help me beat alpha strike

I have a few ideas that can handle it but I need strategy with my main list for a league. I've had great success so far but the alpha strike is killing me..

I run a regular haemonculus as hq
Six venoms with splinter cannons, five warriors with one blaster in each

Three ravagers with flicker

Three venoms with three true born. One dark lance in each squad.
They usually get out of the venoms at deployment

If I don't go first, how do I win??

What are you struggling with?

In general, deploy behind cover.

i had my force well spread out and in cover for the most part, but it just didn't matter.

most of my force is in vehicles and his list is 7 drop pods. 4 of them come in on turn one and have basically no chance to mishap.

he plops down, jumps out. his rapid fire bolters are basically guaranteed to pop 4 vehicles right away. then i fly away, then he drops 3 more, pops 3 more vehicles before i can do anything.

he is spamming 70 marines at 1500 points.... thats a lot of marines to mow down even with 18 splinter cannons, but when you can't use distance as an advantage AND you can't shoot first, by the time I get to attack back, I don't have enough to stop it.

I'm not sure of a good way to play it... sure if he rolls terribly or a few of them don't come in on turn 2 etc...

should I huddle everything together? Spread out?


I'm thinking of running an assault heavy list... 10 grots, 10 incubi, drazhar, lilith, 20 wytches etc. he can deep strike beside me all he likes. the bolters wont kill all the grots. probably put khymarae and beasts in front of everything to soak shots. once those units are in assault, i'm confident we can clean it up. but, an assault heavy list like that wont beat things regularly. my venom spam list has had no problems except against chimera spam guard, or flyer spam necrons. ive been working on handling those lists with more lance weapons, but this alpha strike business is painful....

Huddle and dont deploy in your transports.
He drops, pops four empty transports and then you wipe them out.
You do need some counter attack combat capability.

Pod lists are a pain, but mostly you just have a pretty one dimensional list.
Swap your trueborn for incubi and those tac sqads will drop, pop a 65pt transport, and then be cut to pieces

one dimensional it may be, but up until this it has tabled everything it's come up against. even vehicle heavy lists I've started clearing.

I found I was having trouble with a lot of armour, so I added one blaster to each warrior squad.
The three trueborn squads deploy outside the venoms so I can have another three independent dark lance shots. plus the three ravagers... ends up giving me 15 lance shots per turn coming from 12 different units. chewing through armour is no longer an issue.

I could find the points to drop the trueborn and swap in some incubi, but for the most part the venoms are better. even against deep strike heavy lists I've still done well because I can at least destroy almost everything on the table before the reserves hit.

Incubi are way too expensive that I wouldn't get enough of them to make it work...

with the venoms I get 108 splinter shots per turn at 36 inch range.... I haven't come across any infantry that can handle it; marines, nids, terminators, etc. Now that I've got enough lance capability to pester the hell out of tanks I've been cruising.

With the upcoming league we need to submit a static list. my list is finally tuned perfectly to what I've needed it for.... or it was at least until I met the pods...

Why would you suggest not deploying in the venoms? I'm finding that most of them get glanced to death and don't explode... I usually pass the pinning test. No saves against bolters... there's no way I can keep everyone in cover and still be useful.. The only cover that can work is a ruin heavy board.

The only thing I can see that could work would be dropping a squad and taking an aegis line..... turtling it so he cant possibly get behind it and just hiding. go to ground on turn one with the troops outside the ships maybe, start shooting back turn two. even then... i wont kill enough in one turn of close range shooting that hell assault me and well lose.

any ideas with the list Im running to fight better against pod lists would be awesome!!

You are having issues with the list for a number of reasons - really he's just a spam list that is slightly favored in matchups to your spam list. Against my regular list at that point level he would suffer, because he'd be dropping in, shooting from behind a wall of beasts (either shooting the beasts with melta or having to risk not having range to my transports after dropping in) and then would be assaulted and killed by the beasts and my assault elements while I shot up his foot list.

Even if you want to keep running your list as is (it does well for you in other matches, you already have it all painted up, whichever) you can do a number of things to help protect yourself.

1. Generally speaking the best way to deploy versus pods (unless you can fill your deployment zone) is to castle - not spread out. The point being to force the DSing units into a narrower optimal drop zone, so that they are less likely to drop where he'll want them, and it also helps protect your army because things towards the center of the castle likely can't be functionally targeted.

2. Having some sort of buffer around your castle to help push the pods even more out of optimal shooting range also helps. I often use Beastmasters, or terrain to try and manage this. You can use disembarked Trueborn and terrain for the same purpose, with his list as described there are few better uses for your Trueborn than as 'spokes' coming out of your castled corner to help drive back DSers.

3. Reserves can also be your friend - deploy as little as possible/only things the pods can't really hurt. Allow him to do his obligatory drop in and lose his alpha strike, then come in from reserve with your own alpha strike and pick him apart.

Hope some of those ideas help.

The other thing you have to remember is that he has to deploy something- if he doesnt have a single unit on the table at the start of turn 1 you auto win, unless I missed an faq regarding drop lists like this.

Two confused rules.
You must deploy more than half of your deployable units.
If you have nothing on the table at the end of a game turn, you lose.


All his units must start in reserve, so he must deploy half of nothing in the deployment phase.
He will have up to 12 (4 pods, 8 combat squads) units on the board at the end of Game turn 1.

Much appreciated. I like the castle idea. Even the ravagers could accomplish it... the three are large enough to hide everything else behind, the bolters can't hurt them and I get saves against the melta.

Let's say i survive the alpha, would you advise turbo boosting away so he isn't on assault range? I'd have to give up a unit of shooting, but if im able to put distance than those four pods will be useless. I'd only have to deal with the remaining three as an immediate threat..

Mathhammer... he drops four squads for a total of ten Marines. let's say he can't shoot past the ravs... if his plasma or melta don't kill them, he can't target the other stuff.

Statistically, i can kill 25 Marines with average rolling.
Maybe I should stay and fight...its just dicey once the last three come in
Although nothing guarantees they will.

DominicJ wrote:

Two confused rules.
You must deploy more than half of your deployable units.
If you have nothing on the table at the end of a game turn, you lose.


All his units must start in reserve, so he must deploy half of nothing in the deployment phase.
He will have up to 12 (4 pods, 8 combat squads) units on the board at the end of Game turn 1.

I wonder if he'd lose if he went second? I'm pretty sure that turn applies to individual player turns, not a full round of play.

I'm certain its game turn, but cant find the rule

DominicJ wrote:

I'm certain its game turn, but cant find the rule

Page 122

Quote :

Likewise, if at the end of any game turn, one player has no models on the battlefield, his opponent automatically wins.

If I castled I'd always stay and fight - remember that any subsequent pods will still have the narrow optimal deployment area...except now there will be a bunch of other drop pods in the way as well.

I'll admit my DE are actually capable of killing Marines in assault - really the big goal with you is to always remember you still get Overwatch in a vehicle, and to also try to position units to prevent him from being able to multi-assault multiple vehicles.

so we rematched and the store closed before we could finish but it ended as a draw.
If the game were to have ended it looks like I would have tabled his marines, but his 7 drop pods were still alive.

By the end he killed my haemonculus warlord, all my troop squads (2 of them fell back after losing combat and we were so close to the board edge that they ran away) and he killed my 3 ravagers.

I still had 5 venoms left, and two of them had 3 trueborn with a dark lance.

I wouldn't have been able to kill every one of his units in 2 turns remaining, but as we called it, he had 19 marines left and 12 of them were out of range. Had the game continued I could have easily skirted his 24 inch range with splinter cannons and killed the rest of them.

I took the advice of castling.... I lined all three ravagers up and hid all 9 venoms behind them in a triangle corner. It was a nightmare to move, but on turn one he was able to kill 3 venoms and that was it. On MY turn one, I opened up the ravs and they killed 7 marines with their 9 dark lance shots in one squad.

My troops all disembarked except for the true born. They rapid fired and then assaulted. They all lost (tried a few assaults with 3 of my squads on one of his, that was successful but the other ones all got stomped) BUT they tied his squads up so they couldnt shoot or assault my venoms. On turn 2 he only had 1 pod come in. On turn 3 the other 2 came in.

I think I could have squeaked the win had terrain been a bit different. It didn't do much to help cover me but it DID mean I was assaulting through cover at initiative of 1. I lost my speed advantage in most of the assaults and that would have helped for sure.

Either way, the game wasn't fun haha. It was annoying, 2 hours of playing in a 20" square section. Just a grudge match between friends. But I'm glad to see that if it happens in the league, I have an answer. Had I turboed one of the venoms away when I started moving, I would have captured an objective 100% at the end and I would have won. He would have beat me by 1 or 2 points as it stands; first blood and warlord kill. I would have killed his warlord, and if venoms can capture linebreaker we would have tied. so all in all, a much better outcome.

I'm feeling the opposite end of the frustration when I set up 9 venoms against an infantry list and just massacre them. I'll be playing a lot of Tau now that they're redone, but I think I'll start playing my coven list more. The venom spam has been insanely good to me, but I'm guessing it's not very much fun to play against.

I already told my friend that I won't be playing against his drop pod list again; at least not with my venom list. The war of the spam is just so boring.

I'd TB/hug the board edge + nearby buildings, hopefully you're sandwitched so the board edge is to your left and building is to your right.

This means that your opponent can only focus on 1 target at a time safely (dropping behind and in front), or risk coming closer, scatter into your stuff (mishap), or on the other side of the building

Two questions: if you're doing the castling up in a corner method, should you have your vehicles and units close together or spread because when they explode they can threaten each other and lose you hull points and troops.

Secondly. What on earth could we do against a drop pod army with IG allies that include a manticore? If we bunch up in a corner he can just stick 1-3 pie templates on us and blow us away. :/

We could take equally cheese/lame allies ha. Our local meta has very few allies in it. Almost none of us support it.

I'm gonna engage in some heresy here. No offense intended.

If your collection permits perhaps you should try *not* running a gun line army against the codex that does gun lines best?

Raoiley wrote:

On MY turn one, I opened up the ravs and they killed 7 marines with their 9 dark lance shots in one squad.

Imagine what they would have done with disintegrators rather than dark lances

That is a really good point