[How Important are Battalions?]

1 hour ago, AverageBoss said:

You don't ever roll to see who goes first on the first turn of the game. The player who finishes deploying first gets to choose turn order for that turn. 90% of the time it is better to choose to go second to give yourself the first double turn (if one happens), and put your opponent on the back foot waiting for it to happen.

You can throw down your battalions in one drop (even if it is your whole army), or you can piecemeal them out. Once you do so however, you can only deploy remaining battalion units one at a time. So an eight unit battalion could be deployed all eight units at once, or four units -> one -> one -> one -> one, as an example.

Because of that, you also don't get many opportunities to actually counter deploy large battalions. Your opponent will simply count up your number of drops, and deploy in a manner where they have one less drop than you. It is an extremely potent advantage.

So you basically base it on Do I want First Go at Turn 1, or Do I want to counter each of my opponents drops. Of course, the chance to go twice in a row also makes going second a nice incentive to not drop them all at once too. I guess you just base your decision on your opponents army, size, and what scenario you’re playing.  Plopping everything down in one go might mess up grabbing objectives later on, etc. 

[How Important are Battalions?]

Huh...I had no idea you could drop a full Battalion as one unit. That’s interesting. So in a 1k pt game, if your battalion is the whole army with no extras, you can pretty much guarantee that you go first? You don’t have to roll for it? That’s a pretty nice incentive to use them in smaller games.