Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Veskrashen wrote:
My optimal S7 platform is no S7 platform. Or at least, no platform dedicated to throwing S7 shots at a target.

I run Hammerheads with Ion Cannons and Razorsharks. They exist to throw S8 pieplates on things that annoy me. If there is something that annoys me, and it's not really optimal to hit it with a S8 pieplate, then that means 1 of a few things. Either it's single wound TEQs, or it's an MC, or it's a vehicle. If it's TEQs, then my usual solution is massed pulse fire with Ethereal and ML support, with plasma rifles to clean up. If it's an MC, then it's eating massed Seeker Missile fire from my Skyray and Devilfish, then Ion Cannons in direct fire mode. If it's a vehicle, then it eats Quad Ion Cannon in the side / rear plus Seekers, or it eats Deep Striking Fusion Blaster Crisis Suits. Flyers I either ignore (I don't consider Vendettas all that good against mech heavy Tau), or they eat QICs in rear armor plus Skyray assisted TL Fusion.

In short, because we've got such good access to other weapons now on so many good platforms, I consider missile pods (and Kroot Guns) to be a less optimal choice. Ion rifles I'm also kinda meh on, because small blasts are so much less effective than large blasts. In addition, vehicles are so much better than Pathfinders at handling overheats. I feel that Tau players in general got sucked into a mindset of "Crisis = Fireknife or Deathrain" because Broadside spam took care of heavy vehicles so well, and 5th had a heavy emphasis on lots of light armor. I don't feel that situation holds, and as a result I don't put a lot of emphasis on MP availability.

What are you wanting your missile pods to do, role wise? What else do you generally field and why? That would let us give you a much better answer.

This explains a lot, I've been trying to avoid mech tau apart from piranhaswhich i adore. I could not for the life of me find a way to get a list i felt comfortable with, i really like some of the vehicles especially ionheads I just couldn't get something I felt would work. If youre willing I'd love to see a list of yours. Personally I use a firewarrior firebase behind aegis alongside one pathfinder squad sometimes two, with sniper drone squad for marker support and Teq/MCs, a ruptide or sometimes two for fire support and contesting objectives (that's the real strength of the riptide giving tau a survivable and mobile unit which can contest, with a cherry on top of being able to strongly discourage deep strikes and having a good weapon.) a squad of kroot to outflank and make the enemy make a tough vouch of turning around, and finally shadowsun with a command drone and an xv8 squad with two dual plasma one PEN and one drone control and a dual melta with target lock. I've also been messing around with Aun'va and occasionally trying misc crisis squads, and the commander oiranha drone swarm idea I previously mentioned. What I really need it for I dealing with flyers like a helldrake which can wreck destruction on my units or light vehicle spam which while rare does still come up.

My core list is 3x9 FWs in Devilfish with SMS, 1 Skyray with SMS, and 2 Ionheads with SMS. 2 Tetras take care of my ML support, but they're Forgeworld, which is why I've been looking at that Crisis team. I run 2x Razorsharks with MPs for air support, then 3xCrisis with FB/PR and 2x Crisis with TLFB/PR.

I'm still working on the rest of the list. I've been running Kroot as support, but not been happy with them. I've been running an Ethereal as well, but unless you get off at least 1 Storm of Fire assisted fusillade with 18+ FWs, he's more of a liability IMO. I've been looking at including Shadowsun instead, since she'd mesh well with my TLFB team, and I've been considering switching up the teams to 2xPRs or 2xFBs each instead of mixed FB/PR.

All that said, having 6 skimmers on the board is a lot for most armies to deal with, especially with the general assumption that "mech is dead". SMS are a real hoot, and being TL Heavy 4 can be decent at grounding FMCs. It also means that having PFs or Kroot sitting on objectives simply gives my opponent handy targets for all of his army's anti-infantry firepower... which tends to make up the majority of shooting these days. It also means that static ML support would often not able to support my heavy hitters by Turn 2 or 3, which is why mobile MLs are a priority for me.

If you're running gunline foot Tau, then a lot of my suggestions probably won't work as well. You'll probably be engaging front armor a lot more, and including tanks just gives the bad guys something worthwhile to shoot their lascannons at.

If I may the new being able to take double weapons means you should never get mixed weapons on a suit squad, In a unit of two get one dual plas and one dual melts, with target lock on one. That way both can shoot at their best target, and if you for example dont see a lot of heavy armor keep the melts up front. This lets you allow the suboptimal suit to the situation to die while allowing the better fit to last longer. Also i highly recommend shadowsun, a 'vre with 2 fusion is only ~60-70 points less but you gain stealth plus shrouded and 3d6 jsj and split fire. And if you have a slot you could run a solo piranha detach the drones, your enemy will never waste any fire on two "free" drones and should you ever get a bad jsj you jump them in front for intervening cover normally a 5+ but for this unit its a 2+.

Yup, those are basically the conclusions I'm reaching as well. I am experimenting / looking at the numbers for mixes of 3-gun suits, seeing if having a certain mix of weapons lets me optimally engage a wide enough variety of targets for the additional weapons to make sense.

I.e. does it make sense to run a suit with PR/MP/FB, or one with PR/BC/MP, or FB/MP/BC? It used to be that you'd pick a primary threat you're looking to kill (i.e. MEQ for instance), pick the best weapon to counter it, then pick whatever weapon was second best as your second weapon. That gave you things like PR/BC suits to take out MEQs, FB/PR suits against TEQ, TLFB against heavy armor, and PR/MP or TLMP against light-medium armor.

Now though... you can conceivably mount enough weapons on a suit to effectively counter the entire threat spectrum, being able to pick the best two for the job. I used to run all my Crisis 'Vre with a third gun and HWMT, just for the flexibility. Now, though, a PR/FB/BC suit is good against pretty much every single target you would want to throw it up against. GEQ, MEQ, TEQ, vehicles, MCs... all could be fairly effectively engaged by that one suit configuration alone. You'd need to play more aggressively due to the comparatively shorter range, but that's an question of gameplay rather than mathhammer.

But I'm still up in the air as to whether that's a good idea with Crisis suits in particular. As I've said, I feel that Crisis are the one place in a Tau codex where it pays serious dividends to specialize. Everywhere else, you don't have enough options in any one unit to do more than 1-2 things well, so by taking that unit you are by default using it to fill a particular role (or set of roles). Crisis are probably the only unit in the entire codex that can be configured to be decent to excellent at every single conceivable task outside of assault.

I've found triple weapons to be to expensive, Crisis suits have always had a problem of being to many points for to soft of a platform. The only one that may be worth it is a flamer on a fb/plas dual plas or dual fusion suit so it can serve teq/ mc as long as reasonable new and good geq with a flamer, anything else just feels like to many points. The only problem I have with that is if I have fusion I almost always want target lock and advanced targeting system synergises reasonably well with plasma.

Sure, it's expensive. But on a point per kill basis across multiple threats, it's an interesting exercise.

Taking PR/BC/FB is 62 points, or 5pts more expensive than 2 guns plus support system, or TL + single weapon. That's not much more expensive at all. PR/FB/MP suits are 67 points; that's a significant enough jump that the efficiencies really get out of whack. But, even then, it's more efficient at killing GEQ, and not too much less efficient at killing MEQ/TEQ/MCs. It's a lot better at killing AV10-12 though. Spending the 15pts makes you better at light armor and light infantry, while you don't lose a lot in efficiency terms against med-heavy infantry. PR/FB/BC suits interest me the most, since adding the BC basically increases your efficiency against the entire threat spectrum. You're not going to be as good against a specialist suit like TLFB/FB against AV14, of course, but as a generalist loadout it's got a lot to recommend it.

But you have to at what the test of the army can do. Who cares if Crisis suits can kill GEQs? Everything in the army is loaded with weapons that replicate burst cannon performance. My Crisis teams will not take short range versions of weapons that are on my Troops choices. That means plasma and fusion, as I'm not really enamored with dedicated S7 shooting. I'd rather take a cheaper suit that was better with the find I cared about.

Here's how I've been arming them.

I'm not really sure about mixed builds, I'm finding once I find the pure weapon type I want, I find it's really just a case of choosing support options.

currently mine are in 2 flavors:

missle pod + missle pod + interceptor to park in midfield or backfield and threaten fliers to make them jink or take down drop pods's worth of stuff.

I offset their poor BS3 with divination prescience (via alleid farseer eldar) which is a blessing so it persists through the enemy movement phase.


Other is marker suit commander (I just use 6 marker drones, it's enough to get the job done most times) with double missle pods and target lock to split fire

supporting rapid fire double plasma gun crisis suits. (maybe with drone controller and extra gun drones) Melts marines and terminators good!

assuming 5 maker hits, it'll strip cover and give 12 plasma rifle shots at bs 6. Enough to take down 10 man squads of marines very well.

Biophysical wrote:
But you have to at what the test of the army can do. Who cares if Crisis suits can kill GEQs? Everything in the army is loaded with weapons that replicate burst cannon performance. My Crisis teams will not take short range versions of weapons that are on my Troops choices. That means plasma and fusion, as I'm not really enamored with dedicated S7 shooting. I'd rather take a cheaper suit that was better with the find I cared about.

Which is, of course, why I love Crisis so much - I choose the core of my army, make sure they can handle most threats, then tool up my Crisis to specialize against those areas I need shoring up. As I run Mech Tau, I do see situations where I simply don't have the volume of shots to take care of both the squishy infantry and the light-medium vehicles I need to. Being able to kit out my Crisis to be more effective against those threats, while retaining their capability against the heavy armor they're generally needed to kill, does have value to me.

Scipio Africanus wrote:I'm not really sure about mixed builds, I'm finding once I find the pure weapon type I want, I find it's really just a case of choosing support options.

That's what I've been finding in general too - for most of my army lists, running 2xPR or 2xFB plus whatever is generally the best option to fill the gaps. OTOH, running 2xPR+FB has it's merits, as does running 2xFB+BC/Flamer for instance. There's a few issues that I see specialist formations suffer from. Namely a) there's too many targets on the board of the kind they're designed to kill, so they can't kill everything they need to fast enough and the rest of your list can't compensate, b) there's none of their preferred targets, or those targets are too difficult to get to and engage or c) there are targets they can kill effectively, but after that there's nothing for them to do. In each of those cases, running a cheap third weapon suddenly gives them a whole new set of targets they can effectively engage.

 sudojoe wrote:

Other is marker suit commander (I just use 6 marker drones, it's enough to get the job done most times) with double missle pods and target lock to split fire

supporting rapid fire double plasma gun crisis suits. (maybe with drone controller and extra gun drones) Melts marines and terminators good!

assuming 5 maker hits, it'll strip cover and give 12 plasma rifle shots at bs 6. Enough to take down 10 man squads of marines very well.

I run mine as a Commander and 3 Suits, 8 Gun Drones

Commander gives BS5 to drones as well as H&R to the squad through VRT.

Then, I give all 3 of the suits ATS and suit it out with 8 plasma guns.

16 Plasma gun shots, usually 2 Precision shots, as well as 16 Pulse carbine shots at BS5. What this means is that I can efficiently ruin a TAC squad without Markerlight support. I don't kill every model necessarily (actually, usually I do - I hit 9 times with plasma, wounding 7.5 - as well as about 15 pulse gun shots, wounding 10 times - I should to 10.8 wounds to a Tac squad - I admit they're out of cover in this example. But hey, I only need 2 markerlights to remove their cover saves, don't I?) but what I do do is remove their heavy and special weapon - meaning I should kill at least the two major threats, reducing the squads danger to effectively 0 - rinse and repeat, until I destroy lots of infantry.

I actually really like the flamed as the third weapon option. It's cheap, and combined with a full swarm of gun drones it is a fearsome thing to assault. As both plasma and melta really like being close, some extra assault protection/horde killing gives you a lot of utility for the price.

Is twinlinking one gun and running a duplicate worth it?

ie:

Crisis Suit with:
Twin Fusion Blaster
Fusion Blaster

 Timmy149 wrote:
Is twinlinking one gun and running a duplicate worth it?

ie:

Crisis Suit with:
Twin Fusion Blaster
Fusion Blaster

I think its worth it when you don't have enough marker light support. As TL+1 suits are (generally) 5 points more and give you 1.25 hits vs 1 hits for a 1+1 weapon. the only argument against it is that with 1+1 you also have access to your 3rd slot though there isnt all that much worth taking.

Early warning override is the same cost as TL'ing one of the weapons. Alternatively, a single flamer is the same cost as well.

I think there are going to be many situations where giving up a bit of raw firepower for a bit of reactionary ability is better.

I go MP, MP, EWO on my crisis suits at the moment. My 1500 point list features 2 units of broadsides, a crisis team and a riptide all with early warning override.

The mass EWO is important to prevent your army from succumbing to traditional anti-gunline tactics such as deepstriking, outflanking and other reserves. Want to bring in an outflanking transport or deepstriking terminators? Ok, gone before they get to do anything. Its really powerful, as it can often give you your second or 3rd shooting phase before your opponent gets theirs. For instance, if you go first you can get your 3rd shooting phase before they get their 2nd, or if you go 2nd you can get your 2nd shooting phase before they get their second.

Since Tau units are relatively lacking in the resiliency department, this is a very important tactical point to consider. Not one size fits all, but a very nice option.

I've been running Shadowsun with 2 bodyguards each with a fusion, plasma and target lock and a n-chip on one. This unit has just wrecked lists. Now I'll be replacing the plasma for another fusion. Infiltrate the unit up close to some AV13-14 and watch it burn!! Or watch huge monstrous creatures collect holes like a pumpkin during Halloween.

Yep I use that unit to! Its great, but I suggest vectored thrusters on one, and target lock on the other bodyguard. This lets you escape CC if you get caught on a bad jump roll or by a fast unit, and makes better work of splitting the fusion shots. The chip isnt really needed and is pretty expensive.

I think for 15pts the chip is for sure worth its cost. With AV 14 in particular, even with 2d6 penetration, you still only have a about a 60% chance of a pen and a 50% of blowing it up. With the chip you're chances to pen go up to about 87% and more pen hits promise a better chance of rolling a 4+ on the chart. Against monstrous creatures, you guarantee all of your hits deduct wounds.

Its not that its weak or anything like that, but the unit will put enough fusion shots up to blast away anything you want without it, and the unit is already pretty expensive. I just think the unit is good enough without it, and adding it only sinks in more points. To each their own tho

ajsnips44 wrote:
I think for 15pts the chip is for sure worth its cost. With AV 14 in particular, even with 2d6 penetration, you still only have a about a 60% chance of a pen and a 50% of blowing it up. With the chip you're chances to pen go up to about 87% and more pen hits promise a better chance of rolling a 4+ on the chart. Against monstrous creatures, you guarantee all of your hits deduct wounds.

Sorry, but which is this chip you speak of?

Puretide chip. It's special issue.

 GoDz BuZzSaW wrote:
MTs only allow you to fire 2 weapons in the shooting phase, however Riptides are allowed as they are monstrous creatures, and hence can fire two weapons as standard.

So?

What is the restriction against models firing more than one weapon (pg 51)?

Unless otherwise stated, if a model has more than one Shooting weapon, he must choose which one to shoot -- he cannot fire both in the same Shooting phase.


I don't get why people don't understand that Overwatch allows a model to fire in the assault phase as though it is the shooting phase...if you don't play that way, then all the rules for shooting start to fall apart (as they written as though the model is firing in the shooting phase).

So if someone wants to play that my Multi-tracker doesn't work in Overwatch, then I'll say: fine, but the restriction against a model firing more than one weapon also only applies in the shooting phase.

 yakface wrote:

 GoDz BuZzSaW wrote:
MTs only allow you to fire 2 weapons in the shooting phase, however Riptides are allowed as they are monstrous creatures, and hence can fire two weapons as standard.

So? What is the restriction against models firing more than one weapon (pg 51)?
Unless otherwise stated, if a model has more than one Shooting weapon, he must choose which one to shoot -- he cannot fire both in the same Shooting phase.

+1.
Also, I'm pretty sure that Monstrous Creatures 'can fire an additional weapon in the shooting phase', not all the time (though, subject to pg51, restrictions are only on the shooting phase).
Now, to build a 9xFlamer crisis team for Supporting Fire shenanigans (as they don't need range to their target, mwahaha)

So you can fire both a TL Fusion Blaster and a Fusion Blaster in the same turn? It all seems a little illogical to me...

 Timmy149 wrote:
So you can fire both a TL Fusion Blaster and a Fusion Blaster in the same turn? It all seems a little illogical to me...

The TL Fusion Blaster counts as one weapon even though it is filling two slots. So with a Multi-Tracker, you can fire two weapons.

 Nilok wrote:

 Timmy149 wrote:
So you can fire both a TL Fusion Blaster and a Fusion Blaster in the same turn? It all seems a little illogical to me...

The TL Fusion Blaster counts as one weapon even though it is filling two slots. So with a Multi-Tracker, you can fire two weapons.

Agreed

 Scipio Africanus wrote:
Here's how I've been arming them.

I'm not really sure about mixed builds, I'm finding once I find the pure weapon type I want, I find it's really just a case of choosing support options.

He is just shoving drones everywhere....he is making huge and pricey squads.

He should learn that sometimes, less is more. the less value per squad, the less it hurt if it gets shot, and the more squads you field.

 Scipio Africanus wrote:
Here's how I've been arming them.

I'm not really sure about mixed builds, I'm finding once I find the pure weapon type I want, I find it's really just a case of choosing support options.

Just a note on your flamer build: Jet Pack infantry doesnt get hammer of wrath.

Ookami wrote:

 Nilok wrote:

 Timmy149 wrote:
So you can fire both a TL Fusion Blaster and a Fusion Blaster in the same turn? It all seems a little illogical to me...

The TL Fusion Blaster counts as one weapon even though it is filling two slots. So with a Multi-Tracker, you can fire two weapons.

Agreed

Awesome.... Thats an idea for when I finally finish tau...