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This is a bit worrying.

Just started 40K last weekend and chose Tau mainly because of the cool looking Fire Warriors and Battlesuits. Didn’t realise they’re seen as a power army and people have problems playing against them…..

Hoping this doesn’t hinder me in my first foray into 40K.

Only started it as our local GW is running a Winter Crusade where we have to start a brand new army either in WHFB or 40K and at end of Jan have a fully painted 1500pt army. If you do, go down to Warhammer World for free and spend the day battling each-others new armies.

I shouldn't worry about it. I think the current moaning about Tau has been greatly exaggerated.

A lot of people got used to Tau being rubbish in the previous two editions and are finding it hard to rethink their game plan when they have to play them now.

Perhaps it would be helpful for some of the people saying Tau are not OP to suggest good ways of dealing with Tau gunlines sitting behind Ageis, Riptide heavy and likely with Eldar psychic support.

Especially for those armies with older Codexes..........

Alot of people have trouble dealing with this and finding any kind of enjoyment in playing against it...............

The Aegis defence line and Eldar are not part of the Tau codex, they are part of the overall game rules.

I suggested earlier in the thread to:

Play without allies and Aegis defence line.
Put more terrain on the table.
Play at a lower points level.

All those things would help any match-up to be more interesting.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
The Aegis defence line and Eldar are not part of the Tau codex, they are part of the overall game rules.

I suggested earlier in the thread to:

Play without allies and Aegis defence line.
Put more terrain on the table.
Play at a lower points level.

All those things would help any match-up to be more interesting.

Agreed, and that goes back to the work out stuff together but when a Tau player turns up with the Aegis and Eldar and wants a game with his competative list - what are the effective generic counters that people have discovered by playing against them that all Codexes can use?

I'm a longtime tau player, and I can honestly say that the new codex is pretty strong, but not that hard to beat. It requires you to tailor your list a bit, but the fundimental tau tactic still works: get in close. Be it riptides, broadsides or FW, get in close and they will lose. Supporting fire sucks to go up against, but if you plan it right the tau support won't have LOS, so they can't shoot. Another option is actually to tank shock them. They have to move out of the way because their grenades suck, and that cuts off LOS, increases the distance between units, and seriously panics most players. Are tank shocks considered assault? If they aren't, then I don't get supporting fire either. Also: multiassault! I can only support fire once, and I don't get to snap shot from a unit that has already done supporting fire.

Poly Ranger wrote:
As an experiment you would need multiple trials to come to a correct conclusion.

You need at least 4 games to run a 2x2 (players, army) DOE with only 1 replicate on the corner points and no center points. That's holding the game type and deployment sequence constant. The conclusions of such a DOE would be minimal, trivial really.

 Mr Morden wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
The Aegis defence line and Eldar are not part of the Tau codex, they are part of the overall game rules.

I suggested earlier in the thread to:

Play without allies and Aegis defence line.
Put more terrain on the table.
Play at a lower points level.

All those things would help any match-up to be more interesting.

Agreed, and that goes back to the work out stuff together but when a Tau player turns up with the Aegis and Eldar and wants a game with his competative list - what are the effective generic counters that people have discovered by playing against them that all Codexes can use?

I get your point.

40K arguably is a bit of a game of paper/scissors/stone. There are lots of codexes which have particular strengths and weaknesses. Unfortunately the game is not balanced to the point that all codexes can always counter anything that any other codex might bring to the table.

When someone brings a tournament list, it is likely to be the kind of list that exploits a particular build, vulnerable to a specific counter but strong against non-specific lists.

In defence of Tau, I should imagine that IG with Eldar allies in a defence line probably present a similar kind of problem.

As my main army is Tyranid, I would think about using Spore Pods and Mawlocks to disrupt the defences. IG could use barrage artillery. SMs could use Land Raiders to bring assault forces up quickly.

Also, terrain that blocks the defence LoS is always helpful.

 Mr Morden wrote:
Perhaps it would be helpful for some of the people saying Tau are not OP to suggest good ways of dealing with Tau gunlines sitting behind Ageis, Riptide heavy and likely with Eldar psychic support.

Especially for those armies with older Codexes..........

Alot of people have trouble dealing with this and finding any kind of enjoyment in playing against it...............

One of the oldest codecies now is orks. I have seen orks decimate the new Tau with a few simple things. They charge in with multiple battle wagons and use them to disrupt the Tau line and cut off LoS between units. They then disgorge their contents of nobz and burna boyz and they stomp the isolated unit into the group. Battle wagons are AV14, so that helps a lot. Then while those units keep doing their thing of isolating and culling tau units and keeping the tau player busy the rest of the boyz rolled up in trukks and on foot to join the slaughter. Meanwhile their commandos were sneaking in and taking out the pathfinder teams that the tau player kept hidden in the back field. Quite an effective take down. If orks can do it with their codex anyone else should be able to come up with a tactic that works for them.

There is no one single solution that will work for everyone exactly the same way. You need to figure it out based on your codex. If you generally try to beat the tau the same way every time that fails horribly, take note of exactly what doesn't work and change it. Eventually you will find something that does work. Tank shock is a great tool. In objective based games ignore the suits and focus your fire on the tau troops to keep them from being able to claim any objectives. Stomp the pathfinders. Markerlights are one thing that make the tau hit so effectively. Remove those tools and the tau just aren't as great anymore. Isolate tau units from each other to mitigate the strength of their supporting fire abilities. Deep strike/flank assault to keep the gun line busy with close in threats while moving the bulk of your power closer. The key is that you need to figure out how to accomplish these tasks with your codex, or you speciifc army as not everyone has every unit from a codex and not everyone has the ability to have more than the 1500 points of units they need to play. If you don't have many options you will really need to get creative.

Skriker

Hikaru-119 wrote:
Tau players fail to get games at my store simply because they always show up when everyone has to leave. Otherwise I'd always fight the blue skinned bastards.

Correct: You mean you would fight them Blueberries . Plus, a friend showed me this that explains my reasons for calling them that perfectly lol.

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/453475

 Skriker wrote:

 Mr Morden wrote:
Perhaps it would be helpful for some of the people saying Tau are not OP to suggest good ways of dealing with Tau gunlines sitting behind Ageis, Riptide heavy and likely with Eldar psychic support.

Especially for those armies with older Codexes..........

Alot of people have trouble dealing with this and finding any kind of enjoyment in playing against it...............

One of the oldest codecies now is orks. I have seen orks decimate the new Tau with a few simple things. They charge in with multiple battle wagons and use them to disrupt the Tau line and cut off LoS between units. They then disgorge their contents of nobz and burna boyz and they stomp the isolated unit into the group. Battle wagons are AV14, so that helps a lot. Then while those units keep doing their thing of isolating and culling tau units and keeping the tau player busy the rest of the boyz rolled up in trukks and on foot to join the slaughter. Meanwhile their commandos were sneaking in and taking out the pathfinder teams that the tau player kept hidden in the back field. Quite an effective take down. If orks can do it with their codex anyone else should be able to come up with a tactic that works for them.

There is no one single solution that will work for everyone exactly the same way. You need to figure it out based on your codex. If you generally try to beat the tau the same way every time that fails horribly, take note of exactly what doesn't work and change it. Eventually you will find something that does work. Tank shock is a great tool. In objective based games ignore the suits and focus your fire on the tau troops to keep them from being able to claim any objectives. Stomp the pathfinders. Markerlights are one thing that make the tau hit so effectively. Remove those tools and the tau just aren't as great anymore. Isolate tau units from each other to mitigate the strength of their supporting fire abilities. Deep strike/flank assault to keep the gun line busy with close in threats while moving the bulk of your power closer. The key is that you need to figure out how to accomplish these tasks with your codex, or you speciifc army as not everyone has every unit from a codex and not everyone has the ability to have more than the 1500 points of units they need to play. If you don't have many options you will really need to get creative.

Skriker

exactly.. hve an exalt...

plenty of great strats for dealing with tau... they are just the "gun lines" gun line... tau armies are generally immobile turtles, super strong when you take them on, in their turf, with all their synergized abilities all at once, but separate them, or take out a key unit, and they start to fall apart.

for objective missions, they have to stick a portion of their force out of the turtle zone, which you can use your superior manuverability (you do HAVE manuverability right? thats a key thing to have in a TAC list)

heck, I tend to outshoot tau at 20-24" with my GK's, flank them, and rarely even need to charge into CC to deal with anything but a riptide or two or three...

my IG out range tau, usually have more disposable scoring bodies too.

my orks just mob them, tau cannot cause enought HITS to take out my green tide.

gotta change along with the meta,

riptides are not WAAC, there are DK, WK's, nids, demons, ect and LOTS of monsters in the meta now, gotta adapt to that.

As an IG player I like the rules as I felt that melee has always been overpowered considering that table widths are actually really short. Playing by the old rules you would really need to play on a table about 6 feet long or more to balance out the power differences between melee and ranged.

So far my mechanized IG still makes swiss cheese out of tau as you can just load veterans up in chimeras and pop out shotguns and melta guns or whatever.

Also, in terms of just a fun fluffy army I to change up my imperial guard and have exterminators and flak cannons and auto cannon weapons teams. Defiantly not the most effective build, but I have a huge affinty for the auto cannon which got better with the new rules.

Majsharan wrote:
As an IG player I like the rules as I felt that melee has always been overpowered considering that table widths are actually really short. Playing by the old rules you would really need to play on a table about 6 feet long or more to balance out the power differences between melee and ranged.

So far my mechanized IG still makes swiss cheese out of tau as you can just load veterans up in chimeras and pop out shotguns and melta guns or whatever.

Also, in terms of just a fun fluffy army I to change up my imperial guard and have exterminators and flak cannons and auto cannon weapons teams. Defiantly not the most effective build, but I have a huge affinty for the auto cannon which got better with the new rules.

Know the feeling mate. I currently run a Mech Guard list at the moment and so far I have done really well against the Tau, wiith my only loss against them coming in an apocalypse game that was way one-sided as this particular Tau player set the game up to his advantage from the start, aka complete tool and power gamer attitued . However, overall Im currently 2-1-1 against him, as he has a hard time dealing with all of my Chimeras who usually pop smoke turn 1x and then just take it from there. Eradicators are great against Tau for the sole purpose of ignoring cover in this edition for sure.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
I shouldn't worry about it. I think the current moaning about Tau has been greatly exaggerated.

A lot of people got used to Tau being rubbish in the previous two editions and are finding it hard to rethink their game plan when they have to play them now.

Tau were rubbish in 4th? They were the JSJ-area terrain kings...

I don't mind Tau at all. With so many bad players in my area using them and copying internet lists, it's actually quite funny when I beat them.

*Of course, I admit that I'm not winning against Tau because of superior playing skills. I'm winning because some Tau players here have no idea how to use their internet army correctly and I take advantage of it if they're the ones to challenge me to a game against their "unbeatable" 2 Riptides.

So to answer the OP, no- Tau find plenty of games here.

I am terrified to play against a competent Tau player. I have not yet. I am smart enough to research their codex and abilities just like I do for every enemy army, and I am always breathing a sigh of relief when I see a player forget to Markerlight up, for example. Of course I don't say anything. I'm already a very lenient player in that I will let people go back and do Blessings and what-not if they forgot, or move inconsequential units after they've started shooting. Sorry bro. No going back to Markerlight my one Rhino, or Ahriman's unit if you're Nova-charging that Riptide.

nosferatu1001 wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
I shouldn't worry about it. I think the current moaning about Tau has been greatly exaggerated.

A lot of people got used to Tau being rubbish in the previous two editions and are finding it hard to rethink their game plan when they have to play them now.

Tau were rubbish in 4th? They were the JSJ-area terrain kings...

That in itself doesn't win games, and was not immune to counter moves.

Compare and contrast with Eldar tanks with holofield.

 Kilkrazy wrote:

nosferatu1001 wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
I shouldn't worry about it. I think the current moaning about Tau has been greatly exaggerated.

A lot of people got used to Tau being rubbish in the previous two editions and are finding it hard to rethink their game plan when they have to play them now.

Tau were rubbish in 4th? They were the JSJ-area terrain kings...

That in itself doesn't win games, and was not immune to counter moves.

Compare and contrast with Eldar tanks with holofield.

Except Tau were the secondary, with Fish of Fury helping them out in winning games and keeping their gunlines protected.

Secondary what?

You point at JSJ as if it is an unassailable game winning manoeuvre. Every army has some kind of special thing going for it.

Fish of Fury wasn't that good either, and it didn't protect gun lines because you used FoF with a mobile army.

Tau was fairly rubbish for the first half of 4th edition, with a thin 3rd edition codex. They improved after their 4th edition codex came out, but they were never top tier.

 easysauce wrote:

 Skriker wrote:

 Mr Morden wrote:
Perhaps it would be helpful for some of the people saying Tau are not OP to suggest good ways of dealing with Tau gunlines sitting behind Ageis, Riptide heavy and likely with Eldar psychic support.

Especially for those armies with older Codexes..........

Alot of people have trouble dealing with this and finding any kind of enjoyment in playing against it...............

One of the oldest codecies now is orks. I have seen orks decimate the new Tau with a few simple things. They charge in with multiple battle wagons and use them to disrupt the Tau line and cut off LoS between units. They then disgorge their contents of nobz and burna boyz and they stomp the isolated unit into the group. Battle wagons are AV14, so that helps a lot. Then while those units keep doing their thing of isolating and culling tau units and keeping the tau player busy the rest of the boyz rolled up in trukks and on foot to join the slaughter. Meanwhile their commandos were sneaking in and taking out the pathfinder teams that the tau player kept hidden in the back field. Quite an effective take down. If orks can do it with their codex anyone else should be able to come up with a tactic that works for them.

There is no one single solution that will work for everyone exactly the same way. You need to figure it out based on your codex. If you generally try to beat the tau the same way every time that fails horribly, take note of exactly what doesn't work and change it. Eventually you will find something that does work. Tank shock is a great tool. In objective based games ignore the suits and focus your fire on the tau troops to keep them from being able to claim any objectives. Stomp the pathfinders. Markerlights are one thing that make the tau hit so effectively. Remove those tools and the tau just aren't as great anymore. Isolate tau units from each other to mitigate the strength of their supporting fire abilities. Deep strike/flank assault to keep the gun line busy with close in threats while moving the bulk of your power closer. The key is that you need to figure out how to accomplish these tasks with your codex, or you speciifc army as not everyone has every unit from a codex and not everyone has the ability to have more than the 1500 points of units they need to play. If you don't have many options you will really need to get creative.

Skriker

exactly.. hve an exalt...

Lol looks exactly like a copy of my response to another tau moan threads that I posted 3 days ago:

"If I were an ork player against a tau gunline, I'd go for battlewagons holding burnaboys (for the firewarriors) or nobs (for the riptides). Have trucks filled with boys following the battlewagons so that they are out of LoS.

Most tau gunlines lack an effective way to deal with av14:

- elite slots will be filled with riptides (no fusion blaster suits)
- most broadsides use missiles rather than railguns
- riptides have to ensure they don't scatter or get hot.

You can actually use the battlewagons to move between tau units to prevent supporting fire LoS"

Fish of Fury.

Soooo, I've been busy the last few days, and so have you guys. XD I started to read from First Unread and then noticed the couple posts quoted out of mine. I'd like to clarify some points and smooth over some wounds.

I believe, first and foremost, that unless you are playing official status (and this comes from a background in Yu-gi-Oh as a Tournament class player -still got my decks, less go. Haven't rare-hunted in a while. +__+) in a tournament setting or in some fashion that dictates some overall global score, that people and myself play for fun. Otherwise, if it's no fun, you are probably not playing. Now, is it fun to Win? Yes. Is it fun to lose? Depends on how, it turns out. For example, in First Person Shooters, my favorite tactic is the Kamikaze. Will I win? Probably not. Will I have fun? ABSOLUTELY. Making an enemy player win with a score of 1 to -100 is hilarious sometimes. (Battlefield 3? C4 attacks anyone? I KNOW IT'S NOT JUST ME OUT THERE DRIVING THEIR MOTORCYCLES INTO TANKS!)

So there is that staple position.

From there, the whole childs cry thing was limited specifically to the scope of that statement itself, and in no way reflected on the Tau as a race, but rather some of the players (or perhaps a lot of players, as it turns out. Enough players? Let's go with that) who take that claim. Look, I haven't had the greatest of life and I'm not going to say it's been the hardest either, but because it has been difficult, does that mean I go about making everyone else's life difficult too? No. Because I'm a grown up and I deal with my problems better than that. At least I hope I do. At least I can say I deal with them more creatively ( like suicide-ing on your corpse 100 times).

Hope that cleared some stuff up. Going back to reading now. I hope I'm not being a dick. Oh, and instead of using examples from other games, here are some WH40K examples.

-Charging your only squad of cultists (other troop is "Doppleganger" Marines) into Swarmlord
-Watching a Helbrute go Berzerk on some IG
-Blocking a Land Raiders path with some Deep Struck Nurglings.
...Things like that. <<

Yeah, I would agree that tau haven't ever been rubbish. At least, not since 4th edition. MSM WAS a lot more powerful with old area terrain, and there was less stuff with indirect fire back in the day as well. Also, most codices were a LOT less shooty two editions ago.

The only problem was when everyone caught up with their shooting towards the end of 5th. This reduced the number of different kinds of tau builds down to roughly 1, but that one list wasn't all that bad either. TL S10 Ap1 en masse wasn't exactly a breeze to play against.

The only people who thought tau were bad were tau players, who fawned over themselves to see who could badmouth their codex in the strongest possible language. It took them getting a stupid codex to bring tau players up to the point of "pretty well balanced, but could still be a bit stronger" that most tau players seem to feel.

Really, it seems to be a matter of everyone but tau players agreeing on what the power level of tau is like, and tau players still bemoaning how their long-martyred codex could still be stronger.

And THAT'S the one thing that's been true since 4th ed...

I disagree with your opinion, which rests on ad hominem attacks.

 Ailaros wrote:
This reduced the number of different kinds of tau builds down to roughly 1, but that one list wasn't all that bad either.

You realize this is the definition of a bad army, right? No army at the time was so awful that you couldn't come up with even a single build that would have a chance of winning, bad armies were the ones that were severely limited in what options they could use and weren't all that competitive even when they took their few good ones.

The only people who thought tau were bad were tau players, who fawned over themselves to see who could badmouth their codex in the strongest possible language.

Lol? Virtually everyone agreed that Tau in late 5th were solidly in the bottom tier of armies, and competitive tournaments confirmed this pretty indisputably.

It took them getting a stupid codex to bring tau players up to the point of "pretty well balanced, but could still be a bit stronger" that most tau players seem to feel.

You really have no idea what you're talking about if you think any meaningful number of Tau players are asking for a stronger codex overall. The biggest complaints about the codex are the poor internal balance and the over-use of the magic laser pointer gimmick.

 Peregrine wrote:

 Ailaros wrote:

The only people who thought tau were bad were tau players, who fawned over themselves to see who could badmouth their codex in the strongest possible language.

Lol? Virtually everyone agreed that Tau in late 5th were solidly in the bottom tier of armies, and competitive tournaments confirmed this pretty indisputably.

Funny, but reading through certain threads seem to give the same opinion of the situation right now.

"Meta just does not yet know how to cope with Tau."
"Riptides aren't that good, kill their markerlights and they do nothing."
"Just get in CC with Tau and they will automatically lose."

I do not believe Tau in 5th were the bottom tier, but then again our group never played truly optimized lists. We rarely if ever use the same list twice. Of course our Tau player already then spent most of his time thinking about his army's movement to the extent that we often joked about introducing a chess clock. In tournaments such meticulous moving could not be done.

It took them getting a stupid codex to bring tau players up to the point of "pretty well balanced, but could still be a bit stronger" that most tau players seem to feel.

You really have no idea what you're talking about if you think any meaningful number of Tau players are asking for a stronger codex overall. The biggest complaints about the codex are the poor internal balance and the over-use of the magic laser pointer gimmick.

That, and certain combos even without the markerlight support. Luckily I face only one Riptide but that HBC makes a mess of my daemon troops. We need to improve our scenery. Oh and notify the Tau player that his Riptide only moves 6" in movement phase?

Naw wrote:
Funny, but reading through certain threads seem to give the same opinion of the situation right now.

Not really, those quotes are just saying that Tau aren't as overpowered as some people claim. That's very different from 5th, where pretty much everyone agreed that Tau were a very weak army.

I do not believe Tau in 5th were the bottom tier, but then again our group never played truly optimized lists.

Yeah, that's how it was. Tau could compete as long as nobody else brought optimized lists that could exploit their weaknesses, but that kind of environment isn't the real game. When people didn't deliberately weaken their own armies to give the Tau players a chance it was much less even.

Tier isn’t a defined term, of course, but most people reckon it to be three divisions -- top, middle and bottom.

There are 15 armies in the game, so roughly five are in each tier. In that scheme I am astonished to find people who think there were five armies worse than Tau in 5th edition.

IMO Necrons were probably the bottom army. Tau got progressively worse as newer and better codexes were published, and they weren’t a fresh book at the start. I would certainly put Tau in the bottom five if not the bottom three over the whole life of the edition.

Returning to 6th edition, though, if your local Tau player is a cheat that is a reflection on him, not on the codex.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Tier isn’t a defined term, of course, but most people reckon it to be three divisions -- top, middle and bottom.

There are 15 armies in the game, so roughly five are in each tier. In that scheme I am astonished to find people who think there were five armies worse than Tau in 5th edition.

IMO Necrons were probably the bottom army. Tau got progressively worse as newer and better codexes were published, and they weren’t a fresh book at the start. I would certainly put Tau in the bottom five if not the bottom three over the whole life of the edition.

Returning to 6th edition, though, if your local Tau player is a cheat that is a reflection on him, not on the codex.

Well if I had to pick five armies that were worse, Daemonhunters was pretty close till it's update, necrons had a very specific build (till update). And that's kinda...it.

Tau in 5th, most of all, scaled pretty bad.

They actually weren't half-bad in 500 pts. or 1000 pts. games where few opponents could throw too much target saturation at them.

At 1500 and higher, Tau armies usually had all their "useful" stuff maxed out and were simply adding pointless bling to Crisis Suits. They also had absolutely nothing to deal with reserves, drop-pods, null-deployment lists, etc.., xept (relatively) pricey bubble-wrap set-ups (pretty much the exact opposite of today ). Tau in 5th Edition played "all right" if you played 40K "old school" 3rd/4th Edition style, e.g. both sides set up on their side of the table and move towards each other. However, 5th Edition was the heyday of things like all-Drop Pod, Elder-dual-Autarch-all-Reserve, full-outflanking-bike-army, etc.. and all that kind of shenanigans.

The most interesting part of this thread to me, is that there is a huge faction of people stating that Riptides are overpowered. It is stated that running three or more Riptides is a blatant power move. If you look in other threads, there is a huge faction of people who take the stance that Forgeworld is "official" and just as balanced as standard units for use in 40k in spite of there being zero mention of it in the 6th edition rulebook.

If they don't tweak the Forgeworld Riptide rules much, a Tau player utilizing Forgeworld would now be able to bring 6 Riptides to the table in a standard FOC army.

Ouch.