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Hello All,

I have been seeing more and more tau lists taking stealth teams as a way to get a lot of markerlights. The idea is to have a lot of markerlights on mobile suits under the cover of the stealth field. It can JSJ and infiltrate, while other markerlights are found on stationary pathfinders and FW sarges. This unit could theoretically have 13 markerlights, but the downside is the cost. A full unit can cost over 500 points!

I am planning on running a team(proxying gun drones as markers).

Does anybody have any experience running this unit? What is the optimal points cost/unit to run this?

I run them quite often and run it as three separate things under normal circumstances.

One is 6 suits with 10 gun drones and 2 markerdrones, plus markerlight and team leader + bonding.

Another is 3 suits with 2 marker drones and markerlight. plus lead and bonding

The final is 3 suits with 4 marker drones 1 light and 2 gun drones, more suits and drones as points permit.

Stealth teams work best at extreme range and when no barrage weapons are on the table. Two units with a ton of markerlights will help you quite a bit. I suggest using 5 markerlights in some fashion for the best results.

Normally you would require 3 markerlight hits to remove cover, needed for killing vehicles in most games at the start. Otherwise you have leftover lights and burst cannons for dealing with troops and such.

When using stealth teams, you will want 2 large units, your 2 troop choices in smallish numbers normally, then some railguns (broadsides!) And to top it off take a crisis HQ with plasma missile and one normal crisis team with the same deal. You will kill all vehicles and hopefully everything else before it's melee krumpin time.

juraigamer wrote:

Stealth teams work best at extreme range and when no barrage weapons are on the table. .

barrage units shouldn't bother you. You should be to far away for them to spot you. Anything over 24" is unlikely to be able to target you.

Correct me if i'm wrong, but I don't think Barrage weapons need to roll to spot in Night Fighting, they just fire and add an extra D6 to the scatter if they don't hit.

I would check, but it's gone 4am, and my rulebook is all the way over there.

Avatar 720 wrote:Correct me if i'm wrong, but I don't think Barrage and weapons need to roll to spot, they just fire and add an extra D6 to the scatter if they don't hit.

I would check, but it's gone 4am, and my rulebook is all the way over there.

Assuming you are talking about Night Fight spotting (as opposed to Veil of Tears, which is different) then yeah you can still fire, it just scatters more.

Yeah, I was talking about Night Fighting; edited post for clarity.

Thanks for all the input guys.

Barrage weapons are a concern. If they don't wipe the suits, I can mark em up and have the broadsides finish em off ASAP.

Yea you simply try to railgun the barrage stuff first, then it's smooth sailing.

The obvious issue here being that you're hoping you can see it first; a good amount of blast barrage weapons (not that I know of any non-blast barrage weapons off the top of my head) can simply sit behind LoS blocking terrain and fire regardless, since no matter what they still have a 1/3 chance of ignoring the 3-4D6 scatter roll anyway.

All they need to do is kill a single model from the Stealth Team, then let Ld8 do the rest when it comes to the pinning check.

Jazzpaintball, I probably butchered his name...anyway he told me something of like 6 stealth suits with a lot of shield drones and marker drones he called it a "stealth cloud" basically they were pretty hard to kill with all of the wounds and night fighting rules. Try asking him about it.

The biggest problem with this his the very large amount of points you're going to sink into something that is not killing the enemy. If I were the guard player, I would just ignore your stealth suits and concentrate on the rest of your army.

I run three stealth suits. The leader gets a target lock, a markerlight, and a marker drone. Each of the grunts gets a marker drone. I usually throw in a Bonding Knife because this team is still useful even when reduced to one or two models. The total cost is about 200 points, and it gives me four markerlights which can be divided two ways - as many as a minumum unit of Pathfinders. So far my opponents have found this unit hard to deal with. If they choose to ignore the marker team, they pay the price. If they choose to kill the marker team, they have to ignore the more offensive units and often end up having a hard time finishing them off.