Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace, by Edward N. Luttwak. It's military focused for the most part, but there's lots of good insights in it for anyone that's in a competitive relationship with another person or group. It's going to provide fodder for a lot of future posts, that's for sure. :)
While reading it, I started to wonder... If one were to list all of the competencies that go into making someone a good 40K player, what would they be?
Well, let's list them:
The Strategic category includes everything you do on or off-table before the game begins. From research on Odds to planning out your lists.
1) List Efficiency
2) Knowing Your Weapons (Odds & Probabilities)
3) List Redundancy (Risk Reduction)
4) List Focus (Having Set Roles)
5) Unit Flexibility (Sometimes Called Duality)
6) Strategic List Flexibility
7) Deployment Planning
8) Game-Phase Planning (What does each unit do when?)
9) Competitive Objective Placement
10) Strategic Misdirection (Not Lying)
11) Knowing Your Units
12) Knowing All your Enemy's Codices
13) Understanding the Top-Level (not just local) Metagame
14) Knowing When To Seek Failure
The Tactical category includes everything you do on-table during a game to ensure that one unit prevails over another. If Strategy is the big-picture 10,000 foot view, then Tactics are the micro-view from ground level.
1) Rules Familiarity
2) Effective Movement
3) Proper Target Priority and Focusing Fire
4) Multi-Charging Your Assaults
5) Effective Blocking and Delaying
6) Properly Understanding True Line of Sight and Cover
7) How to Pull Models For Advantage
8) How to Shape Assault Moves To Your Advantage
9) Becoming Objective Focused
10) Knowing Your Opponent's Army.
11) Knowing What Your Opponent Must Do
12) Learning To Estimate Distances
13) Timing Your Advances Properly
14) Proper Use of Reserves
15) Proper Deep-Strike Defense
16) Reading Your Opponent
Added by sonsoftaurus:
17) Knowing When Not To Shoot
18) Knowing When Not To Assault
Added by Chumby:
19) Multi-Turn Maneuvers (Or, thinking 1-2 turns ahead)
What do you think? Am I missing anything? If we can come up with a fairly complete list, then I (and others) can start discussing the details of each competency in greater detail, one article at a time.