So after a pretty gruelling night my Space Wolves have walked away from two pretty bloody draws. Both 750 points, both capture and control games and both with crazy deep strike style deploying units giving me a right royal headache.
To my embarassment my first game against Imperial Fists was dominated by Darnath 'the tank' Lysander dropping into my line with 5 sternguard, breaking my nearest blood claws squad before marching around my deployment zone mullering everything in sight with his big meaty death hammer. Even though I completely respect the big yellow Jessie as a commander I'm strongly of the belief that he should have gone down to the mighty sons of Russ in hand to hand combat... 8 grey hunters, 10 fenrisian wolves and a dreadnought later and I was forced to rethink my position.
The second game was against nids. Now I'm no stranger to the be-tentacled freaks jumping on my shiny grey boys but usually I get a turn of shooting to thin them out, then counter attack gives me a decent edge. Today it was Ymgarls and boy do they hurt. Charging straight out of 'deep strike' is an absolute shock to the system, going into the game I was completely at a loss on how to deploy in order to minimise my casualties and hang on to my precious objective. In the end I chose to cluster my army centrally, meaning that any Ymgarls coming at me would have to face the threat of a full on space wolf counter attack. Initially this failed as the creeps skirted my castle formation, managing to get round one of my flanks to the juicy grey hunter goodness inside. Shamefully my boys broke as the stealers managed to get out enough hits to snipe my fisty wolf guard down. Even though I wiped up all the stealers in the end I found that the game just turned into a desperate assault brawl, me having to throw guys into the meatgrinder to try to regain control of the central ground.
I suppose the point I'm trying to make is that novelty deep strike/crazy deployment units have a real nasty habit of messing up my entire battle plan, forcing me to play reactively rather than taking control of the situation. The usual close proximity of deep striking sternies and hardass multi limbed bugs really limits the amount of tactical options you have. So I'm just wondering how to sidestep them. The two most obvious tactics seem to be:
a) pack your guys in transports (obvious but pricey at smaller games)
b) gamble with placing units in reserve (great in a perfect world where your whole army comes on at the same time, scary as hell when only one or two of your units show up isolated)
I'm going to attempt both of these in the coming weeks... the Ymgarl Drop Pod challenge has been thrown down!
Only in 40k can 3 'survivors' for want of a better term pull out a draw against a force that's still at half strength :P I know your pain though; Lysander is a right arse to kill.
ReplyDeleteI think you're right about transports and reserves clart, do wolves have any way of modifying reserve rolls?
Nothing so useful man, otherwise i'd consider reserves as a much more viable/reliable option.
ReplyDeleteWith regards to transports I'm pretty excited to get some on the table... trying to break my 2nd edition footslogger code has been very hard though.
Reserves would be the standard counter for drop-pods and it tends to be awesome effective, at least one drop pod is already down by the time you walk onto the table as such you get free pop shots at whatever it was bringing in. Should potentially work well in smaller point games when that drop pods contents is a proportionally larger part of the army too.
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