Designing for Doubles

So I'm taking a little break from my last crack obsession, Dragon Age: Origins. I know it is probably weird to hear some of us play things other then table tops but it's true and might I say that game is down right addicting.

Back to what I wanted to talk about today. Playing in Doubles Tournaments and how best to design your army. Now let me be the first to say that I've not actually played Doubles but next weekend I'll be participating in my first game. And because of that I've been thinking about the best way to go about it for the past couple weeks, not full time of course.

First let's examine what the different ways of choosing armies for doubles.

1. Fluff - Armies that will play nice together, Sister's of Battle and IG can go around burnanating the country side and you wouldn't have any reason not to see them doing it. On the other hand if you saw a Hive Tyrant and a Librarian Holding Hands on the Love boat you might be wondering what's going on.

2. My army has X which goes great with Y's bonuses. Now I know what you guys are thinking, it's obvious that an Epidemus army and Nurgle CSM army would benefit greatly from each other, and let me tell you if I had that I'd probably end up playing it. But in the game tourney I'm playing they've abolished all of these little combos by saying your abilities can only affect your army.

Which brings us to;

3. I own army X and my friend owns army Y. Because this is what is most likely to be occurring for most tournament this is what I'll examine deeper.

So for this tournament each person will share 1 Force Organization Chart and be given 750 Points to use.

First things first, ask your friend what he's playing, and decide what are you will be playing. From there try to think of the strengths of each army. If you're playing as SM you have very tough troops, 3+ armor saves, each unit being able to become 2 different scoring units is a very big bonus.

SM also have some of the strongest armor in the game, AV 14 Landraiders can be extreamly powerful, but is the cost worth it?

Now let's say the other army is Eldar, what is it that Eldar have that makes them special. They have special units that can fill any role. My first thought was using Howling Banshees in a Land Raider, can you imagine that pain of that rolling up :D But unfortunantly that's disallowed from this tournament.

The Goal being to have 2 seperate armies fighting together, not creating 1 army from 2 different codexes.

So after determining the strengths of each army you should decide on what the goal is for your team. Are you trying to play a Gun Line, a Mobile Force, or something that can move from one to the other.

With that in mind, then start picking the best units from each codex and building something that will feel in the weaknesses of the other. And if that fails, build yourself something you'll have fun playing and tell you friend the same.

At the moment we're still argueing our strategy a little but I think we're close at hand. The tourny is in a Week and I'll share what I lrean from that.

-Mike