Saturday, June 7, 2014

The Art of Getting In and Out of Buildings.


One thing that often comes up in games is the rules for embarking and disembarking in Dropzone Commander. You can do some amazing redeployments in Dropzone with just a little know how.


Embark/Disembark
First off, every unit in the game is limited by the number of embark/disembarks you can do per activation. Quite simply you can do two for each unit. This means that a squad of Rapier battle tanks can embark into their Condor dropship, the dropship can move 9" and then you can redeploy. The redeploy is 3" + half your movement, assuming you did not use up half your movement to embark (you can only half once, even though it can be split up).

Its Getting Tricky
Now assuming you are still with me........ Here is something interesting about that tactic that I used recently with my Scourge Minders. I keep my dropship near them (and in many cases you always should for your units), I pick them up by moving my intruder 3" to get within 3" to pick up them up. Once I do I now move my intruder another 12" (up to half its movement), redeploy them 3". Now the cool part about that is, that the minders have not yet moved. Redeployment is not movement. So if I redeploy them behind a building, and then move them further behind it up to half their movement, I may have just avoided reaction fire with the minders. (this happened in my game against David Lewis, and he had to explain to me why he could not reaction fire at the minders (although he could of declared the reaction fire against the intruder and did not).

Now what we actually came here to talk about. Troop movement in and out of buildings. This is confusing when first getting into the game (not as much as the situation above).

The Situation: What we are here to discuss
Your troops are in a building and want to get out into another building nearby. Your apc is parked outside and so is your dropship. Since you only get two embark/disembarks embarking out of the building into the apc is one, but is also one for your apc. Once the apc gets into the dropship, that is number two for the apc and number 1 for the dropship. Now the apc cannot get out until its next activation, so the infantry squad cannot get into a nearby building this round and must wait until the next activation.

So with APC's that is how it is done. You can see that when you deploy a squad in this method, you are not going to be entering that many buildings round after round with normal movement. If you go into a building from your dropship/apc/building, dont plan on getting out, especially if you are getting into this building in round 3+. Of course there are underground monorails that can aid your movement. An early round 1 or 2 enterance in a building though, can give you just the amount of time needed to get a chance to work your way into more buildings.

Now.......... There is a way to do this faster. 
Light Dropships. Light dropships can deploy a squad of most often 2 bases directly into a building just as an apc can. The only difference is..... that with a light dropship, there is no apc. So when you are departing a building, its one embark to leave the building into your dropship, then half movement for the light dropship, and then another disembark directly into the next building.

So yes, ideally you (if ideal was ever really possible all the time), you should be loaded up with at least one unit like this in a light dropship. Not to mention but then those extra dropship cards that you always draw and cant use, now you can if you lose your dropship. Remember when we were recently talking about the uses of fast moving flyers killing off light dropships?

I always like to have one squad decked out in apcs in my list, and another infantry base of some kind in a light dropship. Mostly I prefer special forces for this, but when points come to points, standard infantry for your faction would also work.

Of course you can completely deck out your list for lighting fast raids between buildings, but you will not be able to hold those buildings if a close quarter battle ensues. That is why a mix is tactically ideal.

Tactics are just awesome in this game.