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Last week I played my first game against a double Thunderfire Cannon SM List with a slightly kooky GK List. I wasn't expecting to do that well (had to quickly move to 1750 from 1500, adding something that didn't really help the list), but I got pretty slaughtered, and a lot of the slaughtering was being done by those thunderfire cannons. The weapons quickly depleted my henchmen units, put many wounds onto my Strike squads, and in general played havoc with my army. All this while camped in Reinforced Ruins, so T7 with a 3+ cover save, so I couldn't engage them via shooting. It didn't help that my opponent believed that he was able to overwatch with both techmarine weapons and I let it pass , but my attempts to assault them were not very successful either, from either being unable to reach combat (Strikes got brought down from 10 to 2 by just 1 turn of two cannons shooting) or from an inability to win once they got there.

If you've encountered multiple Thunderfire cannons parked in 3+ ruins, how have you dealt with them? I know there are some hard counters (heldrakes, Broadsides + Markerlights, Poison/Snipers) but outside of those, what options have worked against these?

This brings up a bigger problem, in that I think that the 6th edition artillery rules are very powerful. GW artillery is generally good, but FW artillery moves a bit beyond that, with for instance Thudd Guns being very deadly against infantry and simultaneously very difficult to remove except by mass poison. Other than that solution, what other solutions are there for artillery in cover?

Techmarine can overwatch with both of his weapons, but cant overwatch with the thunderfire of course.

Get behind him so the techmarine will be the first to die as he cannot LOS wounds to the gun and only has one wound or find a better delivery system for your strike squads.

Thunderfires are a very good unit though

The Techmarine's Servo-harness specifies that he can shoot his weapons in your shooting phase, just like Tau Multi-trackers. Thus he cannot overwatch with multiple weapons in an opponent's assault phase.

I outflanked my strike squads (using a generic grand master's grand strategy, part of the kookiness of my list), which normally would have done it, but he had his Techmarines on the inside. I would have DS'd them in a good position, but unfortunately it was Emperor's Will, and doing so would have resulted in an almost certain mishap into his forces camped on his objective. It didn't matter anyways, as I lucked out and didn't get any wounds onto the unit at all, even with psybolt ammo.

And yes, I feel thunderfire cannons are probably the standout option in the SM codex right now.

Thunderfire cannons will murder henchmen and their is no way around that. Best way to stop henchman from dying is to keep them in a chimera. As for the rest, keep your units in max coherency which will greatly reduce the amount of hits he does. psyfilmen dreads will down thunderfires, as will 2 rounds of shooting from a full strike squad with psycannons.

Be thankful there were only two

As TFC often feature a dual-save of 3+, I think the best way to deal with them is often to forget quality shooting, and go for pure numbers (unless you got an AP3 or better gun that ignores cover)
GK does not do "volume" very well outside of the henchmen, and as the original problem is, the TFC gives them a bad time.


Also, as mentioned, taking down the techmarine removes the cannon, so if you can get to him, its done.
As a GK player, you got the Callidus assassin.
Good choice overall, and provides a near auto-remove TFC answer, unless he dedicates a large part of his army to protect it.
The Vindicare might also work with using a hellfire or TP round and allocating to the techmarine, then you only need him to fail his save once, and the cannon is down.

Your main problem is, that yo got little access to the regular answer (snipers and poison), so other then assassins, you really dont have anyhting else but charging into it and hoping to take it down before it kills too much (because even if you go full mech, the tremor rounds will STILL cause problems!)

As someone that runs a TFC I don't like cheap mass firing and I don't like walkers. Whether it's the psyriflemen shooting or the many flavors of walker assaulting: my techmarine won't last.

Sniper rifles kill them pretty easily. Sadly for them, snipers die easily to TFC's.

 juraigamer wrote:
Sniper rifles kill them pretty easily. Sadly for them, snipers die easily to TFC's.

ally in Tau(Kroot snipers) or DE (posion)

 Exergy wrote:

 juraigamer wrote:
Sniper rifles kill them pretty easily. Sadly for them, snipers die easily to TFC's.

ally in Tau(Kroot snipers) or DE (posion)

The GK already have a Sniper, the Vindicare. Pop a Hellfire round into that tech marine and the gun's dead.

 Wilytank wrote:

 Exergy wrote:

 juraigamer wrote:
Sniper rifles kill them pretty easily. Sadly for them, snipers die easily to TFC's.

ally in Tau(Kroot snipers) or DE (posion)

The GK already have a Sniper, the Vindicare. Pop a Hellfire round into that tech marine and the gun's dead.

if said techmarine fails his 3+ cover save. The vindi can also fail to hit/wound. About 25% chance of missing or failing to wound with the 2+ to wound round. .75 wounds on techmarine per shot. Then through in the cover save and you are down to .25 wounds per shot. That means it will take on average 4 rounds to silence 1 thunderfire cannon. A venom can almost silence 1 a turn(although the techmarine would be alive to run around) and costs FAR less.

I wasn't even doing henchmen spam -- I had one unit with three plasma cannon servitors in it, because I just converted some models up for them and was wanting to test them with Coteaz. Their firepower wasn't bad, until of course they were blown away by the TFCs and Coteaz failed his first 2+ save and died to S6.

They were also hiding behind my ADL, not that it did any real good. My main troops were two full strike squads. One of these outflanked in an attempt to take out one of the cannons, and was blown away by just those two cannons after failing to kill one of them. The other DS'd with my Grand Master to try and force the enemy troops off of his Emperor's Will objective, which they didn't do too badly at, but eventually failed.

Yeah, GK don't really seem to have real good in-faction answers for high toughness (with 3+ or better saves) without psycannon rends or CC hammers. A Love Can Bloom Assassin just doesn't really do enough damage, and doesn't ignore cover. Thus he's not going to be able to deal with the 3+ reinforced ruin cover save. It seems like the answer is just to ally in Tau? Outflanking Kroot + Outflanking/Deepstriking Strike Squads could be interesting. I wouldn't want to ally in DE, as desperate allies don't really do enough to be worth it. I'm considering starting DE though, but that's beside the point.

Huh. Come to think of it, I think my opponent also claimed that the TFCs were barrage weapons, because he sniped out the servitors and coteaz first, but looking through C:SM right now, they aren't. Not particularly applicable, as I still think TFCs are more than good enough without barrage, but it just makes my opinion of him continue to move from 'commonly wrong about rules' to 'cheater.' This includes odd things about his dice rolling (picking up ones to reroll a TL weapon, and basically dropping them with a little spin from a short distance, resulting in sixes), claiming first that my GK terminators couldn't consolidate from destroying a walker (and then blowing them up with a Demolisher Cannon) in one game to claiming that his assault marines got to consolidate after blowing up my Psyfleman in this game, to claiming that Nemesis Warding Staves were S6 AP4. Added to that the double-overwatch by Techmarines and Barrage from TFCs (I remember asking him whether they had barrage, and he said yes), all rules 'discrepancies' that wound up in his favor because I was too nice to confront him about it... well, guess I probably won't have to deal with TFCs at my local shop anymore, cause he's the only one bringing them, and I'm sure as hell not playing against him ever again!

I think someone mentioned it already, but the callidus gets those D6 randomly allocated hits when she comes in. I'm not sure if you would still end up going against the gun's toughness, but that would be an easy way to cut away the tech marine.

The Polymorphine of the Callidus is D6 S4 hits, so very very unlikely to do any wounds (she is going to be going against the gun's toughness), although any wounds that do happen will be AP2. A little too unreliable. With the Neural shredder, I'm not actually sure if the callidus can wound the TFC model itself, as it has no leadership. If so, it'd be a 4+ to kill the Techmarine if you can put her in the right place. Since the Callidus is almost certainly going to die afterwards, she's only going to get one chance. That's not too bad, but I'm not sure using 145 points to maybe take out 100 points is the right way to go.

Funny, the first time I ever faced a Thunderfire the player thought it was a barrage weapon too. Allowed him to blow up a Chimera that otherwise it would barely have been able to scratch - amazing what a difference two points of AV makes. I ended up killing it with a mass of S6 shooting but that was last edition so that wouldn't work as well now.

Las cannons...

Dalymiddleboro wrote:
Las cannons...

3+ cover and 2 wounds....

you have to hit, then wound, then get through cover twice.
Thats:
10.8 BS4 Lascannons
14.4 BS3 Lascannons

by the time your lascannon spam vendettas come on the board the thunderfire cannons might have killed all your squishy troops

Callidus is cc, correct? If so, you'll be going against the techmarine's toughness. T7 only applies to shooting

Well look, if you need to tailor your list to beat something, you're not taking a good balanced force. That or increase your playing skill by playing more games against it.

Not sure anyones mentioned it, but have you tried actually spreading out?

 juraigamer wrote:
Well look, if you need to tailor your list to beat something, you're not taking a good balanced force. That or increase your playing skill by playing more games against it.

Not sure anyones mentioned it, but have you tried actually spreading out?

You are correct about the list tailoring problem. What I'm trying to do is to highlight Thunderfire Cannons, and artillery/high toughness ranged stuff in general, as something that a balanced force needs to be able to counter. My list wasn't particularly a balanced list, although it did have a lot of nice elements. Just for kicks, the list that I took was (from memory):

Grand Master w/ ALL THE GRENADES, 2x Servoskulls
Coteaz
Henchmen Unit w/ 3 Plasma Cannon Servitors and some ablative Bolter henchmen
2x 10 Strike Squads with psybolt ammo, psycannons, etc.
2x Razorbacks w/ Psybolt Ammo
2x Psyfleman Dreadnoughts
Dreadknight w/ Sword, Incinerator, Teleporter
Aegis Defense Line w/ Comms Relay

The weaknesses of this list that come off the top of my head are: AV14 / Good Cover Saves on stuff that isn't easily killed by S5 Storm Bolters / Heldrakes. There are certainly others that aren't on this list, but this is what I tried out. It wasn't really meant to be 1750, at 1500 you just take out the Dreadknight and adjust the composition of the henchmen squad a bit.



Spreading out is a good idea, particularly if you do it well enough. My only problem was that the shop I'm playing in mostly uses 4'x4' boards, so there's very little room to spread out, even with simple 10 man strike squads. The guard players have a real difficult time spreading their guys out at all. On a 4'x6' board, it might have been a bit different, but TFCs are still good even if the target spreads out.

For Thunderfire cannons, it's the high toughness, combined with a 3+ or 2+ armor save, alongside the ability to camp in 3+ cover, that gives them their survivability. Combine that survivability with good offensive power against horde units and even space marines (piling on saves) that you get something that needs to be in mind when doing competitive list-building. You don't need to think specifically about TFCs, just how to deal with High Toughness stuff with good saves, and how to deal with good artillery. These two things already are in the Meta, in the form of Iron Armed TMCs, and Manticores.