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Riptides can Smash tanks. Dont forget their speed. They can get up there in a hurry. And once they get a shot at doing it, against mech heavy forces, they tend to gobble up three tanks a game.

Even though its bad to put him in melees he cant immediately win outright, its easier for a riptide (low init) to force sm's outta combat and back where you do want them... in the open.

If the general sees heavy armor and doesnt think to approach, then it could get rough, i agree.

Riptides can be a threat to tanks sure. But if you have your own dedicated cc units close by, or enough grav guns to stop the riptide leaving cover, then you can punish such a move by taking out his riptide next turn, or deter him from doing it in the first place.

IF. However you can defang the threat in round 1 if they are especially army heeavy. Bikes aren't cheap and people cant be both bike and tank heavy. At some point the points run out. so I am just saying that the Riptide has options for dealing with Heavy armor. I personally agree that Bikes are a very good list to take against Tau, but the Tau, knowing this (including myself) have adapted to that possibility. So if all we're talking about is an armor centric list, I feel confident that the Riptides will both DO serious damage to it AND be able to sacrifice the Riptides by the time its required without losing a lot of ground in the game itself.

A Riptides death isn't tragic. I find it extremely valuable to soak enemies into sectors and the Riptide IF NEEDED is pretty darn good at it. He's an irresistible target.

 Commander_Nightflier wrote:

Belly wrote:
Multi-assaults and sweeping units kicks ass against Tau.

As an Eldar player, I like playing Tau, because when I can get my troops into combat, I will usually win and sweep them. Like that time I multi-charged 8 Dire Avengers into a squad of fire warriors and a riptide. Caused 3 wounds, to his one. Swept them both.

thats accually not legal. you cant make a sweeping advance if your in combat with more than one unit. sorry to burst your bubble. but yeah, tau go down pretty quickly in combat and usually get swept...

It is absolutely legal. Pg 28, "assault results" spells it out pretty clearly. However, all of the enemy units must fail morale.

I do it to Tau with large footprint assault units all the time (Beastpacks, Khorne Hounds). Get a squad of Kroot and a Riptide in one assault, massively overkill the Kroot, profit....

Tau's weakness is assault? Don't make me laugh. I've never seen a tau army beaten by close combat, and I've never, outside of demons, seen tau face serious problems because of close combat. It's not a weakness.

The tau players I know of can easily kill the most threatening assaulters before they even have the chance of engaging, and if, by some miracle, close combat happens anyways, the offending unit gets ultra-overwatched just so that they can possibly make it into close combat (but you're always charging into terrain, so goodbye charge range), and if they do get into assault and win, then yay, you've just knocked over a 75 point kroot screener or sacrificial firewarrior squad. You ate a speedbump, he ate your army.

Ld is the only real weakness, especially since most tau players don't bring vehicles. The tricky part is forcing those morale tests. The idea of tanks surviving long enough to tank shock is a bad joke most of the time, and attempting assault, as mentioned, is nearly pointless. That means you've got to force tests with shooting (psychic or otherwise), which is a pretty tall order, given that you're dedicating yourself to outshooting tau.

But if you're not trying to do more damage than tau, then it's not completely hopeless. It's possible to really cram those Ld-problem units in, like if everyone who can take a sniper rifle takes a sniper rifle, for example, or you really get yourself some barrage weapons. The main problem with this, though, is that pinning a tau army is good, but it's not enough. You need to actually cause real damage, which investing in all those Ld weapons is probably going to make more difficult.

If you could reliably keep a few key units pinned, however (like those pathfinders and a couple HS choices), then there is a chance for the rest of your army to get in there and do something.

... so long as it's not relying on deepstriking or cover saves, in which case you're still screwed.

And mobility isn't all it's cracked up to be here. I've seen bike lists melt like snow to a blowtorch against tau, and for good reasons. It doesn't matter how fast you are if you can't apply enough killing power relative to the tau player once you get there.

Super assault units like Beaststars, Seer Councils, Dog bombs , Superfriends Biker lists, and the like will roll entire Tau Armies in 1-2 multi assaults. When I said multi assault is the weakness of Tau, I only meant in the hands of an Army that can actually survive to the cross the board in 6ED. Not generic "assault and you'll win" type advice. Because multi assault is absolutely a weakness of Tau, it's just a weakness most Armies cannot exploit.

 Ailaros wrote:


...Tau's weakness is assault? Don't make me laugh. I've never seen a tau army beaten by close combat...

...and if they do get into assault and win, then yay, you've just knocked over a 75 point kroot screener or sacrificial firewarrior squad. You ate a speedbump, he ate your army.

Ld is the only real weakness...,

And mobility isn't all it's cracked up to be here. I've seen bike lists melt like snow to a blowtorch against tau, and for good reasons. It doesn't matter how fast you are if you can't apply enough killing power relative to the tau player once you get there.

This caught my attention. i beat Tau silly with my Chaos Space Marines in close combat. Dirge Casters. So cool.

I'm a very good Tau general so i know what my own possible weaknesses are. Dark angels bike army has proven to me that bikes are a very good answer to Tau (as is having flat out better tactics, but that's besides the point I suppose and food for another thread).

I do agree that LD is a weaknes, and unlike you, I have made it my life's mission to attack that stat in every game I'm allowed to do so in. Tau are particularly susceptible as they lack Psykers to defend them against some of those attacks nor units and powers to bolster them other than Aun'Va who surprisingly, no one seems to take.

My favorite story on that is the eldar air force I used. Cheeky dude had 9 Broadsides on the table, all missiled out. I forced two broadside untis off the table without them firing a shot into my flyers (apparently they didn't like what my War Walkers did to their third broadside unit and wanted to see that end). Then I knocked all four scoring units off the table the next round, using the same tricks and support from other units and pinned others. By his bottom of turn four there simply was no game left to play. He didn't bother.

So I think it's a little unimaginative for people to underplay the LD weakness. Psykers and just plain shooting can force morale checks over and over again on the enemy Tau. But not if you waste your time on the wrong targets. One of the Taus strengths is misdirection. They do an awfully powerful job of convincing you to fire at the impressive units while their quieter ones go about winning it for them.

I think that some players DO spend too little time nuking baby troop units. or undervaluing that as a tactic against Tau. Tau almost default to 6 man squads (and for good reason) and you can use that against them. 2 Casualties and they are rolling. even the worst built list can gank two FW's! Powers like Horrify and such are pretty seriously awesome at finishing the job.

Iperial Guard also do a pretty neat job of eliminating the big boys. they zap the Riptide and make his morale like Zero, and if he foolishly took Drones, well... He's a goner. Same for Broadsides. They hate that. Mi9ssiles sides hate it worse because you can start outside their effective range, walk INTO range, get the power off and then watch them run like girls.

Certain Space marine+Allies combos can really mess with Tau LD as well because not only are the long fangs firing willy nilly and causing plenty of wounds to force checks but they can also add Terrify to the list of indignities.

I am not one to be falsely modest. Tau are an excellent codex (and its about damn time). But lets not allow sour grapes to color our opinion. Tau LD is definitely an achilles if you attack it intentionally. Some lists dont really attempt to do it but that's a choice, not an immiutable limitation on you.

because who doesn't like salvo 4 bolters?

so tau's bane seems to be chaos space marines with sonic marines,dirge caster, berserkers. do you think heldakes would be good against them as well or point that should be spent elsewhere?

and also tyrinids seem to be as well with poisoned hormagaunts, devourer gaunts. i have the codex for them and i think this list for them against tau and most armies would be good:

155-prime with regenaration
19 genestalers(x6)

so thats 6 good infiltrating scoring units that do not need synapse they have rending so the can take out vehicles or 2+ amour saves...oo they can also outflank. in my head you wont be able to kill enough of them before they hit your line.

 orklord wrote:
155-prime with regenaration
19 genestalers(x6)

so thats 6 good infiltrating scoring units that do not need synapse they have rending so the can take out vehicles or 2+ amour saves...oo they can also outflank. in my head you wont be able to kill enough of them before they hit your line.

I have a friend who plays exactly this kind of thing. He was testing out his army for a 1850 tournament and it was pretty much designed to laugh at deathstar armies by feeding them so many units they just couldn't do anything the entire game. It looked like:

flying hive tyrant
2x squads of zoanthropes
venomthrope
2x genestealer squads with brood lords
Moloch

deathleaper assassin formation
manufactorum genestealer formation
broodlord hunting formation

He always just infiltrates everything 18" in front of you in a solid line across the board and says "come at me".

I cut him down with ease in that game, it was kind of hard to watch actually. Of course my tau list isn't anything like what a normal tau list looks like (and we use Forgeworld stuff). If he had infeltrated evreything in one big clump on one side of the board things might have turned out differently though.

 orklord wrote:
because who doesn't like salvo 4 bolters?

so tau's bane seems to be chaos space marines with sonic marines,dirge caster, berserkers. do you think heldakes would be good against them as well or point that should be spent elsewhere?

and also tyrinids seem to be as well with poisoned hormagaunts, devourer gaunts. i have the codex for them and i think this list for them against tau and most armies would be good:

155-prime with regenaration
19 genestalers(x6)

so thats 6 good infiltrating scoring units that do not need synapse they have rending so the can take out vehicles or 2+ amour saves...oo they can also outflank. in my head you wont be able to kill enough of them before they hit your line.

Heldrakes are just good, period.

nanook wrote:
Been playing against these a lot recently and finding the rip tides and ravana's very difficult to deal with. Played in a few apoc games against 6-7 of them.

What would be a good counter to them for a SM bike army, or any SM army. Any ideas other than D weapons would be really helpful.

Assault, morale, and AV-14.

Getting into assault is however, extremely difficult without being reduced to a few ragged handfuls waiting to be wiped out by overwatch, or even be reduced to so little strength that even the Tau will be able to kill you in asault (I had an Abaddonwing in a Spartan get reduced to a single wound Abaddon by fusion suits, a rip tide, and having to slog through a hellstorm of pulse shots, who after screwing up his daemon weapon roll promptly missed his attacks and got smacked by a firewarrior and died), and the Av-14 problem has an answer in the form of Fusion blasters on JSJing crisis suits.

Morale can be fixed by Ethereals, who are a double edged sword in that if they die the Tau get penalized pretty heavily. Tau players know this, and will do everything they can to rectify that. They also rely heavily on marker-lights, but of course will always go out of their way to make sure their markerlights can keep on designating targets.

In apocalypse, the Tau have fliers with D-strength weapons and more secondary weapon systems than you can shake a stick at, so kiss your titans goodbye.

However, I have found that endless swarm Tyranid units can work against the Tau as they endlessly press forward until something starts getting bogged down by gargoyles and hormagaunts in assault, at which point the generally very high initiative of a Tyranid army ensures repeated sweeping. The weakness is of course, the Tau blowing apart your synapse units or racking up huge amounts of kill points in the game modes where that matters.

Imperial Guard armored battle-group also gives the Tau fits as you shrug off most of their shooting with row upon row of tanks and are capable of blowing apart Meltasuits and simply having too many Leman Russes for any number of Hammerheads the Tau can field are able to deal with, while the Siege Assault Vanguard is also capable of fielding lots of tanks to give the Tau trouble (all the points you spent on rerollable armor saves though, will be meaningless due to the large amounts of AP3 or better the Tau have, and the Tau are going to make sure you will have to get that siege objective with the maximum amount of blood and iron.)

The DKoK siege brigade can also out-castle the Tau, I'd recommend the maximum number of units that can benefit from artillery rules in this force and maybe Imperial Strongpoints if you have the points or multiple Sky-shields in Apocalypse games. Rune priest or power field generator allies are also a must as they benefit your troops immensely. The Earth-shakers will be able to one shot the crisis suits and make any fire warrior relying on directional cover have a very bad day ahead of him. I'd recommend a great deal of lascannons on fortifications and on sabre platforms too, to ID more suits, gun down riptides, and deal with those pesky super-heavy fliers. I'd recommend heavy mortars in elites over thudd guns as the former can penetrate Tau armor saves, IDs non-suited Tau characters, and takes much less time to resolve each firing.

If you don't feel the need for Power Armored allies, ally in an Armored battle group to have an armored fist of fury to punch the Tau right in the face and crush the Tau's macross and gundam influences beneath the plasteel weight of grimdark world war one in space. I recommend playing Panzerlied at full volume while doing this.

Tau suck as a statline, but their advantage is that they work around it. Low BS is offset by markerlights. Rubbish LD is fixed by ethereals and by bonding knife. And cc is fixed by uberwatch fire.
Remove the support elements via precision strikes and tau suck at all roles. Making them easy to defeat.

In most of my games vs tau i can say that they're more of a one-turn army. You either kill their main elements that glue the army together - markers - in the first two turns or loose. Riptide spam works a bit differently cause it doesn't rely on synergy and strategy. And must be worked around like any other cheeze-spam list.

 anonymou5 wrote:
The biggest Tau weakness is multi assaults. At BFSR this weekend I beat three Tau Armies in a row, continually wrapping up bigger and bigger multi assaults. If you get a Riptide in with a squad of Kroot, the Riptide is dead even if you don't wound him.

This! To further this explanation (for those who overlooked it). Riptides are not fearless, which means that if you multi assault and then murder 10 kroot and the riptide takes 0 wounds but kills 2 guys of yours then at the end of the phase the riptide has to take a break test at -8.

Weakness #1: Troops. They are taken in low numbers, fire warriors lack mobility, and kroot are just plain unreliable due to piss poor ld+ fragile when they outflank.

Allied gjb can help fix that problem with 2 units of 3 in reserve.

MC have an easy counter with marines.

step1 Grav gun
step 2 allied runepriest with jaws
step 3 profit.

 schadenfreude wrote:
Weakness #1: Troops. They are taken in low numbers, fire warriors lack mobility, and kroot are just plain unreliable due to piss poor ld+ fragile when they outflank.

Allied gjb can help fix that problem with 2 units of 3 in reserve.

MC have an easy counter with marines.

step1 Grav gun
step 2 allied runepriest with jaws
step 3 profit.

You can even have double runepriests in a single allied HQ slot. JOTWW, the ultimate answer to riptides, just hope they don't have early warning overrides on all their riptides in order to S8 AP 2 pie plate your guys when they come out of their drop pods.

Tau have another important quirk. The have a Codex with good internal balance. Riptides are really good but are priced for it. I personally play with devilfish with lots of firewarriors and an ethereal. Supported by lots of crisis suits hammheads and just a scraping of marker lights. I say this so that while there may be a meta standard, tau are capable of playing several powerful play styles.

Pin them.

Bikers work well, but something people forget is that a single skyray can delete a biker squad a turn simply due to the fact that seeker missiles are ap3 and ignore cover.

 Gitsmasher wrote:
Bikers work well, but something people forget is that a single skyray can delete a biker squad a turn simply due to the fact that seeker missiles are ap3 and ignore cover.

Skyray has 6 missiles. It has 2 options:

1. If it stands still it can fire all of them at it's regular ballistic skill (4). If it does this they don't ignore cover unless he spends marker lights to remove your cover save. It must have line of sight to the models it wishes to fire at.
2. It can expend X marker light hits either form itself or from other marker light users to launch X missiles. These are BS5 and ignore cover and line of sight.

This means that a skyray can delete 2 minimum biker squads in the entire game, assuming it rolls no 1s. Most likely it will be responsible for destroying 5 bikers total (from it's seeker missiles). Make sure you keep track of the number of missiles that a skyray has if your opponent doesn't.

A fun thing to do if you have first turn and a fast psyker is to zoom up and puppet master the skyray and have it launch all of it's seeker missiles at once into the nearest tau unit. Good times.

Im not sure anyone is "forgetting" what Skyrays can do... They just have tactics to make sure the Skyray has more important things to do. =)

 Jancoran wrote:
Im not sure anyone is "forgetting" what Skyrays can do... They just have tactics to make sure the Skyray has more important things to do. =)

Tank shocking things when it's out of missiles? Which is actually fun lol. All jokes aside if I'm playing tau and opponent is playing bikers the most important thing my skyray can do is destroy his bikers. If I know before hand ill bring 2 skyrays minimum and hopefully remove enough bike squads to where he won't be able to contest all objectives.

I never list tailor. I don't actually mind it but I just don't personally. However, skyrays are very cool. I'm not saying they're not. I'm just not sold that the skyrays qualify as a hard counter, per se. A good matchup for sure and definitely a help.

In addition to leadership, Tau also suck when it comes to initiative. Nothing for C:SM there, but jaws from SW or warp rift from GK will do horrible things to riptides.

yeah, those powers are pretty rough.

Killing the pathfinder is going to seriously blunt the accuracy and effectiveness of their shooting.

It wouldn't against my army. =)

I have literally only fired my 6E Pathfinders as markerlights in two different games... and only once in each of those games. Pathfinders are far more useful as natural born killas.

Just imagine if they made markerlights an upgreade and decreased pathfinders points cost.
In apoc games it's fun to take lots of minumum sized pathfinder teams with heavy weapons.

they are awesome at killing stuff. round 1, in come the Rail rifles. round two, heres comes the Haywire. Bwahahahahaa.

They also have scouts, so that's fun. And if your doing min teams, three heavy weapons guys and the team leader, you can chain markerlighs with them as well.