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To a certain extent much of this game is psychological...more and more so as your tactical intelligence grows in your games as well.

What I am wondering is what you do to throw your opponents off kilter...are there any units or strategies you use to try and force your opponent to react differently.

Maybe you have a strategy for reserves or maybe you play up or play down the potential of certain units.

What do you use for psychological ammunition?

EDIT: This includes diversionary tactics.

I used to scout move my deff-coptas into my opponent's faces before the start of the game. Makes my low-point unit that I don't care about a priority to them for a turn or 2 while my boys rush forward. If they ignore them, fine! Have some missiles! WAAAAGH!

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.

My favorite being drop pods but only because my opponents haven't played against it that much.

In my Daemonhunter days I used to equip an Inquisitor with Terminator armor, Holocaust, and an Evicerator...I talked him up all the time because he was a swiss army knife or sorts...and people avoided assault with him like the plague...dude wasn't ever that great in assault but it always meant my PAGKs were given wide berth.

Bring all the guardsmen!

Which can, err, backfire a bit when I take off fifteen or twenty a turn, but then the air support arrives...

Scare tactics, threat overload, target saturation... all similar in forcing your opponent to make tough choices. The more tough choices you force them to make, the more likely they are to make mistakes in movement or target priority.

My lists all incorporate fast threats. Wraithknights, dreadknights, chaos spawn, genestealers, flyrants. Choose fast resilient units and use them to apply pressure and draw fire. This allows your support and backfield units to operate more efficiently an draw less fire.

If you really want to get into it, appearance plays a part too. A "grimdark" paint job can actually provoke a different reaction than a pink paintjob with flowers. Not saying one is better than another, just different. I know of one very successful international player that has eldar, tau, and necrons all painted pink with flowers. Less scare tactics and more deception.

 hyv3mynd wrote:
I know of one very successful international player that has eldar, tau, and necrons all painted pink with flowers. Less scare tactics and more deception.

Have they been to Adepticon? I think I have seen these Crons!

Honestly I'm not a competitive player, but I have a tyranid list where the board is covered in gribblies. The enemy focuses on basically making space for his stuff to move, forgetting my reserves. I've seen great faces when on turn 2 I said I had a bunch of units coming on the board. They either get swamped by gaunts or ignore my reserves. And ignoring 18 genestealers is rarely a good idea .

 B0B MaRlEy wrote:
Honestly I'm not a competitive player, but I have a tyranid list where the board is covered in gribblies. The enemy focuses on basically making space for his stuff to move, forgetting my reserves. I've seen great faces when on turn 2 I said I had a bunch of units coming on the board. They either get swamped by gaunts or ignore my reserves. And ignoring 18 genestealers is rarely a good idea .

Unit saturation is also a fantastic tactic...I have run Draigo, an Inquisitor and 6 small squads of 3 Paladins, and Interceptors at 2000 pts to great effect.

Also, taking an upopular HQ choice with crazy rules. You'd be surprised how often people don't realize Valeria can just banish their model from the board.

I find that emptly dedicated transports can frustrate people to no end.

I like deploying enough Guardsmen to swamp my side of the board in bodies and tanks. A single tank wrapped in 2 to 3 squads makes some guys at my FLGS nervous due to the absurd number of guys I can field. Way too many things to shoot at once, even if they fold like wet paper. Throw in Send in the Next Wave! if you really want an ungodly amount of cheap wounds and flashlights. And then when my opponent sees that even my Reserves outnumber their main force by 2:1, well, the muttered insults are totally worth it. Even if my guys are average BS, WS, T, etc. with crummy saves, I still have more bodies than you've bullets. Ultimate psych out. Guard are the best, IMO, for victory through attrition.

When you have 3 deathstrike missiles, 56 guardsmen, 10 lascannons behind an aegis line with 96 guardsmen outflanking plus a lord commisar, chimera and ol alrheam, you don't need to say anything, they are already scared.

Refused flank works often quite well if you go second, especially when the opponent hasn't placed his units symmetrically or slightly off the center.

I once took Fabius Bile to a game where my friend wanted to test out his shiny new Trigon.

Immediately, sent it towards Bile as he was my Only HQ on the board (Kharn was in reserves)

And I believe it was turn 2 they met in CC, boy was he surprised 1 bad roll on an armor save meant his Trygon was Trygone

Well, with fast moving units you can do crazy things.
Once, I battled Nids with my Eldar. I fielded a unit of 10 Warp Spiders. When fast moving small bugs were close, my Spiders stepped into the swarm, shot the Warriros at the back of the swarm, and then moved (at the end of the shooting phase) into a ruin behind the swarm. My opponent got nuts.

Randomly switching between small 1337 CSM and zombie apocalypse.


And throw in a heldrake against the only tactically-capable guy in my group (He plays UM, and it scared the s**t out of him, he spent two turns firing everything at it in the first game, it died, ofc, but not before crippling his troops and munching a razorback ).

3 fast vindicators and 3 fast scouting flamestorm baals...

Maugen Ra. nothing is better than watching some ones face fall when i shred half a squad or a land raider in one volley from one model. or having him single handily take on Farsight blob in CC then sweep the rest of the unit off the board. its just pretty to see the total look of defeat cause by my grim gunner

I find (from both sides of the table) that speed can have a big factor. If you can get your opponent on the back foot early on, then they are forced to play a defensive game. Twice recently I've experienced this against me, once with Eldar and once with Raven Guard scouting/infiltrating everything. The feeling of being one turn behind the whole time can be a huge factor in the early game. The same thing can also be done with Drop Pod assaults, or Deathwing.

On the other hand, having a slow but huge horde can also be good, as a lot of opponents will spend time killing Guardsmen while my artillery and russes are doing the killing. Yes, they're killin a dozen models a turn, but there's always more where they came from (I consider 100 guys at 1500 points to be a 'small' army with IG).

I also like placing objectives in odd places. If placing the last one when there is an odd number, I'll put it in the opponent's far corner, meaning they either claim it and I know exactly where he'll be deploying, and a squad is usually taken out of the battle, or it will be left, so either I can go for it or we play for even objectives, meaning I can plan more around FB, LB and STW, It's a win-win usually.

Relying on the psychology of the game usually is a very desperate tactic that is unlikely to work, and at a tournament against experienced players its probably going to be all but useless unless they had a really bad nights sleep.

The only exceptions is challenging your opponent's willingness to take risks by taking measures to decrease the chances of his actions succeeding, but then again that's essentially just playing the game; what you'd be doing anyway probably, and if it isn't you may be taking a stupid risk yourself.

The other exception is feinting; manipulating your forces in such a way that you make your opponent think you are attempting to accomplish a long term goal that you are in fact not going to, giving you an advantage as he pre-emptively manipulates his own forces. That said, this is quite hard to pull off.

@Mr. Omega: I don't think anyone relies on it as a key part of a plan, but it can certainly be a useful asset. To dismiss it entirely would be to throw away a tool that, as you say, is there already, so why not make use of it? If it works, great, if not, you've not lost out.

I take 6 or 7 trukks filled with choppa boys and then place my objective markers in his deployment zone. Most people aren't ready for that and it catches them off guard. Most of the time it works pretty well barring those few games where all my wheels gets blown off the table in the first turn.

One time I took Eldrad against my friends (2v2, Eldar &Tau vs Orks and SM) who didn't know of his divination, flew my unit of wraith guard infront of his termies, stole inititive, obliterated his unit of 10 termies with SS and Lysanders on turn one (Using just the guard and Eldrad, Doom+ Guide OP) and proceeded to rip them a new one the rest of the game. They didn't like me quite as much after that...

Last game I came up against a squad of Centurions with Grav Cannons and Hurricane Bolters. I cast Weapon Virus on the unit, and since each unit was putting out 11 shots, he was pretty scared of losing wounds to Gets Hot, so he didn't fire a single shot after the first turn.

Saying names of scary units as you move them will draw attention to their scaryness.

The bloodthirster of the blood god moves up to try to decimate x

Now your opponent probably wont just totally ignore that unit. You can distract opponents this way.

As I only play at my local store, I just bring my entire army. And then when grabbing everything for the game, I just pull out every large TMC I have and calmly set it on the table. Or if playing Eldar, calmly pull out all of my skimmers.

 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?

Have you ever faced a 2000 points CSM army that has a total of 121 models in power armour?

 kronk wrote:
I used to scout move my deff-coptas into my opponent's faces before the start of the game. Makes my low-point unit that I don't care about a priority to them for a turn or 2 while my boys rush forward. If they ignore them, fine! Have some missiles! WAAAAGH!

Was about to comment something like this, but i pretty much find that deffkoptas do extremely well for scare tactics, forcing you're opponent to think very carefully because they could very well be in range of my missiles in most cases, being forced to hide their tanks or whatever

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


Automatically Appended Next Post:

jakl277 wrote:
Saying names of scary units as you move them will draw attention to their scaryness.

The bloodthirster of the blood god moves up to try to decimate x

Now your opponent probably wont just totally ignore that unit. You can distract opponents this way.

This... actually works.

I've used my own version of this, which is to set my units in seemingly illogical places and act like I have a plan. Works every time, but only for one turn.