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Primaris are decent... but not competative. You will only see certain units in competative lists, but the majority of troops would be normal marines. If you play tau, you need to have an assault oriented army (those skull helmet dudes are awesome... use them as templars for deepstrike, rerolls charges, 3 attacks each after shooting with heavy pistols... dead tau).

Tau shoot up an entire army and assault turn 1? With the amount of heavy shooting he had, he wasnt running towarda you. I think he did something illegal, that's not entirely possible for the amount of wounds you had, even if out in the open (or in assault... he hits less than you, has a harder time wounding... charging with tau is suicidal most of the time vs primaris).

This BR has just been uploaded by Winters. Showing T'au v Primaris (accompanied by some scouts) Interesting game, shows the T'au are very much a force to be reckoned with considering the very sub-par list and utterly shambolic rolling.

 Crimson wrote:

 Togusa wrote:
I've heard it argued before that the rules for Primaris have been on purpose made bad so as not to upset marine players thinking that their army will be replaced. Is this true?

Most likely not. It is just that the marines overall are pretty mediocre at the moment, and the Primaris line is still very limited, so Primaris only force is lacking some tools.

I recommend getting some regular (rapid fire) Hellblasters and perhaps a Stormtalon (put lascannons on it.) These will help you to deal with heavier enemy units. Then maybe add some Inceptors (with bolters) or even Reavers to act as distraction and harass enemy infantry holding objectives. And most importantly, learn to hug cover.

Also, just play more games; you may have made some mistakes and the army may have some weaknesses, but this really still sounds like a totally freak occurrence, so you probably should not make terribly extensive conclusions about the viability of the army based on this one game.

We are scheduled to play another game tomorrow. I've finished a squad of Interceptors and a Squad of Reivers so I'll be trying these out.

Honestly, either he played with extremely wrong rules, or you are a VERY bad player.

Tau are currently bottom of the barrel, and for a good reason-everything they can do, others got a superior equivalent. EVERYTHING. the only thing keeping them remotly viable now is the CA stratagem that helps mitigate the markerlight issue (you gotta have them in spades as you are useless without them, but investing in them is silly as you can't actually benefit from more than 5 hits)

Hammerheads in particular, are very, very bad. as in, a railgun hammerhead is mathematically about half as deadly than a trilas predator, while costing more.
Ghosts are expensive, and point-blank. sure they can infiltrate, but with any reasonable deployment they won't be able to set up anywhere near your tanks
Commanders are actually good, and fire warriors are not useless, but that's it.

So unless he rolled like a god, or you practically force-fed him the easiest kills possible, he should not have need able to do this. the amount of damage you describe on turn 1 is incredibly hard to believe, as its far above the expected results even assuming the perfect conditions where you had no cover at all for any of your units, and he had easy access with each of his units to it's target of choice.

 GI_Redshirt wrote:

 Togusa wrote:

 Marmatag wrote:

 vaklor4 wrote:
Best you can do against Tau? Cover. If you really gotta, have cover in your deployment zones and just hunker down. That makes your marines a 2+ before AP, but otherwise...You really shouldnt be losing turn1 to tau. Theyre garbo.

Tau are not garbage.

Taking a 3+ to a 2+ while also simultaneously hiding in cover for the entire game isn't exactly engaging or an intelligent way to win if it's an objective based game.

Tau will sit on objectives and shoot at your 2+ with their longer range, higher AP weaponry. It's a losing proposition either way with his list. Are you seriously afraid of 18ppm boltgun marines?

Everyone keeps talking about cover, as if marker lights aren't a thing. I didn't get a single cover bonus because it was taken away from me with how stupid marker lights are.

Ok, here's where I have a question. What marker lights? The list you posted has no dedicated markerlight sources anywhere in it. The only potential markerlight sources he has are the Fire Warrior Shas'Uis who can be upgraded to have one for 3 points, and the "bunch of drones" you mention (without telling us what kinda drones they are). How many markerlight sources did your opponent have in their list? It takes 4 markerlights on a unit to be able to remove their save bonus for being in cover. You have 7 units in your army. How many of them were deployed in cover? Because Shas'Uis would only hit with their markerlights om 4+, or if they moved 5+. Assuming that the drones were Marker Drones, they only hit on a 5+, or a 4+ if they're near a model with a Drone Controller (either the Commanders or the Ghostkeels). So, even in the best case scenario, his markerlights would only hit on a 4+, meaning he would need on average 8 markerlight shots to get 4 on a single unit. So, 8 markerlights on average per unit you deployed in cover, under ideal circumstances. Even with the new strategem Tau have, that could only have been used once due to matched play rules, and still requires a markerlight hit to be used.

So again, how many markerlights did your opponent have? Because looking at the picture you posted, it looks like 1. He didn't have too many (and the ones he had aren't all the reliable) and 2. You didn't have many units deployed in such a way as to benefit from cover anyway. At most, assuming every drone he has is a Marker Drone and all 4 Shas'Uis have Markerlights, he has 16 Markerlights. Enough for, going by averages, removing cover from 2 units, without use of the strategem. It seems to me like either your opponent messed up how his markerlights work, you're exaggerating about never getting cover, or you didn't deploy many units in cover meaning he could focus his markerlights and you wouldn't have really benefited from cover anyway.

I realized I left out his three squads of 4 drones. They were with one of the commanders who had a "drone controller" whatever that is. I also realized I left out my Ancient with a banner from the list.

 Xenomancers wrote:

Hate to break it to you man. This edition is just a continuation of the last ones in regards to space marines getting the worst rules...92% of the codex is crap. And as you experienced - you have no ability to beat even index armies unless you go first.

This was the silliest thing I've read all week. SM has several competitive builds, all viable. GMan Razorspam is the first that comes to mind. Predator Autocannons are insane. There are some amazing psychic combos you can pull off (Null Zone the enemy hero and then charge him with MoH up?) Stormravens anyone??

 BoomWolf wrote:
Honestly, either he played with extremely wrong rules, or you are a VERY bad player. .........
So unless he rolled like a god, or you practically force-fed him the easiest kills possible, he should not have need able to do this. the amount of damage you describe on turn 1 is incredibly hard to believe, as its far above the expected results even assuming the perfect conditions where you had no cover at all for any of your units, and he had easy access with each of his units to it's target of choice.

Look, I get that you all seem to have a bug up your butt about the math. Fine. But I was there, I know what kind of game I played and what happened. If you're not going to accept that, there is nothing I can do about it. Also, please keep your "bad player' insults to yourself. Nothing is served by that kind of talk and it's the primary reason why people get driven away from these hobbies. Bring criticism of tactics and lists all you like, but please keep it respectful.

At the end of the first turn, I had a Captain and a Banner Ancient on the table.
Repulsor: Exploded
Dreadnought: Exploded
13 of 15 marines dead to shooting, with the remaining two failing leadership and being removed.
Hellblasters: 4 of 5 dead, 5th one failed leadership and died.

Flukes happen. I once rolled 18 successful melta hits against a Landraider that had a 5+ cover save and dealt only 1 wound to it, with a result of a 3 on the damage table for that roll. It happens. I'm not even here to complain about that, and I don't much care that I lost. I wanted to know what caused that loss. Many people have offered great ideals about this and tomorrow I'll be playing almost the identical list again, with an update to this topic.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Elric Greywolf wrote:

 Xenomancers wrote:

Hate to break it to you man. This edition is just a continuation of the last ones in regards to space marines getting the worst rules...92% of the codex is crap. And as you experienced - you have no ability to beat even index armies unless you go first.

This was the silliest thing I've read all week. SM has several competitive builds, all viable. GMan Razorspam is the first that comes to mind. Predator Autocannons are insane. There are some amazing psychic combos you can pull off (Null Zone the enemy hero and then charge him with MoH up?) Stormravens anyone??

Agreed. I was alpha striked with free drop pods and skyhammer nonsense many times last year.

 Hollow wrote:
This BR has just been uploaded by Winters. Showing T'au v Primaris (accompanied by some scouts) Interesting game, shows the T'au are very much a force to be reckoned with considering the very sub-par list and utterly shambolic rolling.

There’s a lot wrong about that BR. Neither player seemed to know how drones work after deployment, skipping morale checks on drone units, using drones to provide unit coherency for that crisis suit team that dropped in, letting that unit deploy in a location it otherwise couldn’t legally have. I actually turned it off when the crisis team dropped in back.

You completely ignored the other options I suggested though.
Either that he played his stuff wrong and did things he is not allowed to do, or you didn't do things you are supposed to do.
Or that the rolls were complete bonkers.

You had 5 man squads. your hellblaster took 4 casualties, the 5th lost moral. that can only happen if you roll 5/6 and rerolled into 5/6, so 1/9 chance.
Losing 2 intercessors from the same 5 man squad to moral is outright impossible, so that means two more cases of losing 4 dudes than rolling 5/6 into 5/6, so that is two more 1/9 chance. having all three of them happen at once is 1/729 chance on its own.

Losing the 16 wound repulser to a single ghostkeel and longstrike means that between the two 16 wounds were dealt.
Longstrikes railgun, ignoring miss chances does only d6 wounds, with d3 more if he got 5/6 on the wound roll. ignoring miss chances, that's on average 4.1666 wounds overall, or 5.5 if you assume he did get the extra d3.
So that leaves a single ghost to deal 10-12 wounds. I'd assume twin fusion blasters and fusion collider, as its the worst case for you. it has to reach 12" to be even able to fire these, so unless he had the open ground to reach even closer and trigger the reroll to damage (because that requires the deployment to truly favor him) you should expect, on average, to have 4 fusion shots, out of them only 2 will hit and only 1 will wound-dealing 3.5 wounds. even a double-than-expected result would do 7 wounds, who still not enough. even had longstrike gotten his extra wounds in.

Overall, the AVERAGE you'd expect longstrike+full fusion ghost to do, is merely 7.666 wounds. almost half the repulser's wounds.
Killing it, means double than the expected result.
And even doing that-means you allowed the ghost to be somewhere within 24" of the repulser during deployment.


THAT is why I say you either played poorly, did something wrong, or the dice were insane.
Because these are the three options, the results you describe are in no way normal or reasonable, and they definatly do not point to some sort of "problem" with the marines themselves.


Now, now that we know what the three options are, the next step is to figure out what of the three actually happened.

Playing wrong is easy to figure out, you just need to get an in-depth read of all the rules he and you used during that game, and see if there are any mismatches between what happened on the table, and what is supposed to happen.

Insane dice are also easy to factor in, for example if you after reading the expected results look back and remember that longstrike and the 12" ghost have ineeded been enough to destroy the repulser without outside help, that means the dice were rather nutty on that case.
The dice were also rather nutty on the moral test, unless you forgot ATSKNF, and then it was just unlucky but not outright crazy.
If the dice were crazy, it happens-but not something you should use as an anacdote, as it shouldn't happen again soon.
If the dice were reasonable-it leaves one option, you played poorly.

Now, playing poorly is a thing, we all been there, new or old. we were all noobs at some point, and I know full well I make dumb mistakes still, everybody does.

BUT, pretending you don't, will get you nowhere. you can't learn if you refuse to admit you made mistakes. and we all made mistakes.
You, in this spesific case, probably made more mistakes than most, and if you can't accept it than your problem is bigger than playing poorly.

Where you went wrong, likely during deployment.
I don't know HOW you deployed, but knowing he has two full-fusion ghosts, what you COULD have done, is make sure there is no way for him to deploy them within 24" of your repulser/redemptor either by deploying them only after seeing where he places the ghosts, or using your intercessors to form areas he cannot deploy (he has to be both 12" away from your dudes, and outside your deployment zone after all) and only then place your heavies, or failing that making sure he can't reach into 12" (again by haivng bodies in the way) and as such at least disable their fusion blasters.

You can't really counter-deploy against longstrike or his buddy tank other than trying to see where they park, and then park behind some tall stuff to block his vision.
Can't really tell without a step-by-step of what you deployed where by what order, but you need to learn to judge enemy plans by where the put, or don't put, their stuff.
Especially against a list such as his that contains many things that want to be deployed in response to you (hammers need vision to your heavys, ghosts near your heavies but they can't be placed close after your infantry set up a zone, drones want to be close enough to mark yet far enough to be safe, etc)

As for list-level mistakes, I'm not sold on the repulser being used in a mere 1400 point game. its a big toy, but suffers from the defiler condition of trying to do too many things at once.
What does it even transport? (because if the dudes are inside, who's building a defensive no-deployment zone around it?)
Especially considering how little wrapping you contain. even for a primaris list, that's a low model count. you will always find it hard to set up no-drop zones around your big stuff with this list.

Also, salamandar make poor primaris.
Salamandar are good, when you got that 1 good weapon in the squad like tactical marines does, and MM dreads, etc. but with "everyone is identical" primaris, not so much.
If I were you, and wanted to stick to pure primaris, I'd switch to maybe iron hands or imperial fists, if not ultras.

 Togusa wrote:


I'm okay with losing a game. I'm not okay with losing a game, whether it is to rolls or not, due to unbalance. I've heard it argued before that the rules for Primaris have been on purpose made bad so as not to upset marine players thinking that their army will be replaced. Is this true?

No that is not the case. Every single two-wound infantry model was more or less overpriced at the beginning of 8th edition, including Primaris Marines (and bikes and what not). Primaris Marines has received some pretty hefty points decreases since then, and they are a lot better than they were.

I would strongly advice you to play with the tournament rule, that counts the ground floor of ruins as blocking LOS.

pismakron wrote:
I would strongly advice you to play with the tournament rule, that counts the ground floor of ruins as blocking LOS.

Otherwise known as the anti-turn-1-table-wipe rule. This rule alone forces a lot of army tweaks since it reduces the effectiveness of gunline armies and really makes you play around the terrain and opponent like, you know, you should.

 Togusa wrote:

 GI_Redshirt wrote:

 Togusa wrote:

 Marmatag wrote:

 vaklor4 wrote:
Best you can do against Tau? Cover. If you really gotta, have cover in your deployment zones and just hunker down. That makes your marines a 2+ before AP, but otherwise...You really shouldnt be losing turn1 to tau. Theyre garbo.

Tau are not garbage.

Taking a 3+ to a 2+ while also simultaneously hiding in cover for the entire game isn't exactly engaging or an intelligent way to win if it's an objective based game.

Tau will sit on objectives and shoot at your 2+ with their longer range, higher AP weaponry. It's a losing proposition either way with his list. Are you seriously afraid of 18ppm boltgun marines?

Everyone keeps talking about cover, as if marker lights aren't a thing. I didn't get a single cover bonus because it was taken away from me with how stupid marker lights are.

Ok, here's where I have a question. What marker lights? The list you posted has no dedicated markerlight sources anywhere in it. The only potential markerlight sources he has are the Fire Warrior Shas'Uis who can be upgraded to have one for 3 points, and the "bunch of drones" you mention (without telling us what kinda drones they are). How many markerlight sources did your opponent have in their list? It takes 4 markerlights on a unit to be able to remove their save bonus for being in cover. You have 7 units in your army. How many of them were deployed in cover? Because Shas'Uis would only hit with their markerlights om 4+, or if they moved 5+. Assuming that the drones were Marker Drones, they only hit on a 5+, or a 4+ if they're near a model with a Drone Controller (either the Commanders or the Ghostkeels). So, even in the best case scenario, his markerlights would only hit on a 4+, meaning he would need on average 8 markerlight shots to get 4 on a single unit. So, 8 markerlights on average per unit you deployed in cover, under ideal circumstances. Even with the new strategem Tau have, that could only have been used once due to matched play rules, and still requires a markerlight hit to be used.

So again, how many markerlights did your opponent have? Because looking at the picture you posted, it looks like 1. He didn't have too many (and the ones he had aren't all the reliable) and 2. You didn't have many units deployed in such a way as to benefit from cover anyway. At most, assuming every drone he has is a Marker Drone and all 4 Shas'Uis have Markerlights, he has 16 Markerlights. Enough for, going by averages, removing cover from 2 units, without use of the strategem. It seems to me like either your opponent messed up how his markerlights work, you're exaggerating about never getting cover, or you didn't deploy many units in cover meaning he could focus his markerlights and you wouldn't have really benefited from cover anyway.

I realized I left out his three squads of 4 drones. They were with one of the commanders who had a "drone controller" whatever that is. I also realized I left out my Ancient with a banner from the list.

For future knowledge and understanding, a Drone Controller is a Support System upgrade that any Tau Battlesuit can take. Any Drone units with the same SEPT keyword that are within 6" of a model with a Drone Controller add 1 to any hit rolls. Basically means that Gun and Marker Drones hit on 4+ instead of 5+, so its a fairly decent upgrade.

 andysonic1 wrote:

pismakron wrote:
I would strongly advice you to play with the tournament rule, that counts the ground floor of ruins as blocking LOS.

Otherwise known as the anti-turn-1-table-wipe rule. This rule alone forces a lot of army tweaks since it reduces the effectiveness of gunline armies and really makes you play around the terrain and opponent like, you know, you should.

Its a good rule.

 Desubot wrote:

 andysonic1 wrote:

pismakron wrote:
I would strongly advice you to play with the tournament rule, that counts the ground floor of ruins as blocking LOS.

Otherwise known as the anti-turn-1-table-wipe rule. This rule alone forces a lot of army tweaks since it reduces the effectiveness of gunline armies and really makes you play around the terrain and opponent like, you know, you should.

Its a good rule.

I made some simple risers to elevate some of my chem building terrain, in an effort to "8th-proof" it. Worked wonderfully and super cheap!


Top right/bottom left, under the chem building and square building.



Literally just a gift box/presentation box from something, opened, each half stuck to some board, quick detail and paint (I did these in about an hour to throw them together in time for a game). Hey presto, your scenery is taller.

They really helped change how the game went! Terrain in between us that neither side was 'on' once again had a purpose!

BoomWolf makes a lot of good points and his questions are very valid.

The table is extremely favourable to the Tau player with its almost complete lack of LoS blocking tearrain and a huge expanse of open ground in the middle.

Looking at the two lists I can say the Tau list is certainly better than the Primaris one. Having both a Repulser and Redemptor in the same list at 1400 points is just too many points in units that aren't worth it in games at a "normal" points level, never mind the slightly lower 1400 points.

I have to wonder if one or both of you were getting some rules wrong though. Looking a the Tau list, even if his Fire Warriors hit and wound with every shot, statistically 20 of them should kill 3 Marines (again, assuming all 20 hit and wound). That's not even one squad. He shouldn't be able to get in Rapid Fire range in turn 1 since he'd need to start closer than 21" to your units and you just shouldn't allow that. It's a similar story with your vehicles. I can see how you might lose the Repulser to combined fire from the various anti-tank units but to lose both seems extremely unlikely.

It would take a dice swing of monumental proportions to do the damage you're talking about with the two armies involved. Of course it's possible this is what happened, but if the dice were genuinely that skewed in his favour your luck was so monumentally bad it's impossible to draw any conclusions from the game.

It may be difficult to remember now, but can you tell us how the Fire Warriors killed your infantry? Were they in Rapid Fire range? What Markerlight support did they have? How exactly did the Hammerheads and Ghostkeels destroy your vehicles? Did the Ghostkeels get within Melta range for the extra damage?