Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

How to defend against a deep strike was requested, here ya go.

While pictures are probably easier, I don't feel like setting everything up.

Deep strike defense is easiest with a mechanized army, or a horde army; but it can be done with any army.

If you remember that no enemy models can be deployed within 1", you can protect those troops you want to and sacrifice others.

So what you do is setup either an armored box (your mechanized forces) around your army so people cannot get to your troops, or you set up a line of cheap troops around your other assets.

In 5th, incorporating terrain on your outer edge will help alot since deep striking into terrain causes dangerous terrain tests. In this instance you don't want to be IN the terrain...you want to be on the other side of it.

Usually a L shape in a corner is best but you can setup a U in the middle of the board if you really want to.

Using tanks is easy, put them hull to hull and wait for the other guy to show up.

Using infantry is a little more tricky. Setting up at the edge of your deployment zone is key. You need to move on turn 1 if you can, to force the area he can deep strike into a smaller area.

You want to have a outer ring of troops (that can be anything, not just troops choices) and behind them another ring of troops approximately 2.9" away. Repeat this repeatedly until you have a series of rings with your expendable troops on the outside and your high value troops on the inside.

When turn 1 comes, you 'decompress' the mass of troops out 6". This lets you protect high value vehicles like Land Raiders from dropped meltaguns by making it impossible to reach them, or high value assault/dev units in marine armies since they cannot be shot...only tactical marines (and possibly rhinos) can be. Just make sure you keep yourself spread out 2" apart so template weapons have little effect on you (and you maximize the space you occupy).

This kills most drop pod armies, even well played ones. If you go first (and in 5th you'll know if you do or not) you can also cripple demon armies this way.

The enemy drops, and your outer rings move back. Running away from the troops while your assault troops get into counter attack positions and your devs shoot the high priority targets is the best way to shut down demon armies.

Against drop pod armies, you don't have to run away if you don't want to. Just make sure when you setup that unless he creates a wall of drop pods you can shoot him. With the vehicle rules in 5th, removing drop pod walls shouldn't be too difficult.

Hope that helps.

Excellent write up. I've seen Sisters and Eldar players call it "circling the wagons" and use it amazing effect.

Keep in mind that this formation helps you survive the drop, it doesn't help you win the mission, but protecting your mobile assets will usually do the trick there.

the response to this as a Drop Pod player is to avoid the formation, and try to squeak out a win through mission objectives, mobile firepower (terminator assault cannons) and LOS games with the drop pod wall. In the end, a well built well played army should handle drop pods most of the time. (which is sad for me, because I love my pods).

When faced against this type of stratagy, the deep strikers are mostly screwed. The main crux of their problem is that their advantage of getting to land anywhere (almost) is marganinalized and now they have to fight the entire enemy army with only half of theirs. Not a winning situation for them.

Not to mention some units need to be close to you to be effective (flamers in the demon lists, plasmagunners in IG drop lists) and that means you need to be real close--like 2" (flamers) or moderately close--like 8" (plasma) and a bad scatter will kill you or put you in a bad spot so you can't get all of the shots (or hits) you wanted...

As far as DS defense goes, you can't beat a DH Inquisitor in your elites or HQ slot. You could equip them as a fire support squad, or just run him with 2 mystics. That will give you a free shot at each and every deep striking unit that lands near you, for a minimum of 32 points. Really, if you expect to see one and have the slot, it is a very worthwhile investment.

Speaking of "circling the wagons" and interesting tactic can be used with transports that let you disembark from the sides. At the mid-point of the line, have a transport containing a squad of short ranged shooters, and do not disembark them until the enemy Deep Strikes within range. This way, even if your enemy drops in a location that denies you line of site to the droppers, you can hit them nicely with a surprise unit. Those sister squads with the special weapons are gold for this, as not much comes back from four flamers. As many transports disembark from the back, it can be harder to arrange your vehicles to make this work and still cover all your angles.

Also, once the enemy lands, start moving the transports. Have some heavy-hitters (like four-HBolter or 4 Missile Launcher devastator squads, or a demolisher/vindicator) inside the wagons. When the enemy hits the ground, clear the area and begin hurting them. You can place just one heavy unit there to draw the enemy's attention while you move the bulk of the army, in their transports, away from the enemy to encircle them, grab objectives, etc.

open_sketchbook, I don't understand your obsession with leaving stuff inside the vehicles. You want to maximise coverage, so taking a whole squad off the table is counter-productive. Also, in what sense is this unit a "surprise unit"? Your opponent knows they're there! Lastly, Dominions suck.

Thank you.

Where should I start. I guess, "close, but missing the mark entirely" would be a good beginning.

The flaw in Stelek's defense is that it makes a whole bunch of assumptions, and tries to impose a "one-size fits all" mentality on defending against deep strikers. The problem is that the defense he advocates is situationally good, but in other situations can be the exact wrong thing to do. It also limits your options while making the choices obvious for your opponent.

There are really a couple of major considerations that he doesn't even consider, which need to be accounted for.

#1 - What style of army do you have?
#2 - What style of army does your opponent have?

Question number one revolves around a question of where your army expects to do the most damage. Is it a shooting army, or is it an assault army. Most importantly (for those that are a little bit of both), which flavor of army gives you the greatest mismatch against your opponent?

Question #2 is a bit different, because you also want to look at the speed/reach of your opponent's army. Once it hits the ground, what kind of maneuverability and/or range will it have? Again, most importantly, will it be faster/have greater reach than you?

If you have an assault-based army, and your opponent does as well, you almost certainly want to castle up as Stelek describes. You're almost certainly going to be faster, so you can take the hits coming down, and then swarm your opponent in the next turn. Contrary to what he says, however, you want to deploy as the spokes of a wheel, as opposed to the layers of an onion. This maximizes the number of targets your opponent gets to shoot at, while maximizing your ability to throw bodies into an all-out assault. If you have an assault based army and you're faced with a short-ranged shooting army, you can deploy in this manner as well.

Against a deep striking army with good ranged shoooting, castling up is the exactly wrong thing to do, because you're allowing your opponents to deploy exactly as far away as they need to be to maximize their shooting. Instead, what you generally want to do is scatter your units out across the board, getting the maximum separation possible. Your opponent will be able to target and overwhelm individual portions of your army, but barring ridiculously lucky reserve rolls, will generally find themselves with more targets than they can reliably deal with. Once they're down, you simply swarm selected enemy units en masse and proceed from there.

If you have an army with decent range and/or speed, scattering will, in general allow you to to take the initial hits, and then counterstrike with massive force.

The one time this goes out the window is if your army has a point failure source. This would be a unit that is an obvious lynchpin of your army. Unless this unit is completely rock-hard (we're talking smoked Land Raider Crusader, Monolith, or Falcon here), you're going to want to do everything you can to protect that unit.

In general, of course, this boils down to Sun Tzu: Know your army, and know your enemy, and you will never be defeated. A deep striking army (with a few notable exceptions) has limited range, and is relatively slow once it hits the ground. Force most deep striking armies to move and engage targets at range, and almost any other army will gain a significant advantage.

Where should I start.

Well, let's start with the condescending remarks and see how it goes from there.

Hey I have an idea--since everyone is asking YOU to post your insights into the game (you being the big gladiator winner and everything) why don't YOU post your own threads?

Sure is easy from the backseat.

All of this:

"Contrary to what he says, however, you want to deploy as the spokes of a wheel, as opposed to the layers of an onion. This maximizes the number of targets your opponent gets to shoot at, while maximizing your ability to throw bodies into an all-out assault. If you have an assault based army and you're faced with a short-ranged shooting army, you can deploy in this manner as well.

Against a deep striking army with good ranged shoooting, castling up is the exactly wrong thing to do, because you're allowing your opponents to deploy exactly as far away as they need to be to maximize their shooting. Instead, what you generally want to do is scatter your units out across the board, getting the maximum separation possible. Your opponent will be able to target and overwhelm individual portions of your army, but barring ridiculously lucky reserve rolls, will generally find themselves with more targets than they can reliably deal with. Once they're down, you simply swarm selected enemy units en masse and proceed from there.

If you have an army with decent range and/or speed, scattering will, in general allow you to to take the initial hits, and then counterstrike with massive force."

Utter crap. Nuff said.

Stelek’s recommendation of putting the cheap/disposable stuff on the outside of the formation to limit the damage your opponent can do on the drop is exactly the tactic I’ve been successfully using and recommending since the pod rules came out over four years ago.

While there are tactical situations and missions in which castling can really impair your ability to complete the mission, getting your important units shot to pieces on turns 2 and 3 also impairs your ability to complete the mission.

Cent, since my experience tends to be that castling is usually the best defense, I’d like to hear a bit more about your alternative strategy and the contexts in which you use it.

With some armies I could absolutely see spreading out more. If, for example, your army has a lot of cheap, interchangeable, individually disposable units, you don’t have to worry about protecting your valuable stuff. Spreading out can put you in a better position to fulfill mission objectives, as long as you’re still set up in a way that allows your units to support each other and respond to attacks. If you spread out too much you allow your opponent to take you piecemeal, which is exactly what a Deep Striking/Podding army wants.

Some mechanized armies also don’t necessarily want to castle in the corner. Mech Elder and Tau need to displace more than 6” each turn to keep SMF active, and it might be a better tactic for them to move up the side of the table, keeping their vulnerable rear armor to the table edge while moving. This keeps their SMF durability. But they still generally want to stay close enough together that they can counter-strike any unit that attacks one of them.

Stelek wrote:All of this:

"Contrary to what he says, however, you want to deploy as the spokes of a wheel, as opposed to the layers of an onion. This maximizes the number of targets your opponent gets to shoot at, while maximizing your ability to throw bodies into an all-out assault. If you have an assault based army and you're faced with a short-ranged shooting army, you can deploy in this manner as well.

Against a deep striking army with good ranged shoooting, castling up is the exactly wrong thing to do, because you're allowing your opponents to deploy exactly as far away as they need to be to maximize their shooting. Instead, what you generally want to do is scatter your units out across the board, getting the maximum separation possible. Your opponent will be able to target and overwhelm individual portions of your army, but barring ridiculously lucky reserve rolls, will generally find themselves with more targets than they can reliably deal with. Once they're down, you simply swarm selected enemy units en masse and proceed from there.

If you have an army with decent range and/or speed, scattering will, in general allow you to to take the initial hits, and then counterstrike with massive force."

Utter crap. Nuff said.

Why is this "utter crap"? Please elaborate and clear this up for us?

Great advice, as always, Centurian99.

Thanks.

It really depends on your type of army.

The wagon wheel thing is predicated on being able to swarm the pods that come down with multiple units. For example, I played with Iron Warriors and had 6 squads of 12 guys, power fist etc. Against a Templar Player, I set them so that instead of concentric circles, they made rectangular blocks. This kept the deep strike marines from being able to shoot my shooty units (MLs and Oblits) much like the concentric circles you've described Mannahnin. The difference is that when his 3 pods came down, I was able to shoot the marines from the middle pod into ineffectiveness and assault the 2 marine squads on the outside with 2 squads each. 24 CSMs vs. 10 BTs. Wagon spokes allows an assault army to mass effects of assault weaponry on the target better than the concentric circles.

I have also seen opponents with mobile firepower spread out to a HUGE degree - trusting to SMF to keep them alive. When the pods drop, all spread out, the skimmers move another 24" and the pods only get 1 turn of shooting at them. On following turns, the skimmers "mob" up and reduce podded units one by one, staying out of range from return fire. I certainly would not suggest this for every army, but some can be quite effective doing it.

@Stelek: Wow. Take constructive comments much? You do have a "one size fits all" solution to pod defense. Cent does bring up some good points and alternatives. Aren't you the one who says that there is more than one way to play the game? Why won't you listen/read what others have to say. Your initial post made some good suggestions and has some merit - but it is not the end all be all of tactical doctrine. And that is not meant as an insult. You have a fine "once over the world" of how to prepare a defense against drop pods. You have not gone into differences of different armies. You talk about setting up an "armored box" around your troops. But what about if you're playing a skimmer force. How do you set up then? If you don't move, you lose the SMF rule. If you do move, you have to break up your formation. Just because people bring up questions or offer alternative solutions to the one you propose does not mean that they are making a personal attack.

Now, how do you go about a pod defense if the scenario encourages maneuver - recon etc... Do you castle up until turn 3 and then start the march or simply castle and try to get the pod force to fight a different fight from the scenario?

You can beat any defense ....Just Deploy on one side of the board or in front of his men. You'll lose men but thats a mini war.

No plan Survives first contact

You strech way to thin if i destory a part of your line and every thing else is in one area then you'll have to foot slog over to me and i'd get another round of shooting probelly.

Just my thoughts maybe wrong but o well

Who asked you by the way to post your remarks dont be so rude.adn he posted on your remarks

its not like you the god emperor himself JC

Its just a game by the way.

Centurian99 wrote:

Against a deep striking army with good ranged shoooting, castling up is the exactly wrong thing to do, because you're allowing your opponents to deploy exactly as far away as they need to be to maximize their shooting. Instead, what you generally want to do is scatter your units out across the board, getting the maximum separation possible. Your opponent will be able to target and overwhelm individual portions of your army, but barring ridiculously lucky reserve rolls, will generally find themselves with more targets than they can reliably deal with. Once they're down, you simply swarm selected enemy units en masse and proceed from there.

If you have an army with decent range and/or speed, scattering will, in general allow you to to take the initial hits, and then counterstrike with massive force.

I'm not going to pretend to be the tactician everyone else claims to be, but:
*Doesn't that strategy also depend on your own force? Spreading out slow (often expensive) vehicles would lead to those vehicles being vulnerabel to flanking or massed shots. I'll admit this is, and using terrain as Stelek noted, are how I run mech eldar (in 40K and EPIC)- you can force them to spread and then run at them with everything-the reverse advantage of pod concentration. But I could see slower vehicles having a problem.
*Similarly, would not troop heavy landser lists (I'm really thinking troopie guard here, but could see for other non-high speed forces) potentially have difficulty? Your opponent can do the aformentioned shield wall and block off a section of your forces/objectives and hide behind it. In one test game with my rendy nids (one of only two), my genies had real problems getting around/through the pod wall for the tasties on the other side.

As an aside, its a nice tactical thread. An instant flame doesn't help discussing an interesting topic.

@Stelek: Wow. Take constructive comments much? You do have a "one size fits all" solution to pod defense. Cent does bring up some good points and alternatives. Aren't you the one who says that there is more than one way to play the game? Why won't you listen/read what others have to say. Your initial post made some good suggestions and has some merit - but it is not the end all be all of tactical doctrine. And that is not meant as an insult. You have a fine "once over the world" of how to prepare a defense against drop pods. You have not gone into differences of different armies. You talk about setting up an "armored box" around your troops. But what about if you're playing a skimmer force. How do you set up then? If you don't move, you lose the SMF rule. If you do move, you have to break up your formation. Just because people bring up questions or offer alternative solutions to the one you propose does not mean that they are making a personal attack.

Now, how do you go about a pod defense if the scenario encourages maneuver - recon etc... Do you castle up until turn 3 and then start the march or simply castle and try to get the pod force to fight a different fight from the scenario?

Respectfully, and this pains me , Stelek didn't start the flaming portion of our program.

Where should I start. I guess, "close, but missing the mark entirely" would be a good beginning.

This is not likely going to engender a reasonable interchange.

Maybe not, but "Utter crap. Nuff said." isn't a good response to Centurion99's points. I'd like to see Stelek actually rebut Cent's advice.

Ozymandias, King of Kings

I'm with ozzy, and I posted already! I'm genuinely curious because now everyone I play has a demon army!

I said use a certain defense.

He said, instead, don't use it and use a nonsensical deployment that protects nothing.

Most assault troops are fast. Why do they need to be "close"?

Why do you think players are stupid and won't concentrate all of their fire on the units they want dead, if you are going to be so kind as to allow drop troops to shoot anything they want?

I.E. Rubbish advice, written solely because I said something and the krew need to put in an opposite word.

Then another member of the krew comes in and says 'yep, don't defend against the deep strike--let drop armies pick and choose the parts of your army they want to shoot'.

Woo. I am impressed by this.

This is an interesting tactic indeed, would you recommend it with speed freek style orks, or would trukks be too flimsy for the protection?

Trukks tend to run off and blow up in odd spots (including off table). They can protect you though, because he cannot blow them up when deep striking. So most of his units will be too far away from more than 1 unit 'behind the wall', so to speak.

Hope that helps.

jfrazell wrote:=
Respectfully, and this pains me , Stelek didn't start the flaming portion of our program.

Where should I start. I guess, "close, but missing the mark entirely" would be a good beginning.

This is not likely going to engender a reasonable interchange.

As I say in my sig...I'm not making fun of anyone personally. I merely heap scorn on inexcusably silly ideas.

Heaping scorn on what you consider inexusably silly ideas is a great way to make people defensive, and to make you look like a [bully]. Responding in kind just starts (or perpetuates) a downwards spiral.

A dispassionate and well-considered rebuttal, on the other hand, can be worth reading and raise the quality of a thread.


[Edited by yakface]

Let's not dump on Stelek as a matter of course.

He wrote a post with some useful ideas, and without proclaiming himself God Emperor.

At the end of the day, we all owe our thanks to Yak for this site, and it's clearly his intent that it be friendlier. If Stelek wants to be an arrogant douche, hey, I certainly lack the restraint to ignore it. But if he's being helpful and polite, let's respond in kind, and help Yak run the site as he hopes to.

I, for one, see a disagreement for the sake of disagreement. Layers of onion vs. spokes of a wheel? How many units are we talking here? How complicated a connect the dots picture can you draw with 5-10 units?

Mannahnin wrote:
Cent, since my experience tends to be that castling is usually the best defense, I’d like to hear a bit more about your alternative strategy and the contexts in which you use it.

First, I generally tend to stay away from having any units in my armies that are point failure sources. That's usually a unit or combination of units that costs a significant amount of points and is critical to success of a battleplan (i.e. GK Grand Master, Brother Captain Stern, 6 GK Terminators, and a Land Raider Crusader), or a cheap unit that has an amazing force multiplier effect on the army (i.e. Ethereals, Eldrad, IG C&C units).

If it does its job, the army wins. If it fails, the army falls apart. If I do include a point failure source in my army, I damn well make sure its protected, as Stelek advocates. But its generally much better to avoid having the point failure source entirely.

So if you design your force to avoid giving your opponent an obvious target, Stelek's idea isn't as useful, and can in fact be counterproductive.

Basically, if you want to boil it down, it revolves around concentration of forces.

Every unit in the game has a threat range. This would be either the range of its weaponry (for move or shoot weapons), the range of its move + the range of its weaponry (for move and shoot weapons), or its move (plus fleet, if applicable) and assault range. This is a pretty basic principle that most people understand. The difference is that most people think of it in terms of a range, which gives them a straight line. The trick is to think of it in terms of a threat radius, because that unit can generally (barring terrain or other LOS issues) engage any unit with a circle with that radius. This gives us an easily understood threat radius for any unit in the game, or if you want to put it another way, a clearly defined area in which they can affect the battle.

Now for a few generalizations. Yes, I know there are specific exceptions to each generalization, but I'm posting on a forum, not writing a tactical field manual here.

Deep strike armies, in general, have relatively poor threat radius. Good ones make up for that by making them extremely strong within that radius, but overall, their ability to affect the battle is limited to their immediate vicinity. Deep strike armies, in general, also effectively have a relatively low unit count. Since they're coming in piecemeal, with roughly 50% coming in immediately, and the rest dribbling in, they're limited in the number of units that they can attack. That means that the best tactics for a deep strike army generally revolve around concentrating their energies on a portion of the opponent's army, and minimizing the amount of return fire/assault that they receive. Conversely, the best way to deal with a deep striking army is to wipe out each portion as it arrives.

Now, that would seem to argue in favor of castling...except that you're then essentially hoping your opponent is a moron. Because s/he should fear having each successive wave wiped out, and taken steps to minimize/prevent that from happening. If s/he didn't, congratulations, you just won the game. If s/he did...you're screwed, because not only did you fail to wipe out the initial wave, but successive waves are arriving, and the first wave is moving into assault your firebase, greatly impeding your ability to deal with successive waves.

That's why I generally advocate the exact opposite of castling. As long as your units have a decent threat radius (i.e. larger than your opponent), spreading out is going to work in your favor more often than not. Because you're presenting your opponents with a no-win choice: either they concentrate their efforts on a small portion of your army, where they'll probably win the short-term battle, but lose the game because over the remainder of the game your units have a better threat radius and can therefore attack them while avoiding the returning favor, or they spread out to match you, which allows you (with your larger threat radius) to concentrate your efforts on key units in your opponents army, essentially creating "safe zones" that you can operate from.

Steleks approach puts all your eggs in one basket. It may work. But if it doesn't you're screwed. You've essentially created a point failure source in your army where one didn't exist before. That's its biggest error.

Greebynog wrote:This is an interesting tactic indeed, would you recommend it with speed freek style orks, or would trukks be too flimsy for the protection?

Speed freak-style orks is one situation where you almost certainly want to spread out. Because while the initial drop has the potential to be devastating, in all likelihood, your opponent won't have enough units coming in to engage every one of your trukks and kill them, and once they're down you can use your superior movement to concentrate your forces in a way most advantageous to you.

Nurglitch wrote:Heaping scorn on what you consider inexusably silly ideas is a great way to make people defensive, and to make you look like a Stelek. Responding in kind just starts (or perpetuates) a downwards spiral.

A dispassionate and well-considered rebuttal, on the other hand, can be worth reading and raise the quality of a thread.

Depends on what you consider inexcusably silly ideas, I guess. I find steleks ideas to mostly be inexcusably silly because to writes about extremely specific situations without really defining all the base parameters, and then expands those outwards to come up with general principles. Then he tries to apply those principles to every other specific situation, and ends up giving bad advice.

I hate bad advice. Because some people think its good advice, adopt it, and then when you play them in a tournament, they wonder why their plan didn't work. Generally, the conclusion they come to is because my army was unbalanced, cheesy, or somehow otherwise took unfair advantage of the rules.

If only your advice was worth the paper it was printed on.

Sadly, your advice is worthless on it's face.

What, exactly, are the units you think are single points of failure--and what does that have to do with the majority of tournament armies?

Zero. Zilch. Nada.

Here goes:

I have a space marine army. I have 30 tactical marines, 30 devastator marines, and 30 assault marines.

YOU think I should arrange these in some kind of cheesewheel pattern, so you can force the other guy to "spread his shooting around"? This is nonsense. You don't want the enemy being able to choose what he shoots when he arrives--that is the ENTIRE strength AND point of a drop pod army. God help us when people like you win gladiators and start handing out advice to the masses.

You protect the devastators (so they don't run off the board) and the assault marines (because they cost more, uhh seems obvious but it seems like you've missed this concept so I will s-p-e-l-l it out for you).

The devastators will punish whatever unit you want them to, the tacticals (what's left of them) will either tie stuff up or finish stuff off the devs could not OR soften up units the assault marines are going to hit. The assault marines, of course, should jump out and take the fight to the enemy. Drop pod armies are very vulnerable to assault troops because as a rule they do not have any! Demon armies are not vulnerable to assault, but YOU are. So you need to assault THEM. A 2 attack difference is why, again, obvious...but spelled out specifically.

You want me to be specific, while you offer nothing but generalities and 'Stelek is a tool'. Fine, I can put out the facts. Then you or the krew will come up with another reason why I'm wrong. Depends on the day and which one of you is going to give it a whirl. Probably why people aren't listening to the krew anymore.

I wish you'd create your own thread with your own "original" tactical concepts, instead of polluting mine with your obvious flamebaiting junk.

Centurian99 wrote:

Greebynog wrote:This is an interesting tactic indeed, would you recommend it with speed freek style orks, or would trukks be too flimsy for the protection?

Speed freak-style orks is one situation where you almost certainly want to spread out. Because while the initial drop has the potential to be devastating, in all likelihood, your opponent won't have enough units coming in to engage every one of your trukks and kill them, and once they're down you can use your superior movement to concentrate your forces in a way most advantageous to you.

What bad advice.

Do NOT spread out against the drop, in 5th edition Ork 'mobility' is limited--and if you think 12 boyz will smash a tactical squad to pieces and then move on to the next one...you are sadly mistaken.

Truth is, a drop pod player will GLADLY isolate 25% of your army, kill it, and laugh at your pathetic attempts to get around his drop pod wall.

That's the reality.

Don't listen to newbs. No matter how many GT wins they have.

Bad advice is bad advice.