Deathwing Tactics - The Alpha Strike Deployment

Who remembers when DW were black?!

Righto guys, another post in the series of Deathwing Tactics and Deployments. Having drafted out some of the Mission/Deployment posts, I found myself referring to a couple of concepts more than once, and from this, felt really they should get their own article. These two concepts are as follows.

• Alpha Strike Deployment
• Phalanx Deployment

Now both are strikingly different deployment types, and I find generally speaking I do just use what I refer to as the "Phalanx" deployment. While there are various other deployments (and variations upon both), and nothing is set in stone, I do find these are two of the archtypes I look at when looking at the board/mission. From this I can look to my opponents list, how the board is set up, what he might want to do, what side he gets, and potentially how he sets up (if going 2nd). With so many foot models (26 40mm bases, 6 biker bases, 2 60mm bases) there is potential to clog up or be forced into difficult positioning just on pure size of units alone, despite the model count of your army. I mean we can change things up as well, for example, kill point games against say a mech heavy rhino / pred's / vindicators, you can plonk two squads in the corners, couple in middle and just cover the entire board with good fire lanes and essentially out range him / side armour etc.

Deathwing Tactics - An Introduction

Dakka Dakka - posted so I don't have to look at Bully's DW again -Ven.

Righto Champs, 

So I've wanted to put pen to paper on this for a little while, especially now I feel reasonably at grips with the army, or certainly the doublewing aspect of it. While my juices are flowing over some various other bits of 40K, the foreseeable future I am putting Deathwing as my best foot forward, purely as I have, certainly in 5th Ed, the best experience with it - couple of tourneys and plenty of practice.

So what am I going to cover? Well I want to look at some general concepts of the army, then some more specific unit tactics, plus an overall view of missions and deployment - a bit of everything really.

So lets start off, the Basic's - what to think about with Deathwing, actually lets call it an Introduction to Deathwing and Doublewing.

Deployment in Action - Mech Vs Mech Part 2

 See last week's post for part 1...or just read this lol...  

Pitched Battle – Capture and Control

SM going first

As I ponder this one I realise that I am not this week enjoying writing this.

I am not in a good mood.

It’s most likely because I have a literal fuck-tonne of work on and don’t. fucking. want. it.

I just want to teach.

All the other responsibilities I have taken on…well, they are going out the window as they are distracting me from what I love.

Or its because the fiancé wants me to sell my gas-guzzling car…and I don’t want to.

But I am a trooper and will continue.

ImmoBAliser Analysis: Survivability Going Second

I have fallen in love with the imitation Immospam that Blood Angels can put forth on the tabletop. It fulfils a need for a style of play completely different from my usual, Shooting-Phase-dominated play.

Whilst it is still S-P-dominated, it’s nature is so radically different that you cannot but love it.

And when I say ‘fallen in love’ I mean I’ll be playing it at the X-Legion tournament in late Feb…then probably never again! Lol. I’m so fickle.

But as I am taking it to a tournament, I’d best put some of the famous Venerable Brother thought into how to best run it..

Deployment in Action: Mech Vs Mech

Deployment in Action: Mech Vs Mech

Here we have the first instalment in the ‘new’ approach to this series. It’s going to be a big post, but a ball-burstingly good one!

We begin with a look at our forces. We are going Mech on Mech here. This is surely one of the most common sites on our tabletops since 5^th hit. I know it certainly is for me, the guys at the SoS Club and the Cambridge area in general.

I know it is for the tournament scene in general, although, wherever people play there exist anomalous armies and experiences.

So how does Mech work? Piss off, I’m not telling you. You should know this.

Alternative Builds: ImmoBAlizer list/concepts/deployment

So in relation to getting my head out of my arse and playing Blood Angels in the manner in which they are designed…fast and close in the main… and STOP playing them like wannabe Imperial Guard… I present this…

My take on Immolator spam. When the codex dropped I hit this style of list using Death Company to spam out the ‘Backs, but of course they are not scoring and it was a ridiculous concept. Now though…when we finally stop trying to be IG…

Deployment in Action: The Future

As an experiment, I will try and develop the DiA to cover a whole wide spectrum of armies.

Rather than doing a huge volume of individual army builds, going first and second, across all missions and deployments…once completed, I can go back and do more specific DiA articles as originally planned…otherwise it could take a year before I get to the army you guys may want covering…only to find you no longer want it!! Lol.  

Deployment in Action: Part 4

Continuing this overly large (not yet epic) attempt at investigating deployment in 40K….last time we looked at the ‘correct’ deployment vs a Hammer-style Mech BA army. They went first so our warfare was reactive and defensive…knowing that we would survive the first volley across our bows and be able to strike back hard.

Read up to date in the Deployment in Action series here.

Most importantly, if nothing else, have a read of the first half of this article here.

Lets remind ourselves of the board set up and objective placement.

Remember, for the sake of simplicity, the only terrain that really matters is the piece in the middle. Our assumptions are based on tournament style 25% board coverage.

So first decision for the IG player (us)…where to deploy. Easy. If this is a tournament style board, the quarters are all more or less the same. In this IG force, we don’t need to worry about good, high ruins for Long Fang placement, we just need to be able to manoeuvre.

Deployment in Action: Lesson 3

Seize Ground! Spearhead! A fantastic combination, a game quick to close the ground and with victory built on shifting sand!

We’re back again with the Hammer-Mech BA vs the Mech IG. We’ve completed Capture & Control for Spearhead now our intellectual exercise moves to a new mission.

Seize ground builds in variation every time we roll the dice for the number of objectives, which is great – but for our sakes we’ll go with 4.

With regard to placement of objectives, more and more with mechanised armies I’m seeing them concentrated around 12” from one another, along the mid line of the table.

This is due in general to dealing with the unknown. We do not know which table edge we are going to deploy in, and in order to balance out this unknown quantity, we make a compromise of sorts.

If we knew where we would deploy we would place for our own advantage. Not knowing, we place to reduce the opponent’s advantage.

Deployment in Action: 2

 We started off with how to deploy versus a ‘Hammer’ style list for Mech Blood Angels with our IG army.

Now we have the opportunity to go first. How does this change our set up?

First of all, read Lesson 1.

Back, sweet.

So how is deployment different when you know you are going first? For me we want to strike hard and fast, crippling the advance of the enemy, without over extending our reach.

I’d start with this: 

We don’t know how the enemy will deploy, but we know what he/she (Unicorns do exist, Brent says so) has in their list. This tells us almost all we need to know. 40K can be quite complex in the application of some units and strategies, especially traps being set etc but really, most of the time, a unit does what it says on the tin.

So what do we have?

Deployment in action Lesson 1

This is a lesson to you. This is a lesson to me.

I am ready for the blog to be more than a channel for my thoughts, I want to give more to the community and learn more from it.

Over the last year as I have started reading online my game has improved massively. I think everyone can do this. Check out the links on the left of the blog to see where I got my info....

Let’s all learn and push our game to a higher level.

First on the agenda (there kind of is one…. ;) ) is Deployment.

This is a killer for a lot of guys. I see it done wrong all the time, even at the recent tournament I attended with Arteides (Brighton Warlords Doubles -3rd).

I’m also going to use a series of posts to learn more about my most recent army. I’ve been building and playing an Imperial Guard for some time and it currently looks like this.

How do I use it on the tabletop though? Well, lets forget what happens mid game for now and focus purely on deployment vs a series of armies across a series of missions and deployment styles.

First up IG vs Mechanised ‘Hammer’ Blood Angels.

This is a fairly min/max list that can be found here under the ‘Hammer’ entry. Pretty tough and a common Internet list (a scaled down version of Jawa's...not something I would run but hey ho).

Dice rolled Spearhead and Capture and Control. BA has won first turn in this scenario:

Important Note: IGNORE the terrain set up on the Vassal screenshots, for this idealised model we will assume shots can be taken and room for movement and LOS is available…cos generally it is!

The LRR full of Termies is headed straight for the IG lines, the Baals will push up for suppression of return fire, the Preds provide anti tank death, most likely to reduce the Vendetta’s as they have deadly range and fast speed for late game contesting of the very far away BA objective. The Las/PlasBacks sit back in cover of the AV13 Preds and claim whilst suppressing IG armour with Lascannon fire.

How can IG cover/react to this then? Lets look….