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It's a advantageous footing to take drop pods and just place them in front of your enemy. I've seen people argue you cannot shoot through them etc...

Also, having looked at the model and measured it its a 4x4 box.

Its freaking huge. Lay out the doors and it covers a even larger area.

Also its elevated high enough off the ground and has enough items inside it you actually can have trouble even drawing line of sight through it.

Add to this most people will just opt to glue or permanently close the doors.

Your placing a brick on the battlefield. The damn thing is huge. Pick one up and then set it next to a Landraider to get a idea of how large this model is.

i am pretty sure that all doors on vehicles are ignored for all aspects of the game. Meanig no concideration when deploying, measuring, LOS, ect. useing the drop pods as listed above is going to be a shot in the dark. Because of scatter, getting your line of blocking terrain, ot for blocking LOS is going to be really tough to pul off regularly, and I feel like for a good player it will not be big enough of a problem to warrent spending all the points on them. KP comment above good call, if you do go for this strategy, wouldn't go for it in KP.

You can pretty accurately place Drop pods there are several methods of doing so.


The problem is the physical model itself is so large. On a 6x4 board you can take up a line of 20 inches with just 4 that you cannot move through.


Also, there are no rules for that. The only mention of models and there like is drawing line of sight to models with large pieces on them such as wings etc....

I've actually seen this abused twice now.

Orks bring battlewagons so they can get closer to you. If you drop pod your army on top of the battlewagons to blow them up... You sort of just saved them the trouble.

End threadjack

If you place 4 empty drop pods around a ork battlewagon it cannot move and the troops may not disembark. It's pretty much a rules abuse. I mean in game terms its pretty slowed. OH NOE you got 140 points, if you blow them up ; they have armour 12 you have to shoot at least a strength 7 to penetrate reliably.


It's a abuse of a game feature.

i am pretty sure that all doors on vehicles are ignored for all aspects of the game. Meanig no concideration when deploying, measuring, LOS, ect. useing the drop pods as listed above is going to be a shot in the dark.

It depends whether or not you count the doors as part of the hull (some people do, others do not). Regardless of this consideration, you cannot ignore the doors for LOS purposes (they still grant cover). You would only be ignoring them for measurement purposes because you always measure to and from the vehicle's hull.

Hollismason wrote:If you place 4 empty drop pods around a ork battlewagon it cannot move and the troops may not disembark. It's pretty much a rules abuse. I mean in game terms its pretty slowed. OH NOE you got 140 points, if you blow them up ; they have armour 12 you have to shoot at least a strength 7 to penetrate reliably.


It's a abuse of a game feature.

You need at least 8 pods in your army to pull this off and you need to be either lucky enough to have none of them scatter on the first turn or to have 4 pods show up simultaneously on a subsequent turn. And the Ork player has to be dumb enough to not take a Deff Rolla. Either way, this situation is rare enough that it really isn't even worth mentioning.

Hollis: I think you must just be trolling, or joking.

How some people can consider the doors as hull, is completely beyond me. The insistence on calling them "Petals" is just a childish attempt at avoiding the painfully obvious. They are doors!
I mean....C´mon! All doors on any vehicle can be considered as hull since it covers a hole/gap in the hull, thus making it part of the hull. This in turn makes the rule about ignoring doors for measuring purposes completely redundant as nothing is ever a door.
Who in their right mind would consider the ramps and doors of any other vehicle as part of the hull? That's right. Nobody is that stupid. Just because a Droppod is more door than hull doesn't mean that the doors become hull.

again I have to ask, how have you not discovered these tactics with Rhinos months ago?

Meaning that you, yes you, open up the doors of a Rhino attempting to increase the footprint in direct opposition to the rules?

Rhinos are armour ten; place a rhino next to a drop pod its almost twice the size of it.

TLOS means that you can shooot through a drop pod with its doors down but can't shoot through a pod with its doors up.

Further complicating this is the lack of modeling rules. So a player could remove or replace the doors whenever he liked during the course of a game - taking advantage of whatever was best for the moment.

Hide and seek with Drop Pods.

People should NOT do this. A drop pod is open topped. Why? Because it blows its doors open when it lands. Period.

The concept put forth in the OP calls for having at least 9 pods, and dropping them empty.
That is a hell of a lot of points (and KPs) just to 'funnel' your enemy
Remember, they are blocking your LoS also

There is nothing in the rules that lets you change a model in play. So the doors must be left up/down once they are placed.

There's nothing in the rules preventing you from openeing the front ramp of a Land Raider, spinning the turret on top of a predator to face the enemy, or opening/closing the doors on a Drop Pod. None of these actions is illegal per RAW. In fact GW specifically shows the first two in its game photos.

There's nothing in the rules that say I can't put a 10 x 10 inch plastic "bulldozer" blade on my Rhino and drive it around.

You're absolutely correct. I've seen this (or similar) on the table top both in casual play and at tournaments.

However, I haven't seen GW put pictures of this in their official publications as I have with open/closed doors on transports.

A reasonable middle ground is to glue the doors shut or leave them off entirely and assume that the doors/ramps are for loading and that when the pod lands, the doors blow off entirely with explosive bolts leaving the remaining hull as the object on the battle field.

Just look at a 6x4 table with terrain decently placed and drop pods, its kind of silly .

Using drop pods for terrain denial in terms of physically limiting your opponent, I have a feeling this was intentional. I don't see anything wrong with it, per se, it's a viable army tactic. If your opponent tries to hedge you with drop pod rows, fair enough. He's just thrown away his army's only shot at mobility by bunching his army up for you, that's ok. How is this any more painful than a Tau player lining up 3 or 4 Piranhas with flechettes in an arc around some ork boyz and saying "go around, or blow up on the flechettes"? Amplifying your own speed is tactically similar to limiting your opponent's. More power to you.

However, gluing the doors shut just so you can deny LOS is a borderline shameful thing to do. It's just another thing to add to the "you can technically do it, but everyone will think you're a d-bag" list. If it's friendly play, I'll just forfeit the match and never play you again. If its a tourney, either a judge will own your face, or your soft scores will. Too many things have one fairly obvious answer, but too many people are desperate for a leg up, no matter how pathetic. I guess if someone needs the crutch to support their poor generalship...

You can just drop empty pods.

lol, marines don't really need another tactical advantage. Players who do crap like this at the store where I play...simply don't get people to play with them very often. I think stuff like this takes away from the spirit of the game. Of course if someone has 10 drop pods (with units to fill them) then I'm sure I'd have more than enough points (not wasted on weaponless vehicles) to really deal out some damage to the units that use to occupy the drop pods. I don't play orks, but I don't see many units surviving a disembark in front of the green tide...

Well, this tactics is useful vs horde armies. Drop the empty Pods between the horde and your own deployment zone, and give the Pods deathwind. The horde will have to approach the Pods while it will rain large S5 pie plates. Destroying immobilized Pods is also not an easy matter since it needs S6 or higher.

Devastator, Assault, Honour Guard, Command Squad, Vanguard, do not have the requirement to be 10 models.


It's especially good for assault Marines and Shrike.

Let's see um I get 10 models for 200 points with a upgrade to a deathwind, I can fleet. Hmmmmm.