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This is how kroot should be run.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_5vIIUwnvs

and unless you have 9+ vehicles running at them on your first turn, chances are you won't be tank shocking them when facing a properly built Tau list.

Thoughts?

Well you're giving your opponent a free 4+ cover save.

And Aun help you if they are packing flamers.

Using Kroot as a wall and as a delay tactic is not a 'bad idea' it's a decent idea....but what if there are no forests? Thankfully, A tau list is very flexible, I've seen the same tau army play radically different every time it was fielded.

No this is how

Kroot x 15 , Kroot Hound 10 x 5.

1 Squad of Firewarriors w/ nothing and minimum squad size.



Congratulations you just infiltrated 125 models 18 inches away from your opponents deployment zone.

have your opponent enjoy dealing with that.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
No one really uses Positional like you are suppose to they all do weird ninja tau builds with it.

Put your objectives in corners as far as way as possible and now you have the ability to instant claim them with large squads. While the rest of your army runs towards the others.

Also, Tau have MarkerLights they take away saves, use marker lights light up a squad take or reduce its cover save if the kroot are in the way.

Or hell just blast the gak out people Kroot are actually armed with STR4 BS4 weapons.

Hollismason wrote:No this is how
Or hell just blast the gak out people Kroot are actually armed with STR4 BS4 weapons.

Ummm I don't think so. Kroot are BS3 and they have STR4 AP6 weapons which means everyone is getting saves against them except Orks and Other Kroot and maybe one or two other things.

Using Kroot as a barrier to prevent Assaults against your firewarriors and giving the firewarriors cover saves is great. The firewarriors get to negate the cover saves that the Kroot are giving by using markerlights. Better yet is jsut placing firewarriors behind a forest with Kroot in it. The Kroot get the 3+ cover save and can go to ground to get a 2+ cover save like in it mentioned in the video (I think - I can't remember).

Kroot are huge squads that are effective at area denial. Have 2 squads together attacking a unit or in multiple assaults together and you can prevent a sweeping advance because you have so many models and it would take so many wounds to actually do something to the unit whereas it is destroying you with an incredible number of attacks per turn (even if they do not ignore saves).

If you plan on assaulting at all with Kroot you must take Hounds. Having a normal 20 Kroot in assault will take a while to kill off but they will be going at the same initiative. With Hounds you actually get a one up on most models since the basic initiative is 4. Having a full 12 Hounds will mean 24 attacks. Say half of these hit and with strength 3 about 1/2 to a third will wound. We're talking having 4-6 wounds placed on the opponent before they even have a chance to attack (with I4). With a SM 3+ save 2/3 of these will be saved. This equates to 0-2 wounds taking place. With Terminators You'll have a good chance of scoring at least one wound with just your hounds. Now add in all of the I4 Kroot. With the sheer overwhelming number of attacks from 20 Kroot all having 2 attacks equates out to The majority of units dying in a horrible mob of flesheaters.

Before this even happens if you've been supporting your Kroot with Firewarriors you have been having the advantage of pummeling the opponent with S5 weapons possibly with a BS of 5 if you are using markerlights. Concentrating this firepower on the correct targets that are the largest threat to you is where the tactics of Tau come in to place. TARGET PRIORITY is key. The units you take do matter but concentrating firepower on a single unit until it is completely toast is what needs to happen with Tau.

Space marines can hold their own with a single tactical squad first takign down a Rhino then assaulting the unit inside. Tau must have Deathrains or Railguns take down the Rhino before the Firewarriors blast away at the contents. If need be markerlight the contents of the rhino after it is destroyed. Afterwards the Kroot can assault and clean up whatever is left. Rinse and repeat.

If you find some units are getting to close for comfort place a ton of markerlights on them then use railrifles or even gun drones to pin the unit. This is often overlooked but a great way to prevent assaulting troops to get close to you. ATSKNF does not prevent Space marines from being pinned. Fearless however does prevent pinning and provides a problem.

This is a pretty good tactic. Except how much did you just pay for that meatshield, 280 points? If you noticed, the kroot wall was a solid chunk of that guy's army, and it was basically a throwaway unit. That's a lot of guys to pay for if they are just going to die. Filling the first line with hounds helps a little, because they can damage the assaulters, but still, that's throwing away a ton of points. Plus what happens when there are no forests? Or even a small forest? You'll need a pretty big forest to cram in half your unit if you're stringing it out like that.

Forests aren't necessary, any cover is fine. You don't even need much of it. Say you've got 2 units of 14 bases. The unit in front deploys 7 of them in or behind any size piece of terrain and the rest string out as far as they can in whatever direction you need your wall to go. The unit behind them keeps at least 7 behind the front 7 that are out of cover, giving both units cover saves. Hooray!

It looks something like this:

=====
@@@@ @ @ @ @ @ @ @
@@@ # # # # # # # # # # # # # #

There you go. 2 units in cover and still able to cover plenty of ground without any mixed unit shenanigans.

Yorick_of_Tau wrote:This is a pretty good tactic. Except how much did you just pay for that meatshield, 280 points? If you noticed, the kroot wall was a solid chunk of that guy's army, and it was basically a throwaway unit. That's a lot of guys to pay for if they are just going to die. Filling the first line with hounds helps a little, because they can damage the assaulters, but still, that's throwing away a ton of points. Plus what happens when there are no forests? Or even a small forest? You'll need a pretty big forest to cram in half your unit if you're stringing it out like that.

Do I sacrifice 210 points of kroot, or all 1750 of my army because I don't have anything to stop a proper mechanized force from rolling into me on turn 2?

210 points to give every other gun in your army at least one more turn of of shooting even when played poorly and a minimum of two if done right. Why yes, I will make that trade.

If you make a Tau army with less than 50 Kroot with hounds or 15/10 mixes or 13 and 12 mixes which is cheaper you are doing it wrong.

13 Kroot and 12 Hounds is 176 points.

Hollismason wrote:If you make a Tau army with less than 50 Kroot with hounds or 15/10 mixes or 13 and 12 mixes which is cheaper you are doing it wrong.

13 Kroot and 12 Hounds is 176 points.

There really is no perfect mix of units that work for everyone. No I'm not saying take a full unit of 32. A unit of 20 pure Kroot is 140. A unit of 10 Kroot and 10 hounds is 130. Both of these are relatively small pointswise and have a good chance of making back their points quickly with combination of other units. If you are going against a unit of terminators a full squad of Kroot has the possibility of taking out the unit which is comparable pointswise. Another point that needs to be realized is that if you do take 2 separate squads of Kroot and make them say 16 models a piece rather than a full 32 models you are paying the same amount of points but you are also creating an extra kill point that with most long range firepower can be taken out easily. Bolters create havoc on Kroot as do normal lasguns from GEq.

grankobot wrote:
Do I sacrifice 210 points of kroot, or all 1750 of my army because I don't have anything to stop a proper mechanized force from rolling into me on turn 2?

210 points to give every other gun in your army at least one more turn of of shooting even when played poorly and a minimum of two if done right. Why yes, I will make that trade.

Well, sure, that's a necessary sacrifice...if you're playing a static gunline. If you're playing a proper Tau army witht the right amount of mobility, you won't get overrun by mech on turn 2 because you can move out of the way. Three full trucks bearing down on you? Pop them with deathrain, JSJ out of there, and then heatwave the boyz or something else. Your arguement holds some water with some of the more static units, such as Broadsides or pathfinders. But 210 extra points to save one unit is too many, when the rest of your army should be able to kill anything before it gets to them. Especially with twin-linked railgun cover or plenty of markerlight hits.

Yorick_of_Tau wrote:

Well, sure, that's a necessary sacrifice...if you're playing a static gunline. If you're playing a proper Tau army witht the right amount of mobility, you won't get overrun by mech on turn 2 because you can move out of the way.

There's only so much room on a 6x4 table.

12" deployment, 19" move, 13" move, 2" disembark, 1" base, 1-6 fleet, 6" assault = 54-59" threat range in 2 turns of movement. You have enough mobility to get away from that? Does your opponent let you put down an extra board when you run out of room? It doesn't matter how mobile you are, unless you're saying that you can move far enough to reach the table next to yours...

You either put down a roadblock, or you get creative with reserves. Only one of these options lets you get the most out of your guns, and it works against skimmers too!

Three full trucks bearing down on you? Pop them with deathrain, JSJ out of there, and then heatwave the boyz or something else. Your arguement holds some water with some of the more static units, such as Broadsides or pathfinders. But 210 extra points to save one unit is too many, when the rest of your army should be able to kill anything before it gets to them. Especially with twin-linked railgun cover or plenty of markerlight hits.

You MIGHT shoot them all down in two turns (if you go first, good luck if you're second!). They WILL have to take an extra turn to deal with a speed bump like kroot or piranhas. I'll take the 100% option, myself. Regardless, like I said above, you've only got so much space. Most opponents aren't willing to run in circles and will eventually realize that if they start at point A and follow the line to B, they'll catch you, even if they're walking.

This is why people with Tau are not competitive they still think they can get away with playing the army like it was 5th edition.


Newsflash : Firewarriors suck now, devilfish sucks now, all of these changed because of the defensive weapons rule. Taking a mechanized Tau force of Devilfishes with firewarriors is a horrible horrible army. 184 points for a scoring unit is a horrible horrible unit.


Take your required 6 fire warriors and stick them offboard in reserve.

FWs need to be used in conjunction with the rest of the Tau Army. If they stand alone they are weak but with 12 FW holding a position (or just forming a gun line) and a unit if Crisis Suits on either flank they become much more resilient. People tend to shoot at what is scarier and 3 Suits are percieved as the real danger....(even if they produce less than 12 shots) so your Tau line may last a bit longer and get another round of shooting in before the CC begins.

I rarely use my Devilfish any longer so i can add a Kroot or Gue'la as my 3rd and 4th troop selections (also add the +1 Pulse Grenades for CC) I cannot argue with you that the DF has been reduced/Nerfed to being almost useless in my lists.

I have recently played against SMs and Necs and my Firewarriors were instrumental in those victories.

Dogface 76 wrote:FWs need to be used in conjunction with the rest of the Tau Army. If they stand alone they are weak but with 12 FW holding a position (or just forming a gun line) and a unit if Crisis Suits on either flank they become much more resilient.

Can you go into greater detail on this idea? The image I have in my head isn't really a beneficial setup, it's just asking to be multi-charged.

Battlesuits on their own will last a round or two of combat vs assault units that can't ignore saves (especially those wimpy enough to take a few casualties in return and even out the combat resolution) but if you let them get stuck in a combat with FWs, they're boned. A smart opponent will mess up the easy targets and force your battlesuits to take a ld check at a penalty, and initiative 2 won't do them any favors...

People tend to shoot at what is scarier and 3 Suits are percieved as the real danger....(even if they produce less than 12 shots) so your Tau line may last a bit longer and get another round of shooting in before the CC begins.

Forcing your opponent to make a bad choice is a solid strategy. Hoping that he'll make a bad choice isn't really a strategy at all.

Shoot the soft target, or the hard target? Hmm. Tough one.

Vulkan Enhanced MMs at the Crisis, Vulkan Enhanced HFs at the FWs :-)

What SM players really needs named characters to take down Tau?

___________

My only advice, don't take Ethereals.
A single spawn once killed 50% of a gun line...all it had to do was get into B2B with the Ethereal...best 120 points on Spawn ever spent.

After that: no more gunline Tau and no more Ethereals in my area.

Ninja tau ftw.
I have won about 80% of my games since switching to ninja. A good deal of the losses were in the first 10-15 games while I was learning how to properly use the army.

My experience with tau in 5th is as follows:
Gunline: borderline to bad
Fish of fury: bad to awful
Hybrid: playable
Mechanized suit heavy: good to playable
Ninja: great

The thing with ninja tau is the learning curve (what comes out when and where...) and the fact that a LOT of people hate playing against it ( it isn't LoS, but I get some pretty negative reactions when I put the commander on the board and say everything else is in reserve... )

Because it basically shrinks the game to 1-2 turns...and it takes more time to set up the game than actually play it...

I think everyone wins in saving the time when not playing vs. Ninja Tau.
/shrug.

Centering your army around the positional relay is like showing up to play a game of 40k, and then not actually playing a game of 40k.

Crushing your opponent in an actual fight is one thing, playing a total of 2 turns on your own terms is just lame. You'll run out of opponents pretty quickly if you let the positional relay be your crutch.

Well... at least there's more than enough time in a tourney situation to just watch other people play

The thing is, not only is it lame, it's easy as hell to beat on objective missions. You're giving your opponent all the time he needs to position his armies to deny you late game objectives. How do you plan on swooping in for some easy claims/contestions if he's assembled his dudes such that you can't legally move within 3" of an obj?

You either do that, or you feed him your army in little bite sized pieces. Poor options.

What I've read of Ninja Tau battle reports and comments from the players, the tactic is used as sort of an "equalizer" when the deployment and opposing list is such that regular tactics would almost certainly lead to loss.

You see a plan B. I see a crutch. You'll be a better player for learning to not use it and your opponents will have more fun when they actually get to play games.

Everybody wins! Drop those training wheels!

Ill try to clear that up grankobot

I keep my Crisis Suits close enough to influence the Shooting Phase on the Flanks of the FW line but with the Jump Shoot Jump jetpack rule i always try to keep my suits out of CC. My point about Fire Warrior resiliency is by combining units within striking distance of FWs the enemy is forced to make the decision of where to assault/shoot/move to. If he charges just for the FWs he usually opens up his charging unit to extensive shooting damage from the Crisis Suits or if he goes for the Suits he is then stuck with a possible Double Tap from my Rapid Fire St5 AP5 Pulse Rifles.

I try to keep all of my Tau units within the firing ranges of the units next to it as to maximize their effective protection.......It has saved me with Deepstriking opponents like SMs and Necrons using the Veil of Darkness. On two occasions i have blasted a Necron Lord and his Teleporting units with overlapping fields of fire.

Now all the above is mute if the assaulting is close enough to reach the FW lines....then run away and shoot them when they consolidate after the Sweeping Advance carnage...

what is a ninja tau build? Im new to them and the codex is on the way. Thanks

lordbug wrote:what is a ninja tau build? Im new to them and the codex is on the way. Thanks

Ninja Tau is a gimmick army list; you take a commander with a positional relay, three piranhas, and fill the rest of your list with Kroot. The positional relay lets you bring out one unit per turn from reserves on a 2+, but nothing else, so turn2-4 you bring out a piranha.

Turn 5, all reserves automatically hit the field, and you outflank your entire Kroot army, gobbling up objectives which you strategically placed near board edges.

All in all, its a really weak army list, relying on a gimmick to succeed and in most cases will result in a tie at best as you outflank and move close enough to contest objectives, but unable to hold them. Remember that Objectives have to be placed 12" away from any board edge, meaning that you outflank, move 2D6 onto the board towards it, and either run D6 more, or assault 2D6 if there's an enemy in range. You can foil this by holding an objective at the 13" mark, and if the Kroot don't roll well, they won't even be able to get close enough to contest it.

The other obvious flaw is that this relies on your commander living through 5 turns against an entire army virtually alone.

yeah ninja tau is a gimmicky army and there are easy ways to beat it. Kill the commander.

Thats it. Kill one model.

Dashofpepper wrote:

lordbug wrote:what is a ninja tau build? Im new to them and the codex is on the way. Thanks

Ninja Tau is a gimmick army list; you take a commander with a positional relay, three piranhas, and fill the rest of your list with Kroot. The positional relay lets you bring out one unit per turn from reserves on a 2+, but nothing else, so turn2-4 you bring out a piranha.

Turn 5, all reserves automatically hit the field, and you outflank your entire Kroot army, gobbling up objectives which you strategically placed near board edges.

All in all, its a really weak army list, relying on a gimmick to succeed and in most cases will result in a tie at best as you outflank and move close enough to contest objectives, but unable to hold them. Remember that Objectives have to be placed 12" away from any board edge, meaning that you outflank, move 2D6 onto the board towards it, and either run D6 more, or assault 2D6 if there's an enemy in range. You can foil this by holding an objective at the 13" mark, and if the Kroot don't roll well, they won't even be able to get close enough to contest it.

The other obvious flaw is that this relies on your commander living through 5 turns against an entire army virtually alone.

That is very poor description of the Ninja Tau. Most Ninja lists I've seen are little different from 'regular' Hybrid lists other than Commander having Positional relay and often some other buffs (shield drones, Iridium etc). Also, Commanders death before Turn 5 is by no means an auto-loss.

Well, Ninja Tau is one way to avoid needing a kroot meatshield. I'm not sure how well it works, since I haven't tried it, but it can't be too efficient for objective missions. You can't win an objective game by contesting, and the outflank isn't going to get you much if you have a single outflank move to grab all the objectives you can. Although, you could have your required 6-man FW unit footslog onto the board edge on turn 4 to take your home objective, and then make sure that everything else is contested by deepstrikers. But that also requires lucky scatters, and the fact that your opponent doesn't think to go for your home objective in the 4 turns he's basically alone on the table.

Back to the actual meatshield strategy: there's no way it can possibly work unless you are playing your army static. Which doesn't work. Because if you want to stop boyz in trukks from assaulting you so badly, you'll have to remember that the trukks can tank shock right on through the kroot. Even if they do decide to assault each kroot line one by one, and get reduced to three boyz, they'll still kill your FW or pathfinders or whatever in an assault.

So it's not a matter of running away from the mech orks, or what have you. It's a matter of popping their transports and making them footslog, then splitting them up with your speed advantage and hitting their flanks and isolated units. Use the kroot to grab objectives and outflank, but don't blow all those points on a throwaway unit. Sure, 7 points is cheap, but you're paying those 7 points about 40 times, aren't you?

Ninja Tau is simply a tactic where you can keep what you wish in reserve and decide when and if it comes in. You vbring in one unit a turn and can save your firewarriors in reserve to keep them safe instead of on the board.

Sure you can use the Rush all the Kroot on at the end as a tactic. This is NOT a proper Ninja Tau tactic however. It is a end of game grab. When I play Ninja Tau I leave my troops and possibly 1-2 other units in reserve (such as a deepstriking Crisis Team or a spare Broadside team).

If you set up the army correctly you will have a ton of long range weaponry that is manueverable on the board. You continually shoot at the enemy and move away. Turn 2 you deepstrike the crisis team such as deathrains or meltas behind enemy lines. Rear armor opens up and you nail it with Fusion or Missile Pods.

Next turn you can bring on a squad of Kroot to tie up stuff in assault that are near the edges or do a quick move towards on objective and assault the enemy off of it.

Fourth Turn you possibly can bring in a Firewarrior unit right near a devilfish and load them up to take them to an objective in a vehicle that always has a 4+ cover save.

Fifth turn you have the rest of your troops come in (in 1500 that would be the last squad of firewarriors or Kroot for me depending on how I am playing) and reinforce or grab a close objective to your side of the board.

During the entire game you have your Crisis suits JSJ around the board staying at the max range you can while concentrating firepower and taking down units one by one. Your broadside teams will take out the armor and the SMT or pathfinders will be lighting up targets for all the other squads to fire at.

The common misconception is that most new players will see ninja tau played and try the tactic. They will keep everything in reserve and slowly bring on their army without using their elite units to take out the enemy. This will cause the enemy to heavily fortify the objectives and prevent the Tau from controlling them. These games are not fun - they prevent the game from being played. Using ninja tau and using your elite forces to clear out the way for you troops to come in and secure objectives is actually a military tactic that is used quite often.