Tactics of the Deathwing
The deathwing army is a fearsome opponent full of deadly save making terminators, but how do you win with an army of only 25-30 models on the board? There are several ways to help yourself acheive sucess with the the deathwing army, but first we need to understand some basic terminology. In battle there are tactics and there is strategy and the two are not the same.
Tactics are the actions or combonations that you employ inorder to gain a temporary advantage over your opponent. Strategy is what your overall plan is that you will employ to win the game. For example in fifth edition games a typical stategy was to employ foot slogging and deep striking hammernators with predator and typhoon landspeeder as fire support. The tactic was that the typhoons and preds would out range the opponent would would stay back and force the opponent to come to them while the hammernators would meet and beat anyone who got close. Strategy here is forcing the opponent to come to you, the tactic is the use of particular units. One of the easier things to figure out is how to use certain units effectively, or the tactics of an army, as some combonations lend themselves to synergy in the codex. Strategy and when to change it is harder to use well, and often take time to learn and master.
Lets focus on one of the new items in the codex, banners. There are several good banners to use with the deathwing but one of the best is the standard of fortitude, why is this? Well terminators are good at making saves but with there being so few of them in a unit or army every loss contributes to a big reduction in efficacy of the army. This means that volume of fire is often the means to killing terminators. The other way they die is to ap 2 weapons, often in the form of plasma. Plasma guns are a cheap and effective way to kill terminators and can be quite deadly as they can be rapid firerd at close range.
The landraider + SoF tactic:
The standard of fortitude helps to ameliorate this problem by giving a 12" Feel No Pain radius from the banner carrier in a command squad. Now your terminators within 12" of the banner can get a 2+/5+ or a 5++/5+ save needing to fail both to die, giving them an extra layer of protection. We can further improve on this spread when we consir that area of effect buffs in vehicles are measured from the vehicles hull so if we place our command squad inside a landraider we can improve the spread of this radius by a good 2" in all directions.
When we include belial with the command squad in the land raider and keep two other units on the board we can effectively reserve four units of terminators and drop all of them on turn one or two using the teleport homer on belial. This tactic is probably going to best when applied on turn 2 after moving the landraider at cruising speed turn one. In this way you can get the terminators as close as you like to the enemy lines and have a turn 2 drop with a turn 3 assault lined up. The other units to start on the board will probably be dreads or predators but using typhoon squadrons may also be a good choice. Next time we will dicuss deploment strategies.
Tactics are the actions or combonations that you employ inorder to gain a temporary advantage over your opponent. Strategy is what your overall plan is that you will employ to win the game. For example in fifth edition games a typical stategy was to employ foot slogging and deep striking hammernators with predator and typhoon landspeeder as fire support. The tactic was that the typhoons and preds would out range the opponent would would stay back and force the opponent to come to them while the hammernators would meet and beat anyone who got close. Strategy here is forcing the opponent to come to you, the tactic is the use of particular units. One of the easier things to figure out is how to use certain units effectively, or the tactics of an army, as some combonations lend themselves to synergy in the codex. Strategy and when to change it is harder to use well, and often take time to learn and master.
Lets focus on one of the new items in the codex, banners. There are several good banners to use with the deathwing but one of the best is the standard of fortitude, why is this? Well terminators are good at making saves but with there being so few of them in a unit or army every loss contributes to a big reduction in efficacy of the army. This means that volume of fire is often the means to killing terminators. The other way they die is to ap 2 weapons, often in the form of plasma. Plasma guns are a cheap and effective way to kill terminators and can be quite deadly as they can be rapid firerd at close range.
The landraider + SoF tactic:
The standard of fortitude helps to ameliorate this problem by giving a 12" Feel No Pain radius from the banner carrier in a command squad. Now your terminators within 12" of the banner can get a 2+/5+ or a 5++/5+ save needing to fail both to die, giving them an extra layer of protection. We can further improve on this spread when we consir that area of effect buffs in vehicles are measured from the vehicles hull so if we place our command squad inside a landraider we can improve the spread of this radius by a good 2" in all directions.
When we include belial with the command squad in the land raider and keep two other units on the board we can effectively reserve four units of terminators and drop all of them on turn one or two using the teleport homer on belial. This tactic is probably going to best when applied on turn 2 after moving the landraider at cruising speed turn one. In this way you can get the terminators as close as you like to the enemy lines and have a turn 2 drop with a turn 3 assault lined up. The other units to start on the board will probably be dreads or predators but using typhoon squadrons may also be a good choice. Next time we will dicuss deploment strategies.
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