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So been crushing my local shop with Riptide spam. Wanna try something else. Thinking Crisis suit Death Star. So what are must haves? How to kit them out? Any suggestions?

I don't know much about tau but I'd say maybe spam as many marker lights and low ap guns as you can. battle suits are pretty cool but I'm not sure of how good a deathstar they would be. Correct me if I'm wrong but they are t4 3+save with 2 wounds? A single battle cannon direct hit could wipe your whole unit

The closest thing to deathstar for Tau is grabbing Farsight and his full bodyguard group (both from Farsight Enclaves) and Shadowsun and a Buffmander (both from Tau Empire). You give missile pods to all and target locks (optional). This unit shoots everything twin-linked and ignoring cover - using markerlights to improve BS (BS4 TL is awesome).
You'll get:
1 Plasma Rifle at BS5
2 Fusion Blasters at BS5
14 Missile Pods at BS3

This is costly as hell, though. Shadowsunm Farsight and Buffmander clock together at almost 500p, and 7 bodyguards...

If you're really invested on it, buy as much drones as possible - mostly shield drones to absorb S8+ AP3- stuff.

 Vector Strike wrote:
The closest thing to deathstar for Tau is grabbing Farsight and his full bodyguard group (both from Farsight Enclaves) and Shadowsun and a Buffmander (both from Tau Empire). You give missile pods to all and target locks (optional). This unit shoots everything twin-linked and ignoring cover - using markerlights to improve BS (BS4 TL is awesome).
You'll get:
1 Plasma Rifle at BS5
2 Fusion Blasters at BS5
14 Missile Pods at BS3

This is costly as hell, though. Shadowsunm Farsight and Buffmander clock together at almost 500p, and 7 bodyguards...

If you're really invested on it, buy as much drones as possible - mostly shield drones to absorb S8+ AP3- stuff.

Also seen it built with Plasma Rifles, and really make a bit more sense at the range you will be at to go with the AP2 vs AP4. You really want to go with basic drones over sheild drones most of the time. Adds more Dakka, and still about as good against incoming thanks to Shroud.

Shield drones are complete garbage.... i dont know why people keep bringing them....

Drones are purely ablative wounds, no matter what weapon they got. Shield drones die just as easy as gun drones when your opponent has a way to just spam a ton of low strength shots to eat the 4++ on a single wound model....like infantry that youre probably sitting right next to?
Gun drones will survive, on average, just as long as shield drones since people will still spam the lowgrade stuff to deal with them and use the highgrade to splat the suits behind them. Get even 1 round of dakka from the gun drones, they did more work than the shield drones ever could.

1-2 gun drones is meh, but never underestimate the power of 6+ drones. My piranha wall dumps a 10man gun drone unit that everyone always ignores because its just a BS2 model that yields no points and cant score without an IC attached. Then it single-handedly rapes infantry squads one after another. Never, ever underestimate those things lol

Farsight bomb runs between 700 to 1000 points

 Vector Strike wrote:
The closest thing to deathstar for Tau is grabbing Farsight and his full bodyguard group (both from Farsight Enclaves) and Shadowsun and a Buffmander (both from Tau Empire). You give missile pods to all and target locks (optional). This unit shoots everything twin-linked and ignoring cover - using markerlights to improve BS (BS4 TL is awesome).
You'll get:
1 Plasma Rifle at BS5
2 Fusion Blasters at BS5
14 Missile Pods at BS3

This is costly as hell, though. Shadowsunm Farsight and Buffmander clock together at almost 500p, and 7 bodyguards...

If you're really invested on it, buy as much drones as possible - mostly shield drones to absorb S8+ AP3- stuff.

Buffmander should be able to take a drone controller and make all the drones BS5, no?


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Vineheart01 wrote:
Shield drones are complete garbage.... i dont know why people keep bringing them....

Drones are purely ablative wounds, no matter what weapon they got. Shield drones die just as easy as gun drones when your opponent has a way to just spam a ton of low strength shots to eat the 4++ on a single wound model....like infantry that youre probably sitting right next to?
Gun drones will survive, on average, just as long as shield drones since people will still spam the lowgrade stuff to deal with them and use the highgrade to splat the suits behind them. Get even 1 round of dakka from the gun drones, they did more work than the shield drones ever could.

1-2 gun drones is meh, but never underestimate the power of 6+ drones. My piranha wall dumps a 10man gun drone unit that everyone always ignores because its just a BS2 model that yields no points and cant score without an IC attached. Then it single-handedly rapes infantry squads one after another. Never, ever underestimate those things lol

I could see taking a couple shield drones, putting them behind the ICs and only directing wounds to them with LoS when an invuln save is needed, but yeah, you can't really take too many if you do this because you still need the cheap ablative wounds in the front.

 Vineheart01 wrote:
Shield drones are complete garbage.... i dont know why people keep bringing them....

Drones are purely ablative wounds, no matter what weapon they got. Shield drones die just as easy as gun drones when your opponent has a way to just spam a ton of low strength shots to eat the 4++ on a single wound model....like infantry that youre probably sitting right next to?
Gun drones will survive, on average, just as long as shield drones since people will still spam the lowgrade stuff to deal with them and use the highgrade to splat the suits behind them. Get even 1 round of dakka from the gun drones, they did more work than the shield drones ever could.

1-2 gun drones is meh, but never underestimate the power of 6+ drones. My piranha wall dumps a 10man gun drone unit that everyone always ignores because its just a BS2 model that yields no points and cant score without an IC attached. Then it single-handedly rapes infantry squads one after another. Never, ever underestimate those things lol

My Wall O' Gun Drones tactic gets the same treatment, right up to the point it mauls the grav bike command squad.

Mavnas wrote:

 Vector Strike wrote:
The closest thing to deathstar for Tau is grabbing Farsight and his full bodyguard group (both from Farsight Enclaves) and Shadowsun and a Buffmander (both from Tau Empire). You give missile pods to all and target locks (optional). This unit shoots everything twin-linked and ignoring cover - using markerlights to improve BS (BS4 TL is awesome).
You'll get:
1 Plasma Rifle at BS5
2 Fusion Blasters at BS5
14 Missile Pods at BS3

This is costly as hell, though. Shadowsunm Farsight and Buffmander clock together at almost 500p, and 7 bodyguards...

If you're really invested on it, buy as much drones as possible - mostly shield drones to absorb S8+ AP3- stuff.

Buffmander should be able to take a drone controller and make all the drones BS5, no?

If you field Gun dones yes.

Buffmander should always have a drone controller even if you arent intending to put him in a drone blob. If he attaches to a unit that even has 1 ML drone or Gun drone, that drone is going to suddenly become MVP of the unit.

I would be tempted to take one or two shield drones purely for if the unit gets into CC and has to survive a round before getting away with vectrored retro thrusters. I'm currently building towards this unit for use in around 1500pt games. How do propose to get farsight, shadowsun and a buffmander in the unit? Wouldn't that require allying Tau with Tau which i thought wasn't allowed?

CADs still work, but if you want the FE shenanigans you cannot bring shadowsun. if you want to, you can take all 3 in two CADs with the condition that you are going to run at least 4 troops.

FE shenanigans? there really isnt one in terms of the farsight bomb. Farsight is only brought because of the 7man bodyguard team requiring him and the no-scatter deepstrike trait. Other than that its all about the buffmander being used for a TON of models, which is original tau stuff.

Also, you dont technically need a commander for the farsight bomb. The drones will be BS3 doing this but you can outfit a bodyguard as a buffmander, they can take unlimited signature systems as well as commanders...just dont have a 4th weap/supp slot (not that its needed anyway for this role).

If you really want shadowsun and bs5 drones from a normal buffmander, double cad is the way to go. Requires four firewarriors though (or kroot) so you might not have the points unless you literally just want the farsight bomb (bad idea)