How I Deal With Space Marine Drop Pods

Facing space marine drop pods can be a bit overwhelming without a plan to nullify their advantage. Eldar (mech) have the speed and firepower to deal with them branching out if you are facing one drop pod or multiple pods coming down. Let’s look at both tactical plans.

The first example is where you have one pod coming down often with a dreadnought inside followed by deep striking terminators using the teleport homer. As a space marine player this build isn’t that bad, two hard hitting units coming down into your opponent’s zone forcing him to deal with them while the rest of your units move out to capture objectives. Actually, quite a good plan as the marine player has the concepts of sacrificing units for the win down tactically. How to deal with this? From the Eldar perspective you want to wipe out those hammer marine units as quickly as possible. This involves a bit of playing into the marine strategy and then springing the trap on them. Here is how it is done. Reserve everything except your wave serpent, some jetbikes, and your seer council. Deploy the jetbikes and council at one of the table corners and park the wave serpent in front of them. By only having these units on the table clustered like this, this is the only target of opportunity for your opponent, and it looks like he is playing you just as he wants. Pod comes down, dread gets out and most likely fires at your wave serpent with that melta gun. Energy shield takes that armor pen down to 1d6 so no real worries there. Next turn your council fortunes up and engages the dread with singing spears and witchblades as needed. Depending on placement your jetbikes can maybe line up rear armor on the dread with shurieken cannon shots. Dread goes poof! Termies come down on the teleport homer or deepstrike and shoot and then you hit them with the seer council destructor, doom, witchblade assault and they go poof! Watch this concept in action from my third game at the last GT in the vid below vs. an Ultramarine army that I faced.

Now against a full drop pod army you don’t want to be on the table at all. Reserve everything and let half the pods fall first turn, as your stuff comes on target what is weakest and use your speed when your units come on the table to first move far away and then engage as needed. Drop pods are only effective if they can catch you on landing out in the open to rapid fire and isolate units that might be hanging out there. Don’t let this happen by reserving everything and picking the when and where you engage your opponent.