Saturday, March 27, 2010

Deployment-practice makes perfect


Deployment. Its almost hilarious to spend hours on creating the list, even more hours building your army, and even more time pondering on how to play the army. One little area, I rarely here people discussing is deployment.

In a recent game I played, I had set up my army since I had won the roll off, and the next 15 minutes was spent while my opponent set up, and re-set up his deployment against me. There must of been 3-4 variations he went through, finally settling on something very close to what he started with. It was highly annoying. Not annoying becuase of that fact that he was having a hard time, and working hard not to fail his player moral check with my army sitting across from him. It was annoying becuase it took so long that I took a bathroom break while he sat up. It was annoying becuase he obviously hadnt given as much effort into deployment as he had the rest of his army.

Then I thought to myself..... Crap, Ive never really sat down and figured out tactically how my army should be deployed. I simply went off of what I thought when I created the list. The annoyance of a hesitant set up and re-set up, allowed me to discover a weakeness in my own game.

There are so many variances on how you should set up, and what you play, that I will not break it down here. Suffice to say, I think you should practice it, diagram it out, and figure out several different options. Get it down so you dont have to think about variations you will need to do on the battlefield. Here are some things you should consider when figuring out your deployment.
1. Morale: Dont play your opponents game..... Big errors can be made here, and failing your personal moral check and hiding your army off in some corner is silly and isnt really how your going to win.
2. Opponent types:.... Here are a couple. Know how you will deploy against these.
a. Armies with Drop Pods... (1st round deepstrikers)
b. Reserve armies.. Whether outflankers, or deepstrikers
c. Scout armies
d. Infiltrators
e. Gun line armies
f. Assault armies
g. Horde
h. Mech
3. Terrain: (nothing worse than a horrible terrain set up ie.... either none, unbalanced, or way over terrained (like cityfight tables

The main point here is, Give your deployment some thought. If you cant, make sure you play a spam list so it dumbs it down a little for ya.