First-turn charge armies got you down? Don’t worry we got some helpful tips to help you bring your Ynnari A-Game, and maybe pickup some tips for other armies as well.
There’s a good amount of first-turn charge armies out there that can pretty much guarantee a kill any of your units once they get it off. I don’t think this is quite good for the game, and why they made Drop Pods and other similar units pin-point accurate is beyond me. Regardless, it’s always good to keep your head clear, see the threat for what it is, and develop a counter-strategy so you can stop this kind of nonsense.
Luckily, I play an army that has a lot of thin little space-boats that can come together like LEGOS if I need them to. So next time, before Swarmlord sends 20x Genestealers into your face, deploy in a manner that eliminates the possibility of your units getting charged. Unless you’re taking a huge lot of Razorwing flocks to clutter the field as fodder, your next best option is flyers.
How? By using flyers’ rules and their fat bases to bubble-wrap your army in a way that will minimize the amount of damage that can be inflicted by funneling the opponent. Think 300, the Battle of Thermopylae, the Hot Gates, or if you want to be more imaginative with 40k examples, you’ve called for Broken Arrow on top of your surrounded units. Now that you have Aeldari air superiority forming a corridor of firepower to stop the enemy in his tracks. This does not work against flying units that can just assault you, but that’s life.
Here’s how it works in the rules:
- Your opponent has to be 9″ away from you when he drops in with his units.
- Their units have to be more than 1″ away from your units before they charge.
- Airborne says that units cannot assault you unless they have the Fly rule.
- Flyer bases are fat, so you can extend the charge range needed for your opponent.
- You space out your flyers enough so nothing can get in, and if your army needs more space, make room so only a few small base models can fit through, and only in a straight line.
Examples below where I have 4 flyers and set up by the table edge behind me. Another example shows a corner deployment because I have fewer flyers and bigger units. The ~3″ line is just a rough example of the distance you can put out to enable single-line infantry-sized models to get in.
Basically, if you see someone trying the first-turn charge cheese, you deploy like this. Depending on the size of your army, and how many flyers you have, the easier it will be to deploy against such shenanigans. In short, any faction can do this if they have enough flyers or units with the Airborne special rule.
It doesn’t look pretty, but it gets the job done.
