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Hey guys,

I recently played against a friend's Space Marine army and it did not end well. I know Tau aren't the best matchup when you're facing a wall of 3+ saves, but rather than blaming bad dice rolls, *cough* I was wondering if you had any suggestions. Here were the matchups:

Him:
Vulkan 1500pt list:
2 Rhinos with 10 troops each
2 Vindicators (demolishers)
3 Landspeeders (meltas)
1 Thunderfire Cannon
1 Droppod w/ Venerable Dreadnaught (flamer+melta)
.. he also had 2 squads of missile launcher marines but those were wiped pretty early game. Oh, and Vulkan. Don't even get me started on how much I hate that guy.

Mine:
R'myr 1500pt:
10 Firewarriors x3
2 Crisis Suits (missilepods)
2 Crisis Suits (plasma+shieldgen)
1 Shas'o R'myr (Forgeworld model, basically a glorified standard shas'o with a plasma rifle)
2 Tetras (markerlights)
3 Broadsides (railgun+plasma)
2 Ionheads

You'd think it's a decent matchup on paper but it was so one-sided it was scary. The only thing left at the end were broadsides and by then he held maybe 4/6 of the objectives. Assuming this was more for annihilation than objective-based, what could I have done differently?

Sounds like a lot of tanks on his side while your foot troop are unprotected

A few suggestions would be to not equip your broadsides with the plasma as I don’t often see them ever in range to use them. Also may be better to have 2 squads of 2 equipped with ether adv stabilizers or a gun drone each and a leader with BSF and target lock that’s 4 potential vehicle per turn.

Shield gens for suits are ok but generally I prefer shield drones as it also gives extra wounds.

Your suits are ok I suppose though against marines I prefer the Helios load out

Lastly your troops don’t seem protected at all

Expensive or not I do like devil fishes and the new dpods making for a very hard to kill mobile wall

At that point limit, I prefer 2x2 broadside teams and 1 ion head. above is correct you should use SMS instead of Plasma.

Always shield drones before generators. 2 wounds, easy allocation, plus look out sir.

With all of those vehicles, hide your firewarriors till there is something to shoot.

Lately I've been deep striking a couple suicide teams of 2 crisis suits to pop armor.

Trade the ion cannons for railguns on the Hammerheads, the railgun's pretty much always a better choice. The plasma rifle upgrade on the Broadsides is almost always a waste of points, drop it. Ideally you'd focus the five railguns on his Rhinos and Vindicators and cripple his ability to move early, then let him come to you piecemeal through your gunfire. The Dreadnaught wouldn't present too much of a problem if downed his tanks early and could reorient the railguns to counter it.

Great advice guys. Yeah, the dreadnaught was actually a big thorn in the side (turn 1 DS) but those demolisher cannons were my #1 priority. Too bad he knows not to split his units because enough shots wasted on Av13 and he was on me by turn 3. But oh well. You learn something new every day.