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Specifically an enemy who selected, as is their right, "Assassination" and "Bring it down" when fighting as a T'au player and the bulk of the list are either vehicles or characters buffing other stuff to make it work..

Thinking are there any reasonably effective counters?

taking "Bring it Down" for the T'au can work but a lot of other factions don't have/need so many things tagged [Vehicle] making it harder to rack up the points and T'au lack effective ways to nuke characters inside tougher units before they can go hide.

thoughts?

leopard wrote:
Specifically an enemy who selected, as is their right, "Assassination" and "Bring it down" when fighting as a T'au player and the bulk of the list are either vehicles or characters buffing other stuff to make it work..

Thinking are there any reasonably effective counters?

*Sort of a joke/sort of not....
Eliminate anything likely to have a decent chance of harming your vehicles/suits 1st, then mop up the rest.
*Deploy things you don't want dead on turn 1 behind cover. You can always move around/through/over if needed.
* You can also try putting some of these units in Deepstrike or strategic Reserves.
**Personally I don't really worry about it. I've chosen to play a suit & vehicle heavy army. I assume I'll give up some pts to Bring it Down. And by some I mean plenty. So to compensate I'll just have to out-score & out-kill the other guy.

leopard wrote:
taking "Bring it Down" for the T'au can work but a lot of other factions don't have/need so many things tagged [Vehicle] making it harder to rack up the points and T'au lack effective ways to nuke characters inside tougher units before they can go hide.
thoughts?

If the opponent brings enough vehicles/monsters to make choosing BiD a suitable choice? Then I choose BiD....
As for Assassinate? I can & will nuke those tough units they're leading. If the target(s) survive & scurry off to hide? That's fine. Hiding units likely aren't doing much to me. And I'll just catch up to them in a moment.

seems about my thoughts, there are plenty of options for some lists to instant kill mid level vehicles, and can usually only get so many out of sight. may need to look at what else can go into reserve though.

its more ways to counter these two, I have managed to zap a few things but it does seem a remarkable number of forces have either options for an invulnerable save or some sort of -1 to wound mechanic etc

I try to defend by not having many/any high value "if this dies I've lost" targets and spend more time worrying on VP scoring than killing (e.g. last night in effect sacrificing a Piranha and its two as yet unfired seeker missiles in exchange for a secondary objective - and it being the next thing to die instead of a hammerhead)

its nice that game results are getting closer, just not an easy army to run when its easy for those two secondaries to max out for a few turns early on

note, specifically not a whine about it being broken, it is what it is, looking to develop counters

The counter to this is list building your opponent isn't makeing that choice. Your making that choice for them

if your opponent plays a killy list and you give away both they are going to try to kill you anyway so they will take both

Strategy A - minimal of both - if I have 12 pts of vehicles and characters my opponent is unlikely to take this a stratagy and if they are they are dropping 18VP at least

Strategy B - pick 1 to sacrifice - I run my sisters list with 10+characters but no vehicles sure my opponent can take assasinated but then they have to pick another fixed which they can't do easily. An IK list might do the reverse give away a brung it down but not characters

Strategy c - tempt fate - take just enough of each that your opponent can meaningfully take that choice but if anything doesn't die they are shelling vp

Strategy d - suck it up - you've chosen to optimise your list and incentivised your opponent to pick those choices against you you have optimal choices unlike the other options where you have to compromise your choice

U02dah4 wrote:
The counter to this is list building your opponent isn't makeing that choice. Your making that choice for them

if your opponent plays a killy list and you give away both they are going to try to kill you anyway so they will take both

Strategy A - minimal of both - if I have 12 pts of vehicles and characters my opponent is unlikely to take this a stratagy and if they are they are dropping 18VP at least

Strategy B - pick 1 to sacrifice - I run my sisters list with 10+characters but no vehicles sure my opponent can take assasinated but then they have to pick another fixed which they can't do easily. An IK list might do the reverse give away a brung it down but not characters

Strategy c - tempt fate - take just enough of each that your opponent can meaningfully take that choice but if anything doesn't die they are shelling vp

Strategy d - suck it up - you've chosen to optimise your list and incentivised your opponent to pick those choices against you you have optimal choices unlike the other options where you have to compromise your choice

If you remove every option from the Tau that has Vehicle as a keyword you are left with Shadowsun, Fireblade, Kroot Shaper, Ethereals, Darkstrider, basic infantry (Fire Warriors, Kroot, Pathfinders), Firesight Marksmen, Stealth Suits, Vespid, Kroot Hounds, Drones.

Fireblade, Shaper, Ethereals, Darkstrider, Fire Warriors, Kroot, Firesight, Vespid, Hounds, and Drones have zero access to any anti-tank weaponry. Pathfinders can take 3 rail rifles (S10 AP-4 D3) per squad, Stealth suits 1 fusion blaster per 3, Shadowsun has 2 boosted fusion blasters.

So sure, you could make a Tau list which isn't instantly the optimal army to take Bring it Down against, but your list will be utterly crap because you have to leave pretty much every hard hitting unit in the book on the shelf as the Tau don't sprinkle heavy weapons into all of their squads. It's not a case of optimising your list, it is a matter that if you want your list to be able to do pretty much anything, you have to take units with the vehicle keyword. Even if you take an unoptimised list, you will probably have an abundance of vehicle keyworded units unless you are just crossing your fingers that your opponent takes no tanks, no monstrous creatures, no high save infantry of any kind, really.

Then maybe you don't eliminate vehicles from the list you limit yourself to 3 characters

Or go for option 4

Then he will take bring it down not assisinate and have to take a board control secondary or go tacticle

I have wondered on fewer characters, part of the issue there though is its the characters that make a chunk of the rest actually work.

e.g. you need one if you want extra CP, this is perhaps the easiest to drop.

the fireblades are what makes the Breacher teams work, remove him and you remove a third of their firepower, it can work but 'meah', likewise removing the devilfish and the breachers stay at home

two fireblades and a crisis commander of some sort for three is viable though

virtually impossible not to have "bring it down" as a nemesis, my list already is running six infantry squads.

so far "suck it up" seems to be about the only option and just accept they will be maxing those secondaries out while trying to win on primary and whatever secondaries I can grab

worth noting there are a few secondaries this list can do reasonably well, I tend to go for the tactical option as I've found most of the fixed ones are not that hard for an enemy to avoid (though knights etc are facing "bring it down" themselves)

No you have options as you stated and you could even go to 4 character and assassinate can still be a questionable choice for your opponent as will know if you can keep one alive your op is only getting 12vp and that can be quite a risk.

What your doing is choosing to optimise your units making them stronger at the expense of making your opponent's secondaries easier.

Now whether that's the right decision tactically is a different matter if it provides that much of a offensive boost then it probably is just sucking up but at its heart 40k is an objectives game not a pure kill one and sometimes reducing your opponent's score makes it easier to win even if you have less firepower.

Not a Tau player, but my Ork list runs 7 characters and 6 vehicles so I also understand the pain of haemorrhaging VP to Assassinate and BID.

I've found that what CCS says is generally correct: if it threatens your VP units, kill them. If you can't kill it, hide from it.

Focus those units down and then clean up and win on VP yourself.

 A Town Called Malus wrote:


So sure, you could make a Tau list which isn't instantly the optimal army to take Bring it Down against, but your list will be utterly crap because you have to leave pretty much every hard hitting unit in the book on the shelf as the Tau don't sprinkle heavy weapons into all of their squads. It's not a case of optimising your list, it is a matter that if you want your list to be able to do pretty much anything, you have to take units with the vehicle keyword. Even if you take an unoptimised list, you will probably have an abundance of vehicle keyworded units unless you are just crossing your fingers that your opponent takes no tanks, no monstrous creatures, no high save infantry of any kind, really.

Then you minimize characters.

Bring it down without assasination=opponent has one less ideal secondary while you can go on for maximizing 40 secondaries.

Agreed... drop a character or two. Fireblades add 50% to the unit's damage output, but basically zero to its survivability for 44% of the cost. Fireblades are decent, but not a steal. Then they have a harder time picking a second secondary.

Agree the fireblades are not *required*, however they do add a decent punch in terms of damage per model in a given point.

that said, I will try without them, and maybe stick the points saved towards another breacher squad maybe

As a Tau player there's not much you can do about Bring it Down. All your most important units give up points for that so you just have to accept it. However, I think far too many players fail to realise that it's not kills, but points that wins games. If they're going to take Assassination you should be thinking about modifying your approach to make those characters harder to kill. For the Commanders that's probably not that easy, but for Fireblades and Ethereals you can keep them and their unit in reserve or not commit with them until much later in the game. That may mean you're not using them to their fullest, but if you're denying your opponent 10-15 secondary points it's usually worth it.

I have been scrolling through this. Does not the whole point of this come down to not make a list that easelly maxes both bring it down and assassinate.

I mean most Orks lists are build around characters. If they do that they just leave a juice bring it down at home. Seems if tau needs to bring max bring it down don't make a big assassinate.

Or if you do both, play in a way where not a lot of units die. (Harder then said.) Lastly some opponents really want that CP and might stil wanne play random objectives.