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I've been interested in starting a Drop Pod/Null Deploy army recently, but my area is pretty littered with Tau, who of course are stocking up on EWOs with how cheap they are. How do you keep Riptides/Stormsurges/etc from tearing up the army before it has a chance to do anything?

- Drop more targets than they have intercepting units (Combat squads help here).
- Drop stuff that they'll have trouble destroying - Ironclad dreads can cause issues depending on how many broadsides they've got and if they've got tank hunter
- Drop out of LoS, then it's just SMS to worry about
- Drop close enough to their units that they can't fire their big blast unit removers without hitting their own units
- Pray for bad scatter on their unit removers
- Take stormshields on your command squad/s in pods to survive said squad removing guns
- End up in cover as they won't have ignores cover (unless they've got the drone net or are intercepting with their OSC)

I have actually been overwhelmed before in individual rounds by marine drop pods. I still wasted everything, but at times I had issues with target priority. My own shooting phase the first couple turns was very limited and quick

Note its a standing rule of mine to give every unit that can take it early warning override and I play suit heavy. So yeah dropping in the middle of my army with only 3 or 4 drop pods isnt a great idea, even with dreadnoughts.

My advice is not to drop spread out. Drop on the edges so the opponent cant use multiple units shoot you with maximum effectiveness and you can use multiple units to shoot up his fringe units.