Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Hopefully I don't steer you the wrong way, but what about a infiltrating army. You can never go wrong with Kroot, Shadowsun is a cool special character and Stealth Suits are always fun. The only unit a feel is underpowered are the Stealth Suits, you end up bringing to much str5 fire with them and not enough hard hitting firepower, but you can often get away with one unit. Throw in a couple Riptides and an Iridium Commander and fill the rest out as you see fit.

You could always bring Stealthsuits with a Positional Relay and as many Kroot as you can field. Infiltrate the Stealth Suits right on the back board edge, survive one round, and then bring in Kroot right behind them.

Really fun to do and will really mess up their movement.

I play Tau with a strategy I have to call "support and advance" (I just made that up by the way.

I have a central firebase usually consisting of 3 fire warrior squads, an ethereal, a hammerhead, a sky ray, and a couple squads of pathfinders (and until recently a broadside team and support commander). That's what I sit in my own board deployment zone and dare the opponents to come get.

The other half of my force is more mobile and I send that out to harass targets of opportunity or otherwise make a nuisance of themselves. That's my Riptide, crisis suit teams, and a couple big blobs of outflanking/infiltrating kroot with sniper rounds and a couple of hounds each. Just recently I've included a Barracuda and a XV9 team led by Shadowsun in this part of my army. It's reduced my markerlight numbers by a lot, but since I've been putting markerlights on my fire warrior sergeants (and actually buying fire warrior sergeants) I haven't actually noticed that much, especially since my pathfinders are the single most shot at unit in my army.

Also I put early warning override on evreything that can possibly take it, so having a lot of the board covered by at least one interceptor unit makes my opponents very sad pandas.

Probably not the most optimal way to play tau, but it's fun to bounce my battlesuits all over the board and potentially use them to flush the opponents towards my firing line.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Phanixis wrote:
Hopefully I don't steer you the wrong way, but what about a infiltrating army. You can never go wrong with Kroot, Shadowsun is a cool special character and Stealth Suits are always fun. The only unit a feel is underpowered are the Stealth Suits, you end up bringing to much str5 fire with them and not enough hard hitting firepower, but you can often get away with one unit. Throw in a couple Riptides and an Iridium Commander and fill the rest out as you see fit.

One more thing, it is a truly fun and sometimes rage inducing (but not exactly optimal) strategy to take a full squad of burst cannon stealth suits...and give them all the advanced targeting system. Then just laugh and offer the tearcup as all those precision shots come rolling in.

An infiltrating army and one that utilizes positional relay on stealth suits is, IMO, an advanced strategy. I tried it out for the first time last night and i made plenty of mistakes. I will say though that it offered a lot more options not previously available to me. Tactics wise, it made my opponent go all over the place. First he was pushing up the side, but then had to turn around to face the threat coming in from his rear. He thought his objective was safe, but because i could come in on any board edge i desired, i was able to hide behind a structure he placed, wait and then charge his objective on the last turn. I was able to do this because he couldn't reach me at all, and his troops were not fast enough.

Unfortunately, he rolled to continue the game and shot my guys off the marker. Otherwise, i would have won!

If you do decide to do the P-ray strat, just remember that it's 6in from any board edge at the start of your turn. So if they are not in place, you don't get to use it. The pre-game set up will be the hardest to do of course as you'll have to kind of trick your opponent with terrain placement and make sure that the units that have the P-ray can survive for turn 2.

IIRC, you don't have to say that they are outflanking and committed to just that. So, Shadowsun as an example should be able to outflank OR deepstrike on her discretion if she is in reserves.

Ultimately, i would suggest having fun and trying new things. I've never tried the p-ray tactic before and it was fun to play around with it. Clearly it was at least decent as i almost won. But almost only counts in horse shoes and hand grenades.

Some good advice here and some optional advice offered as "mandatory". Must be an internet forum!

Absolutism aside, I think the question was HOW to play them.

What I like about Tau is you can effectively give the enemy bait and when they take it, be behind them. Time is the best friend of Tau. Once the enemy is committed to a position and broken apart, you can attack the weakest links and bring overwhelming force there and then across the enemy line.

In my case, I deploy half the force. The other half stays off. The half on the board is tougher to kill and damage dealing enough that the enemy cant ignore it. I've seen Broadsides with Heavy Rail Rifles, and Riptides, both do well in the role of bait. I think tanks make a much poorer bait since they can be one shot'd. One can argue the difficulty of this all day long but the reality is they canbe, and Broadside units with Drones (or a couple Riptides) cannot. Tactically a better gamble than tanks.

If the enemy has, let's say, 12 units it's a near certainty that they will have 2 Scoring units at or near their own backfield to maintain the objective there. Probably at least 2 to the fore. Assault and other units will be dispatched to silence the isolated Broadsides conclusively, for unless they beleive in winning the lottery, it seems silly to try and outshoot the Tau. So then you end up with at least 4 pools of units, more or less. Each pool can at most bring 3 units to bear on its "sector" by the time turn 3 arrives. The clock is now ticking.

The avalanche of force is then brought from reserve against the weakest and least defensible enemy pool of units to ensure they will have feeble at best response. In turn 4, they are wiped and in turn 5, a second sector will be with no one in range to EFFECTIVELY help it. At games end, you have used your position to win instead of just trying to outmuscle the enemy the whole game.

You CAN try to outmuscle them and you might even win that way. But learning how not to HAVE to will make mismatches a lot less relevent to you.

Obviously to pull this off, you need mobility and you have to be really comfortable with half or more of your firepower not present for a lot of the game. It takes a bit of faith and experience to really find the comfort with that. Thats why so many people just don't do this. But more are catching on.

But as for how I fight with Tau: That's how. My regular opponents know its coming. My regular opponents recognize that I will lose half the firepower I own for a goodly part of the game. They desperately want to take advantage of that fact. Unlike Gunline Tau, they dont have to worry that I will hide behind a fence nor blow them off the board. So they will sometimes try to control the middle and counter what I'm about to do by "sticking together" and waiting for the monsters to come from the corners, so to speak. This has disallowed them from silencing the Riptides or Broadsides pretty often, due to range issues and they run the risk of being pretty exposedto what IS on the board while they wait. In the case of Broadsides, the enemy is picking up vehicle models round after round, but not "falling" for the bait. By the time i get there, they only have their normal units, which are prime targets for the reserves but at least they HAVE them to lose and then respond in more force than they normally could if they took the bait. Lists that rely too much on armor end up doing poorly when they do this though. Mechdar for example tend to do pretty poorly when they try this. So much of what makes those lists good relies on the hulls staying intact and thats tough to do with no cover save. Warp Spiders provide a darn good answer to this trouble because it can gety to the target unabated and through speed acheive kills and NOT be isolated. Warp Spiders are a hard counter to this concept, but here again, any kind of bad luck for the Warp Spiders is pretty disastrous. they have to kill their target on the drop OR ELSE and of course if its a Riptide we're talking about, the Early Warning Override could make for a much lower than average performance by the Spiders. Still, it's a good counter.

Don't know if that helps, but there ya go.

Also:
Tau Flyersl

Tau listiness

It's not as simple as just holding units in reserve and calling it a strategy. There should be a purpose to it before hand. You need a game plan more so than "i'm holding them back". Typically, you want the units you have to be able to shoot all game long. A few reasons why you may want to put unit's in reserve:

They are DS and have a specific roll to fill. (crisis fusion for tanks)

They are Outflanking and have a specific roll to fill. (kroot warriors for objective grabbing / pathfinders / etc)

They are scoring units you want to protect by keeping them out of the fight until later. (Keeping firewarriors off the board if you deem it a good call)

There are no places on the board to allow them safe cover. (you didn't get a good terrain set up, so vulnerable units are sent into 'reserve cover')

I would say those are the four main reasons to put units in reserve. Units like riptides, broadsides, markerlight units and the like should always be out fighting the whole game if possible. They are needed to lay down fire and support in order for your reserve troops to have a better time later. An example of this would be the game i just played today. It was the scouring which made fast attack units a VP and scoring. Well, i had 3 5x pathfinder squads. I could only fit one on the board comfortably, so i put the rest into reserves. In this way, i denied my opponent VP early and target priority for the pathfinders he would have most certainly attack as well. This also allowed me to position those pathfinders by outflanking on the board. Sudden markerlights, and pulse carbines on a board edge could really mess him up, and it certainly helped.

One of the best advantages the tau army has is mobility and strong shooting. Once you get the hang of that, the rest comes pretty easy.

One tip i'll also add about markerlights. They are the #1 target for all armies. They will go down first. You need them, but the enemy also wants them dead. Keeping them alive is important. Marker drones with a commander is often the best choice, but also one that limits your commander's role as well as his shooting (in a way). It'll be a great source for markerlights though as the drones can JSJ and fire at BS5 (with DC).

However, pathfinders are not bad either. The trick is positioning them right so that they cover a certain portion of the board. I'm not talking about sticking them into ruins and calling it a day, that will get them killed. The enemy wants them dead, so no amount of fire power would be wasted going into a pathfinder squad in ruins. I'm talking about LoS denial.

Imagine if you will the bumpers on a pinball machine: \ / What do you notice? The objects behind the left bumper's LOS is blocked by anything on the right side. The objects behind the right bumper's LOS is blocked by anything on the left side. In this way, the left bumper is only exposed to the units on the left side, and the same is true for the right bumper and the right side, and so i have effectively cut off a portion of the board's visibility to those objects.

T............S
|
|
|p\........./p

........p........

In this example, the T is a tank and the p is the pathfinder squad. The S (squad) to the right has no shot on the pathfinder squad to the left, limiting the pathfinder's chance of being killed, at least by some degree. You can throw another pathfinder squad on the other side as well. Finally, another pathfinder squad further back could provide cover for the middle if your opponent decides to use the advantage of the "marker blind spot". Of course, this isn't the only kind of set up, just an example. Playing with range and LoS avoidance is a critical part of tau play. Also don't forget, snapshot markerlights are not that bad, so don't be too afraid to move them because....

You want to be thinking in terms of not what you're going to want to do turn 1, but what you want to do on turn 3 while you are starting turn 1. If i am going against an army that will try to control or push to and past midfield, i can have a group of pathfinders cover that portion of the field by having them hang back. Far enough out of range of marking the enemy further down the field but their purpose is the middle, so it doesn't matter. This will also have the added benefit of keeping that group safe. You can take other pathfinder groups to cover targets further away.

I think it stating the obvious that the units have to have a plan.

I strongly disagree that you want everything shooting all game. whatever shoots is a target. The longer its a target the more likely it CAN die.

Some units matter less than others.

I think it is not a truth that you need to shoot everything as much as you can to win. I win in the movement phase routinely. They have no troops. I do. I can kill the things on just one objective to win. They cannot.

Each battle is different. an entirely asault army probably DOES call for all hands on deck. But that is a minority of what you will see. But yes, when you see it, by all means, whack a mole.

 Jancoran wrote:
I think it stating the obvious that the units have to have a plan.

I strongly disagree that you want everything shooting all game. whatever shoots is a target. The longer its a target the more likely it CAN die.

Some units matter less than others.

I think it is not a truth that you need to shoot everything as much as you can to win. I win in the movement phase routinely. They have no troops. I do. I can kill the things on just one objective to win. They cannot.

Each battle is different. an entirely asault army probably DOES call for all hands on deck. But that is a minority of what you will see. But yes, when you see it, by all means, whack a mole.

It does of course depend on your opponent, that 's why putting units int o reserves needs a plan. I was just taking what you had said and explained a little more. He is asking how to play tau. For example, i see no real reason to put a riptide in reserves. You want him to be on the board shooting all game, or being a bullet magnet if possible.

Basically, you want to attempt to maintain board control and threaten the opponent with units on the board, rather than having units in reserves that might not even come out. Being afraid of putting them on the board because "they'll be a target" already hamstrings you.

Riptides would rarely do well off board, thats true. The Deep Striking ability is not worth it when you consider that the thing can be tied up. It is in no way to be confused with a melee combatant DESPITE its monstrous creature status. I will say this though: a Mechdar list might actually get badly beaten up by DSing Riptides. In those armies, so MUCH of their army is wrapped up in Hulls, and squishy combatants, that you might actually want to try this. melee with a Vehicle is usually a lot more sure kill than dropping singular attacks on them with templates. They would be forced to move and expose their weak rear armor to lesser units that are more than capable of Glancing them to death.

Food for thought. But for the most part, you probably dont wanna do this.