Tactical Deployment – Mission Pack, First Impressions
I will start out with saying I was excited for this book in theory. I genuinely was. While I had no intention of using the ‘players bring terrain’ idea for our events, the idea of GW telling us how much/what kind/where to place terrain was an exciting prospect to remove the doubt and conflict of terrain at events… at least in theory.
Tactical Deployment showed a lot of promise in the lead up. New missions, new terrain rules, buying terrain for your army that isn’t fortifications… it all sounded great. Let’s jump in and take a look.
We kick off with (literally) no preamble – and get the pregame sequence laid out. This includes a big section on ‘Gather Tactical Terrain’. This is where it all starts to fall apart. The first thing we have a requirement for only using terrain that has data sheets, which should be fine right? Its not. It refers you to page 11 about Tactical Terrain datasheets, gives one example and then moves on. A little digging on the webstore only shows the most recent terrain having tactical terrain datasheets – nothing prior to 9th ed does. Oh… that’s… frustrating.
At 2000 points (typical matched play stuff) a player can spend between 150 and 200 terrain points and must include at least 4 data sheets worth of terrain. There are also limits on how many times a data sheet can be repeated. That’s all fine and good but as mentioned – we get no actual data sheets in the book to use from the get-go so we have no idea what that 200 points even buys.
The pregame sequence continues until the terrain section when it says not to deploy terrain until the tactical terrain deployment step. This step is all new and lengthy. There is a specific order and limits to how and where and when terrain is placed.
The attacker deploys the first piece of terrain and it then alternates. Terrain must be placed with the most expensive first working down in points. The terrain must be set up in your own territory (usually your board half), not within 3” of the edge/another terrain piece. There are a couple of caveats around how to work with objectives and the section also mentions terrain markers that terrain must be placed at first. Other than that, it’s pretty open.
The sequence moves on like usual matched play after this step. It moves straight on to the sample terrain data sheet – a Storage Fane worth 40 points. If you have seen terrain rules and read any 40k data sheets this is super familiar. It’s also my main complaint of this book. I can forgive the fact the next section jumps into the terrain rules (copy pasted from the main rule book) as it helps to have all the relevant rules in one spot. What I do have issue with is that the book is 104 pages of which a third is simply repeated rules. Basic rules/actions/stratagems/reserves/objectives/rare rules – all copy pasted from the core rules. These some 30 pages could have been dedicated to some generic data sheets like “single story ruined building” with max dimensions, basic rules, and points. 30 of these sorts of generic data sheets so that players could jump in and use the book as it is would have done wonders for it. Instead we must buy the expansion and can only use the most current terrain. It’s a big disappointment.
After the terrain rules repeat, we get a repeat of the secondaries for matched play from the GT mission book plus a couple of extras thrown in. After that it’s a bit on battle ready painting, some nice art and then on to the missions.
The missions take up about 40 pages of the book and are broken up into the game sizes like usual. I’m going to focus on the strike force size ones since that’s what we would use for most events. The missions feel familiar in terms of deployment, objectives and so on. All 6 missions have between 1 and 3 terrain markers (where your first pieces of terrain must be deployed). And all have their own secondary for the mission like normal. That’s kind of it. It would be easy to ignore the reference to terrain markers and just play these like normal missions. A couple of the mission specific secondaries reference the terrain markers or terrain in specific locations but that would be an easy fix for most players.
From here its all copy paste from the main rules again and I am left more than a little underwhelmed. As you saw at the start, I had high hopes for this book – and a few little changes would have made it invaluable for players. I already talked about the idea of generic terrain data sheets but I also feel like fixed terrain maps showing the expected deployment of terrain, recommended volumes of terrain and the types as well would have instantly made this a must have book. Instead we have about half of the book being a copy paste from other publications with just the modified pregame sequence and missions being the actual meat of the book. When it comes to Tactical Deployment – that’s just not enough for me.