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It seems to me that if your opponent is Space marines, (and sometimes when not), that you are guarantied to face at least one drop pod full of melta. Now this causes a huge problem for both my Sisters of Battle and my Guard armies. Some of my Sisters, (who have to work to get to where they want to be), end up being dismounted and having to deal with a squad in their own deployment zone while they would rather be rushing towards the main body of the enemies forces, and my Guard end up loosing at least one tank before it can even begin to earn it's points and have to hope that they can destroy a space marine squad really quick or have to deal with being tied up in assault when they would rather be shooting at the rest of the enemies forces. To complicate things the drop pod is often equipped with a homer and at least one squad of Terminators are on their way. Even if I manage to deal with it, the drop pod does it's job and cost me time and disrupts my plans.

Shoot it down?
I imagine one could intercept and destroy the drop pod, but you would have to do three hull points to armor 12. Sisters of Battle have NO skyfire at all and the Guard skyfire does not have Interceptor. I guess I could take a Quad Gun with an Aegis, but mathhammer says it will remove 1 hp on average and only one hull point needs to remain for the drop pod to do it's job.

Shield myself?
Or I could make an defensive barrier of bodies around my tanks and main force. Is my only hope to have a enormous conscript squad with a moral upgrade surrounding my army? I really don't want to have to buy that many more miniatures right now and I don't want to give the entire world a cover save from my shooting as I shoot through the squad.

Servo Skulls?
Sound good at first, but all my research into taking a small Inquisition ally force for these little guys seems to indicate they only help with scout and infiltrate, they do nothing about deepstrike.

Something else?
Is there something I am missing on how to deal with these darn things?

Thank you.

What do you need skyfire for? A drop pod appears on the ground, skyfire is useless against it. You need interceptor to kill the marines before they shoot, but the pod you can just kill on your turn. Drop pods are open topped. One of your own meltas will blow it up on a roll of 4+ next turn. As for the melta-marines that drop, well they do cost quite a bit of money. I say let one tank die and get over it, then blast them with lasguns the next turn. Or field 80 conscripts and go blitzkrieg around your tanks so that the meltas can't find space to shoot the 2d6 penetrate. Either way, dude has payed 200ish points for that drop pod and he knows it's a one-use only thing. He should be able to kill some stuff.

Go Inquisition, but instead of Servo-Skulls (though they are great!) grab Inquisitor Coteaz and stick him in a squad filled with Plasma or some other weapon suitably nasty to T4/3+ models. His "I've been expecting you" special rule allows the unit he's with to out-of-sequence shoot at each and every unit that comes out of Reserves within 12" of him. Careful placement of your units will make any Drop Pods wanting to get in Melta range take a huge gamble.

In addition, Coteaz lets you re-roll Seize the Initiative (or force the opponent to re-roll his), has 2+ save, is a ML2 Psyker, sports a Nemesis Demon Hammer and if you so choose to make him your Warlord comes with a Trait that gives him and his unit Preferred Enemy (Demons). For 100pts he's an absolute bargain.

Filling your field is the best way. You'll force him to deploy far from your force

If you flood your side with bodies as meat shields for the tanks they wont be able to drop in very close.

Also make drop pod traps.

Play Tau. Use interceptor. Win games ( against pods anyways).


Or alternatively, bubble wrap important units, and make them drop in too far away to be useful.

Nothing says sad panda like instagibbing some sternguard with Kroot who stand in a circle. I once had a pod of grav cents deviate into a trap made of BA Rhinos/bikers. It was glorious.

As is often the case with IG, the answer MORE THINGS.

He can blow up a tank on drop? Ok, you have eight more tanks.

Not that many tanks, make his marines wade though a sea of your corpses. Drown then bodies and bayonets.

+1 Coteaz.

He is a huge combat multiplier at 100 points, gives stubborn to the unit he joins, and then two roles on Divination is just more awesome to the party. I like running him with plasma or melta henchmen, maybe a couple ablative wound guys, or, if going for expensive; Crusaders with their 3++ and Space Monkey Jokaeros for their LC/MM/HF at your time of choosing.

As a Drop Pod player, here would be my advice.

Bubble wrapping doesn't work. One combat squad clears the bubble wrap (as IG, your bubble wrap is pitifully easy to shred), opening a clear line of fire to the tank for the squad with the melta. Try to shield guys inside, you get the same thing, just in reverse.

Castling up (blobbing all your guys into one area) can sometimes work, since it makes it harder to find an ideal target. It's still fairly easy to find vulnerable units however, and IG tanks aren't plentiful enough that you can affort to lose a whole bunch.

Baiting and counter reserve make the best approaches. With baiting, you leave one really vulnerable target open. A sure kill (it has to be something worthwhile, too). Then you use one more more protective strategies on everything else. That leaves your opponent the choice of whether to take the easy kill (and be in a vulnerable position for a counter attack) or try for a more difficult target, and leave the bait unit unharmed. (If they take option two, punish them.)

Counter Reserve is similar to baiting, except you don't give them the choice. Put out just enough chaff that they can't kill it all on the drop. Then, bring your own units on in subsequent turns to annihilate them, preferably so far out of melta range that they'll die long before they can hoof it over to you.

Hope that helps.

(Coteaz is nice too.)

So by baiting you mean just decide which tank I want to loose and make it vulnerable so he takes that one and not the others?Then after he kills the tank I use something else to take out the Drop pod squad?

I play shooty nids against a SM player who frequently drop pods and deep strikes with terminators, marines, and dreadnauts.

I can usually wipe him away by simply blobing up my forces during deployment. I load one whole side of the field with all my forces.

The games can sometimes be very one-sided in my favour because I effectively have my whole point value army focusing down one or two units a turn.

If I deploy my blob away from the bulk of his deployed forces he has even less support for the drop pod assault. He now has to choose to drop the pod into the blob without any support of his forces, or drop the pod back and keep overlapping fields of fire from already deployed forces.

This tactic doesn't work so good for maelstrom of way missions because your blob is not spread out getting you objectives every turn. The tactic works great when the VP's come primarily from destroying enemy units though.

 SQRT(-2) wrote:
So by baiting you mean just decide which tank I want to loose and make it vulnerable so he takes that one and not the others?Then after he kills the tank I use something else to take out the Drop pod squad?

*lose

A tank is one possibility, although there are others. Basically, anything which can theoretically threaten MEQ units makes a good choice. Either he has to kill it on the drop, or face the very real possibility that it will wipe out his pod squads should he fail.

Coteaz's reserve bubble sounds awesome in theory, but in many years of playing him, it's a miniscule area. If your opponent is incompetent enough to drop in within range, it's probably going to be an easy win anyways, and your army is almost certainly far, far too large to allow him to protect everything. He's good, don't get me wrong, but he's not some sort of magical instant-counter to all drop pod armies.

 Jimsolo wrote:
As a Drop Pod player, here would be my advice.

Bubble wrapping doesn't work. One combat squad clears the bubble wrap (as IG, your bubble wrap is pitifully easy to shred), opening a clear line of fire to the tank for the squad with the melta. )

How do five guys with bolters clear a line of fire through 50 or 60 bodies? Even if they do somehow clear a line of fire through it, the'll be well out of melta range, possibly out of weapons range entirely.

maceria wrote:

 Jimsolo wrote:
As a Drop Pod player, here would be my advice.

Bubble wrapping doesn't work. One combat squad clears the bubble wrap (as IG, your bubble wrap is pitifully easy to shred), opening a clear line of fire to the tank for the squad with the melta. )

How do five guys with bolters clear a line of fire through 50 or 60 bodies? Even if they do somehow clear a line of fire through it, the'll be well out of melta range, possibly out of weapons range entirely.

I've literally never seen anyone get a wall of guys 50-60 bodies thick around every vehicle. You don't have to kill the squad, just clear a hole big enough that the vehicle doesn't have concealment. With bolters, grenades, and template weapons it's pretty easy.

The idea with IG bubble wrap isn't cover, it's to put a whole platoon around your tank squad so that melta weapons can't get close enough to metla. With a full platoon you can reliably deny drop pods access to roughly 1/4 of the table.

This is mostly used in infantry heavy lists with only a few, very valuable, tanks you want to protect. It's even better with a renegade list that has infinite conscripts.

Jim the key is to force the pod to land outside melta range.

Fair enough, if you can bring enough guys to do that. I've yet to see it happen.

EDIT: I should say, I've yet to see it function correctly.

 Jimsolo wrote:
Fair enough, if you can bring enough guys to do that. I've yet to see it happen.

EDIT: I should say, I've yet to see it function correctly.

Considering you can't shoot before the pods start landing I'd be curious as to how. Whilst you're right that it's not terribly difficult to dedicate enough raw fire power to blow an opening in the surrounding guardsmen, there's all of 0 answers to a proper bubble-wrap that prevents the pods from getting close enough to melta.

Coteaz coteaz coteaz

 morganfreeman wrote:

 Jimsolo wrote:
Fair enough, if you can bring enough guys to do that. I've yet to see it happen.

EDIT: I should say, I've yet to see it function correctly.

Considering you can't shoot before the pods start landing I'd be curious as to how. Whilst you're right that it's not terribly difficult to dedicate enough raw fire power to blow an opening in the surrounding guardsmen, there's all of 0 answers to a proper bubble-wrap that prevents the pods from getting close enough to melta.

Indeed the only real answer to bubble wrapping is to keep the Melta pods in reserve and clear out the units that are bubble wrapping. The problems with that are:

1) You might not clear enough men to get into Melta range
2) The tank will be able to fire and potentially remove a key unit
3) Drop Pods on turn 2 roll for reserves so there is always the chance that they won't show up until it's too late

Guard should have less problems with pods than many armies. I'll reiterate a few things and add a couple..

First bubble wrap. I've never seen a guard player or renegades player without at least 50+ infantry/zombies etc making life difficult. He will always have short ranged anti tank so punish that weapon choice with fodder.

Also this is where cheap scouting/infiltrating units are priceless at pushing back the landing zones out of double tap/melta/template range.

Obviously you'll also want to use cover to your advantage just needs to be stated but then another overlooked strategy is objective placement. Force hard decisions between using his invariably short ranged weaponry or getting to those objectives. This is trickier with guard but you can build for it where a pod heavy list only has pseudo mobility on arrival.

Lastly reserve your armour dude, and really any juicy targets. This actually falls under bubble wrap because the concept is the same. I used to do it with mechanized wolves but I apply the same concept to pretty much every army I play because I don't like having no outs to alpha strike lists. Flood the field with 2" spread marines, lose some dudes then have my entire mechanized force EtB and mop up my side of the board. Its what I like to call 'flipping the alpha strike' and it can work really well if your built to do it.

Also make drop pod traps.

Can you elaborate on this - what does it involve?

 Ratius wrote:

Also make drop pod traps.

Can you elaborate on this - what does it involve?

Leave holes in your units or between units just large enough for a drop pod to land there, but not enough room for the troops to disembark. They all die instantly. The traps don't go off often, but pods can deviate into your troop formations, and if that trap is the closest place to land, it's $$.

 GoonBandito wrote:
Go Inquisition, but instead of Servo-Skulls (though they are great!) grab Inquisitor Coteaz and stick him in a squad filled with Plasma or some other weapon suitably nasty to T4/3+ models. His "I've been expecting you" special rule allows the unit he's with to out-of-sequence shoot at each and every unit that comes out of Reserves within 12" of him. Careful placement of your units will make any Drop Pods wanting to get in Melta range take a huge gamble.

In addition, Coteaz lets you re-roll Seize the Initiative (or force the opponent to re-roll his), has 2+ save, is a ML2 Psyker, sports a Nemesis Demon Hammer and if you so choose to make him your Warlord comes with a Trait that gives him and his unit Preferred Enemy (Demons). For 100pts he's an absolute bargain.

I came here ready to say exactly this. You can place Corteaz with a few multi-melta servitors, too.

If you take a Fortification, utilize the option in taking Tank Traps (impassable) to extend your bubble around critical units and grant Cover. While a squad can walk through this barrier after the pod plants itself on the far side, you can hopefully get its range beyond lethal Meltagun range. You could always take Tanglewire and attempt to Dangerous a model.

Martel732 wrote:

 Ratius wrote:

Also make drop pod traps.

Can you elaborate on this - what does it involve?

Leave holes in your units or between units just large enough for a drop pod to land there, but not enough room for the troops to disembark. They all die instantly. The traps don't go off often, but pods can deviate into your troop formations, and if that trap is the closest place to land, it's $$.

I was wondering what that was about.. Honestly they'd have to be a complete idiot to fall for this. I'd love to see it happen but I don't see anyone I play with doing more than laughing me off for putting holes in my deployment. Otoh something I have done which I suppose would fall into the same camp is leaving a tempting area next to a board edge. Big enough that they can get the job done but if scatter goes wrong the pod mishaps. I'd suggest this over the 'trap'. Well unless they're already highly intoxicated.

I've been playing guard for years and in that time I have played against SM so many times I lost count. Seeing as how Drop Pod armies are now the big thing thanks to free transport formation (maybe the IG/AM will get this lucky, but doubt it) you will see it all the time. You can never win a game in the deployment phase, but you sure can lose.

1. I keep most of my stuff near my table edge, maybe two inches of space behind. Not enough to fit a drop pod.

2. I keep my armor facing forward. Make them have to roll higher than giving them the rear armor.

3. Most drop pods will go against my LR tanks, so, I put the plasma and or melta vets in chimeras near by. Might take out that tank, but Im taking some stuff with me too.

4. If I run Pask (punisher of course) I also run Bullgryn. That bubles pask front, and with cammo netting a pretty good cover save. Keep chimeras on the sides, so, I might loose something, but not the mighty pask.