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A cavalry charge with mech vets throws my usual opponents off guard (pun totally intended). It's also far more fun than cowering behind an aegis for 6 turns.
It can be quite a shock for a melee oriented opponent to suddenly have all my guns in range when s/he thought that there was a spare turn to organise. Those heavy flamers really make them think twice about bunching up as far forward as possible in the deployment zone.

I've always loved the idea of recreating Hannibal's famous encirclement of a larger force with a smaller one. Although when I do manage it, it's not quite as devastating as it would be IRL.

 Tyberos the Red Wake wrote:

 Desubot wrote:
Pretty standard is just threat saturation

bring enough scary crap that a normal list wouldn't be able to deal with in 5-7 turns.

This.

Stop wasting time and relying on petty tricks that may or may not work and just do something that DOES work. Which would you rather do, try to convince your opponent that your Plague Marines are super scary, or just table him using Heldrakes?

Why not do both?

"Gamesmanship usually ends up distracting the person using it as much or more than the intended victim. Spend that time working instead!"

Garry Kasparov said this the other day and I think it's dead-on advice. Don't worry about playing mind games, because you need all your mental strength to focus on actually being good at the game at hand.

VIIIIIIINNNNNNNDIIIIIICAAAAAAATOOOOOOOORSSSSSSS

Seriously though, almost every single person I have played tells me in the course of our casual conversation while setting up our game and deploying that they don't like my Vindicators. I bring two in a balanced Codex Marines list and they just mess with people. They will base their deployments off of what they think I'll do with my Vindicators. They will sit in their movement phase and eye my Vindicators warily while making their decisions. They ignore units that are legitimately more threatening to them and their game plan in order to devote attention to my Vindicators. My opponents range from Feast of Blades participants to casual pick up games too, this isn't just rookies.

I love my Vindicators to death, even though some people have valid arguments for why they aren't the best for their particular list or playstyle; but when people sheepishly admit to you that they fear your Vindicators, you know you are doing Space Marines correctly.

If you are a Codex Marines player and you want to get into someones head without the use of Drop Pods. Then Vindicators are for you.

EDITED SIDE NOTE :

To disregard the value of psychological factors in wargaming is ludicrous at best. Psychological factors do affect this game from the lowliest of noobs to the most experienced commander.

I am not advocating gimmicks, but if you can bring a psychological element to your game strategy while still executing your logical tactical plan you will be markedly more successful.

Necrons:

Monoliths. Deep Striking pyramids of death - while perhaps pricey - does certainly grab attentions.

CSM:

I've been finding out that my Berserkers with Kharn tend to receive much attention. Perhaps not a good thing but seeing how my other units receive less attention (Oblitz) I'm okay with that.

I love to infiltrate stuff. Today I used Kommandos with burnas and a klaw, and infiltrated on the side of my opponent's denied flank setup. Reckon that scared him a little bit.

Other thing I did was bring an allied Necron force for a C'tan. Dude definitely had that gribbly on his mind for the whole fight, it went down in one round sadly =(

 ductvader wrote:
Why not do both?

Because mind tricks don't work on good opponents and you shouldn't need them against bad ones.

 Selym wrote:
Painting a throwaway unit in colours that are offensive to the eye. If the opponent has a thing for colours, that's all they'll want to kill ...

That works against me...
I play most games against a friend who plays Blood Ravens and a blue librarian among all that red is something i simply need to remove from play ASAP. Somehow it just bothers me alot when a model stands out colorwise from the rest of my opponents army.

A Riptide with Velocity Tracker and Ion Accelerator is always good fun when your enemy have fliers.

Nooglez wrote:

 Selym wrote:
Painting a throwaway unit in colours that are offensive to the eye. If the opponent has a thing for colours, that's all they'll want to kill ...

That works against me...
I play most games against a friend who plays Blood Ravens and a blue librarian among all that red is something i simply need to remove from play ASAP. Somehow it just bothers me alot when a model stands out colorwise from the rest of my opponents army.

A very good point...not on purpose, but I actually have my Grey Knight Terminators painted black while the rest of the army is tin bitz and bronze...amazingly enough, the terminators often don't recieve the attention they should as a target.

There's a guy at our shop that hates pink. So naturally I bring my pink dice keeps him distracted all game.

 wowsmash wrote:
There's a guy at our shop that hates pink. So naturally I bring my pink dice keeps him distracted all game.

Paint just one model's head in pink, and hide him somewhere in your army, a different place/unit each time...
That will fk with his head

 wowsmash wrote:
There's a guy at our shop that hates pink. So naturally I bring my pink dice keeps him distracted all game.

I actually did this in my Warmachine army...I have a chick caster so I gave pink highlights to everything...and played down the pink on fragile stealthier things.

I agree about not wasting time\effort on psychological gameplay. That line of thinking presumes that you are smarter than your opponent, which is an unwise basis for any strategy.

There was a good article about this type of thinking on 3plusplus.net here http://www.3plusplus.net/2013/11/disadvantages-only-make-my-units-stronger/

Does screaming your WAAAGH loud enough to get threatened with being kicked out of the store qualify as a useful response to this thread?

Yes.

What? If you don't scream your waaagh how do they expect you to get a proppa waaagh going? Silly umies waaaghs are fer screamin.

If psychological warfare didn't work, we wouldn't use it in our military. Just sayin'...

And you could be a genius on the battlefield. Enough pressure to force a mistake can happen to anyone.

This is my general rule of thumb for playing, considering I'm usually at the bottom of the barrel getting rolled over (because of I don't have access to a large or diverse army), I play my games with the understanding that I'm probably going to lose and that I need to upset as much as possible. And when I play my games to mutual defeat, I usually come out on top.

"If I'm going down, i'm taking you with me!" is the battle cry. So the more uncomfortable I can make my opponent feel about his initial game plan, while furthering mine each step of the way, keeps me in the game at times when I very clearly should not be.

Ex: I played a Grey Knight player a while back who fielded all sorts of mechanized crab. Baby Carriages, Rhinos, Terminators, a Psyker Squad and even a Vindicare Assassin. My most armored thing in my army is either my Heldrake or Helbrutes. That's it. i'm not a big threat. XD But this guy piled all of his infantry and vehicles against my infantry, the Vindicare went high for a quick First Blood and he thought his Psyker squad would be enough to fend off my sorcerer.

After turn 2, (by the by, my Sorc' flies on a disk with the Burning Brand) I had torched the first ranks of his psykers and denied all of his abilities, my Heldrake had finished off his back ranks of infantry and glanced all three rhinos in a burn, and he suddenly found himself turning away from my infantry who were still pounding out shots (ineffectively, until the infantry started popping out of the armor)

Moral of the Story: This guy thought he was going to go up the middle on me and because of just my Sorcerer and Heldrake, he turned his head long enough for me to put down some more of his infantry. Not an overwhelming success, but like I said. I should have been an easy target, not a detracting obstacle.

Psychology works, you just gotta know your opponent.

Oh, and to emphasize this even further; How much of poker is won on your face? o__O