Introduction

Planetstrike is a brand new way to wage war in the 41st Millennium - enabling players to participate in climactic planetary invasions, rife with carnage and excitement. Whether you take the role of embattled defenders, prepared to see off the foe with interceptor guns, battle cannons and cold hard steel, or the attackers, who plummet from the skies upon trails of fire bringing devastation in their wake, Planetstrike makes for a whole new set of tactical challenges.

Planetstrike is the third Expansion released for Warhammer 40,000 and throws the players into the desperate battle for control of a contested world.

A New Way to Play
In Planetstrike, players take on specific roles - one player is the attacker, attempting to wrest control of a planet; and the other is the defender, who does everything in his power to defend it. This means that games of Planetstrike have an inherent storyline and the winner in a game of Planetstrike is the player who controls the board at the end of a game.

Both the attacker and the defender have a host of special tools at their disposal, including 'active' terrain pieces and stratagems that will help them in their war. The attacker can rain death from the skies in the form of firestorms and orbital bombardments, shattering the defenders who will, in turn, retaliate by scything down the attackers with automated defences and slaughtering them with lasmazes and minefields.

Deadly Battlefields
In a game of Planetstrike it is not only the models that are of utmost importance. The woods, hills and ruined buildings of a normal battlefield are bolstered by grim strongholds, interlocking defence lines and corpse-strewn craters. In Planetstrike the defending player sets up the terrain to his best advantage, creating kill-zones and traps and organising the battlefield into an indomitable fortress. For the defender, one of the real thrills of Planetstrike is daring the invaders to run the gauntlet of his carefully laid defences.

This is no normal scenery either - in Planetstrike the strongholds that the defender has available to him range from gun-bunkers and rockcrete bastions, to the mighty building known as the Fortress of Redemption. These terrain pieces all have one thing in common - they all bristle with heavy weapon emplacements that the controlling player can unleash on the foe.

A War on All Fronts
In Planetstrike there are no battlelines, not in the conventional sense at least. Attackers strike from orbit, delivered into battle by drop ships, teleporter assaults, grav chutes or mycetic spores. Most units in the attacking force suddenly find themselves able to Deep Strike into the heart of the action, while units that normally benefit from this special rule are able to assault in the turn that they arrive.

This freedom of deployment makes for a free-flowing battle where combat becomes a maelstrom of death as both forces whirl around one another - players find themselves recreating a cinematic experience as their forces are embroiled in a frantic and epic confrontation.

Getting Started
So, if the idea of spearheading an immense orbital offensive or scouring the skies of alien invaders sounds like your cup of tea, read on as we give you the full details on Planetstrike and how you can start recreating your own planetary invasions.