While a bad deployment doesn't automatically mean a game loss I often find it very difficult to make a comeback after a bad start. What are your tips and strategies for picking deployment zones and actually positioning your units? I am primarily an undead player that is struggling with this part of the game, mainly against humans.

So much to cover.

First of all look at the number of units each of you has. Do you out number your opponent or does he outnumber you. This will impact on your deployment as it means who gets the last unit down on the table. In some ways you can win this mini game in the list building phase. Get yourself a chaff unit as often winning deployment can tip the battle in your favour.

Second of all look at your own units. What hits hard, what is soft but needs to get actions to make your army work, what is your stayer unit, what's your chaff and what is your most mobile. By understanding the roles of your units you will know when to deploy them. I often start with a wide forward deployment of a chaff unit or a wide deep deployment of a soft but important unit to see if I can sucker my opponent into also deploying wide. I want him to deploy wide as I am aiming to get into one flank heavily.

I may then deploy my stayer unit, the one I know will stick around for the whole game. I will push this one more to the centre but still off to one side, remember I am trying to expose a flank of my opponent by forcing him to stay wide as well. I then usually follow up with another soft unit, i am trying to force him to put his heavy hitters down before I put mine down.

The last types I will deploy are either fast or hard hitting. These I will put on the opposite sides of the battle line from his heavy hitters. I want him to be hitting my large stayer unit with his hard hitters allowing me freedom to swing my heavy hitters out wide and roll up the line through his weaker but important support units.

Then we get into terrain. I am a huge believer of anchoring one of my flanks, usually my weaker one, with a piece of terrain. It will disrupt his charges, slowing down the inevitable destruction of a weaker, often chaff unit, but importantly holds the enemy up for a critical turn or two.

Happy to provide Waiqar specific examples if you want.

It is a sort of decision tree for me. If there is a painfully obvious deployment (one that really isn't a choice) on your side, drop it first. For example:

Head to head is chosen and the forest, spikes, and spikes are all placed between the deployment zones. You have a 3x3 reanimates block that can only fit through one of the gaps. Deploy that first. They know that was your plan since reanimates are too slow to flank reliably. You lost no surprise or tricks.

After the obvious/no-option deployments, I consider deploying solo lancers.

I usually deploy archers early if terrain is cluttered and I see good safe spots.

Ardus and carrion lancers will be later. Assassin units usually deployed last unless buying time for a lynchpin formation.

This is the latest iteration of the list I have been working on (suggestions are welcome): http://tabletopadmiral.com/runewars/undead/p031uEMu0fp083u40uEMu47uEMuEMp012u27u47u26p012u27u47u26p071uEMp071uEM

I have been placing archers on either side of the reanimates block with the lancer's in front of the archers to provide cover from cavalry charges. Ardus will normally go next to a carrion lancer to allow access to the surges from both the archers and lancers. In one of the more recent games I played my opponent put Kari on one flank, a large cavalry block on the other flank and a spearmen group just off center towards the cavalry side. If I turned towards the cav/spearmen they would slow down and let Kari get a rear charge. If I turned towards Kari she would stay back and shoot while the cavalry got a rear charge. Deploying wider might help prevent the rear charges but I felt like then our armies would take each other on 1 unit vs 1 unit, a fight which I would lose due to my opponents larger formation sizes.

11 hours ago, Thornoo1 said:

So much to cover.

First of all look at the number of units each of you has. Do you out number your opponent or does he outnumber you. This will impact on your deployment as it means who gets the last unit down on the table. In some ways you can win this mini game in the list building phase. Get yourself a chaff unit as often winning deployment can tip the battle in your favour.

Second of all look at your own units. What hits hard, what is soft but needs to get actions to make your army work, what is your stayer unit, what's your chaff and what is your most mobile. By understanding the roles of your units you will know when to deploy them. I often start with a wide forward deployment of a chaff unit or a wide deep deployment of a soft but important unit to see if I can sucker my opponent into also deploying wide. I want him to deploy wide as I am aiming to get into one flank heavily.

I may then deploy my stayer unit, the one I know will stick around for the whole game. I will push this one more to the centre but still off to one side, remember I am trying to expose a flank of my opponent by forcing him to stay wide as well. I then usually follow up with another soft unit, i am trying to force him to put his heavy hitters down before I put mine down.

The last types I will deploy are either fast or hard hitting. These I will put on the opposite sides of the battle line from his heavy hitters. I want him to be hitting my large stayer unit with his hard hitters allowing me freedom to swing my heavy hitters out wide and roll up the line through his weaker but important support units.

Then we get into terrain. I am a huge believer of anchoring one of my flanks, usually my weaker one, with a piece of terrain. It will disrupt his charges, slowing down the inevitable destruction of a weaker, often chaff unit, but importantly holds the enemy up for a critical turn or two.

Happy to provide Waiqar specific examples if you want.

Thornoo I feel like this is good advice for a force with cavalry. You talk about flanking, and fast heavy hitters but undead don't seem to have units like that yet. The closest I could come is 2x1 lancers with rank discipline. Some Waiqar specifics would be really helpful.

Good deployment starts with good terrain placement. As human or undead, I usually try to pick the deployment card. That means that you get to place 2 out of the 3 terrain pieces and you get to pick the most ideal deployment zone (if there is one). This is doubly good because the first player has to deploy first. Deploying second is better. Try to place terrain to 'juke' your opponent. For example, I played a game where I dropped the Stone Terrace right in front of my deployment zone. That made him think I would put the archers behind the stone terrace to climb onto it and shoot him. I would have maybe even done that, except one of his first deployments was to put a scary group of spearmen directly opposite my stone terrace. I was able to save the archers for near the end and place them in a completely different location that was slightly less ideal, but much more effective. It was effective because that block of spearmen couldn't maneuver around to do anything meaningful till round 6 or so. My opponent probably thought that was an 'obvious' choice of where to put his unit because "of course you want to get into melee with those archers quickly". Problem is, he made a bad assumption. So that's kinda what I mean by using terrain to juke.

The next thing is that you should generally place your most valuable and vulnerable units last. Placing single-tray carrion worms early is usually a safe bet because you can easily reform and maneuver them to a different spot if needed. Until death knights are out, you usually should just never place toward the flanks. The only exception really is if your opponent places early flanking worms or cavalry. I've found Ardus chews those up. After worms, I find Ardus is usually good to place as he is also fairly mobile (single-tray units squeeze through most places). Then just place things to counter your opponent's deployments and try to save your most important/vulnerable stuff for last. For me, that's usually the archers, but not always.

These are all sort of general recommendations and I don't claim to be great at undead (I just saw that there weren't many replies here). Don't stick to them exactly. The basic idea behind deployment, is that you want to avoid unfavorable match-ups and minimize enemy threats. For example, if you cluster all your infantry around the same area, then Kari will tear you to shreds. Try to have Ardus take her down if he's not busy slaughtering horses. Keep worms blighting either spearmen, rune golems, or Kari based on which of those is in the position to do the most damage. Even with front-line runegolem, spearmen aren't at all scary if they have even 1 blight on them. "Oh no, 1 blue die!" Don't bother blighting horses as much unless you can get at least 2 blight tokens on them or they have at least 4 trays together. They have 3 dice, so blight is much less effective against them in general. Position your worms accordingly.

P.S. My rule of thumb is that you should always have at least 4 units to deploy (at 150 points which is mostly what I'm confined to playing till the rest of these xpacs come out so maybe 5 at 200). 3 giant units are going to suck if the enemy has deployment advantage and just totally out maneuvers you.

11 hours ago, Willange said:

As human or undead, I usually try to pick the deployment card. That means that you get to place 2 out of the 3 terrain pieces and you get to pick the most ideal deployment zone (if there is one). This is doubly good because the first player has to deploy first. Deploying second is better.

Though don't you only to get to control picking the deployment card if you are the first player? - and then you would have to deploy first as well. Whereas the second player can deploy second but has to let the opponent get best pick of the cards. If that's right, would you prefer to be first or second player?

12 hours ago, Qark said:

Thornoo1 I feel like this is good advice for a force with cavalry. You talk about flanking, and fast heavy hitters but undead don't seem to have units like that yet. The closest I could come is 2x1 lancers with rank discipline. Some Waiqar specifics would be really helpful.

I had a look at your list. Let me guess, your archers are getting bogged down really early and you cant generate blight?

What about moving to two of these instead:
Reanimate Archers x2 [18]
--Training: Combat Ingenuity [6]
----------Total Unit Cost: 24

Then with the saved points put in one of these:

Reanimates x4 [26]
----------Total Unit Cost: 26

Use the second unit of Reanimates to bracket your two smaller units of archers, with Ardus just in front of them. You will still lose the 2x2 Reanimates, fit a necromancer in there if you have Ardus.

Deploy like this:

For whatever reason my opponents tend prefer picking the scenario card so I rarely have this issue. I think I would still choose second player though.

4 hours ago, CastleRock said:

Though don't you only to get to control picking the deployment card if you are the first player? - and then you would have to deploy first as well. Whereas the second player can deploy second but has to let the opponent get best pick of the cards. If that's right, would you prefer to be first or second player?

The only time I pick first player is typically if I know there are some scenarios that could really screw me if they show up.

10 hours ago, Thornoo1 said:

I had a look at your list. Let me guess, your archers are getting bogged down really early and you cant generate blight?

What about moving to two of these instead:
Reanimate Archers x2 [18]
--Training: Combat Ingenuity [6]
----------Total Unit Cost: 24

Then with the saved points put in one of these:

Reanimates x4 [26]
----------Total Unit Cost: 26

Use the second unit of Reanimates to bracket your two smaller units of archers, with Ardus just in front of them. You will still lose the 2x2 Reanimates, fit a necromancer in there if you have Ardus.

Deploy like this:

With only 2 core sets to work with I only have 8 trays of reanimates. I could go with 2x2 on both sides. Looking at that deployment the line of sight of the archers is very small. How would they get shots at units attacking from the left of the 3x3 block?

9 hours ago, Willange said:

For whatever reason my opponents tend prefer picking the scenario card so I rarely have this issue. I think I would still choose second player though.

The only time I pick first player is typically if I know there are some scenarios that could really screw me if they show up.

Good thinking - thanks.

5 hours ago, Qark said:

With only 2 core sets to work with I only have 8 trays of reanimates. I could go with 2x2 on both sides. Looking at that deployment the line of sight of the archers is very small. How would they get shots at units attacking from the left of the 3x3 block?

Perhaps ask if you can proxy in a single tray. The booster box is due out in a week or so.

You're right that that the archers don't have great LOS. In this formation they're primarily for engaging units to the front of your two reanimate blocks. Perhaps do a refused flank by deploying hard up against a table edge?

I guess you're starting to see the limitations of being a field marshal. You can only work with what you have, make a plan and stick with it.