Deathwing Tactica: problems

1. armies you will struggle with

pure deathwing has little to no antiair.  since aircraft is new, it’s only via justifications that you can actually include provisions while keeping the list pure.  allies can solve the problem, but drain away points for more terminators.  instead, you can add a Storm Eagle, a Fire Raptor, a Dev Squad of green marines with Flakk missiles, or if you’re not playing with babies you can field a Mortis or a Contemptor Mortis -- i use a Rifleman Mortis and a twin TLLas (Or twin Kheres, since many aircraft are av12 or less) Contemptor Mortis with roof rack.  with Interceptor and Skyfire, they are both really handy and almost always earn their points back anyway.  still, high-count flyer armies are tricky.

Horde armies will cause problems for you.  you just cannot put enough bullets into the air to cut them down fast enough, so if your decoys and deployment shenanigans don’t give you control of the board, you will be hip-deep in green or gribblies that will saturate your field.  and the easy ways to handle this are also potential problems with other armies.  let’s face it: terminators with heavy flamers (one of the best weapons against hordes) aren’t optimally used… their short range means harder to participate in the distance games needed to play well.  but dedicated antitroop units -- such as a set of deepstriking dual-heavy-flamer landspeders, or allies with large blasts -- take away your ability to field more terminators.  

2. weapons you must eliminate

part of target priority is finding those weapons that most endanger your units and eliminating them quickly.  for Deathwing, this is very important, but also very easy.  find high rate-of-fire (RoF) weapons that would cause you to have to make a large volume of saves.  find AP2 weapons.  find heavy weapons with high strength that will threaten the dreads and landraiders.  

then kill them.

there isn’t that much more than that.  true, there are some considerations about in what order, and how exactly, but mostly it’s according to what you want to protect.  personally, i try to take out their antiarmor first, so that landraider can cruise around doing stupid vehicle tricks for the rest of the game.  After that is taken care of, or if the need is more pressing, high-strength low-ap blasts are dangerous -- particularly if you are required to cluster close due to terrain.  plasma guns are less dangerous, because if you are paying attention you’ll be staying out of their rapid-fire abilities, but attempting to eliminate them early if possible, or wiping out units that have access to many of such weapons (veterans, crisis suits, etc) as early as possible is key.

if you can, especially if you have the first real turn, target an easily-killable unit to guarantee first blood.  if you can, wipe away the enemy general.  but since you can do that later (since actually killing a unit of terminators is difficult for most armies to do quickly without devoting everything to achieve that goal… which you can use to your advantage), the threats are more important.  if you protect yourself, your survivability increases dramatically, and you are more able to act aggressively when action is needed.  but with a 2+5++, you have some level of protection against most weapons, and you have the ability to neglect cover in favor of more maneuverability, and you have the option to dictate the flow of the game through your actions.

3. luck

once, when the only place you were likely to see assault cannons was being held by terminators, and they were only 3-shot weapons, they used to be less reliable.  if ever you rolled three 1s, you “jammed your assault cannon” and it was unusable the next round.  the same series of (old metal) models were on standard bases, and the cyclone-carriers had a targeting device in their off-hand.  it was an interesting time just before the real heyday of the Deathwing list.

it’s important to remember, because as unlikely as it sounds, it happens at the worst possible time.

the majority of sidearms will wound you on 4s or 5s, but you will shrug off most of the hits with a 2+ save… up until the game-changing round when you will jam your assault cannon.  you will cream virtually anyone if you’re left alive to swing in combat… up until your opponent’s general is cornered by a unit of Deathwing, but you jam your assault cannon.  you will have an enemy general with one wound left cornered in the last round and just needing a single round to finish them off… up until you jam your assault cannon.

it is much more likely that the decisions you made earlier are more at fault than the one set of rolls.  don’t feel that the dice hate you, don’t get angry and throw away your army (or do so, but do it near me so i can snag them).  make a joke of it and move on.  play another short game, and learn from your mistakes.  that above all is what makes a winner over the long haul. their shooting.