// BATTLE PRINCIPLES
The 15 Rules.
25 years of military doctrine. Hundreds of tournament rounds. Thousands of games. These are the principles that survived.
B.H. Liddell Hart
“The principles of war are few and simple. Their application is the art.”
// DOMAIN I
Before the Battle
Planning & Preparation
Know the meta before you build the list
Sun Tzu: know your enemy before the battle begins. List building without meta analysis is hope, not strategy.
Objective first, force second
What are you trying to achieve? The mission dictates the force composition. Reverse engineering a list from a cool unit is not strategy.
Plan for friction, not against it
Clausewitz said no plan survives contact with the enemy. The plan that assumes perfect execution will fail first.
Study your opponent before the game starts
Tournament pairings are intelligence opportunities. What do they play? What does their faction want to do? What breaks their doctrine?
The indirect approach wins more than frontal assault
Liddell Hart: attack where the enemy isn't looking. The obvious move is the one they've planned for.
// DOMAIN II
On the Battlefield
Execution
OODA faster than your opponent can adapt
Observe, Orient, Decide, Act — and cycle back before they can respond to your last move.
Secure objectives before pursuing kills
Tournament Warhammer is scored on objectives, not casualties. The player chasing kills loses on points while winning on kills.
Protect your center of gravity
Every army has one thing that makes it work. The opponent knows it too. Protect it or you lose without a fight.
Apply decisive force at the critical point
Concentration of force at the right moment wins more than distributing it evenly across all threats.
Never reinforce failure
If a flank is lost, don't throw more resources at it. Redeploy. Adapt. The impulse to recover a lost position destroys more armies than the initial loss.
// DOMAIN III
After the Battle
Learning
Do a post-game debrief on every loss
Not to feel bad about it. To extract the lesson. A loss that produces no lesson is a loss that will repeat.
Identify which principle you violated
Losses have a cause. It's always a principle that was ignored, forgotten, or overridden by impatience. Find the principle.
Update the list, not just the mindset
Strategic learning must produce material changes. A lesson that only changes how you feel changes nothing in the next game.
The meta rotates. The doctrine doesn't.
What wins changes every patch. Why it wins is always the same. Study the why.
Teach what you've learned
The surest test of whether you've internalized a principle is whether you can explain it to someone else. @architectofwar exists because of this.