Decoy deployment

Hi guys, just thoughts I'd share a few ideas I had on deployment with you all - I tried this strategy last night using my Iron Fists Marines against a combination of Grey Knights & Salamanders and it worked a treat (a 12-4 win for me!).

The basic idea is to force your opponent to go after a decoy unit, leaving them with poor field position in the later game turns and allowing you to take on their army piecemeal.

In this game we were playing Big Guns Never Tire (with a limit of 1VP for heavy support kills - a campaign rule to make sure all participants can score the same amount of VPs in their games)

4 objectives were placed, and with diagonal deployment rolled it just so happened all four objectives ran pretty much along the dividing line in no-man's land.

I brought a list based on minimal deployment tactics, so i started out with just my libby HQ, two 5-man tactical squads and 3 lascannon/missile launcher centurions. The last unit was the decoy, deployed within a coupld of turns walking of the most isolated of the objectives. One of the tactical squads deployed alongside, whilst the libby and other tac squad deployed in the battlements of a dilapidated bastion in my deployment zone.

Surprise surprise, on turn 1 and 2, my opponent sent a lot of units the way of the centurions - a full tac squad in drop pod, deep striking dreadknight, a combat squad of bikes, and thanks to my dreadnought dropping in to make a mess of things (ironclad) he also diverted a land raider full of halberd terminators that way.

My reserves arrived and a storm wing came onto the board, along with a drop pod of sternguard. The sternguard unfortunately scattered the full 12" into range of the land raider redeemer and got toasted next turn (then finished off by a pair of plasma cannon devs) but the storm talons teamed up to strip 3 wounds off the dreadknight (warlord), who then shunted back across the table to get finished off by the storm raven later. The land raider immobilised itself on a trench (about time, he'd already passed several tests) meaning the terminators only just got in range of one of the central objectives. The storm talons and storm raven soon finished them off with rending shots, and my libby warlord survived just long enough to claim the objective nearest my side of the table.

In conclusion, by deploying a big threat out of the way on one flank and giving my opponent little else to see, I forced him to decide between going all out to destroy that threat quickly (which he failed to do) and spreading his forces thin to cover any area i might bring my reserves on. He chose the former, which meant that i isolated a significant portion of his army, forcing it to footslog (thanks to the land raider and lots of terrain) across the board if he were to claim the objectives. Consequently I was able to destroy the threats as they came to me at different speeds by focusing on them.

I'll do a more detailed analysis of the tactic and the game on my blog over the weekend, but i think it's a good lesson to learn that you can manipulate your opponent by what you deploy and where, and it's a tactic the Dark Eldar can do extremely well thanks to their mobility - in this scenario i could easily have stranded many of those units and made them ineffective where they were just by boosting away in my first turn.

Yup a major benefit of dark Eldar.

Directing your opponent's attention is one of the chief benefits of Deep Strike lists.