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Ionheads lead by longstrike look good aslong as you can mitigate the alphastike lists.

Farsight vangaurd for suits seams like the obvious choice for a manata stike element. A large suit unit with the strategum hitting on 3's without markerlights, add in some markerlights and you can get that down to 2+ rerolling ones to really bring the pain.

Vespid and piranhas are the worst units of the codex to me so far.

Sacea is excellent for firesight marksmen. 5 man strike squads with 1 markerlight, 3 man stealth teams with 1 fusion, and ethereals, in addition to high power-low volume shooting. This makes it a great choice for a cheap CP/Markerlight battalion.

Piranhas seem to be decent seeker plattforms. But if you bring hammerheads you have no need for them.

One major bummer iis Crisis Suits min squad size of 3. Taking 1 was so much better tactically. Whether it was dropping double/triple fusion or a cheap drone controller

Ice_can wrote:
Ionheads lead by longstrike look good aslong as you can mitigate the alphastike lists.

Farsight vangaurd for suits seams like the obvious choice for a manata stike element. A large suit unit with the strategum hitting on 3's without markerlights, add in some markerlights and you can get that down to 2+ rerolling ones to really bring the pain.

Vespid and piranhas are the worst units of the codex to me so far.

Aun’Shi deserves the missing letter t at the end it’s so bad. Railgun on a Hammerhead shooting - one shot? Convocation of the Elements - underwhelming. Photon grenades don’t stack.

Ice_can wrote:
Ionheads lead by longstrike look good aslong as you can mitigate the alphastike lists.

Farsight vangaurd for suits seams like the obvious choice for a manata stike element. A large suit unit with the strategum hitting on 3's without markerlights, add in some markerlights and you can get that down to 2+ rerolling ones to really bring the pain.

Vespid and piranhas are the worst units of the codex to me so far.

Longstrike can easily be hidden behind LoS blocking terrain and still move and fire with BS 2+ against anything without negative to hit abilities thanks to his Hammerhead aura buff working on himself as well (giving him BS 1+). With his supercharged Rail Gun (33% chance for D3 MWs and wounds basically everything on 2+), buffed SMS and magic seeker missiles he has the most punch out of any Hammerhead formation anyway.

Also did you even read the Vespid entry?
14 points for 18" Assault 2 S5 AP -2 (!) with deep strike, 14" movement, T4 with a 4+ save is a great buy. Awesome backfield harassment unit and a nightmare for any MEQ player.
They fly, have LD8 and the infantry keyword, so they even get 3+ saves in cover. They will always be where you want them to be. They can slaughter almost all backfield infantry/arty units and even effectively tie down AT vehicles in combat in a pinch. And unlike say breachers they come with their own transportation, so you can easily throw a 5-6 bug strong unit into any list (5 of them are only 70 points).

I literally fail to see any downside to them, besides them being metal models with a rather high $ price.
They easily beat Tactical Gun Drone units at the cheap backfield harassment job.

After more than 10 years of being a meme unit methinks that people don't even check their data sheet anymore and just go on claiming that they are a bad unit even if they totally are not.

Longstrike and Hammerhead spam could be reasonably viable now. I'm waiting on the March CA update to make a call on that front. The twin HBC variant could be stellar, and there's hope for the twin plasma, as well. In any event, buffed Ionheads are strong enough to be useful when they're hitting on 2s. I'm not sure I'd call them competitive, but they're strong.

I'm quite interested in running a decked-out CIB Crisis Bomb. It's outrageously expensive for 1 unit, but man, it'll dish the pain on the turn you drop. Assuming 5 markers and appropriate strat support, you're rerolling 2s to hit and 2s or 3s to wound with 81 shots. Against T7/3+, that's an average of 70 dmg. Unless you roll like absolute trash, you're probably going to clear just about everything in range. Attached gun drones clear screens and hopefully allow you a nice repeat performance the following turn.

Hi,

With the new codex, I Wonder if I can build a viable list (at competitive level) with these miniatures:

Cadre
Coldstar commander
Riptide
2 ghostkeel
2 Broadside (missile / rail)
10 strike
10 breacher
10 pathfinder
a lot of drones
3 stealth

Is it possible ? Thanks a lot !!!

MilkmanAl wrote:
Longstrike and Hammerhead spam could be reasonably viable now. I'm waiting on the March CA update to make a call on that front. The twin HBC variant could be stellar, and there's hope for the twin plasma, as well. In any event, buffed Ionheads are strong enough to be useful when they're hitting on 2s. I'm not sure I'd call them competitive, but they're strong.

I'm quite interested in running a decked-out CIB Crisis Bomb. It's outrageously expensive for 1 unit, but man, it'll dish the pain on the turn you drop. Assuming 5 markers and appropriate strat support, you're rerolling 2s to hit and 2s or 3s to wound with 81 shots. Against T7/3+, that's an average of 70 dmg. Unless you roll like absolute trash, you're probably going to clear just about everything in range. Attached gun drones clear screens and hopefully allow you a nice repeat performance the following turn.

Maybe drop Farsight himself with them as a scarecrow. He hits hard in melee and has the nice ability to heroically intervene from 6" away. Plus he can be the one who pops the strats since his shooting is meh anyway.

If you wanted to do the crisis bomb thing as a vanguard, what elites do you take in addition to the big suit unit? Stealth suits? Firesight marksmen? Dare I say it, more Crisis?

I think Ragnar must be up late posting after a raucous bar binge. Vespids are not hitting or wounding much MEQ at BS4. They are not only whiffing big time on offense, they are dying like flies with a single wound and 4+ save. They are expensive and situational at best. Not seeing awesome or great buy here, sleep it off buddy.

 Ragnar Blackmane wrote:

Ice_can wrote:
Ionheads lead by longstrike look good aslong as you can mitigate the alphastike lists.

Farsight vangaurd for suits seams like the obvious choice for a manata stike element. A large suit unit with the strategum hitting on 3's without markerlights, add in some markerlights and you can get that down to 2+ rerolling ones to really bring the pain.

Vespid and piranhas are the worst units of the codex to me so far.

Longstrike can easily be hidden behind LoS blocking terrain and still move and fire with BS 2+ against anything without negative to hit abilities thanks to his Hammerhead aura buff working on himself as well (giving him BS 1+). With his supercharged Rail Gun (33% chance for D3 MWs and wounds basically everything on 2+), buffed SMS and magic seeker missiles he has the most punch out of any Hammerhead formation anyway.

Also did you even read the Vespid entry?
14 points for 18" Assault 2 S5 AP -2 (!) with deep strike, 14" movement, T4 with a 4+ save is a great buy. Awesome backfield harassment unit and a nightmare for any MEQ player.
They fly, have LD8 and the infantry keyword, so they even get 3+ saves in cover. They will always be where you want them to be. They can slaughter almost all backfield infantry/arty units and even effectively tie down AT vehicles in combat in a pinch. And unlike say breachers they come with their own transportation, so you can easily throw a 5-6 bug strong unit into any list (5 of them are only 70 points).

I literally fail to see any downside to them, besides them being metal models with a rather high $ price.
They easily beat Tactical Gun Drone units at the cheap backfield harassment job.

After more than 10 years of being a meme unit methinks that people don't even check their data sheet anymore and just go on claiming that they are a bad unit even if they totally are not.

One thing people are missing with Vespid, is that they benefit from markerlights. This is huge buff.

The markerlights entry says T'au Empire units which Vespd and Kroot both have. And there is only a restriction on the auxilary units not getting Sept bonuses.

Another unit whose bubble buff is T'au Empire is the ethereal and his leadership and evocation of elements.

A Kroot kill squad (2-10 carnivores, 12 hounds, shaper) with an ethereal is cheap and survivable with the 6+ ignore wounds from the ethereal. This squad comes in around 240ish points and is fast so they typically get focused on. With the 3 markerlights the carnivores are Imperial Fist bolter shooting with ignore cover, reroll 1's for both shooting and wounding (shaper bubble), and have leadership 9 (10 if ethereal is secsea).

Last night I did a Tau on Tau battle, I went very infantry heavy while my opponent was Suit heavy. It came down to bottom of turn 5 and if I could table him for who would win. We were close to drawing because I surrounded his surge who proceeded to blow up and take the last wounds off all my squads that were there. Was a filmed report so can share if interested when it is posted.

 Ministry wrote:
I think Ragnar must be up late posting after a raucous bar binge. Vespids are not hitting or wounding much MEQ at BS4. They are not only whiffing big time on offense, they are dying like flies with a single wound and 4+ save. They are expensive and situational at best. Not seeing awesome or great buy here, sleep it off buddy.

1. Markerlights work on Vespids and a single one has them re-rolling 1s and you can easily deep strike them close enough to ignore the usual '-1 to hit' modifiers. Once you get past the hitting, S5 and AP -2 makes forcing saves easy. They sure as heck deal more damage against MEQ than Stealth Suits do, eh? Run the math.
2. You do realize you can deep-strike Vespids straight into cover for a 3+ save against shooting, or on top of buildings to minimize the risk of getting charged? What sort of stats are you expecting for a 14 PPM unit with deep strike and that sort of mobility and firepower anyway? T5, a 2+ save and 3 wounds ?
3. They are cheap, have no problem dealing with the usual soft targets camping in the back (such as ork artillery, devastators or min-sized objective campers). One shooting phase should be more than enough to get their worth back either in points or by seriously disrupting your opponent's backfield.
4. If you are actually clever with positioning them, you can easily deny LoS to other units than the one you want to shoot.
5. They are great late game objective grabbers.
6. Suddenly the other guy has to deal with a threat in his own deployment zone that he can't ignore. You know, catching him with his pants down and forcing him to either waste the fire of his camping Heavy Support on cheap bugs rather than your big guns or pulling back units that are moving against YOUR corner of the table.

Might want to quit that "more sober than thou" attitude, buddy. Unless you lack the imagination to realize the worth of cheap units that can deploy almost everywhere and packs a good punch, bringing Breacher level firepower to the table for a fraction of the cost of Breachers and a Devilfish (not to mention not having to get within 5" for the full damage). Or how do you plan to deal with objective hugging Raven Guard in cover and perhaps even outside of LoS to the rest of your army ?
Sorry, but "I got dis Y'vahra/Coldstar" doesn't suddenly make Vespids a bad unit.

Aeri wrote:
You guys need to realize, that there will always be some people who just can't stop crying because there is no "I Win Button" in the codex.

Somethimes there is just no point to argue ;-)

Hah, good point .

You guys need to realize, that there will always be some people who just can't stop crying because there is no "I Win Button" in the codex.

Somethimes there is just no point to argue ;-)

Hey all. Blood Angels is my primary faction but decided to get some xenos, so picked up some Fire Warriors to start out. Gonna be doing some lurking for a while but thought I'd introduce myself.

I played a game against Tau today. He used 3 septs, and used a smattering of different options (devilfish of fire warriors, a few crisis suits, one of the bigger robots, a tank, etc. etc., very take all comers.) and...Wow. Unless he wasn't playing it right, Tau are utter trash still. They barely landed any wounds, and their short range on their standard guns makes it super hard to evade most melee options.

The short range on their standard guns...You mean the 30" range standard pulse rifles that's probably going to be at least 36" and potentially 42" in most competitive armies? You're charging from 42" regularly, are you? In that case, yes, Tau will crumple like wet newspaper to melee.

Seriously, though, range is not a problem for Tau. It sounds like you were up against Breachers, which do, in fact, have a short range. It also sounds like you played a fairly friendly and/or poorly optimized list run by an inexperienced player. Alternatively, he may have just been screwing around trying things out. I can't really think of a reason to have 3 separate septs at once. You fragment your bonuses and destroy any synergy your units might have had that way.

HeavenLord wrote:
Hi,

With the new codex, I Wonder if I can build a viable list (at competitive level) with these miniatures:

Cadre
Coldstar commander
Riptide
2 ghostkeel
2 Broadside (missile / rail)
10 strike
10 breacher
10 pathfinder
a lot of drones
3 stealth

Is it possible ? Thanks a lot !!!

Yeah your fine, go have fun

MilkmanAl wrote:
The short range on their standard guns...You mean the 30" range standard pulse rifles that's probably going to be at least 36" and potentially 42" in most competitive armies? You're charging from 42" regularly, are you? In that case, yes, Tau will crumple like wet newspaper to melee.

Seriously, though, range is not a problem for Tau. It sounds like you were up against Breachers, which do, in fact, have a short range. It also sounds like you played a fairly friendly and/or poorly optimized list run by an inexperienced player. Alternatively, he may have just been screwing around trying things out. I can't really think of a reason to have 3 separate septs at once. You fragment your bonuses and destroy any synergy your units might have had that way.

He was using different septs to minmax the usefulness of septs within his units. Kind of like taking different marks of chaos on different CSM units. But it did nerf his army considerably for it, it was a large tax just for the sept bonuses. And we played widthwise deployment on a 4x6, so he had 24 inches from me to shoot. Also, I used a couple units of Warp Talons to get the drop on his army, and a rhino and blood slaughterer weaving around cover and buildings to escape LoS from most of his army.

Yeah, that's a tough move to make since you can't use drones from different septs to chump wounds for big suits, which eliminates the main perk keeping our suits viable. I'm sure there's a way to make a multi-sept list work, but it'd certainly require very careful planning and gameplay.

As for dealing with melee stuff that actually gets to you, we're just as frail as ever. The best solution we have is to kill it in overwatch. If that fails, fall back and shoot it more. Granted, with multi-unit overwatch that might hit on 5+, a ton of units that FLY, and a 7pt trooper that dishes out 3 S5 shots within 15" (or 18" or 21"), those aren't exactly awful options. I haven't played a game with the codex rules yet, unfortunately, but I'm confident Tau are not at all "trash tier." I mean, we've got some bad units - looking at you, Piranhas and Skyrays - but we also have some amazing options, including our most fundamental troop.

Is somebody here proficient enough in excel to help me build a list building tool?

All i can do is simple additions, but I think it would be cool if you could select units from drop down menus...

Aeri wrote:
Is somebody here proficient enough in excel to help me build a list building tool?

All i can do is simple additions, but I think it would be cool if you could select units from drop down menus...

Make a list of all the units you want in the drop down box – 1 per cell, all in the same column.

Highlight the blank cells you want to have the drop down box in.
Data Tab > Data Validation
Change the “allow” section from Any Value to List.
Click in the “source” box, then highlight the list of units, then press ok.

This will then give you the drop down options you’re after. If you run out of drop down boxes, or want to move where you have them, it’s a simple case of copying and pasting.

But how do I add point values?
I want to automatically show point values and allow a selection of wargear (with point values)

At that point, you’re looking at multiple lists and then lookup formulas.

For example, list 1 would contain all the units and their costs.
List 2 would contain all the weapons/upgrades/options etc and their points cost. (gets messy here as you’d have to list each option for each unit separately to ensure you don’t accidently mix and match (i.e Commander Ion, Commander Fusion, Ghostkeel Fusion, Riptide SMS etc etc). It also means you’ll need to remember how many options each unit can take.

The lookups are then just normal vlookups, taking you’re drop down options and looking them up against the 2 lists to return the points values.

It’s a pain in the arse in terms of setup, but certainly makes things easy once it’s done.

I’m really wary of that kind of stuff. It’s so easy to make a mistake in set up and so hard to spot if you have. The chance of making illegal lists as a result is far too high.

I use excel for list building. I put the units and upgrades in one column and their costs next to them in a separate column. Then just make a cell with the formula =SUM(C:C) and it will total up the costs of all the stuff in column C.

You can also make a cell to see what you’ve got left if you want. Something like =2000-(SUM(C:C)) should do it - for a 2k list.

Or just select the whole column and excel will tell you the sum of all the numbers in it.

This is what I've got so far.
It's not too hard actually, the biggest issue is quality of life features I think.

Right now there is only 1 Unit entry that allows choosing a battlefield role, unit type and quantity of models. (drones will count as wargear)
Wargear has not yet been added, but this will not be too hard either.


I need to find solutions to make an "add entry" button (a simple copy paste macro won't work, you can try copy pasting vertically yourself ^^)

So, after looking through the codex I was curious if anyone had found any mention of anything making use of the Jet Pack keyword, or if it's literally wasted ink on half the entries in the codex.

I was just going to ask the same thing! I haven't been able to pin it down. I guess we're waiting for FAQ time.

Deadawake1347 wrote:
So, after looking through the codex I was curious if anyone had found any mention of anything making use of the Jet Pack keyword, or if it's literally wasted ink on half the entries in the codex.

I didn't find anything making use of it BUT I did notice a lot more of a deal being made about certain aspects of shipboard fighting and things of that nature for certain Septs/color schemes.

Maybe they're planning on adding Zero-G environmental rules?

 Kanluwen wrote:

Deadawake1347 wrote:
So, after looking through the codex I was curious if anyone had found any mention of anything making use of the Jet Pack keyword, or if it's literally wasted ink on half the entries in the codex.

I didn't find anything making use of it BUT I did notice a lot more of a deal being made about certain aspects of shipboard fighting and things of that nature for certain Septs/color schemes.

Maybe they're planning on adding Zero-G environmental rules?

That is reaching a bit, I think.

I think it is just wasted ink, copied over from the index. Maybe somewhere back in the index design notes there's a rule for us to have JSJ on jetpack units which never made it in. A lost post-it note, blown out the window....

Like, we have to play in space now? WTF?!

Ahem...

Anyway, I've been thinking more about Crisis Bomb options. Given that we can split fire at will, I don't know that I have much problem running a massive 9-suit unit with supporting drones. Clear the trash mobs with gun drones, maybe have some shield drones for awful things like auspex scanning Hellblasters, and blast away at hopefully 3-5 big, juicy targets with your suits. As I mentioned previously, not much is going to stand up to that volume of fire. I'm thinking I'd have a Buffmander with a drone controller nearby to make the drones more lethal, but I can see the value in giving him a couple fusions to have fusion blades (since he'll be FSE, after all!). The rest of the army would be Battalions to build up CP and get objectives. Maybe have a Riptide or Ghostkeel with a VT in case of flyer spam and to handle a backfield incursion.