glad that I'd brought a cyclone, which I rarely do.

In terms of the time thing, since I took photos, I can analyze turn lengths by the photos' time stamps, but since I missed a turn 2 photo, I don't know how to divide up the 58 minutes that our turn 2s took. As for the rest, his turn 1 took 13 minutes and mine took 18 minutes. His turn 3 took 27 minutes and my turn 3 took 35 minutes. His turn 4 took 17 minutes and mine took 24 minutes. I was consistently taking 7-8 minutes longer than he was. Given that I'm a horribly slow player, I'm counting "only 7-8 minutes more" as a victory here. I took a total of 77 minutes plus turn two, and he took 57 minutes plus turn two.

So I need to continue to improve in terms of time. At least I took a relatively low-model count army, and the one I'm most familiar with.

throwing in my few pennies even though the topic is pretty much obsolete... Newer player games at 75pts generally take 2-4h as they are constantly running through all the rules and thinking of all the possible things they can do with these cool new pieces that have been laid out for them! People who play at tournaments generally have almost the entire rule book as well as all of their stat cards memorized, including combinations between the pieces while taking into account different possible board layouts that might change your actions (like whether you should engage a ranged unit or focus fire on a bonded jack). They also do this... with 2-3 lists x.x (why I've never been to anything but steamrollers) This cuts the time of games in half, as each time someone does something you don't need to go "wait a second" and pull out the rule book or bring up a card. This "pre-pre planning" for even post events really keeps your turns flowing. It also works REALLY well with people, such as yourself, who has to have everything set up before even playing a turn... now you have the entire GAME planned before the GAME even happens Some people need to lay out their pieces on a board to do this. Others (world tourny players anyone?) actually set a board up in their head and keep playing through possible scenarios every night. I even know a guy who reads the cards in the warroom every night like it was the bible; he's the second best player in our group.

TBH, most games on the "death clock" level are generally over by the 3rd turn. First turn is set up, second turn is baiting and set up for the 3rd round, third turn is alpha and assassination. The games that go over that are STILL generally over by the 5th round and are scenario point based. This means, with an assassination list, you can still spend 15 minutes a turn and safely make it into the 4th round if you still need to clean up your mess. It's when you make a list for point based purposes that you really need to cut down your time, as even taking 10 minutes a turn can be cutting it close. The way to end games by points without breaking the 1h death clock (major competitions are 45-1h for the first round, then 1h until the final match which generally gets a bit extra) is to speed up your dice rolling, distance measuring, and mechanics of that nature. An example is when you are facing a Menoth fire based list; every one of your units can be ignited on the same turn. This means you first have to roll to see if the fire goes out, then roll again to see if you take damage and how much. 30 infantry models? that's a minimum of 30 rolls you have to do on your turn BEFORE you even activate. Even at 1 second per roll, that's 30 seconds with 1 additional roll every time you fail to roll out the flames, and everyone knows it's going to take longer than 1 second a roll. A player in my meta made a roll box for his dice to speed up this process. Basically, every time he needs to roll, instead of rolling on the board, he rolls in a condensed box. Instead of the dice "rolling" he tosses them into the box and let the banking do the rolling for him. He also has multiple colors of dice so he can roll "if it hits" and "what damage it deals" at the same time; he claims which color is what and starts rolling. Other players have metal rings that are exactly 3 inches, 4 inches, or 5 inches. The fact that they are rings makes it much easier to determine what is "in" and what is "out" of the circle. Wooden bases to determine movement without someone thinking you're proxying, pre-measuring distances after your opponent has settled on his course of action, and being able to judge length by eye (within 1/32nd of an inch is pretty good) is also a great way to shorten the time. (my father, a former inspector at a sterilization equipment plant, was able to measure things by 1/100th of a millimeter, roughly the thickness of 1 sheet of notebook paper, by eye. However, he had been using calipers to measure things for over a decade before he could do that)