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Hope this is the right subforum for this, but I need some help from seasoned DG players, or maybe those who play with them.

In my gaming group, one buddy has a Death Guard army.

What he has is:

Mortarion
2 x plagueburst crawler
2 x myphitic blight hauler
2 x foetid bloat drone
1 x chaos rhino
6 x deathshroud terminators
5 x blightlord terminators
1 x plague surgeon
1 x biologus putrifier
1 x tallyman
1 x foul blightspawn
1 x noxious blightbringer
1 x malignant plguecaster
1 x lord of contagion
1 x typhus
15 x plague marines
20 x poxwalkers

His gaming style prefers melee to shooting.

The problem is, the others in the group prefer shootier armies, and he almost always gets shot off the board. After enemy turn two, around 40% of his points is dead to shooting. And the problem is not him not trying to hide them/place them in cover but they simply don't withstand the enemy firepower (which the DG should kinda do, right?).

So he tries to deep strike, and if that charge fails, whatever unit tried it gets wiped with the next enemy shooting. And if it succeeded, then they don't actually do the damage they are expected to do. So get shoot off next turn again. Looking at his gameplay he really doesn't do mistakes I can point out, but gets killed nontheless.

Usually his list is infantry and characters in the rhino to move up and get to an objective inside a ruin for cover, deep strike terminators and have crawlers and myphitics for fire support and also to move up and be roadblocks.

So after this long post, what can he do to actually survive and get more units into melee, because to me it seems the DG are too slow to get into melee and get their main weapon (-1 enemy T) to work, and they are too fragile to actually survive long enough under fire to get there.

Any input on what actually works for DG, and maybe a list from what he has?

Can the DG even be a faction that kills enemy units in order to win, and not be the one that camps the objectives hoping to last long enough?

Thanks for the feedback

I see a collection of characters here & not much else. Not enough firepower, not enough ways to get things up field & not enough stuff to support those characters or be supported by them.
I see three real threats - the termies & Mortarian. Kill those & of & your friend has pretty much nothing.

ccs wrote:
I see a collection of characters here & not much else. Not enough firepower, not enough ways to get things up field & not enough stuff to support those characters or be supported by them.
I see three real threats - the termies & Mortarian. Kill those & of & your friend has pretty much nothing.

So...he should do what then, get what?

For reference, last game I had with him (1500 points), he took:

Mortarion (in reserves as to not get shot off the board)
3 x Deathshroud termies (in teleport to deep strike)
2 x Myphitic blight haulers (fire support)
Two units 10 x Poxwalkers (back objective holders)
1 x Plagueburst crawler (entropy, fire support)
1 x Rhino ( with plague marines, plaguecaster and foul blightspawn inside)

I was running chaos knights: knight desecrator, four brigands, one karnivore and one stalker.

Short rundown:

First turn, plagueburst crawler left with one wound, and all poxwalkers dead (they were inside ruins holding/contaminating objectives), I missed all shots on the rhino (he had smokescreen on it).

Turn two, Morty fails charge, deathshrouds make it but deal only three damage to my karnivore, which in turn kills two of them (has re-rolls ones and +1 warlord trait, but is controlling the center objective which gives 2 VP each turn, and was damaged before he charged him due to blight haulers fire). My shooting leaves Morty with 7 wounds left, and I charge him with Desecrator, one claw attack goes through and Morty is left with one wound)

Turn three, both morty and desecrator dead, karnivore dead, termies dead, plague marines shot up, only two remaining (had the +1 T psyker power on them, and were in cover), one blight hauler damaged.

Turn four, everything he has is dead except the rhino and the foul blightspawn which saved two melta shots on 6's. My war dogs damaged (one is at 1W left, two in mid-bracket, two healthy).

Turn five, he is wiped.

Final score is something like 70-30.

Terrain was set up with forest (dense, light cover) in the middle, all the other terrain is obscuring and pipes, and objectives are inside ruins and/or cover. So you can hide, but must step out of obscuring to get to the points, but when on them you have a measure of extra protection.

So now with more details, what should he do? Because the way I see it, he can't do anything really. He just dies too easily, and is too slow to get into melee to get his aura to do its work. Even more so, the few units that have some speed are always primary targets and die first. Poxwalkers were just Favor fodder, but if he used marines for objective holding he wouldn't have the points for some heavier hitters (Crawler, Blight haulers). And even with this setup, which was made more for destroying vehicles he still just couldn't do anything.

So again, some constructive advice anyone?

Well to start off, I always feel threatened into shooting match ups. It's just not something DG plays well into. We should be though as you mentioned but the sad reality is, nothing is though in 9th edtion. Every army crumbles under firepower, DG slower than others but then we are also slower to compensate.
But if you ask me, your friend is putting too much into Deep Strike/Reserves. 9" charges are unreliable and all he is doing now is offering one or two threats a turn for the opponent to shoot at. If he were to advance his entire army up the board in one go he might just get too hold some objectives because they can't all be shot off the board at once. I personally neither own nor play with Morty so I can't offer any advice there. But as the other poster stated, your friend appears to own a lot of buffing/supporting characters but not a lot of models to actually support. Nor does he own enough Deamon Engines to make a spam list of that kind work.
I hate to say it but he should probably really look to expand on either his engines or infantry model count. 2x Bligh Haulers or 2x Plague Marines or at least 1x extra Blightlords might be enough to at least make a more coherent, functional army without costing a lot of money. Failing that, and seeing what he has I'd say try a list were he pushes up his drones and Haulers, while having several PM/Termy units advancing behind to cap points. This way at least the opponent might need a turn or 2 to deal with the engines in his face while the infantry can close the gap and score in the process.

 Castozor wrote:
Well to start off, I always feel threatened into shooting match ups. It's just not something DG plays well into. We should be though as you mentioned but the sad reality is, nothing is though in 9th edtion. Every army crumbles under firepower, DG slower than others but then we are also slower to compensate.
But if you ask me, your friend is putting too much into Deep Strike/Reserves. 9" charges are unreliable and all he is doing now is offering one or two threats a turn for the opponent to shoot at. If he were to advance his entire army up the board in one go he might just get too hold some objectives because they can't all be shot off the board at once. I personally neither own nor play with Morty so I can't offer any advice there. But as the other poster stated, your friend appears to own a lot of buffing/supporting characters but not a lot of models to actually support. Nor does he own enough Deamon Engines to make a spam list of that kind work.
I hate to say it but he should probably really look to expand on either his engines or infantry model count. 2x Bligh Haulers or 2x Plague Marines or at least 1x extra Blightlords might be enough to at least make a more coherent, functional army without costing a lot of money. Failing that, and seeing what he has I'd say try a list were he pushes up his drones and Haulers, while having several PM/Termy units advancing behind to cap points. This way at least the opponent might need a turn or 2 to deal with the engines in his face while the infantry can close the gap and score in the process.

Thanks for the input, but what you are saying is that the tactic is put strong(er) stuff in front, and hope they last long enough to score enough points. Also, infantry can't really be hidden from shooting moving behind armor, so nothing is preventing enemies from pointing the small and medium arms fire at the marines, while the tanks get the strong shots. So in turn, he ends up with no infantry and busted up vehicles. Say they last two turns, that is one turn of capping points (as he needs one to move up) and after that the enemy just steps over their corpses and plants on the objectives.

What the DG lack, IMO is some mid-strength ranged shooting for marines. For example, if he could take up to five blight launchers with marines, and maybe a missile launcher, that would greatly improve the ranged threat.

But really dunno, at this stage the best solution would be to fall into the trap that GW wants us all in, and that is having multiple armies, and using the one for which the codex is newest/best at a given time...

If you meet up to a gunfight with a knife you are gonne get shot. The reason most suksessfull lists include shooting elements is flexabulaty. You can take out glass cannon units. And if a small unit is on a point you can shoot it of instead of spending 2 turns running towards it.

I would try to include some ranged elements. The tanks and the small robot tanks are good fo this. Dreadnoughts with volkite (from forge world) is also good.

Second if he does not have that he should try to get enough models that they survive ariwing. 15 plague marines is not enough for that. 30 would be a much better number. Perhaps in 6 groups of 3. You can put them in rhinoes to push up and into melee.

Spawns are fast, good and cheap. They are quite good.

Further, do you play with enough terrain? If they know they can not with a firefight perhaps they could just start hiding out on objectives and do secondaries. How much points do the opponent have when the game is over?

Further gambling on a 9" charge is bad. Deep strike Terminators behind terrain or in cover and get the charge the next turn.

So I attached the table set up as I recall it.

RED - objectives
GREEN - forest (dense,light,heavy,difficult)
CYAN - ruins (obscuring, light cover, defensible, etc)
BLUE - obstacles (pipes)
MAGENTA - deployment edge

I kinda think it was good on the amount of obscuring terrain, the only objectives not in cover are the ones in deployment zones. And for them you could put an infantry unit behind pipes to get light cover. And the forest in the middle is a boost for DG as they don't suffer difficult terrain, but benefit from dense cover.

The center objective is the sweet one you need, as it grants 2VP for each round of control, and 5 at the end of the game.

Also, there was enough room between ruins to move vehicles, so no venues of attack/retreat are closed down.

DG are not in a great spot I do agree, but we have options.

"What the DG lack, IMO is some mid-strength ranged shooting for marines. For example, if he could take up to five blight launchers with marines, and maybe a missile launcher, that would greatly improve the ranged threat."
Hah, how I would love that. But assuming your friend had the models for it, current DG with free gear already has not great but decent shooting at medium range. Not 5 launchers, but we can take 2 and 3 plasma guns on top, great for tackling elite infantry. A few squads of those with a Tallyman (with Tollkeeper relic) and you can be putting out serious hurt from 24". But as established, your friend lacks the number of PM's to make that work. Also we are not a shooting army to begin with, we will never trade blow for blow with real shooting lists.
New update will change our gameplay a bit, but I'd tell your friend for now that rough as it sounds he probably needs more boots on the ground if he wants his lists to work.

.