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I usually find Deep Strike an incredibly irritating mechanic; either it's too safe and lets you drop a unit into play and get a bunch of shots off without allowing your opponent any chance to respond, or it's so risky and unhelpful as to be effectively useless.

I've been brainstorming fixes, and my current theory is to tie Deep Strike to 'locator beacons'; allow units to Deep Strike only within (say) 6" of a model that's already in play with a homing beacon. The intent is to give players some way to react to/interact with enemy Deep Strikers beyond sitting there and watching the folks coming out of the Drop Pod that just appeared behind them blow up their stuff without trying to institute an entire XCOM-style overwatch mechanic, giving everyone Interceptor, making blanket no-deepstrike zones, or other clunky brute-force solutions.

Thoughts? Remarks?

What would happen when the beacon carrier dies? Do the deep strike units in reserve die as well or does the beacon stay in the ground where the model died?

I wouldn't actually mind the second option: a smart opponant could surround the beacon and deny deep strike. The only problem I see with this is that it prevents deep strike from really affecting gunline armies since you'd have to foot slog up the board before using the beacon and I'm always against anything that buffs gunlines.

Make Interceptor a more common tool, primarily available to infantry (tacticals, dire avengers, fire warriors, etc) with the caveat that you can only use it against units that have arrived from Reserves this turn that are attempting to shoot a friendly unit within 6" of you? You get to shoot right before the unit attempts to fire.

It's a more brute-force situation but it would be better than the super-overwatch you see on certain units.

I think the beacon idea would work for cetain units, but not for all. In the case of the beacon carrier, I'd make the rule if the carrier get killed, the DS unit would then have to arrive from normal reserves.

Another option might be that in the turn prior to the unit's arrival, you have to put down a marker to indicate the intended drop point. This gives the opponent a turn to prepare for the arrival (a psuedo interceptor), without having to do overwatch.

Also, in the case of the marker, if the enemy siezes the area, give the Deep Striker the option to delay arrival or show up, but automatically scatter and face the consequences.

In the case of Mawlocs (or other similar units that swallow/bombard enemies in the arrival zone), you might want to move away from the marker though, lest ye be mulched.

At the moment I hadn't planned on tying the Deep Strikers to a specific beacon, so if one died you could still drop by another one. If you had no beacons on the field at all I think making the unit enter from normal Reserves to represent them using a different beacon some distance off or landing wildly off-course would make sense.

The problem with arriving from normal reserve is that you make a lot of units that want to deepstrike effectively worthless that way. For the same reasons that Trygon tunnels are currently a bad idea and without number is not a rule people generally worry about.

Deepstriking melee units probably won't see combat until turn 4 or 5 if that happens. Deepstriking shooty units tend to be short ranged (thus the deepstriking) meaning they will struggle to see any action that game. Etc.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Edit: Maybe let deepstrikiers arrive within 12" of an objective under your control regardless of whether or not you have a beacon? And let certain units, like psykers, act as beacons?

Wyldhunt wrote:
...The problem with arriving from normal reserve is that you make a lot of units that want to deepstrike effectively worthless that way...

So keep your beacons safe?

(Though given the fact that this rule is trying to simulate paratroopers landing off-course perhaps letting them come on from more table edges might be appropriate, given that they're just as likely to miss and land behind the enemy as they are to miss and land behind friendly lines?)