Secondary Objectives

 In the previous post, I spoke about the importance of troops for primary objectives. Of course the opposite side of the coin is the secondary objectives. Like primary objectives these can generate up to 15 points per turn up to a maximum of 45 points per game.

The secondary objectives split into different categories and you can only pick up to a maximum of one per category:

• Purge the enemy
• No Mercy, No Respite
• Battlefield Supremacy
• Warpcraft
• Shadow Operations
• Mission specific objectives

Careful consideration of which objectives should be taken as if you can create a synergy between the primary and secondary missions then you can score points for primary and secondary objectives at the same time. With the focus on trying to claim primary objectives at the forefront of my mind I tend to be running quite mobile armies, troops in transports. Owing to this it means that I will nearly always pick a secondary from Battlefield Supremacy.

Warpcraft I think is potentially the most interesting objective, if you aren't taking any pyskers then you'll probably not want to take any from this, unless you are facing an army of pyskers in which case there may be a kill the witch style objective. The other side of this is do you want to spend you turns with your psyker doing psychic actions, rather than dealing out damage to the enemy. My view is that for space marines the points cost of a librarian makes this a bit of a sub-optimal use of points, doubly so if you spend the cost for named characters - imagine Magnus just sitting casting Mental Interrogation for an entire game. 

However, I don't really have such a qualm with my troops doing actions as they are only included in my lists to hold primary objectives, so if they are doing that and something else than that is a bonus. Though again you need to think about what the best use of the points are, a full ten-man tactical squad all tooled up might be better shooting than sitting still doing actions (though you could always split the squad into combat squads and leave one half objective sitting while the other goes off and kills stuff - or sit on another objective!).

Each of the secondary objectives have a different points that they are worth so a balance needs to be struck between generating the lower points easier objectives vs the higher point harder ones. You could be in the position where you cannot generate enough points to hang with your opponent purely through objective selection.