Moscovian wrote:
Anyone else have anything new they want to bring to the table?
I'm not sure if this counts as strictly "new" but...
Having both faced and used Dave's method, I have to say it's not so random as has been asserted above. The two purely random elements are the turn in which each formation arrives and the scatter of the landing spot. When choosing the landing spot, strategy comes into play when you have to think "where can I place this so that when the defender moves it 45cm, it still lands somewhere useful?" In a board full of enemy FM's, this is an interesting proposition - both fun and annoying in equal measure. Most of the time, you still end up in assault range of an enemy FM.
The ensuing scatter roll also happens in other brands of planetfall anyway, so the really unique element is turn of arrival. The 'nid player is really screwed if each FM comes in piecemeal, i.e. one a turn. If they mostly arrive in the first turn, it's complicated for the 'nids as they have to choose carefully. I can imagine the 'nid player just adding the landing fm's to the front of the swarm, or hitting a flank. Of course, they don't have to come down at the beginning of the turn either, so there's a lot of flexibility and ability for the 'nids to support the landing fm. There is a strong element of "crap shoot" with the turn of arrival thing, but unless you're doing a turn 1 planetfall with SM into the opposing deployment zone, there's an element of randomness to regular planetfall as well - you either guess the enemy's intentions correctly or not.
The elements of randomness aren't overpowering, especially considering that this is a game that includes a fair amount of random-result dice rolling (unless you're using Dave's dice of course
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