Winning Kill-point Missions

As it says in the title, we as Dark Eldar have a reputation for dying in droves to this mission. With our (often) small units and paper planes we tend to suffer in games of killpoints.

Do what have we all come up with to help mitigate/prevent us from a certain death?

I personally try and attempt to spread out across my deployment zone, using terrain to obscure as many of my units (even choosing not to be embarked on transports when neccesary), in the vain hope that my opponents will attempt to copy me and cover their bases. If they compile into one corner and turtle then I'm often screwed (at least so I found in 5th, haven't played much 6th yet). Webway Portals used to do me proud in this situation: place 2 near his turtled gunline and the talos would leap out and rip his units to shreds. Thats not possible now though so I'll have to re-think this strategy...

In KP missions we are at a disadvantage,you can use your speed and stay out of range and shoot till you make him come out and play.

Nightshields are key here..so you should have them all the time,drifting out of range sniping.

Have patience and wait for a mistake or up the gut and try for the killing blow.

I was sorry to see webways go too,I wasn't playing DE then.

I tend to go hard or go home... Aim to table the enemy

With Dark Eldar I find it's quite often easier to table the enemy force than win through other objectives. Warriors are too fragile to hold objectives easily, and in kill points our transports might as well have massive targets painted on them.

It is not an auto lose for us.
I thought the same when I went up against a IG 1850 parking lot, obj was: Kill point, warlord, FB, Line breaker and a d3 point obj in the middel.
Game ended at 18-8 DE Win!!

When the game was over, all he had left was a vendetta
Just take a risk, I did, and it worked perfectly, othertimes, you crash and brun, but hey, we're Dark Eldar ^^

Andalit

Honestly I think this is the one mission you want to play conservatively on. Kill things dead and not leave squads of 2 or 3 running around, because these guys are threats to anything in our army.

Overkilling things is ok because in this mission it nets us points. Picking a squad one by one and eliminating them makes the mission a lot easier.

I find that most armies don't have as many units or KPs as we do. This actually helps us I believe. Every squad we fully kill means less return fire and means we have an even bigger ratio of units to theirs. Also, that means each unit of theirs has to do much more lifting to make up the gap that the dead squad is leaving.

Nightshields + pre-measuring really helps...

Not so much on a 4x4 table sadly!

Kill them all, and let Khaine sort them out.

dangerous beans wrote:

I personally try and attempt to spread out across my deployment zone, using terrain to obscure as many of my units (even choosing not to be embarked on transports when neccesary)

I'm sort of the opposite. Obviously I still use terrain to shield my vehicles, but (if I go second) I prefer to bunch up on one flank in a kill-point mission. If my opponent has long-range weapons, then I'll deploy on whichever side has the highest concentration of anti-vehicle ones. That way, all going well, I can focus on targetting just part of my opponent's army. Ideally, by concentrating fire, I'll be able to do much more damage than I receive and hopefully take that flank. Really, my strategy is just to try and attack my opponent's army piecemeal - hopefully killing the different segments while they're trying to cross the board and reach me.


Also, did I mention that kill points are a bloody stupid idea? What was wrong with victory points? Why, when I kill a 200pt tank, can I not just have 200pts? But, hell, at least we're not nids - apparently 6 gaunts are just as valuable as the massive creature spawning them.   

At least we only have to play it 1/6th of the time instead of 1/3rd of the time this edition.

Been thinking about shooting for some low-kp lists lately. Went undefeated at a local tournament recently, until the final round was kill points.

Does anyone have any actual advice aside from "engage & pray to table" which never happens against opponents of roughly equal skill?

the baron wrote:

 Does anyone have any actual advice aside from "engage & pray to table" which never happens against opponents of roughly equal skill?

Hide your transports behind terrain, I guess? To be honest , in KP they might as well have a big flashing sign on them saying "shoot for easy points".

When doing the KP mission I tend to become hyper aggressive.  In the other missions I'm still aggressive, but I play things safer.

By hyper aggressive, I mean that I try and focus absolutely everything I have on a single part of his army at a time while getting in close to keep what I'm hitting between me and the rest of his stuff.  In non-KP missions I only send enough of my force forward to keep his busy and distracted away from my scoring units.

Target priority is always key.  In non-KP missions I'll ignore everything but scoring units until those are dead while trying to make my big guys into juicy targets to confuse his targeting.

In the KP mission I focus on eliminating the most number of shooting units per turn as possible.  I'll use enough force to make sure any given unit is dead before the remaining part of my army hits something else.  That might mean ignoring a riptide if I think I can more easily kill a 5 man squad: both are dangerous but if I can eliminate one more unit from shooting at me then I'm winning.  

Landraiders, havocs, long fangs, or really anything that can split fire, is at the very top of my list.  Taking out a single unit which has the ability to target 2 of mine is very important.

Yes, we start with a lot of KP on the board.  However that's a benefit as it means we can more easily balance our shooting to take out the largest number of targets per round.  Also, it means that it takes more turns to wipe us out.  So the goal is to reduce the opponents ability to target multiple units.  The fewer he targets, the fewer units he can kill and the longer it takes for him to table us... by extension it is then easier for us to table him.

Beyond target priority, simple roster makeup is also critical.  For example, let's compare a unit of 20 warriors vs 4 units of 5 warriors.  A single large unit pumps out a lot of shots... however, it is ultimately far easier to kill or cause to break in a single round.  If the opponent has 2 shooting units and both target the warriors you'll likely lose the entire squad.  However if they are 5 man units, then the opponent can at most only kill 2 of them leaving the other two as still being combat effective.  

The downside is, of course, that you now have 4 VP on the table instead of 1.  More on that in a moment.

20 warriors in rapid fire range is generally overkill and can only target a single enemy unit per turn.  4 groups can target 4 different targets or everyone can shoot at the same one.  It might take 10 guys shooting at one target to get rid of it.  If so, then you still have 2 other groups that can target something else.  I've won games where my opponent took a large super unit and a bunch of smaller ones.  Even when that large unit was guaranteed to wipe 1 unit of mine a turn he couldn't win as I was able to clear all of his smaller stuff out while using speed and terrain to keep away from that big unit.  

The goal here isn't to win on VP that's really hard and DE aren't about doing things the hard way.  We're about shoving a knife in their back in a dark alley.  So our goal is to table them.   Assuming both armies are of comparable power (ha ha) then a list which maximizes your ability to control what shots goes where is critical to doing this.  Don't waste a single drop of poison - ergo: make sure everything you have is pumping out shots or wounds to their maximum capability every single round.

"20 warriors in rapid fire range is generally overkill and can only target a single enemy unit per turn."
Yeah, plus there's always the time when you unload 46 splinter shots into 5 Plague Marines and only kill 3!
This actually happened to me before.

FYI - Last night I played a KP mission versus drop pod space wolves. My deployment was perfect as it forced his pods to spread out all over the board allowing me to use my speed to consolidate and pick apart the enemy units at my leisure.

The downside: He went first and I lost all my DL's T1 to melta. (Ravager and a unit of DL trueborn)

Undaunted, I proceeded to follow my own advice. My wyches, working in concert with a talos and two venoms took down a pod and a unit of terminators. Meanwhile my warriors, last venom and a cronos shot up his troops. I had him on the ropes by the end of T2.

Then he brings out a Fire Raptor - which, much to my chagrin, I had agreed to allow him to use. I knew I didn't have much of an answer to it but I'd never seen one before so figured why not. That one model proceeded to decimate my army and I had nothing that could touch it. I was tabled on T5.

For those that don't know, the fire raptor has a Hvy 7, S6 AP3 weapon on the front and a Hvy 6 (twin linked), S5 AP4 weapon on each side. Plus 4 missiles. The weapons are all capable of shooting at different targets. Which means this thing was able to target 4 units per turn.

That should have been at the absolute top of my target priority - but with the DLs gone I had nothing that could even touch it. His T3, when it arrived, it killed all 3 venoms, eliminating my mobility. T4 it killed the Cronos, Talos and the wyches. T5 it went into hover mode killed all 3 units of warriors, ending the game. Pretty much the only thing it didn't kill was dead before it arrived... except the harlies and my haemi. As usual the harlies died just trying to get to a target and the haemi fell to a melta shot earlier on.

grr.

Point is, regardless of what I said before sometimes you're just out of luck. Also, just don't play against a Fire Raptor unless you've got something that can kill it fast.

Once again, the case of GW's awesome Rock-Paper-Scissors doesn't work so well when you introduce Glue to the equation. IE. Powerful flyers simply can't be dealt with by some armies out there. Him using a Fire Raptor like that was pretty lame and frankly that game doesn't count in my eyes!

Not long ago my friend and I started playing KP missions with one simple rule, You don't score kp for destrying an unit as long as its DEDICATED transport is still remaining "alive". Guess what, I won with this rule