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I am not to sure anymore. Yes, we have a 5 point piece of gold upgrade for our tanks. But our troop choices suck noodles.

Think about it. Our troops don’t have access to an anti tank gun. Our troops can’t get an AP 2 gun, and to top it off, they die when something looks at them funny.

If you go for numbers with tau troops, then the kroot will die or run away the first time a flamer thinks about them.

If you go for fire warriors, then they will die the first time an ever prevalent AP 4 weapon look at them.


Now I know that there is a lot of cover saves now. But still, a few turns of firing at mostly the tau troops, and kiss your scoring units goodbye.

I think a max mech list is very good in 5th. 6 DEVILFISH, 3 hammerheads, piranhas and a few suits.. 13 vehicles in 2000 points with cover saves and decent weapons. If anything i think tau got a bump in 5th.

take a look at the chicago GT. They did fine.

I like the flechete dischargers vs orks

devilfish = 2 easy to get kill points

piranhas = 2 VERY easy to get kill points


though i do need to look at those flechete dischargers.

you have two choices as far as troops go.

you can either have firewarriors in devilfish or big kroot squads hiding.

kill points screw mech armies all over so that just something you'll have to learn to play around if you want to go that route.

alternatively you can go with kroot. you have enoguh firepower to be able to saturate enemy squads to such a degree to force saves on flamers and other template weapons.

i have 40 kroot models, and enough fire warriors and devilfish to make up the other 4 troop choices.

i will have to give it a go.

for the fish squads, do you min or max, or go mid sized on the fire warriors??

Yes you do have to worry about kill points but in 2/3 of the senarios your opponent won't be able to deal with that many vehicles. In terms of kill points i think you have a really good chance of overwhelming your opponent with firepower. St Johns Immolator list in the GT is a good example. His vehicles did not have cover saves or fletchette dischargers.

You may want to check out this thread:
http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/217645.page

Also, as shown by the GT results, Tau can still bring a lot of nastiness to the table.

Won a battleforce at a tournament and got Tau... Looking at playing with outflanking mech and think it will work.

3 Firewarriors in Fish. 3 Pathfinders in Fish (outflanking) 3 Hammerheads. If I still have points left, an outflanking kroot unit or two.

Give them all the "counts like fast skimmers" and you can move 6" and unload all weapons or 12" and still fire the mainguns.

I am thinking leave the drones on the fish and I have potentially 6 objective contesting units that I can drop off on turn 5 or so and just race to contest objectives.

I think they still work but gone are the days of the thin brown line of firewarriors firing away and just cutting down your opponents. With 5th ed... the deployments can be 15" to 18" separation and with the new marine codex... the shrike crap or scuttling bugs will just make it intolerable. "Hi we are 18" apart if you set up on board... let's see if I can move 12", fleet at least 1" and charge you...

I think you have to play them from off board and reserve most if not all onto the battlefield now just to give you some options.

The other debate is to play with more carbines. Gives up a lot of firepower but it causes pinning (on a rare occasion) and gives you some reach out range on the turn you dismount. Otherwise it is going to be try to isolate enemy units, dismount the firewarriors and try to pick off one unit while the hammers get rid of the real pains on the battlefield. All I gotta say is it is putting a lot of faith in fleschette dischargers...

Devilfish with SMS solves problems.

Nothing's really changed with our troop choices, that's the thing about Tau, no decent Tau general counts on his firewarrior squad to eliminate a Marine squad by trading fire for a few turns, our army has to flow together.

Flow together, indeed. This has always been true, I think it's still true. I'll let you know when I have more experience in 5th.