Board Control and Reserve Denial

[malkyn76]

Doing a little math, I've realized that a single full brood (30) of Gargoyles can effectively deny all reserve placement within a VERY large area. Placed 2" apart, you can essentially control 76"x24" in regards to preventing reserves from coming in (2" model + 2" apart + 9" on the ends). A double line placed along your deployment zone will deny your opponent any chance to get behind you, plus you can leave then there for the 3 turns he has to deploy and then not lose too much effectiveness with their 12" move.

And while expensive, three such broods can be used within a turn to also deny access to the sides of the table as well possibly forcing the loss of units due to being unable to deploy at all. Coupled with the amount of real estate in your control and with much more juicy targets to shoot at such as mawlocs, flyrants, fexen, trygon with a full brood of gaunts, it may just work. Thoughts?

[acehilator]

Use Hormagants instead?

[malkyn76]

I was sort of hoping for something more along the lines of thoughts and ideas as to if it would work, if it was something worth attempting, etc ...

[gigasnail]

Any of the gribbly units can do this, sure.

[drake003]

Worth trying out. At the very least you want a unit Olin your back field anyway to hold your objectives so you are not sacrificing much by employing This tactic, in which case a cheaper unit like Termagants would be a good choice.

Also worth bearing in mind not to leave any of your objectives in your Dz unguarded beginning of game so enemy's can't DS on them from the start. Helps slow down enemy obtaining tactical objectives..

[N.I.B.]

30 Gargoyles are extremely unwieldy, terrain will give you logistics trouble big time with your army.

[No One]

It's potentially very powerful.

However, there's very little benefit to being able to deny the enemy access to your backfield, in and of itself (objectives is about it, but even then, a single model on an objective denies it that turn, and they'd likely need to kill to actually score anyway - you're denying it that turn just by holding it, and this doesn't really help hold it subsequently).

If you do have things in your backfield though (exo/HG for example), then having something that can deny DS is very good - I'd say pseudo mandatory if you've got more than a minimal firebase. I don't think you'll be denying quite as much area as you mention in practice, but you should easily be able to stop melta drops and keep plasma out of double tap range (provided most of the gargs are still alive ).

Otherwise though, I don't think it has enough utility as a strategy - most armies aren't going to be running too reserve heavy (I think I've only seen one list (9 coldstar commanders - it hurt) that wasn't GSC with more than 4 units in reserve - most have far less than that, though some can place in DS if desired (Tau suits/crons). If they don't have much stuff for you to block...what's the point in blocking? What do you gain from the map control? Could potentially be very good in a maelstrom environment, where you just deny access to the objectives and capitalise on that. But whatever you're doing, you're (effectively) sitting at a points disadvantage - especially if you're running 3 broods. That's 540 pts, that's not contributing much - it's not really stopping them from engaging on your forces (unless you have a strong backfield - but 540 pts down, you won't have much to spend ), and even if it does completely shut down their reserve stuff (if they can't even deploy it with their own forces...you've probably won. If they can, then they can still engage on stuff), that's still probably only 200 pts down: 1500 pt army vs 1800/2k, say? Unlikely to go well for you - even maelstrom, they should be able to then start moping up the gargs and either go for a table, or take back objectives. It could potentially work if your army took enough chunks out of theirs, but still. For this idea, I'd prefer 3 ripper squads for 100 pts - still blocks immediate access to the objective, for much cheaper. The same principle holds (albeit to a lesser extent) to just the one squad.

Basically, a great idea with a strong backfield (though other gribblies might be better for cheaper). Less useful otherwise.

[malkyn76]

I use gargoyles all the time, usually in broods of 20 or 30 so I'm well aware of the issues with them and terrain. Usually I tend to deploy them off to one side and rely upon their movement to make up for it. In this case though, my initial plan is to deploy them in my back field,only moving them up about 9" after everything else has moved forward as well, completely preventing any chance of reserve/deepstrike to arrive behind me. Um also thinking two units of 30 Termagants to cover the center and one side of the board with a Trygon and Hormagaunts to fill the other side. I'd think that most people would wait a turn or maybe two to drop off their reserves in hopes of securing an advantageous position, but the whole plan is to remove that advantage and to essentially overwhelm the forces already deployed. I've found often times reserved units tend to be alpha strike units and expensive points-wise, so removing that factor for a turn or two while bringing my own forces to bear could end the game quickly and decisively.

[butter]

I have begun using spore mines and/or meiotic spores for this in a couple of games. It's an expensive tax in some ways, but since you only need to be 9.5 inches from the board edge, you don't need too many points set aside to do this. There might be a more optimal setup, but 1 unit of meiotics and 2-3 spore mine units (plus my main cluster of junk I take) seems to be enough to totally deny deep striking alpha strike. The two times I've done this, my opponent clearly couldn't decide whether he should deep strike in his own zone or wait until after killing the spores, but then he had genestealers in his face. It definitely requires more testing but it's somehow really satisfying.

[No One]

As above, but mine also serve the purpose of unit count for GSC ambushes . Edit: Mucolids instead of mycetic anyway.

[malkyn76]

This weekend I'm going to try it out and see what happens. Locally we have a few folks who consistently have 5 or more units in reserve every game, usually Marine players with Terminators. It's become a game of cat and mouse between them and CA Genestealers as to who gets the drop on who. I might try to draw them into a slightly larger game (2500 or so) just to be able to field even more gribblies as well as an extra mawloc or two. If the only real direction he has to move is closer together, I think the 'locs will surely feast well.

[miles]

I spread my biovores into 3 units of 1 and space them out in the backfield with warriors between the units and swarms in front. So far, it's done great at preventing my opponents from deploying reserves behind me, and my biovores aren't planning on moving.

[kazetanade]

I do similar with Cult Sentinels and 10 men Neophyte squads with a Heavy Weapons Team. Less point efficient, but I'm aiming for a pure GSC army for that one.

[almostmercury]

It works in principle, and if you're taking the unit of 30 anyway it's an important deployment to consider.

Last game I used three 10 man termagaunt squads. They worked triple or quadruple duty, actually.

1. Provided the troop tax for 3 CP
2. Bubble wrapped my firebase (2 Exocrines, 3 Hive Guard, 2 Malanthropes)
3. Denied nearly my entire deployment zone
4. Were able to chain into my malanthrope bubble and hug terrain for -1 to hit and +1 save, and took a considerable amount of fire.

I've been thinking of using Neophytes because of the better weapons. 2 units for bubble wrap and 1 with lascannons in the back, but I would lose the -1 to hit bubble. Could be worth the trade?

[kazetanade]

Nope. Aint worth the trade.