I did AE yesterday, and tankfully a friend tagged along. In general it is yes, deploy and pwn, but in rare cases such as the bonus room of AE you will be swamped. I only barely managed to keep repped. A tactic I think may work for such occasions is to fit a MJD, jump 100km and set the bastion for one cycle, take out the sentries/elite frigs and if needed do another jump until the damage can be handled. In short, in most cases it's pure pwnage, but in very tough missions it is possibly easy to get cocky.