Deadnight wrote:
Vaktathi wrote:Tau did very well in 3E and 4E, not Eldar invincifalcon well, but they were definitely top 5 in both editions between Eldar, Necrons, Chaos, and
SM's. Tau were a very solid army then (I built my Tau army in 4E).
Eldar and chaos were far and away the superior codices during fourth. Space marines, and all variants bar space wolves were able to adapt really well. Necrons were a hard counter for tau (masses of mid strength high-
ap dakka versus t4 3+save warriors that could get back up. Necrons had thst match up every time).
I think we're arguing degrees amongst the top 5 here, Eldar, Tau,
SM's, Chaos and Necrons. We can argue where they place in that, but, at least in my experience, Tau were certainly in this group. I'm not saying that Tau were *the* best army of the period, but they were certainly on the upper end of the power curve, 4E was not a hard edition for them.
Tau were reasonably solid, in the early days. But by the end of fourth, all you ever saw at the competitive level was chaos and eldar everywhere.
Well, largely Eldar, by the end of 4th
CSM's got the 2007 codex and plummeted like rocks if they weren't running around with Lash Princes.
I was often the lone tau player at tourneys and believe me, I might a star well not have bothered. Like I said, tau did not scale well when compared to the other codices. Tau could compete reasonably well, if you played a top level game, and if you played at 1000pts. Once you had your hammerheads and your two IC suits, you were buying chaff. Tau got worse the higher the points value.
They seemed to work just fine for me, they were a bit cookie cutter, but so were many other armies of the time. In a 2k game you'd see 6-12 crisis suits, 3 hammerheads or 6-9 broadsides, maybe a couple pirhanas, and firewarriors in devilfish to fill it out, and maybe some Pathfinders, and those armies placed very well at many events during 4th edition. My list was 10 crisis suits (including
HQ), 3 Hammerheads, and 4 squads of fire warriors in devilfish, and while I only played a couple dozen 4E games with them, they only ever lost to Eldar, other Tau, a
CSM infiltrate-oriented army a few times, and once to Necrons (I never beat Necrons with anything in 4E
).
Space wolves, being an overpriced assault army suffered in fourth. Blood angels were not too bad - the death co. Builds of doom from their third ed. codex were still disgusting as they were jump pack based, and the rest of the army left their rhinos at home. And switched from 'rhino rush' to the six man las/plas, and assault cannons on everything builds typical of most sm builds of fourth, which were pretty solid all rounders. Dark angels were the same. 6man las/plas, max devestators, flavour. If anything, dark angels basically copy pasted the vanilla sm approach. Sans chapter traits. Boring but effective.
All of which the basic
SM codex did much better, the only reason to run the
BA or
DA books was to get things like Deathwing armies with terminators as troops and the like, and such armies really didn't work very well in 4th.
SW's were just...wonky.
Imperial guard were surprising in fourth. I take it you never faced the drop troop guard of doom army? Drop troops, iron discipline, close order drills, special weapon squads and veterans as your doctrines and with re-rolling deep strike rolls thanks to improved comms from your sentinels, you could drop fifty or sixty heavy and special weapons into your opponents army, and basically one turn their whole army before they could even get s shot in. It was up there with iron warriors.
It was a niche build that worked very well...assuming everything went exactly as planned and nothing at all went wrong.
Drop troop armies were insanely variable, and never did particularly well on any sort of consistent basis, they were just the best build available to the codex. Reserves were more delayed (coming in on a 4+ on turn 2 and had no automatic arrival the way the game has now for turns 4+), control over reserves was much more limited (improved comms was 20pts for 1 reserve reroll per turn, and on a Sentinel that meant an AV10 open topped platform), mishaps were dramatically more punitive, as was Gets Hot (and most drop troop armies were built around massed plasma spam), the infantry died pretty much automatically if they failed to kill their target on arrival, and many missions and tournament packs didn't allow Deep Striking in every game (so if you played an Alpha level mission you ended up with a very short ranged walk-on infantry gunline). Such armies generally maxed out at around 40 special weapons (unless they were trying to go for flamer spam, but really they were all plasma spam) and few or zero heavy weapons (
HW's were expensive back then and they couldn't shoot after deep striking).
If everything went perfectly, they were very good. The problem was that they had zero margin for error and error inevitably always reared its ugly head and the army would get hamstrung and annihilated with half its critical units off board coming in piecemeal to be destroyed in detail.
Anything mechanized was absolutely unplayable in 4th for
IG (and really, for any non-skimmer army), and gunline infantry armies were both really punitively overcosted (as many
MEQ armies could make equally capable gunlines with more resiliency and
CC capability) and were absurdly vulnerable to 4E
CC consolidation, while the Armored Company list was banned much of the time outright and hamstrung by mission rules half the time it was allowed (
lol all your tanks have to start in reserve!) as well as the extremely punitive 4E rules for non-skimmer vehicles and transports.
Dark eldar were a glass cannon army that either won hard or lost hard. In a lot of ways, I miss it. Brilliant army.
They were an army that would eat
MEQ's and Tyranid
MC armies and died flailing in terrible ways to most anything else, and *especially* to Tau and their massed S5
they were terrible performers competitively. That theme generally still holds, though they're probably even less effective now than they were in 4E overall given the power bloat of 7th
Daemon hunters and witch hunters were strange codices, being pre-'allies' allies. I never really included them in the competitive rosters at the time.
that's not an unfair characterization but they were, at least nominally, built to be playable as distinct armies.
But sisters had some surprisingly effective builds. The miracles they could perform were useful, and they were one of the few (or only?) army that could ignore minor psychic powers, like th accursed slanneshi ones.
Aye, but it didn't lead to any sort of consistent or sustained competitive success. They were really good if they could sit in the 12" shooting pocket, but crumbled very quickly if outranged or brought into
CC.
Orks and tyranids - yeah, I'll agree with you there. Orks still had their third ed. codex thst didn't even have a weapons chart. Shows you the love. Tyranids nidzilla builds were great fun, and very effective a short well.
The nidzilla builds could work (but could also get hamstrung by mission type), also infiltrating genestealers sometimes, they weren't awful but overall were a thoroughly middling army overall that relied a lot on certain mission types getting pulled.
So no, I wouldn't say they were 'certainly' better than the above armies. The marine variants (bar space wolves), guard and dark eldar could match and often exceed the tau
The marine variants weren't particularly good in 4E.
BA's had a White Dwarf book to work from that was a cut-down bone-minimum
SM codex with an
FoC swap for Assault Marines and Rending given to Death Company, they were "mediocre" at best,
DA's were similar in that they were largely just
FoC swaps off a core
SM list with fewer options. Neither did terribly well competitively. It just occurred to me that I forgot about the Black Templars, but I honestly cannot recall enough about them off the top of my head to comment, though I don't remember them being particularly outstanding or awful either way.
Neither Dark Eldar nor
IG enjoyed anything near the capability or tournament results of the Tau, both armies were awful in 4E (barring
DE getting to play against
MEQ's) and were renknowned for being especially awful in that edition, especially
IG, in fact I'd go so far as to say 4E was probably the worst edition for
IG competitively.
IG were *really* bad in 4E.
Tyranids could give the tau great trouble, as what tau had in spaces (mass s5 ap5 dakka) wasn't terribly effective against competitive nidzilla lists.
No, but crisis suit mounted missile pods and plasma rifles backed up by railguns and markerlights worked tremendously well against
TMC's, and pulse rifles were notably more effective than bolters or lasguns.
So that leaves them in s similar place to sisters, daemon hunters, space wolves and orks.
I don't think this recollection would match most 4E
GT standings. Just looking over some old threads on here and Warseer, the general concensus is that Tau were certainly a powerful army then, perhaps taking some thought to play, but absolutely not anywhere near the lower rungs of power.
. The changes to skimmers moving and firing, defensive weapons and always hitting them on the rear armour put paid to disruption pods being a bit better. Tau lost their armoured fist in fifth. And to be fair, the only glancing hits for skimmers moving fast, and a re-roll on the one vehicle destroyed result on the table in fourth gave them some serious durability, far and away better to what they had in fifth.
Sure, and in most ways I won't argue with you, though I'd argue that Skimmers were grossly overpowered in 4th (and most editions) while tracked tanks and walkers were hideously undercapable, with 5th mostly balancing them out and Tau simply never getting an update in the lifespan of that edition to rectify how close they were built to certain 4E rules. That said, the 4+ cover disruption pods did them pretty well through the first year or so of 5th when the only really updated army was vanilla Space Marines.
Again, no. It isn't beyond argument that the tau have been in the upper tiers since sixth but before then, they ranged from poor, to mediocre to lower middle of the road bar one period in early fourth, and even then, the reputation of fish of fury's bark was far far worse than it's actual bark, and even that fell far short of its bite. They were never in the upper end of the power curve I'm afraid. They could always be outmoved by most armies, outshot by most armies and outmeleed by anything.
Between skimmers that could ignore terrain for movement and fire as if fast coupled with lots of deep striking Jet infantry crisis/stealth suits and fast Pirhanas, mobility was never an issue for the Tau in 4E unless they built themselves around unmechanized Broadside gunlines. I certainly never felt it to be an issue with my Tau. I'd buy that fish-o-fury might be overhyped it wasn't the big fist of the codex, the crisis suits and
HS units were.
They could be outmelee'd by everything but that's always been true, it's a fundamental hallmark of the army.
About the only armies that could outshoot them were some niche
IG gunlines and
MEQ builds, which then lacked either the resiliency or the mobility of the Tau, or both (and often relied on terrain being *very* sparse), with the exception of Eldar who I think everyone can agree was grossly overpowered.
Tau Empire
Orks
Exiled Cadre
LatD 
