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Hi all,

Just getting back into Da Marines and (as i love assault) the Skyhammer really interests me. My main opponent plays Tau and Eldar, and the running joke is that he should change his name to Kraft due to his love of Cheese. Like trying to fit two WK in a 1000 point "friendly" game kinda cheese. Anyway, I love flexibility the sky hammer will give me on the table, but i am concerned that Tau will blast it out of the sky before it lands. Has anyone had experience with this yet? How did it work?

Based on forum lurking of the last few weeks, i think running all 4 squads at 10 Marines strong, and combat squading after landing will give the most impact. I'm thinking about paying out the wazoo for 1 squad to have 4 Grav cannons, as this SHOULD let me delete a WK, Riptide or possibly a Stormsurge upon landing, not sure about the other squad yet. Same for the assault marines. Again though, this is all for not if the pods get blasted out of the sky before they touch the table, and at the cost of the 4 grav cannons alone, that would be alot of wasted points.

As an afterthought, I'm not sure if scary things on the table would help distract from this. I have a magnitised Knight, a Cerastus Lancer on the way, a whole slew of Space Marine vehicles, BA+SW to ally in if needed, and I am also eye balling the Flying formation that combos the Raven with two talons.

Any thoughts would be appreciated, thanks guys

I know the Tau can poop out a lot of interceptor fire BUT, I would think that with a decent amount of terrain, careful podding and enough saturation (read: all pods), they can't get it all.

Also of note, neither Tau nor Eldar have a lot of fearless units so the special pinning rules with the skyhammer would help. As you mentioned, load up a squad with grav and then put 2 long-range heavy weapons in the other squad that gets combat-squadded which will get you some good pinning options.

Whether or not you max out the assault squads is up to you but you'll just be looking for them to tie-up units in CC to avoid getting shot at.

A lot of tau players tend to gear their forces to take these on. I know I put EWO on everything in my list that can take it and put plasma on my broadside teams. So I guess it depends on where you land it and if or where he has a castle. I only have one castle point and the rest of my force is forward as I hate gunline, but the firebase I do have can put a hurting on a normal skyhammer and pray you don't land near one of my flamer teams(6 flamer templates hurts even marines).

Modern tau armies are set up to do one of two things:

Intercept the feth out of any incoming shenanigans such as the skyhammer.
OR
Counter-shenanigan things like the skyhammer with a retaliation cadre.

And the two are not mutually exclusive, they might just choose to do both.


Skyhammer is powerful, but against tau of all people, it can backfire.

I didn't realize that the interceptor fire came after the pods landed. So terrain would help. I appreciate the advise, mostly just trying to come up with a game plan to fight Tau in general. Aside from "kill the marker lights", I'm a bit daunted to the amount of fire power my marines seem to have to take on the chin. To the Gun line point, that is my buddy's (opponent in question) go to tactic. The only movement (other than running away) he does is to objectives if relevant, Otherwise its me skipping down the field into Tau/Eldar ranged murder haha.

You need to be fast with a lot of durable pressure. If you take a squad with Grav Cannons, try to fill out the squad with Bolter Devastators so they can combat squad and split the cannons evenly between the new squads, this way you won't lose your damage capabilities with one Intercept. If he's not playing the Optimized Stealth Cadre, a Knight of any variant would be a good ally.

Well, you should MSU as much as you can (with marine combat squads, not too hard)
Tau excel at annihilating high priority targets, so don't give them any. as long as everything is small and cheap, they can't focus fire on anything big and expensive.

Avoid terminators. That and MSU is the best way to deal with tau. I still cant believe my friends keep bringing their deepstriking termie blobs when i either kill them via intercepting riptides or with plasma spam during my turn. Terminators die freakishly easy against Tau.

The main marine list that drives me nuts as a tau player is number marines. I can kill a squad or two each turn with plasma suits and a riptide blast (assuming i dont miss/gets hot the blast) but when its only 5 mediocre marines, it takes a long time for that to pay off. That and i cant properly utilize my markerlights when theres so many units with identical value. Dont give me that juicy target full of points to make a lightshow out of.

If you can use grav on the move, get it because it wounds my suits on at worse a 3+, which is great against all of them. If you cant, i would suggest meltas. Meltas scare the piss out of me because they splat my crisis suits and reliably peck at everything else. Firewarriors are the only thing that really doesnt care. Plasmas give you suicide dangers and dont splat my crisis suits/commanders, though they'd probably be better if you know youre going to face a lot more ghosts/riptides than crisis suits.