Tau Troops: Breakdown

Despite almost abandoning my tau, I've seen the light and perhaps will even be joining the greater good and not getting rid of my existing tau. To this end I have even now bolstered my forces with not one, but two riptides.

Today, I want to look at troop choices for tau. You have two: kroot and firewarriors.

Firewarriors:

Relatively cheap for what they do, however that's when you have squads of six, go up to 12 and you can have the same number of kroot for almost half the points. Also these guys either want to be hiding somewhere, in which case you're probably investing in a defence line, or in a devilfish so they can come out of reserve, which brings up the costs. They do have supporting fire, and can take a markerlight though.

Kroot:

Cheaper than firewarriors, and have a lot more options about how to deploy/appear on the board. Infiltrating is always good even if to just keep your enemy guessing. Outflank coupled with the xv8 special system for auto-coming from a board edge within 6 and you can give your opponent a nasty surprise. Also kroot benefit greatly from forests, and actually can still act as an effective sacrifice unit and even hold their own in combat against some enemies (especially orks and guard). The problem is that they have shorter range, but given how close they can pop up to the enemy, this isn't always going to be a problem.

Conclusion:

So which is better? I'm not sure really, sort of leaning towards the kroot, but it seems like it would be a good idea to have at least one maxed out squad of firewarriors in a tau army or two min sized ones, especially in a gun-line type army. However kroot, may see more action with my tau in the future.

As side note... Why am I planning to play tau again?? I mean I hate gunline armies... Oh well, at least the riptides will be fun, as will the farsight/shadowsun deathstar that I may have to invest in for larger point games... Euurrghh - too much new shiny stuff.

Winning combinations in 6th - Part 1: stand and shoot

This is the first part of probably about three where in an attempt to get some content on the blog I am going to talk about what I've learnt.

With the introduction of fortifications, going all out shooting in your army can be pretty lethal, but why?

First of all you have the chance to take a defence line, making all of your units more durable. You have probably the most advantageous piece of terrain in your deployment zone - so why bother moving?

Then there's the fact that your opponent, unless they are an equally shoots army, has to move across the board to get to you, getting blasted to smithereens by your long range firepower along the way. If used to good effect, a "shooty" army may basically have 2-3 more turns of action than an assault one. Quite compelling evidence that shooting is king in 6th.

The Viability of MSU in 6th ed

First things first, all around the internet people have claimed that MSU is now dead, I however, don't think this is necessarily the case.

The aim of the game - basic concept

5 out of 6 of the missions in the rulebook are objective based. There are two ways to handle this when making a list. Either take lots of units (not necessarily small) or take a few durable units AND have sufficient hitting power to knock out enemy scorers. This is where it gets problematic, as most codexes do not allow you to have the ability to have both a lot of units and durable units.

There comes the issue that when you kit out your army with many units, they are often FORCED to be small due to points restrictions, needing other stuff in your list, etc... Meanwhile durable/strong units are often priced accordingly and so you can only take a few.

Where MSU comes in

If you've managed to crack a list which has multiple scoring units, that's durable and works for you then congratulations, for the rest of us, this is where MSU is still viable. Some people would say that in 6th edition you definitely need at least 6 troops from 1500 pts up, (and preferably more as the points increase). I'll be more conservative and say that for 1500 you definitely need 4.

When you take less than this, as soon as one unit is gone - you're effectively screwed. Also it should be taken into account that objectives can be contested/denied, so basically:

the more troops you take = the more objective-grabbing chances you get = the more likely you are to actually hold onto those objectives.

I have seen quite a few players simply take 2 larger squads of troops and then kit out their army into wall of death. The problem with this is that I don't even need to kill the whole squad. Just shoot off 25% and they're gone. This is where fearless troops come into good use, however, it is still just 2 squads. Since they're large squads, you're probably spending quite a few points on them and all you have are 2 chances to capture. In a 5 objective game, I can just let you take your 2 and then easily hold onto 3 of my own, or even just get one and contest your 2.

Tournament Report: Offence 6th

Warning: Long post lol despite saying it's not too detailed... :)

So I've finally decided to share the tournament results with you guys... Won't be too detailed but will cover all 3 of us to an extent hopefully. It was to be 3 rounds 1500 pts... Round 1 missions 1/2 from the rulebook (on a d3), round 2 missions 3/4 and round 3 missions 5/6. Mysterious objectives and terrain were meant to be in play but we generally forgot/ignored that ...

My army for the tournament had to be changed a bit as counting up my army just in case before it, I realised that the excel spreadsheet which I use, I had been using had a slight mistake (!!!) and I was 10 points over, hence the slight change in my list:

Company Command Squad with 2x plasmagun, medic

Veteran Squad with 3x plasmagun, grenadiers, power sword, chimera with multi-laser and heavy flamer
Veteran Squad with 3x meltagun, demolitions, chimera with multi-laser and heavy flamer

Platoon Command Squad with 3x flamer, power sword and plasma pistol
Infantry Squad Squad with grenade launcher and autocannon and commissar with power swrod and plasma pistol
Infantry Squad Squad with grenade launcher and autocannon
Infantry Squad Squad with grenade launcher and autocannon

Vendetta (had a hard choice between this or a hellhound or an aegis defence line)

Leman Russ Vanquisher with heavy flamer
Leman Russ Executioner with heavy bolter and plasma cannon sponsons
Leman Russ Eradicator with heavy flamer

Looking around before the match after I had set up my army on a tray (2 actually) that was (were?) given to me, I found that there were some interesting armies in sight. 3/4 grey knights, 4/5 space marines (various), no imperial guard apart from me, no dark eldar, 2 tyranids, 2 orks (1 Ilya), 2 Sisters of battle (1 with gk allies, one with guard), 2 chaos space marines (1 with daemon allies), a chaos daemons player, a tau player (with some forgeworld) and an eldar player (with just grav-tanks - forgeworld I think). Not sure if that was everyone but that was roughly it, there were roughly 14 tables so you can do the maths...

Round 1 I was paired up against grey knights, so I was a little scared, but I thought what the heck at least I get to see what they're all about. He had a stormraven, a dreadknight, 15 purifiers/interceptors (? troops anyway), a dreadnought with multi-melta, 5 grey knight terminators, a terminator librarian with some powers and a sprinkling of psycannons and maybe a flamer thing.

Mission we rolled for was objectives and we got 3 of them... deployment was pitched battle. Having determined the sides we placed objectives (He got first turn and decided to go first or maybe i was first but in any case he had first turn). One objective ended up in the open and 2 in opposite corners. Night fight didn't happen. His librarian + 10 troops + dreadnought went in the stormraven which he started on the table as he said he was scout moving + starting in skimmer mode (which you're not allowed but he was so confident about it I let it go at the time). His termies went central for the objective and a small purifier squad sat in a building on his side with their objective.

I deploy my blob in my building with the objective, the static ccs behind it to give orders and the executioner to the side to help out. The rest of my force (all meched up) presents a wall of A14 or gets cover saves on the other side of my deployment zone. Vendetta and pcs with flamers went in reserve. Plan: Get first blood, hope to hold home obj., drive up to middle obj and then contest/capture his objective if necessary.

Basically turn one he flew up and deposited his guys and shot me up a little, mainly knocking off the turret of the executioner. I responded driving up on the right and using first rank fire second rank fire on the blob to get first blood, take out his poorly placed librarian and kill about half the purifiers that were with him. (Btw when he saw how many dice I had to roll he suggested using an app he had on his ipad to roll all 60 or of them and it was actually quite useful allowing us to resolve the number of dead without any dice rolling at all) Also my executioner, unable to shoot next turn and with it's turret blown off decided to ram the dreadnought without much success, however in the centre I killed a terminator or two from long range shooting and did a little damage to the razorback.

It boiled down to me managing to kill his dreadknight and termies in the centre (but not before damage had been done) and taking out his remaining purifiers on the left while when the dread charged the blob in combat I just kept using my commissar's leadership and taking off 1-3 guys a turn. I got so engrossed with doing so well that I even forgot to bring on my reserves until turn 5... (facepalm) In the end my veterans in the middle managed to get to the objective on turn 6 after some back and forth running and I secured victory. I had first blood, slay the warlord and 2 objectives worth 3 points, while he had one objective slay the warlord and linebreaker, giving me and 8-5 win, however the difference in the score on vps wasnt enough to give me extra points in additional points to my 15.

Oh and btw in this tourny you could give your opponent a sportsmanship score of 1-3 (with 3 being best) but you could only give each number once (a bit of a silly system). In any case I gave my first opponent 3 and he gave me 3 too.

Round 2

Going into round 2 I was quite happy but I knew it was going to get tougher now that I was going to go up against someone who had also won their first game. At this point Ilya had beaten another ork player and Paul had lost to a chaos + daemons army.

At first I was matched up against Paul, but then they reset the system and changed some stuff around...

So I was matched up against sisters of battle and was a little worried. He had 2 exorcists, 3 squads of sisters with meltas in rhinos, a squad of dominions (?) in rhino, Coteaz, Celestine, 3 squads of acolytes with some sword thing and storm shield (perhaps some with rhinos), a storm raven, and some squads with loads of heavy bolters.

Psychic powers: initial thoughts on divination

Please note: This post was written a while ago (i.e. almost a month ago) before any games of 6th had been played - still while my general opinion may have changed, I still think that telepathy is the best psychic lore, for reasons I may later disclose, although on 3++ they have already done a pretty good review of all the lores now

This may actually end up as a bit of a rant, but you have been warned. What I really don't get is why people all over the Internet say that divination is the best psychic discipline. Ok so your primaris power lets ONE unit re-roll it's to hit rolls... yeah great, because I mean thats so worthwhile to take a psyker such as a space marine librarian for over 100 points just to do that?! Really?

Then we have the powers which are generated randomly. Let's take a look:

Foreboding: while giving you full BS on overwatch is nice, it's very situational and to be honest if thats what you're using psykers for, you're probably wasting your points

Forewarning: this is actually not bad, however in some situations and armies it can be a bit pointless (I.e. where all/most of the army already has the same/better invulnerable save or vehicle heavy armie)- still, this is possibly the best power here

Misfortune: re-rolling successful saves, well that's cool unless you're Eldar and already have pretty much the same power and even if you're not it's rather underwhelming if that's the only effect you're psyker has on the game

Perfect timing: the psyker and unit ignore cover, hmm interesting - great if you're planning to have your  psyker standing near a bunch of plasma guns, not so great if its a ton of lasguns...

Chiswick gw 500 pt games

So I'm just putting up some batreps which happened  few weeks ago close to the time when my new local GW (chiswick) opened. First match was me vs Paul. Btw this is me trying to use a mix of blogger mobile and the new blogger to post this.

He had Mephiston, some scouts, a razorback and 3 deathcompany with a power weapon.

My imperial forces consisted of a plasma vet squad with carapace armour, a blob with missile launchers and flamers escorted by a Lord commissar and a platoon command squad with 2x nade launcher and a lascannon. Oh and I was giving marbo a try

I won the roll off and chose to go first. Deployment: the blob took up the woods, veterans aggressively positioned in the centre and the pcs held some arcane ruins with marbo in reserve. I was faced with a tactical dilemma. You see we had a game at home before this and because 500pts was played on such a small table mephiston was incredibly fast. Coupled with the fact that my army had very bad armour saves and that the veterans had only 24 inch range guns this meant I could do two things. Hide/hold back the vets thus staying away from mephiston but attracting more attention to my very important command squad or more aggressively, meaning they would be more likely to get in range and closer to some cover in the centre since I would be moving forward - I chose the latter. Paul deployed very aggressively.

better look at the troops

Paul seized the iniative and advanced causing light losses. The guardsmen retaliated sniping off the razorback and failing against meph

Frantic assault in the centre ensued, which the blood angels began getting worse and worse at after the initial charge. Was a draw till second last turn and the one before of the game when the sergeant of the vets killed the whole squad.

Mephiston assaults but over a few turns I manage to put a few lucky wounds on him with the lord commissar and a perils of the warp

My command squad shot at the death company for most of the game basically sniping off one guy a turn after the first turn with their lascannon which was made twin-linked by the officer

40k tactics and list building

Warning!!! Long post and I think I may have rambled on a bit...

Here's just a few thoughts that I've been having over the last few weeks, please note that I'm by no means any amazing player but there are just a few things that I have noticed.

So what people usually do nowadays is find a unit that works well, stuff it full of equipment that does the job well too and then spam throughout their army. In the past I when I was told that this would make an army too "one-dimesional" I didn't understand how this could possibly be. I mean if you have loads of awesome stuff in your army wouldn't that make your army awesome too? Well that's the trap that most "netlists" fall into.

IDICBeer 40k

What one-dimensional means, is that every time you set up your army to play a game, you're always going to do the exact same thing no matter what, army-wide. This makes your list as a whole far too predictable, and so there is no scare for your opponent as everything is doing the exact same thing. While your whole army is working in conjunction with each other to do whatever they do best (e.g. meltavets in chimeras), because they all contribute small parts to a greater whole and that greater whole is always the same thing, then your opponent is always going to see what you're trying to do and perhaps be in a better position to adjust and stop it. It also, releases pressure off of your opponent and could make them complacent, rather than being on edge and being forced into silly mistakes and bad tactical decisions.

Imperius Dominatus

So let's take a look at an example, below is my Imperial Guard 1750 pt list:

750 pts orks trial run (Ilya) vs SM

Pretty much what the title says. This was actually a match where I also decided to try some things out - such as a squad of devastators with 4 missiles!

 My list was quite simple - lots of missiles and some anti-infantry firepower. An interesting thing to note is the captain with storm shield and thunder hammer.

Captain TH/SS

Tactical squad with plasma gun, plasma cannon, power fist and combi-melta
Combat squad with twin hb razorback

Land speeder typhoon with multi-melta

Devastator squad with 4x missile launcher

Ilya's army was something like:

Gazskull + small squad of nobs with assorted weapons
30 man ork squad
Trukk
Deffkopta with missiles
Think that was about it.

Deployment - yes tactics matches are always played on this funky mat. Mission was seize ground with 2 (3?) objectives + pitched battle

The ork mob - can you spot the one painted by: 1) Me? 2) Ilya? 3) Paul ? ;)

I as the idiot I am as usual underestimate how far trukks can go and unleash their payload. All squads combat squadded and captain rode with the vanilla combat squad.

The devastation from another angle 

My turn and a lot of shots are unleashed on the mob - not many orks die, however gaz's squad is reduced to 1 man and gaz due to concentrated fire.

The orks retaliate with some minor damage to the land speeder

The deffkopta finally manages to do something but was wounded last turn for all its effort

Blood Angels 1750 Points List

This a 1750 pts list that I am using atm.

HQ

Dante 225pts

Mephiston 250pts

Elites

Furioso Dreadnought 175pts (magna-grapple and drop pod)Terminators 210pts (1 chainfist and heavy flamer)

Terminators 210pts (heavy flamer and 1 chainfist)

Troops

Sanguinary Guard 285pts (infernus pistol, plasma pistol, power fist, death masks and chapter banner)

Scouts 85pts (Missile launcher)

Dedicated Transports

Land Raider 250pts

Heavy Support

Vindicator 170pts (Siege shield and extra armour)

Whirlwind 100pts (hunter-killer missile)

Tactics:

My general tactic is to rush in and chop everything up. The dread drops into the enemy deployment to destroy their strongest vehicles and to distract their army. The sanguinary guard role varies from landing in the enemy deployment zone to kill off some enemies to landing somewhere else to capture an objective. The land raider clears out the tanks and heavy infantry along with the vindicator. The whirlwind shoots down the hordes and the scouts sit on an objective. The termies Land to kill off the enemy troops and tanks when there are no more troops choices left.

2 tactical squads at the ready and new 2000pt list

Just dug up an old tactical squad to bulk out my two combat squads I already had and make them legal to play. So using some spare bits and existing models I managed to come up with the following setups (excuse the models as they are in various stages of painting but none are finished - all will be painted up to the standard of my other tactical squad):

Multi-melta, meltagun, combi-melta, powerfist (to ride in drop pod)

Flamer, (missile launcher which will be replaced by lascannon from my devastator squad), plasma pistol, melta bombs (to ride in lascannon razorback)

Which leaves me afterwards with the following list at 2000 pts making use of what I've learned over my 40k battles in the past with my existing models and my newly discovered gated libbying:

Army List competition

Head over to warpstone flux before its too late to enter the Army list competition, here is what I entered:

Tau hunter cadre 

 Transmission begins  

-------------------- 

"Engaging some of those enemy stealth hints sir!" 

Kaboom! 

"They've destroyed our transport sir!" 

"Attack em boys..." 

Ten seconds later... 

"they're all around us sir! What shall we do? They appeared from nowhere honestly!" 

---------------

 Last transmission from sgt peters 

 HQ: 

 Shas'o with bodyguard team, shas'o with cyclic ion blaster plasma rifle shield generator, crisis suits fire knife configuration with multi-trackers 244 pts 

 Elites

stealth team with fusion blaster, marker light drone 112pts 

Crisis team, fire knife config with multi trackers exept team leader with fusion gun, flamer and target lock 165pts 

 troops 

6 fire warriors 60pts 

10 Kroot 2 hounds 82 pts 

10 Kroot 2 hounds 82 pts 

 Fast attack 

 3 vespids with strain leader 70pts 

Piranha burst cannon 60pts 

Pathfinders 6 two with rail rifles with devilfish 158 pts 

 Heavy support 

 2 broadsides 140 pts 

Ion head with smart missiles 125pts 

Hammerhead with smart missiles 170pts 

 1468 pts- so there's room for tailoring 

 How I see it is the stealth suits infiltrating (possibly with kroot), fire base set up at the back (hammerheads and broadsides) and also set up pathfinders in their fish in place with good line of sight-more on that later. A space marine column coming in or any other army of course, transports are quickly shot down so they try to footslog it into assault with the closest target (stealth suits) and then everything pounces on them from all sides- outflanking deep striking etc... This is where the pathfinders come in. They not only markerlighht but also reroll deep strikes that are in their line of sight, something I haven't seen anyone do yet. Now some of you are probably wondering at the vespids, but to pop in and kill a few marines, ESP devastators/long fangs their gr8, strike where the enemy is least expecting!

More Tau Tactics : Boxed Screening

Hi again,

From my last post, no doubt many of you were wondering about what to do if lets say some terminators dropped down behind you. Well, no doubt you would get owned. So that's why we introduce what I call boxed screening. All it requires is an extra unit of kroot. I think you can already see what I'm getting at. But here are the diagrams.

So, in this scenario the terminators menace the formation so the back squad of Kroot splits of and hold the terminators up (timing is crucial), while the other kroot are still free to screen the fire warriors. If you come under fire in an enemy turn while in formation, again you are safe. The fire warriors are protected and hopefully you followed my advice by using cheap kroot so you don't mind too much about them.

This is a all good and well, but there will be more objectives - I hear you say. Well, you go back to Warhammer Tau and get your mechanised firewarriors onto another one. Then for a more static defense line on your home objectives, you set up your firebase Old Shatter Hands style (Tau of War).

Oh and if you haven't already seen it, you should check out the kroot mercenary codex. I'm not sure where but it's somewhere on the web.

Tau Tactics:The Moving Screen

I was thinking about screening (basketball terms), when it all fell in place with fire warriors and kroot. Let's say you have a squad of firewarriors supported by a kroot squad, and they're going to capture a central objective.

You put both squads onto the field - kroot infront of firewarriors. They start moving towards the central objective. In 2-4 turns they will (should) get there. It is not likely that they will even be shot at but if they are you have 2 scenarios. 1 - they shoot the kroot (you don't really care - you take cheap ones). Or 2 - they shoot the firewarriors who get a 4+ cover save, meaning that they will probably survive.

Right, here comes the complication - an enemy unit is in your way or has beaten you to the objective. This is where the screen comes in handy.

Both open fire on the enemy unit (always do this - but shoot with firewarriors first unless within objective grabbing distance/it's Turn 5). Oh, and don't open fire with the kroot before the fire warriors as if you see your firepower failing as it often does, you will charge the unit, letting the firewarriors run past. Hopefully, you will also have some support, so you can pummel more shots into that unit.

SO... Basically the kroot assault (take some hounds) and with a bit of luck kill some of the enemy so they are not within contesting range, while your firewarriors jump onto the objective. If this works, then Tau can actually capture objectives and don't have to use devilfish!

I will be trying these tactics out with my unpainted/craply painted Tau (hope you don't mind) so stay tuned for updates. Oh and I have thought something up to combat nasty deepstriking attacks on your firewarriors too...