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Friend and i only have each other to battle against as of late, so we decided to mix things up and swap codexes. He has my tau, i have his CSM. Problem...i know next to nothing about CSM tactic lol

Im reading the codex and all i see that i think would work against Tau seems like asking for the stars to align and hope i roll the right powers n whatnot. We are playing a 1500pt game and expecting to proxy like crazy since this is both of our 2nd armies so numbers are low and we arent sure what models are actually available anyway. Anyone have any pointers i should heed? i feel completely lost lol

Here are some fun combos that seem to work well against gunlines. Tau are an extremely flexible force with at least 3-4 very different builds all of which are powerful.

Huron blackheart (for his infiltrate warlord trait)+3x3 man MoN oblits
The idea is you infiltrate your oblits in close and they can either TL-plasma suits, HF FW, or mult-melta tanks and perhaps even get a charge off.

Transports with dirge casters. Dirge casters can remove the tau overwatch and LRs actually have a decent chance to get into combat. I personally like PMs in my transports as they are tough as nails while still doing good damage.

MoN spawn+black mace lord on bike. This unit is fast enough to get the lord into the tau lines and tough enough to require a huge resource investment to remove. Tau don't have alot of ID weapons so they have to use alot of fire to kill them. If you can manage to give them an Inv (ie roll the right power) these become crazy good.

Helldrakes are still pretty good but not to the level they are against every other army. Tau is the one army that can reliably put one down in a good turn of focused fire.

Daemons can add alot the a CSM list BTW. There are some great synergies between these lists.

Personally, knowing I was fighting Tau, I'd take bikers, autocannon havocs, MSU Noise Marines with blastmasters, and some cheap daemon allies to drop on his head as a cheap, look at me so the bikes can close.

Any armor you take is gonna be destroyed as soon as its on the field.

Tau don't have a whole lot that can handle land raiders with destroyer blades. Those things that can blow up a land raider are furthermore generally hopeless against the terminators that charge out into close combat out of the wreckage.

Tau also handle hordes with Ap5 weapons that ignore cover saves. Turns out, though, that CSM are very cheap, and come with Sv3+. Combine with said huron, and CSM as a codex has the ability to get into that close combat, and nothing in the tau codex is going to be particularly phenomenal against khrone berzerkers or terminators or raptors (or lots of stuff) in that setting.

Tau are also a gunline army, and, to rehash, CSM has a lot of fast units, from bikes, spawn, and raptors, to huron infiltration and stuff in land raiders, to maulerfiends and helldrakes (less good in this case), to deepstrikers like obliterators and terminators (likewise). CSM is a codex that doesn't do well in long-range firefights, having nothing really more than a lascannon as their only serious heavy weapon. To make up for this, CSM are pretty well able to take the fight to the enemy.

I'd think that a CSM player would do best by playing the game on his own terms and leaving his tau opponent wishing and hoping that his little bit of shooting is going to be enough before everything closes in on him.

Ironically his CSM has faced my Tau about 7 times now and hes never brought a landraider. I outta do that with termies inside hehe.

Im assuming i should take 4 Nurgletermies and some HQ (or 5 termies no hq) in that landraider, backed up by a hellchicken/lascannon havocs/Blackheart outflanking a big blob of cultists?

EDIT: Also i have tons of ork bikers i can proxy for nurglebikers, but hes ran those against me a few times and i really did not care lol. Ionheads and/or Riptides with IA's just decimated them the instant i saw their face. Rather not have that happen to me lol....and we have no Daemon codex so i cant ally them (the Daemons not the bikes)

I have been seeing alot of "Tau are a gunline army" which is not actually true they have ~2-3 builds which are gunlines but several of the builds (aka farsight bomb) actually depend on extremely mobile and relatively short range units to deal damage.

Riptides have changed the Tau dynamic significantly. Riptides are very mobile, good at shooting, and can handle themselves in CC against most small squads. If they have to a Tau player can also tarpit most CC threates with a riptide for most of the game due to the 3++, 2+, T6, and multiple wounds.

Additionally, Riptides are MC so they can smash. Running a LR directly into a Tau army is only a good idea if you can deal with loosing the LR or can deal with the Riptide(s).

Bikers are not bad but not as good as spawn as their coversave (jink) will be stripped so they do not have that additional survivability they normally would.

A single hellturkey will probably not accomplish anything but soaking a bit of fire power. Big blobs of cultists will die like flies if they threaten a Tau player in any way, shape, or form.

Nurgle termies are okay but it really depends on the Tau build as to how best to use them. Tau are not a mono dimensional force anymore. The only common theme is they are a shooting army. The termies should be useful for getting out of the LR, combi-plasma/melta-ing some suits and then charging them to finish it. The next turn they should need to be spread out though or the riptide will hit them with a S9 AP2 large blast.

Right, theyre not a gunline army. Theyre a gunline army with a couple skirmishers jumping around going "YOU CANT GET ME NENERNENERNENER"

The Riptides, unless he brings a railhead, are the only thing he has thats going to reliably punch the landraider and hes going to need to novacharge his offweapon, focus multiple riptides on it, or charge it to do so (that or get damn lucky with one melta). Which is all possible, gotta keep that in mind, but if he charges it with one that riptide is dead come my turn and my termies are on his end of the board.

This is why i came here. Tau are my army, i know their strengths and weaknesses atleast decently well. I look at the CSM codex and, aside from a little confused here and there since its so freakin random, i see it entirely being i hope i bring the right list to what hes bringing, otherwiseim screwed.

The HQs are cheap and good. Deamon Prince with wings, Chaos Lord on a bike, or sorceror with Telepathy are my favorites. Telepathy works pretty good too since Psychic Shriek is pretty good at hurting Riptides.

Noise marines work good against anything that relies on cover saves. Heldrakes are good at hurting anything short of Riptides and are still a pain for anything expensive hiding behind the ADL.

The only problem with attacking a riptide with CSM termies is they are super expensive with powerfists. They probably have power weapons (usually axes or mauls). This makes them not great against riptides but really good against the other Tau. I would not really recommend termies vs riptide as a great matchup for the CSM player as you are looking at trading a termie per wound with declining benefits, this is assuming you get into CC unmolested.

Do you not have any spawn for the CSM list? Plaguemarines? How many hellturkies? Oblits? Just 1 LR or more?

The LR disembarking the termies into his lines will work well but you may need something to stop him from closing you out turn 1 with a riptide (how many riptides do you have in your army?)

Numbers of models is out of the question we are expecting to proxy alot. I actually only have 1 riptide, but a flyer base with the stick on it is a good proxy (yes laugh all you want we do it all the time rofl).

Ive never even seen spawn used before so i dont know what base they are to proxy lol. Neither do i know how i would get them into combat, im afraid weight of fire would deal with them if i get too close to the firewarriors. Granted ive never used a Beast before so im probably forgetting a rule somewhere that would help.
EDIT: Alright, i dont even know if i want to take chaosspawn at all. i thought they were Daemons at first so they had a 5+ invul....they dont. I am literally dependant on coversaves to get close...against tau that is not happening. Yeah if i take nurgle theyre T6 and have 3wounds a pop (15wounds on 5 models is pretty good) but when im not getting a save at all i expect that to go away quick.

If your opponent runs a farsight bomb, then you'll probably jut beat him. Tau aren't going to win the close range force concentration game against CSM. Anything they do to get close to you is just giving you a helping hand, farsight or no.

Which means he's playing a gunline. In that case, I really would recommend against trying to out-gunline them. Havoc aren't going to compete against broadisdes and the like, and taking helldrakes, while grossly unnecessary (you shouldn't have any problems with firewarriors) is also going to have problems against tau's unique interceptor abilities.

As for riptides, say hello to S5 khorne attacks and S5 force axe attacks from sorcerers, and murder swords, and axes of blind fury, etc. etc. Riptides are better than most stuff in close combat, but they're not better than most of the stuff in the CSM codex there.

MoN spawn move 12" in the movement. They are on the 40 mm bases. They are T6 with MoN, 3 wounds a piece, and fearless. They are really there just to give ablative wounds to a biker black mace lord. As long as they get him into combat and let him go about killing stuff without dying they do their jobs.

They should soak enough fire power to allow the rest of your assault threats to close. Actually it would be hilarious if you took 2 units of MoN spawn, 1 MoK spawn unit, 1 biker lord with black mace, and a murder sword khorne lord on his juggernaut. The spawn to kill suits. The murder sword goes after suits/riptides. The black mace kills anything with numbers. You should have 3 valid melee threats within charge range turn 2-3.

Murder sword wouldnt be that awesome since the only characters i expect to see are his HQs, and i severely doubt he'd let me challenge that knowing Murder is on that model lol. I would say nice because of the AP3 but its 35 flippin points lol

Riptides are not characters and aside from HQs only upgraded suits/FW are characters. I imagine he'd see the same flaw as me to paying the points for it (+1 LD, precision, and sig systems that take 1 of the 3 slots for crisis teams...nothanks). He was very sad the one time he took his Murdersword and found i had 1 character in my entire army lol and it was sitting with missilesides in the backfield.

Though i like the blackmace biker idea behind the spawn...hmm

I was more thinking for the daemon weapon extra attacks, but yeah you are probably right not worth it.

You could instead go MoN sorcerer on bike for the second HQ and get telekinesis. The telekinesis powers are all pretty good against riptides/Tau and the unit should be able to kill something in CC as well.

So say i had a MoN Lord on bike with black mace with 5 MoN Chaos Spawns and a Lv2 MoN Sorcerer on bike with another 5 MoN chaos spawns, what would i follow this up with?
I was going to unload some MoN marines out of a landraider but the cost is too high for a 1500pts game. I have 180pts left if i do that and thats a ton of weight on a low model count and single vehicle. Should i just try and hoof it with marines inside rhinos (hoof it as in walk the rest of the way after the rhino goes boom)?
Neat thing i noticed, since the bikerlords are with beasts they dont take dangerous terrain tests. woot! lol (you have no idea how many of those i have failed with Bikernobz)

EDIT: Given our past games when i was using my Tau and him his CSM, im expecting him to bring anti-air and pi plates because thats the main thing i brought that always wrecked his lists since all the pi plates penned his armor and wounded on 2+ even with MoN.

1500 point nurgle list with that HQ setup?

Lord - MoN, black mace, bike
Sorcerer - MoN, lvl 2, meltabombs bike

5x spawn - MoN 180

20x plague marines - powerfist, 2x meltaguns
20x plague marines - powerfist, 2x meltaguns

You win first blood, even without long-range shooting, and can do very well on secondaries. You also just win emperor's will, relic and purge games.

Strategically, you can either choose which objectives you want, and you'll just have them, or else you can charge forward in an implacable horde and annihilate everything with a turn 3 charge.

40 infantry model and a few fast movers may not sound like a lot, but look at what the tau can do against them. Firstly, they're not reliant on cover saves, so markerlights don't just instantly wipe them out. Secondly, a squad of 10 firewarriors shoots the plague marines at double-tap range. 20 shots, 10 hits, 5 wounds, 1.66 failed armor saves, and 1.1 dead marine.

ONE dead plague marine after all that shooting. It would take 5 firewarrior squads four turns at double-tap range to kill off one of those squads, and odds are pretty damn good that you're not getting 4 turns to double tap them before they get into close combat and end you. PMs may be crummy in close combat, but not compared to tau.

Simply put, this list could simply outlast anything tau could throw at them, especially if you play them very aggressively and limit the amount of turns of shooting the tau player gets.

And while that's going on, there's that cavalry unit eating everything it touches, starting turn 2.

Actually that could be a decent list. The only tough part will be if he MSUs a bunch in which case he may be able to feed you units all game.

I personally would split the Plague marines into 4 groups of ~10 (it should still take more that 1 turn of firing to finish a group of 10 and you can less the impact of MSU).

Actually that is pretty close to what I field. (4 units or 8 PM; 2x melta)

both HQs in one spawn? well with the terrain we got theres a few things that end to be in the middle of the table they could hide behind for a turn, rather than running since theyre too far to charge/shoot (i do this with my nob bikerz, i'll deliberately take a turn longer to get there if i can make you shoot WAAAAY less to do it despite being highly resilient models).

Im assuming with that list i would do that with the cavalry squad while just green-tide-style moving the plague marines (move and run straight forward with spacings). theres no way the 7man cavalry squad would take out all the big guns if theres a huge FW bubble in the way too lol.

EDIT: Btw, when beasts run do they run D6 or something special? im not seeing anything

Vineheart01 wrote:with the terrain we got theres a few things that end to be in the middle of the table they could hide behind for a turn

Well that's your fault. Different armies need to place terrain differently.