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One of my friends who i regularly play against uses space wolves. I play Tau and am having issues dealing with him in my backlines. First turn his drop pod lands lets his termies loose and round 2 i usually get his scouts coming in from behind. It makes it hard to keep my broadsides alive. Any suggestions? I was thinking maybe a solo crisis suit with a TL flamer and a plasma rifle.

Why are you leaving enough room for his drop pods and scouts to get to your broadsides? If you use the Tau's monverablity you should be able to do a refused flank and deploy in a castle formation. Just make sure you have some screening troops to take the charge from the scouts and termies. Then reposition quickly to strand those units out of position.

Don't deploy in such a way that he can deep strike or drop pod near your broadsides.

I have a Blood Angels opponent who tries to deep strike into my gun line (as guard) but with decent deployment he can't and must submit to the entire force of my army opening up on them. This is what you need to do. Those wolves will be terrified when they land and you turn and blast the drop pod unit off the board.

Although as a Guard player I agree about the deployment to deny deepstrikers and drop pods, I find that 2 of the 3 board layouts make this harder. The short table edge one requires you to be a long way from the enemy if you castle at the back line, and at least where I play we use lots of terrain, so it's harder to find clear firing lanes in all the space. And the diagonal one is similar, forcing the castle deployment to be all clumped up in one corner.

Anyone else have these issues?

bb

 beerbeard wrote:
the diagonal one is similar, forcing the castle deployment to be all clumped up in one corner

This deployment does suck. I find I have to go offensive and push for objectives earlier when against a deep strike army so my opponent is forced to split and go after my scoring units without too much back up. There's not a lot you can do in my opinion when the deployment ends up like this.
If anyone has a reliable tactic, I'd love to hear it.

well thank you for the recommendations, I should point out that i'm a inexperienced player. I usually have my broadsides pretty far back due to their range, with the amount of terrain we use i can still get a good LOS across most of the board. So they're generally by their lonesome.

Castle everything together. You should probably have some XV8? Suits with AP2 weaponry to deal with the Termies. Don't castle too close to the edges, or have some screening units (kroots?) to block whoever outflanks.

With the new rules for the disruption pod, you can move your vehicles to get a ridiculous jink save before his stuff comes onto the board.

(Sorry not too familiar with Tau).

Reserve the broadsides and spread out the troops. Makes them go after some worthless unit. Broadsides come in and have fun. That or go all mobile and spread the hell out. Nothing frustrates a drop pod army more then not knowing where to land.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Lots of scouts and infiltrators makes them work to get the right position

I like the idea of reserving the broadsides, though it would suck to not get them in battle till after mid-game. I'm pretty sure my friends fields his termies with Storm Shields (i may be wrong) but that would be why my broads can't drop them as fast as i like, although the drop pod is usually toast. I like the idea of screening with the kroot (shorter ranger than firewarriors, plus better in CC.

Also - unless he is using shooty wolf scouts with the changes to outflank if they come in behind you just light them up with your broadsides. He cant assault until the next turn. They should fold in one volley if you roll well and his squad isnt too big.

I think it ends up with me having to deal with both at once on 2nd turn, he can usually get them in 2nd turn, and i have issues taking the termies out because i believe they have stormshields and he has an annoying tendancy to roll some silly saves. So you guys are recommending screening with what? Firewarriors or kroot? I'm not entirely sure what the tactic castelling is, though i can guess at the basics.

Against storm shield terminators the answer is just lots of firepower. They have to fail the saves eventually. Don't waste important low AP shots into them because they will just bounce off the 3+ invulnerable. You'd be better off keeping 1 or 2 squads of fire warriors or a large unit of stealthsuits available near your broadsides and let rip into them.

Castling is when you deploy your whole army into a small area of the board. Each unit can then cover every other unit and you can concentrate a whole army's worth of firepower into a single target. Having said that the whole army then becomes vulnerable to assault armies if they can get close enough.

Another thing to think about is to deploy your units such that there isn't any good positions for him to deep strike into. Its quite likely that DSing units will scatter, so see if you can force some mishap tests. Terminator units tend to be quite large beasts and only one of the models in the unit needs to be unplaceable. At the very least it will delay the units deployment, and it might let you deploy the unit on the other side of the board and effectively out of the fight

I only have one thing to say and this is from experiance with Tau... Kroot spam bubble, ain't nothing getting through 20+ Kroot!

Unless they get hit with a couple of flamers

That's when you take Krootocks!