~ For those who seek knowledge, wisdom is their reward ~

A Personal Overview 
Blood Angels Assault Tactics

     The Blood Angels are an extremely powerful army (as is any Space Marine army), but even we have our difficulties, difficulties which are shared by all assault armies.

     The classic weakness for all assault themed 40k armies is our inherent weakness to shooting - by devoting so much of our emphasis to assault capability we're inherently vulnerable to shooty armies. There are tricks to compensating for this of course, but a well played shooty army can be a true nightmare for Blood Angels - a great example of this would be Eldar. The Eldar's ability to have strong mobile firepower (with long range and low AP) can be disasterous to an unprepared BA army. Our answer to this lies in our deployment, movement, and to some extent our unit choices. What is for certain is that the BA want to hit the Eldar with our assaults (we want to hit EVERYONE withour assaults eventually!), but against a seriously shooty army our glorious assault elements have to live long enough to reach the enemy first! 

      The first step to succeed is to deploy behind cover (unless you KNOW you will get first turn - some scenarios grant you this), deploying behind cover saves a fair bit of immediate death to enemy firing (why expose your people to firing unless it can;t be avoided?).

     The second step of this process is to keep your whole group together in such a way that your army covers itself - think of it as "can everyone see everybody?". If you do this, and stay behind cover as you advance toward the Eldar positions what you've accomplished is this - any Eldar vehicle which moves around to shoot at you will most likley be destroyed in your next turn by the rest of your army who now has a clear line of sight on the fould Eldar. Sounds simplistic I know, but trust me there are plenty of practical difficulties in carrying this out for real. 

      The third aspect is just as important as the other two, but how far you carry this is a matter of your personal taste (different situations call for different approaches), but here goes... The third aspect involves your army list - you need to go ahead and take a dedicated assault element (in my experience a full third of the army is often dedicated to assault), the seond third is often spent on mobile tac squads who have a multi-task role, they  have tha flexibility to provide excellent defensive power for when your people need to sit still (for whatever reason) but their mobility allows them to keep up with your assault element and ideally they will be able to assault adjacent units to eitheror both sides of where your assault teams hit - if your tac squad transports get whacked just shy of the target it still works for you - for now you have a large tac squad right in the middle of things who can shoot all over the place, and perhaps even walk forward and still get into the assaults as a second wave.... but I still haven't come tot he really important part - the shooty power. Blood Angel armies usually lack shooty power and they really need to at least acknowledge this so they can make their plans knowing this weakness - but a clever BA commander can find it extremely useful to take about a third of their points worth of good long range shooty power (best if it is mobile). Try taking a small Devastator Squad and put them in a razorback with twin linked lascannons, take this and a speeder with multimelta (maybe two) and see how many points you have left over - ideally you've already equipped your tac squads with some vehicle killing power as well - but if your force has shooty power like this you have suddenly become MUCH more able to deter lighthearted shooting attacks on your forces, for whatever they stick out there to shoot at you (and they may kill one or two things) you've almost guaranteed that you're going to kill it the next turn. Now sure you can't maintain this exchange for long - but you don't have to, remember your army is an assault army which is constantly on the move toward the enemy (albeit behind cover) so in all liklihood you will only be on the move for one or two turns - which means this whole plan of exchanging shooty casualties will only happen for one or two turns IF the bad guys are goofy enough to send people out to their deaths....

     The final stage of this should hit on your turn two or three - you've approached the enemy line, your forces are still behind cover for the most part - and this turn your movement will get you into charge range - this is the time to move your whole army at one time from behind cover into full view of the enemy and assault - your units which can move and shoot effectively need to focus on their shooting units - your assault people need to decide (depending on their strength) whether they wish to weaken the units they are about to assault (be careful you don't deny yourself the assault by killing off the models nearest you!) or if they want to spend their shooting at some other more pressing target (ideally kill off the most shooty thing you can) - the rest of it is very straightforward, your assault units get into it, your remaining shooty units continue to engage the remaining enemy shooty targets and proceed to next most pressing/available targets as long as possible. 

Sometimes though it's not possible to find a place where you can approach the enemy and remain behind cover the whole time until contact - try to avoid this if you can, I'm not saying use your magical powers to reshape the available cover but I AM saying make the best use of cover that you can!) so anyway, if you don't have enough cover to really protect your people then you really don't have much choice, it's likely going to force you to rush him as fast as possible - try to keep your people together (so their firing can protect each other as we discussed earlier) and also because when you move your whole group together as a whole like that it messes with the enemy shooting - think of it as "target overload", sure they can see everything - but it's not likely that they can kill everything in a turn or two, and even then you have that whole "screening units" thing going for you :-) LOTS of different tricks are possible along these lines, but this is really a last resort approach - do your best to work with the existing terrain to approach your opponent taking minimal casualties to shooting, and make them pay for coming out to shoot you :-)

Wow - I've said a lot here... but these same general tactics can be applied to any shooty army (Tau, IG, Eldar, Dark Eldar) and all of them will break beneath the crushing power of your assault - IF you can get your assault elements into contact quickly, focus on minimizing your casualties to shooting through use of cover and defensive supporting fire and it will make things easier :-)

There are other problem areas for BA - but death by shooty armies is one of the hardest to beat - the advice I've given here is the best I've been able to come up with after three years of playing :-)

Other units which will give you difficulties will generally be the flip side of this tactic, and by that I mean most of the other problem units for BA are the most powerful enemy h2h units. these will be the enemy HQ, and elite assault troops. Consider these to be very high priority targets for your shooty units - kill dangerous vehicle first, kill dangerous h2h units as a close second priority (or a first priority if the enemy is somehow about to hit you on their next turn - and shame on you if you let them maneuver so well against you!) :-)  But yes - just as your enemy wants to kill your best assault troops (and the rest of your army by the way) with shooting - so too should you be very eager to reduce their most powerful h2h units with your own shooting :-) Gun them down to the last and thnk nothing more of it :-)  If your shooting can;t take them all out well you have at least tilted the odds a tad more in your direction for the moment when your assault units hit them :-)

Well that's it for me.

Glory to the Emperor and Sanguinius ~ Brother Edward
 

PS. one last thing - when you fight against assault armies, feel free to hold back - shoot them down as they come at you, and move your assault people into position so you can assault them just before they are close enough to assault you :-) Nids, Orks, World Eaters, etc fall into this category. Fighting other assault armies can be nasty for both sides - but it can be easier for you if you are flexible enough to allow yourself some quality gun time, and gun them down from afar before landing the killing blow with your assault troops :-)

Glory to the Emperor and Sanguinius ~ Brother Edward