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Anyone have any tips for deep striking a SM army, post it here. Or any army for that matter. What I do is deep strike my models atleast 12" away from the table edge to keep from having any "Accidents".

if you want a DS SM army go all drop pods and teliporting termies or don't do it at all.

have an Odd number of DPs and some should have Locator beacons.

have Dreadnoughts come in first turn vie DP assault and have them smoke an enemy tank with MMs. keep dreadnoughts cheap.


terminators, Landspeeders and Assault marines come in later on target aided by the Locator beacons on the DPs.


the army should have alot of shooty units, don't have heavy weapons on your DP tac squads, you can't shoot heavy weapons when you come in.


don't take Vanguard, too expensive to make effective units.

Thx I already know not to take Vanguard. So Drop Pod, Termies, and assult Marines. Got it !

To deep strike effectively, you must understand the bell curve.

A graph of the probability of any given result on 2d6 is a fairly flat bell curve with the traditional fat bit at 7 and nice gentle slopes.

Here's a nice one from Google image search:


What you can take away from this is that there are 36 different possibilities, but the odds of the dreaded double six are a mere 1/36. In fact, the odds of a ten or higher are only 1/6.

Personally, I call 1/6 an acceptable risk and try to work with a nine-inch radius of safety.

Before all other considerations, you must - with reference to the above bell curve, decide what you consider an acceptable risk.

You'll notice that you also have a 1/6 chance of scattering exactly seven inches - the highest probability. Factor this into your final decision.

My buddy has a deep striking Shrike army that works very well. He uses his deep striking units to either take objectives, kill tanks, or just to hold back the enemy.

He also plays with 1 squad of scouts for objective holding, and will sometimes just deploy his termies instead of deep striking them.
His logic is that 8 assault termies that can fleet will draw a lot of attention (and they do) allowing his deep striking pods to win the game for him.

i ve only been playing for 2 months and i started with daemons and deep striking is a knitemare . I try to brimg tzeentch & nurgle first but the gods dont always agree so I end up getting bloodletters & demonettes shot up .so i got some chaos marines &played an apocholyspe game thi s saterday at miniture market and personally did pretty well although the imperium won . naturally we were out numbered by those dead man on a toilet worshipping loyalist.but had fun none the less.i discovered i could make my pink horrers all sargents and do alot of damage with bolt of tzeentch to termies and tanks .

I'm currently working on a DS SM salamander list and this is what I've learned.

Tac squads should still bring a free heavy weapon in the drop pod. One less 12" bolt shot is a small price to pay for the chance at a MM, ML, or HB. Since I'm running with vulkan and DP means close quarters, MM all the way.

I <3 dreads, but be very careful with placement. All armies I've faced are fully prepared to take on a dreadnought and dropping them in leaves them alone and vulnerable. I'm working on how to deploy them with a tactical squad for support.

That is a good idea! i dont currently own drop pods but im thinking of getting one!

Before i moved onto guardsmen, i had a deepstriking Sm army, and this is how i played it: Its definatly an Alpha strike army, anything i want gone, i assign something to it. I was a bit of a DO IT OR DIE kinda guy, so i had 2 5 man terminator squads, a command squad with an apothacary and 4 melta marines, a tac squad with only a flamer, and anything else that the mission required. Shove the Tacs in Drop pods, give the tac squad (10 man) with the flamers drop pod a locator beacon, and what you can do (as well as having DNs in drop pods) is have 100% safe drop podding to whatever enemy you like. i had a particularly nasty leman russ to deal with, so i put a ironclad DN with 2 HKMs and a underslung meltagun into a drop pod, put the drop pod right behind the leman russ, it scatterd likd 10 inches, so i just disembarked the DN onto the closest side, it was within 6 and blam! i missed with the melta ._. so i shot both HKMs into its rear armour....lol im blabbering on a bit sorry, what im trying to get at is drop pods are safe! see a squad of termagaunts with devourers? use the drop pods safeness to drop pod 10 tacs, land right next to the, rapid fire, there wont be enough left to launch an effective counter attack! dont risk terminator squads to deepstrike unless its ultra safe or you have a locator beacon, ive seen terminator squads die to landing on the heads of guardsmen and it aint good.

Edit:
Remember, half of all drop pods, rounding up, MUST come in on first turn. This is a great rule, use it wisely

Remember that you can pop smoke on your dreads when they come down if they are too exposed from the scatter.

Another key to remember is that fortune favors the bold: you need to risk it sometimes to get awesome results. Don't shy away from dropping your guys where they need to be because you're afraid of a 10" scatter in one direction.

Remember with drop pods that you can reduce the scatter to stop yourself from crashing into units or terrain.

Meltas on troops and MM's on dreads are good when deepstriking, because you can't catch anything in CC when you arrive. If your opponent is playing mech, he will be out of range before you can assault him. If you bring enough meltas to pop the most important transports and tanks, you can stike in the heart of his army and catch his now footslogging troops while they are crawling out of their burning transports.

I'm currently working on a Deathwing/Ravenwing army designed around teleporting terminators into the fray quickly. Also planning to support it with tactical squads. Any tips on how best to teleport the terminators in without getting them killed by enemy fire before they can assault? Also, when I deep strike in can I fire the assault cannon?

@OP
I'm not sure if anyone has already said this, but I saw that you were going to use drop pods and termi's and would like to remind you that drop pods have inertial guidance, so if you ds them close to terrain, they will actually have a higher likelihood of landing on target. Don't do that with terminators, though.
@lechium

lechium wrote:Any tips on how best to teleport the terminators in without getting them killed by enemy fire before they can assault? Also, when I deep strike in can I fire the assault cannon?

Terminators will always survive a drop without sustaining significant casualties, unless you put them in front of a squad with tons of ap2 stuff. Remember, t4 is pretty substantial for infantry, and 2+ means they only have a 16% chance to fail their save. As long as you use the ravenwing's teleport homers to avoid scatter, don't worry about taking fire. In answer to your second question, yes terminators can fire their AC when they deepstrike, since they are able to fire heavy weapons on the move.