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Dark Eldar






Tau



Mission was ITC 6. Dark Eldar grabbed first turn. Deployment looked like this, brown being terrain, black being LoS blocking terrain, grey being craters, and purple being objectives, and the Riptide with the purple triangle being the one with Ion.



Dark Eldar deployed aggressively, ready to threaten as much ground as possible on their initial turn.
Tau split the Riptide wings, while the markers hugged the back corners, not wanting to be an easy first blood from potshots from the midfield pushing Talos's.






The Dark Eldar raiders burned straight up the field, using Aethersails to position themselves directly in front of the Riptides. Talos's rolled extremely well on their run moves, 6 and a 4 respectively. End of their turn, no damage done - but that was to be expected, and the positional advantage was entirely theirs.


End of Dark Eldar turn 1:


Tau's first turn - slightly unlucky roll on the Riptides, with 2 units failing a Nova after rolling 4 1's in a row. But in the name of the Greater Good, luck had it that they were solo units and not multi units. Not knowing what to expect from JSJ rolls, the Riptides moved to escape up the field, with the ones hindered by Nova rolls simply moving to deny a multi assault.
First shooting phase, Tau electected to Hailfire all Riptides - but NOT to Nova their cannons, saving that for the jump move.

Shooting Phase 1 for Tau:

Over the left side of the field first, first set of markers split fire between the Raiders, potential cover for the first Riptide, he scored a ton of pens, and thanks to fragility of open topped vehicles managed to explode the hell, the shrapnel putting a further wound on a Grotesque.
After the second set of markers splitting through the remaining Raider and the Grots, the follow up Riptide blasting his Burst Cannon tore it out of the air, but with the models inside landing safely on the ground.
Then came the unit of 3 Riptides firing at Grots with an accumulated 2 markers and +1 BS for fire team, completely deleting one entire unit of Grots in just a single turn of shooting.

Across the other side of the field, similar thing went down. After lighting the targets up with markers, both Raiders exploded, and the 2 man Riptide squad did exactly enough wounds to wipe another unit of Grot's off the table.


So with all Raiders down, but 2 units of Grots still untouched pushing right up in Tau's grills, they use their Nova boosted jump jets to try counter some of the Dark one's positioning advantage. Knowing the 2 man and the 3 man unit of Riptides is getting charged one way or another, Tau moves in a way to split the rest of the army from them, and to hopefully leave the Talos's milling about aimlessly due to their lack of speed.
Here's how the board looked after turn 1, after failed Nova's and Get's Hot rolls, the Riptides are 4 wounds down, not that their wounds really matter in this game anyway, as if they get caught, they are certainly dead regardless.


End of Tau turn 1:











More coming soon! Please share your thoughts, predictions, and feedback!

That's way more Riptides than I have ever seen fielded. Lol.

The Positioning of the Grotesques is bad here. Hard to tell what actually happened from the description but just going off this final pic here, I would say the Grotesques were badly positioned after being blown out.

Also, I know i spoke to you about boxing them in and you split the Raiders it looks like to me. The four raiders should have sped towards the 5 Riptides and allowed the Talos to form a flank, so that to escape the Riptides have to go towards the talos (the box comment I was talking about).

As it is this looks like a disaster about to happen for the Dark eldar. Lol.


You can kind of see this coming once they failed to focus on the larger group of Riptides. Im guesstimating but it looks range-wise lik the right most Riptides would not all jhave had range on the Grotesques had they been more cautious as to their vector.

Anywho, I do not foresee Dark Eldar victory here unless the distances i am looking at on this are not correct.

this is all made worse by the fact that they could have actually stayed 43" away at the start of the game and allowed a turn to pass by. It actually would have helped them I think with the Power From Pain table.

So yeah. These guys are in trouble but at least the grotesques can reach the Riptides from there. but the game is over at this point. Too many mistakes.

Is a grid overlay possible so we can see distances clearly?

thanks for your opinion!




distances are not accurate, i just did a vague mock up to help visualize. That alone took enough time, let alone measuring everything out somehow on MS paint which I'm not even sure is possible

I would run the two Talos to help out the Grot unit on the right and the three Talos unit to help the unit on the left. Get the grots stuck into cc then bring in the talks to help out.

Yeah the Talos need to do WORK at this point.

 Fishboy wrote:
I would run the two Talos to help out the Grot unit on the right and the three Talos unit to help the unit on the left. Get the grots stuck into cc then bring in the talks to help out.

 Jancoran wrote:
Yeah the Talos need to do WORK at this point.

Cannot split the Talos's as they are one unit, not two.