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Ok i play CSM. And i need help dealing with SM's drop pod assault rule. Now do drop pods count as reserves or do they ignore it? He normally puts 1 devastator squad on the table and a walker, and they will drop in 3 to 4 pods total.
There's always one walker in the drop pods, and thats were all his troops are too. I'm getting a little tired of losing cause he just drops every thing on me then assaults next turn. Any help on this problem would be great.

Well, if you can spread out into two groups that can help. Or hurt, depending on your army. It really depends on your, and his, army composition.

If he is not using template or blast weapons, clump up. Then, when he comes out the pods, assault him! Your chaos marines can take CC weapons, use them! I really find that heavy use of drop pods is a good way to lose.

Drops pods are so powerful. I play CSM also, and I always have problems with them. They come down on turn 1. My friend takes 2 full steinguard squads, combat sqauds both so he has 4 squads. All 4 are chock full of combi melta and plasma. Turn 1, two drop pods come down, 4 squads of steinguard comes out, and either 4 high priority targets get hit by a ton of plasma and melta.

Sure, I often kill off his steinguard after that, but the damage has already been done. :(

A Quad gun would do wonders. could shoot them down before they touch the ground. 4 twinlinked shots will do a lot of damage, esspicaly to AV12
Also, if you kill the pod with interceptor the squad inside of it dies

Interceptors fire after enemy movement.

dp is hard to deal with. at least hes not SW running a RP and doing JOWW to take out whole squads and your warlord at a time

Turn 1 drop pods are really annoying - basically a way for Space Marines to get a close-range firepower unit right where it's needed with virtually no risk. Sternguard and dreads are particularly nasty when deployed like this.

For Chaos, there are a few things you can do to try and reduce the effect:

- Use cultists. These are cheap and highly expendable - deploy them as a screen around your more valuable units, and much of the enemy firepower will be wasted taking them out.

- Concentrate your force. By putting all of your units together, you can ensure that no matter what the drop-podders kill, you can wipe them out in your turn. Remember, those Sternguard are actually pretty expensive - if they weren't deep-striking right next to you, you'd have them as a primary target anyway... This also has the added benefit of preventing your opponent defeating you in detail, by wiping out an isolated force preventing you from retaliating.

- Use terrain. By placing your more valuable units in area terrain such as woods or some ruins, you're giving them a cover save against all of that nasty AP2/3 fire when they arrive.

- Remember that although drop pods don't need to worry about terrain or other models when deploying, they can still scatter off the board edge as normal.

- Play the mission. Unless your opponent has Pedro Kantor, those Sternguard units, Dreadnoughts, and drop-pods are going to eat into his points, leaving him with fewer troops. If you concentrate on killing those scoring units that remain, you can still win the game even with massive casualties.

 Hedgehog wrote:
Turn 1 drop pods are really annoying - basically a way for Space Marines to get a close-range firepower unit right where it's needed with virtually no risk. Sternguard and dreads are particularly nasty when deployed like this.

For Chaos, there are a few things you can do to try and reduce the effect:

- Use cultists. These are cheap and highly expendable - deploy them as a screen around your more valuable units, and much of the enemy firepower will be wasted taking them out.

- Concentrate your force. By putting all of your units together, you can ensure that no matter what the drop-podders kill, you can wipe them out in your turn. Remember, those Sternguard are actually pretty expensive - if they weren't deep-striking right next to you, you'd have them as a primary target anyway... This also has the added benefit of preventing your opponent defeating you in detail, by wiping out an isolated force preventing you from retaliating.

- Use terrain. By placing your more valuable units in area terrain such as woods or some ruins, you're giving them a cover save against all of that nasty AP2/3 fire when they arrive.

- Remember that although drop pods don't need to worry about terrain or other models when deploying, they can still scatter off the board edge as normal.

- Play the mission. Unless your opponent has Pedro Kantor, those Sternguard units, Dreadnoughts, and drop-pods are going to eat into his points, leaving him with fewer troops. If you concentrate on killing those scoring units that remain, you can still win the game even with massive casualties.

This. Drop pods are not the end all be all because if you opponent uses 5 of them, there are two squads we won't get until at least turn 2. This gives you a whole to turn to shoot up/counterattack the three that came down. Yes, you are going to lose guys. But in 6th edition, you always lose guys to something if your opponent is good.

I haven't had much problems with them lately. Use cultists to screen rear armor on rhinos or something squishy. I also just stick my army in terrain and close together. Drop pods have big foot prints.

I basicaly tabled the crimson fist player and space wolf player in my last two games. Dreadnoughts on your backside are scary at first look but then you realize they can't assault and you can melta them through the rhino hatch.

A good answer is to castle up, having armor's read touch the table edge and LOS blockers so there is no way to hit rear armor at all, possible even corners to deny sides as well, they deploy your infantry in rings around them, with the most disposable units in the outmost ring, and the best assault units in the second.

The rings should be set up in such a way that one cannot drop in between (no space for it) and is forced to drop outside of the castle.

Also try to fit in as much massive, D-pod blocking terrain as possible around your castle, just to create a bottleneck.

He drops in right next to your? his only targets are the disposables, then followed up by you gunning him and having all your assault right on his relatively few first-turn drops, he will get outnumbered and you can remove his guys faster then reinforcements arrive if you did it well.

He drops far away? sure you need to regroup, but all his super-elite and very expensive point-blank units are far from your valuable targets with no means for transport and you get to fight on your terms rather then his.

I play with Drop pods all the time. Usually 5. Another way although risky is put the majority of your force in reserve. If you can survive the first turn and not get tabled. Your opponent has lost the majority of his sting. It is risky though but can pay off.

Used full drop pod list today against Chaos, 30sternguard in pods, pedro and vulkan and 20 tac marines, was harsh first turn but got majorly bogged down in combat with plague marines, wounding on 5's with no assault bonus was hard to deal with, ended up 6-7 to the chaos guy as it went extra two turns, turn 5 and 6 I was winning 7-3 as it was scourging with variable points objectives.

 BoomWolf wrote:
A good answer is to castle up, having armor's read touch the table edge and LOS blockers so there is no way to hit rear armor at all, possible even corners to deny sides as well, they deploy your infantry in rings around them, with the most disposable units in the outmost ring, and the best assault units in the second.

The rings should be set up in such a way that one cannot drop in between (no space for it) and is forced to drop outside of the castle.

Also try to fit in as much massive, D-pod blocking terrain as possible around your castle, just to create a bottleneck.

He drops in right next to your? his only targets are the disposables, then followed up by you gunning him and having all your assault right on his relatively few first-turn drops, he will get outnumbered and you can remove his guys faster then reinforcements arrive if you did it well.

He drops far away? sure you need to regroup, but all his super-elite and very expensive point-blank units are far from your valuable targets with no means for transport and you get to fight on your terms rather then his.

Good advice. Also remember that you can cover vast amounts of table with squads at max coherency, with pre-measuring you make small pockets that only a perfect scatter will allow a DS into.

Then the dropping enemy units will come down, shoot a unit (the cheap chaff-infantry spread out in front of your army?) then get all of your firepower next turn...

More pods equals more forces arriving piecemeal, the real danger is in a few pods that can threaten your "best" units. (time to think about redundancy, target priority etc?)

This was posted a not too long ago and is exactly what your looking for http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/495047.page

Over in the thread Red Corsair provided, Exergy made, i think, the most important point: that meltas are only effective when they are <=6" away. I mean yeah sure combi plasma, but you can pretty easily give cover to your important MEQ units, blunting the effectiveness of plasma considerably. Then, you can bubblewrap your tanks so that it is impossible for melta sterguard to be within 6" with their melta weapons, in which case, they'll pop a rhino, or some other light transport, which you can probably shrug off, and then steamroll his sternguard.

I think it will be hard to keep up such a formation in subsequent turns however. If I saw you setting up in such a way for example, I'd just drop my TAC squads turn 1, then drop my sternguard the second turn.. But this is a less effective strategy than the turn 1 alpha strike, so you'll still be at the advantage.

 Lord PoPo wrote:
Over in the thread Red Corsair provided, Exergy made, i think, the most important point: that meltas are only effective when they are <=6" away. I mean yeah sure combi plasma, but you can pretty easily give cover to your important MEQ units, blunting the effectiveness of plasma considerably. Then, you can bubblewrap your tanks so that it is impossible for melta sterguard to be within 6" with their melta weapons, in which case, they'll pop a rhino, or some other light transport, which you can probably shrug off, and then steamroll his sternguard.

I think it will be hard to keep up such a formation in subsequent turns however. If I saw you setting up in such a way for example, I'd just drop my TAC squads turn 1, then drop my sternguard the second turn.. But this is a less effective strategy than the turn 1 alpha strike, so you'll still be at the advantage.

That is pretty brilliant if not castling

I usually play a drop pod Crimson Fists List, and have a solution to bubble wrap and castling.

My Alpha Strike units:

Pedro

2x 10 Man Sternguard, full combi-weps w/ pods

Contemptor Dread in Lucius Pod w/ 2x Kheres and CML

My Key Backfield units:

Telion and scout snipers with cloaks

ADL w/ Quadgun

2x Thunderfire Cannons 1 w pod

1 full Tac Squad w/ pod

When it looks like I'm going up against an opponent who castles or who uses huge ammounts of bubble wrap, I simply deploy my Contemptor behind the ADL as close to the middle as I can, and drop the Lucius and two empty pods (from tac and TFC) first round. I always drop the pods to block line of sight from his big shooty units and try to leave the weak short ranged space-taker troops open to be fired at.

I then proceed to unload on the bubble wrap units with all of my long range firepower and try to make holes for my sternguard to come in.

Usually there is enough room for them to drop after the first turn, then they combat squad, decimate 4 targets, and then go to ground in cover (if available) while the surviving backfield works to thin out anyone that might shoot up / assualt the sternguard.

It works pretty well, but does need a little knowledge about the army your going up against before hand so you can determine your reserves.

Its not perfect but can work when done properly

Hope that helps

And that is why you choose to play second against a drop pod list. you will get alpha-stroke anyway, might as well deny them the knowledge of what you deploy where, so they cannot make a proper decision of what to deploy and what to drop.

Yep, that's the key boomwolf The one major flaw in the plan