Deployment

Listening to the latest road to war today and they mentioned something I have been doing and that I haven't noticed and that is bunching together in the centre for deployment. There are a few reasons to do this:

It gives you the opportunity to pick the battles each unit is fighting. There are quite a few matches where I have deployed first and then first turn ran my units diagonally to give them more favourable opponents, you can't do that if you are way out on a flank.

It gives you flexibility, you can plan out your first turn really well but when it comes to turn 2-4 stuff starts to happen, dice become important and your opponents strategy and the objective start impacting on your game. If you want to change the spells that each unit has or suddenly need to get more models into a scoring area you can do it if your army is towards the centre, if you have a unit way out on a flank you can't do that.

Splitting your army allows your opponent to piece trade without losing anything. If you have a unit of banes behind your satyxis they will murder anything that kills them if however your satyxis are far away from the rest of your army your opponent can concentrate force on those satyxis, wipe them out and then you are just down the points for that unit. Sticking with the Satyxis example this also includes running them too far forwards. If you can't jam me and keep me out of the scoring zone running up your satyxis their full distance is only going to get them murdered.

Like all good rules there are exceptions. The raptors in my legion army quite often deploy not on the edge of the table but further out that other units. They have the speed to still get to the other side of the table if they need to and I'm not worried about piece trading because they use their range and light cav move to stay out of range. Especially if I am playing Rhyas and they are stealthed. Fast solos and ranged units are generally all right on a flank if they don't make use of any support the army provides. In particular the type of solos that always trade up like mage hunter assassins. Even then they should not be on the table edge, just slightly more edgewards.

Other things I've said before but I'll include in the deployment post for completeness. Know what needs to go together. You should have an idea how to deploy your list when you build it. For example in my Vayl2 lists the spawning vessel goes in the middle of my legionnaires unit at the front. It moves 6 they move 10, I want it up the table to collect as many corpses as possible. They go in the open and my battlegroup deploys behind terrain because they fly and have pathfinder. It takes me a minute to deploy because I know where things go. If you don't know that you can give yourself order of activation issues on turn 1 and that is never a good thing. I have seen a player trample Nemo with a Stormwall because they needed the distance to drop a pod and then chain lightning it. It could have been avoided if Nemo was off to the side of the Stormwall instead of tucked up against it. I find in most lists I can have my warcaster go first and cast all their buffs without moving. You only need one model from each unit in range and that's not particularly difficult if you know where those buffs are going and take it into account when deploying.