An Intro to Threat Saturation

Written By Stephen Cobb

How do I keep my melee units from dying before they engage? How can I get more value from my force user diving in? Why does my opponent’s gun line seem to wreck my units when they step up to shoot? One of the answers to these questions is ‘threat saturation.’ In this article we’re going to cover what ‘threat saturation’ means in legion, and how to use this critical tool to become a more effective legion player.

What is ‘Threat Saturation’

Threat saturation refers to the activation timing, positioning, and potential damage output of your units in relation to your opponent’s units. Typically, effective threat saturation involves having multiple of your damage dealing units stepping into engagement range or shooting range of your opponent in a coordinated fashion to force your opponent to make difficult choices about how they should react. Generally you want to create situations where you pose more potential threats to your opponent than they can deal with, hence saturation. This results in your opponent having to choose the ‘least bad option’ presented to them. Poor threat saturation often involves stepping your units into the threat range of your enemy in an uncoordinated or unsynchronized fashion, resulting in your opponent having obvious choices about how to respond to the threat you pose to them. There are a few key components of threat saturation that are worth quickly reviewing:

  • Timing: Your units contributing to your threat saturation need to operate in as coordinated a fashion as possible. Since timing in legion works in activations, you should think of how quickly you will threat generate the threat in terms of activations. You want your opponent to have as few activations as possible to respond to your moves, and you want your units that are posing a threat to your opponents to move and attack in as few activations as possible. This typically looks like having your entire gun line stepping up into shooting range (often range 3) during the same turn, having all of your melee threats advance into charging range or diving into melee in subsequent activations, or having your gun line step up to start shooting at the same time that your force user dives in to melee. Achieving synchrony in legion can be difficult, and often relies on both order control on those important pieces, army composition, and positioning.

  • Control: In order to ensure your units activate at the proper timing, e.g. not going too early and running out in front of the pack or also not going too late in a round and getting left behind, you need to have order control on those pieces during the crucial turns you threat saturate. You don’t need perfect order control every turn to achieve this, often you just need to ensure your timing is appropriate with a few key units during a couple of key rounds. Often, this is control on one round to delay your key units until the end of the round to move out into aggressive positioning as safely as possible, and then again on the subsequent round for them to quickly begin firing or diving into melee before your opponent has much time to respond. While the specific needs here are highly list dependent, you should consider this both during list building and when you select command cards. Have a plan in your head for how to control your key units during the turn(s) you will threat saturate. Nothing is worse than having your units positioned well, but then having their timing ruined due to a lack of control.

  • Positioning: Your units contributing to threat saturation must be positioned in such a fashion that they all pose relatively equal threat to your opponent, and so that one of them is not obviously more vulnerable than the others. For example, let’s say you are charging 3 squads of wookiee warriors at your opponent with the goal of getting them into melee. You need to ensure that with your positioning, all of them pose equal threat to your opponent. If only one of your wookiees can charge the closest enemy unit, then your opponent will focus on shooting the front wookiee down or will retreat the one unit that is at risk of being charged, so that your other units can’t engage. You haven’t threat saturated, you only posed a threat with one unit or to only one of your opponent’s units. If one of your wookiees can be shot by all of your opponents units, while the other two are hidden, your opponent has an obvious choice of who to target: you haven’t threat saturated, your opponent has an obvious choice of how to respond. If all three of your wookiees can charge multiple enemy units, and they all have the same cover, then your opponent has to make tough choices. Which wookiee do they focus on shooting? Which one of their units should go first? If they shoot one of your wookiees, the others will just crash in. If they activate one of their troops to retreat, you’ll just charge a different unit instead. Now you have threat saturated.

Remember the goal of threat saturation: to force your opponent to pick between multiple bad choices. They will be able to respond to some of your threats. They will destroy or shut down some of your units. But they won’t be able to respond to them all. This will create the opportunity for you to win the gun-line battle, get your melee units engaged, or overwhelm an objective.

Examples of Threat Saturation

Example 1: Force Users

Force users are difficult to learn to play and even more difficult to master. In addition to the nuance of using all of their abilities effectively and appreciating the value of zone control vs direct damage, many new players struggle with getting their force users killed quickly after diving them into their opponents line, and feel like they didn’t ‘earn their points back’ in value. While you could write an entire article series on piloting force users, one key factor to using force users effectively is threat saturation. Force users pose a significant threat on their own and have extra tools for closing the gap (force push, command card abilities) or taking limited amounts of fire (defensive command cards, deflect), making them strong units for effective threat saturation. But, if you rely on your force user alone to do the damage you need to win the game, often you will find you come up short.

The value I often find new players not capitalizing on is what your force user diving in allows your other units to do. If only your force user dives in to your opponent’s line - while they will be tricky to deal with - your opponent can focus on neutralizing the damage they do as much as possible. Your goal then, is to use your other units to threat saturate to then force your opponent to make tough choices. Typically, running your rebel troopers into range 3 of a clone gun-line results in your rebel troopers getting shot off the board. That calculus changes however, if your operative Luke just engaged a clone trooper in their gun-line. Now if your rebel trooper steps up to shoot, your opponent has a tough choice - focus on dealing with Luke and ignore the rebel troopers shooting at them OR shoot the rebel troopers, but ignore Luke. Either one of these results in added value for you - your troopers can get aggressive in ways that weren’t possible before, or you Luke gains extra survivability and can wreak havoc even longer. In an ideal scenario, you’d have your entire gun-line of rebel troopers positioned and timed correctly to step up and begin shooting immediately after Luke dives in. Now your entire line can have a couple turns of essentially free shooting at your opponent while they deal with Luke, earning you more value than Luke’s attacks could alone. As you gain experience with this technique, you may find that sometimes you get more value from the space your force user opens up for your other units than the damage your force user does alone. Mastering this timing is tricky and you won’t always nail it, but if you look to use your force user in concert with your other units in this manner, you will find that you get exponentially more value out of them. This concept is why the ‘force user + gunline’ archetype has been successful over the entire course of the game, and every faction has at least one build that matches this format. Examples include:

Example 2: Multiple Melee Threat ‘Press W’ lists

The core principles of everything above apply, but in this archetype, the goal is to get multiple strong melee units engaged with your opponent. The same concepts hold: your opponent will shoot and destroy some of your units while they are charging in, but they can’t stop them all. A common example of this archetype is with triple dewbacks. Dewbacks are beefy with red saves and armor 1, and they can do decent melee damage when engaged. The problem they have is that they are difficult to hide and are somewhat slow on the approach. If you march one or two dewbacks at your opponent, you’ll find that while they can take a lot of fire before they go down, they often will be killed before they get engaged or after they only get one to two attacks in. This usually isn’t enough to win you the game and you find yourself down on points.

The solution to this problem is - you got it - threat saturation. If you have three dewbacks plus another threat - such as operative Vader or IRG - charging in simultaneously, you will quickly overwhelm your opponent and they won’t be able to defeat all of your advancing units before multiple of them are able to get engaged. While it is likely that your opponent may kill one dewback on the way in, the result is that you have Vader and two dewbacks mulching their gunline while your troopers win the objective or assist with dishing out damage. The key to piloting these lists often lie in timing and control. Often players running this list will play a card such as ‘Darkness Descends’ turn 1 to get those juicy surges on Vader, but they sacrifice control on their dewbacks. If they pull a dewback off of their stack early in the round, they either have to hold them back an extra turn, or charge them out early allowing their opponent to shoot it for the entire round. Building these lists in a way to maintain control before you dive in, in order to threat saturate, is essential. One solution could be to put an uplink on one dew back and seize the initiative on your Vader. Now, you can play ‘Assault’ turn 1 and tap the uplink on your front dewback to allow you to hold your dewbacks and Vader back until the end of the round. Then, you can move them out in a coordinated fashion to minimize your opponents ability to shoot them (perhaps you move + recover the uplink dewback if you can). The next turn, you can play ‘New Ways to Motivate Them’, and tap the uplink again plus use ‘seize the initiative’ on Vader to have control on your key units to ensure they all dive in right away.

This is just one example of how to ensure you have control, and there are many, many more options here - but the point is that spending time thinking about your order control and command card order to make sure your melee threats your opponent at the same time are essential. These lists are successful when they threat saturate, and fall apart when their melee threats run in one at a time. Great example of this archetype we’ve seen in Spring 2022 are:

Example 3: Gun-lines

The previous examples have focused on advancing with melee threats where threat saturation is essential to engaging your opponent effectively. The concepts of threat saturation still apply to lists without any melee threats whatsoever. In these builds, the focus is to ensure that all of your shooting units step up into firing range at once so your opponent has to make difficult choices about who they shoot back with and who they target. If you only step up one of your troopers to shoot your at your opponent, then your opponent has an easy choice to make on how to respond - stay back and just aim + shoot at that one unit with their entire army. If all of your troopers step up in a firing arc, where they can all shoot multiple targets and are all equally exposed to enemy fire, then your opponent has a difficult decision to make. Which of your units do they target first? Which of their units do they activate before you lay into them with fire? This also means that you have flexibility in terms of how you react. If you opponent activates one of their troops to shoots back, you can target another unactivated troop to minimize the amount of return fire you receive. Positioning tends to be very important when threat saturating with a gun-line: In an open firing lane - you typically want to form an arc or semi circle around the point where your opponent is in order to maximize your army’s ability to fire at them without leaving one or two of your units more exposed than the others. This also creates a zone where your opponent effectively can’t move their troops into without being destroyed. If you can set up an arc controlling a key position on the map (often the center of the board) before your opponent steps in, you will dominate that objective and force your opponent to either lose that objective, or walk straight in to your superior firepower. Terrain is critical to your positioning - Your opponent typically will try to use terrain to hide from part of your gun-line while engaging the other part, effectively reducing your threat saturation. Every table and scenario is different, but if you are aware of how to threat saturate with your gun-line and know how your opponent will try to subvert this, you can alter your positioning to limit their ability to do so. Examples of common lists that want to threat saturate with a gun-line in Spring 2022 are:

  • CIS: Range 4 gun-line builds with spider droids, AATs, Snail Tanks, sniper b1s and rocket magnas. There are a ton of variations here but the most common build currently involves a super tactical droid, 2 ion spider droids, 2 magna guards, and a b1 E5s gunline.

  • GAR: The classic Rexstar build fits into this archetype well, as well as modern renditions with generic clone commanders and a full 6 corp with heavy weapons.

  • Rebels: The resurgence of rebel veterans with the CM0/93 heavy weapon along with mk2 medium blasters in lists along with heroes such as Cassian and Lando can utilize these techniques to ensure they can put out damage before their white defense saves inevitably fail.

  • Empire: T21 storm gun-lines, Krennic + Death Troopers + Bossk, Iden + ISF and inferno builds, and hybrids of these.

These examples are not exhaustive, and you can take bits and pieces from each scenario and apply them to your and your opponents unique army composition.

In Conclusion

These are just some of the many examples of how to think about threat saturation in your list. Every match you play will be different, and that is where the fun lies: strategizing and scheming how can you apply these principles to be as effective as possible versus different lists on different tables playing different objectives. If you remember the core points - using coordinated timing, positioning, and control of your units in order to force your opponent to chose which of multiple threat to deal with - you’ll be on your way to being a more effective legion player.

Written by: Stephen Cobb (@ASpaceViking)

Stephen Cobb
Previous

The Right Tools for the Job
Next

Your First Steps Into a Larger World