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.

So tomorrow I am facing Tau for my campaign and I have never played against them before, neither the new codex, nor the old. The only books I'm allowed to use for the campaign are Imperial Knights (with FW) and Astra Militarum (just whats in the codex.) I'm considering going 4 knights strong with a Crusader Warlord and then a Paladin, Castigator and Acheron, probaby then going unbound to take a Vendetta for the remaining points. I could also go full mechanized with my guard. I'm just not sure what is strong against Tau. The mission is the 2nd tau mission from the Altar of War book. Its VPs for objectives. Knights have great mobility and if I go battleforged I can give them obsec. Otherwise I would probably run Baronial Court. So what do you think? How caN i I skin these blue devils?

I would think to run the 5 knights if you're allowed. Might be a bit cheesy but Tau are not easy to deal with.

 Dramagod2 wrote:
So tomorrow I am facing Tau for my campaign and I have never played against them before, neither the new codex, nor the old. The only books I'm allowed to use for the campaign are Imperial Knights (with FW) and Astra Militarum (just whats in the codex.) I'm considering going 4 knights strong with a Crusader Warlord and then a Paladin, Castigator and Acheron, probaby then going unbound to take a Vendetta for the remaining points. I could also go full mechanized with my guard. I'm just not sure what is strong against Tau. The mission is the 2nd tau mission from the Altar of War book. Its VPs for objectives. Knights have great mobility and if I go battleforged I can give them obsec. Otherwise I would probably run Baronial Court. So what do you think? How caN i I skin these blue devils?

Tau are TERRIBLE against knights. not enough Str8+ shots to deal with multiple knights.

Tau have trouble with close combat. Cliche but true.

The trick - is surviving long enough to get there - and either tank or avoid all the overwatch.

A lot of tau guns are high str with a decent amount of good AP. So you need something with good toughness and better saves, preferably cover, and speed to minimize rounds of shooting.

PSykers with invisibility etc are good options.
To help negate overwatch - try to charge something with 2-3 or more units at once. That way instead of the whole line firing at one unit they have to pick and chose.

Focus your ranged fire on marker lights. Removing those reduces some of thier bite.

So depending on your army of choice....

IF you are going imperial - consider a skyhammer to go with your Knights. It's tricky with interceptor, but if done right can take half his army out of the game pretty quick, and punch a hole for your Knights to go to town. Don't worry about ranged weapons, except maybe the Gatling cannon. Focus on charging in as quick as possible - and it should be game over.

Just watch out for those little fish and their silly emp grenades...nothing worse than running a 375 point knight into a 90 point squad of firewarriors and lose all your hull points in 1 round of combat...

Find where their markerlights are and set phasors to kill.

Its only not quite as true of a statement if hes using the massive formation to utilize Coordinated Fire, but its still a good thing to do. Markerlight units are typically squishy even if hiding in cover and go down quick. Only exception are ones hiding behind a Buffmander and Skyrays, but Skyrays should be killed first anyway if he has any because if you can snipe them before they fire their missiles thats a huge loss to the tau player.

After markerlights, thin numbers out. Ignore riptides unless you can cause ID or unload a ton of AP2 weapons on them - im not joking, theyre designed to be shot at more than they are designed to kill and theyre already pretty decent at killing w/o ML support. Reducing rate of fire is bigger than reducing big guns, since our big guns are usually tanky as hell and few and far between anyway.

Just bring as many knights as possible, unless the tau player has some of the new toys they will struggle.

That too.

Couple of surges with marker support could probably turn 1 pop 2-3 knights with all those D missiles.

Dont know anybody that bought more than 1 of those things though if any. I never intend to get a 2nd one unless someone gifts it to me lol

 Dramagod2 wrote:
So tomorrow I am facing Tau for my campaign and I have never played against them before, neither the new codex, nor the old. The only books I'm allowed to use for the campaign are Imperial Knights (with FW) and Astra Militarum (just whats in the codex.) I'm considering going 4 knights strong with a Crusader Warlord and then a Paladin, Castigator and Acheron, probaby then going unbound to take a Vendetta for the remaining points. I could also go full mechanized with my guard. I'm just not sure what is strong against Tau. The mission is the 2nd tau mission from the Altar of War book. Its VPs for objectives. Knights have great mobility and if I go battleforged I can give them obsec. Otherwise I would probably run Baronial Court. So what do you think? How caN i I skin these blue devils?

Take all the speed you can get and charge. Seriouly. Just overwhelm them with melee. You'll take a serious hail of overwatch so bring throw away units along to take the hits and then just blitz them. If you're not moving, running or charging, you're wasting your time. You cant outshoot them. You shouldnt try.

Astra Militarum for the win.

So how does this sound.

Baronial Court:
Crusader Warlord with BC, melta, stormspear missiles
Paladin with stormspear missiles
Castigator
Acheron

Unbound:
2x wyvern

that leaves me with 20 pts to play with



Automatically Appended Next Post:
I'll probably rush forward with the knights while I had the wyverns as backfield objective holders. The knights have a lot of firepower so it seems strange to rush them into combat. Is that definitely the best strategy against Tau?

Not a Forge World fan. But I'd drop one of those big boyz and try a Manticore or two. those things mess up Tau really badly. STR 10 makes their suits go away, it wounds everything they have on a 2 and its barrage. So its better for killing suits. I think the Robots will be MORE than enough for them to focus on. Four probably isn't necessary.

I dont have any manticores unfortunately. Just leman russes and infantry. My main reason for not including them is I dont want to provide softer units for them to be able to take out. WHen their only choice of target is a knight, it can negate a lot of their firepower.

Oh. Well the Leman Russ that has the ignores cover cannon will work. Just give it camo netting and an Aegis line and fire away.

Yes but why would I pay 120 base for an eradicator when I can get wyvers at 65 a piece. Plus I have an acheron with a hellstorm templates worth of S7 AP3 ignores cover. I'm not sure that I need more.

The eradicator is less. Just trying to offer solutions since you TOLD me that you ONLY had Leman Russ and infantry!!! and since you TOLD me that, my suggestion followed,

the value of the Eradicator is that it can fire at the stuff that is 4+ armor and you can save the massive number of hits via Wyverns for the other stuff for volume of fire. Makes sense. the cost of that STR 7 AP 3 template isn't small. So there's that. If he focuses fire on IT which he will, then the Tau WILL kill it. And so I don't know what size game it is but if I were him Id kill the Templpate and take my chances with stomps on units I don't care about?

Melee is your surest path top success but with so few units to engage them, it might be a tough time. that's the other concern I guess. Dunno what objectives will be either. Lots of variables.

But mainly you said you just had Leman russ and infantry so I mean... if that's all you got...

I like the list, with all the nastiness that Tau have taking a bunch of knights should help you out, and the wyverns will do horrible, horrible things to tau infantry

I played my game today using the 4 knight + wyverns lists and it went very well.

He brought Farsight with a special bodyguard squad where they all had special stuff and deep struck, a riptide, 2 units of broadsides, one with missiles and rifles and one with just missiles, sniper team, stealth team with fusion blasters, two units of pathfinders and 4 units of fire warriors with EMP.

I tried to rush the field to get into CC but in hindsight Im not sure it was necessary except in the case of the acheron to get the flamer into range. Only the castigator made it to combat where he broke the riptide which ran off the board. and he conceded at the top of turn 5 when I killed his second to last squad which was his warlord. It should be mentioned that I also rolled very well on my saves which definitely made a difference. Thank god for baronial court, lol.

Im sure the game was lots of fun though.

It definitely was. He was a good opponent and had the dice gone differently it definitely could have skewed in a different direction. I think I just had a solid plan going in which also helped. He was prepared with the EMP grenades but I focus fired those units off the board early on to allow me to close in more safely. Same goes for marker lights. He was using cover really well but even when I was using the non ignores cover weapons he just had a bunch of bad rolls. Overall a good game though.

Were you both list tailoring. Because that does not sound fun at all.

 Orock wrote:
Were you both list tailoring. Because that does not sound fun at all.

We were not list tailoring outside of the fact that we knew which books we were each using for the six week campaign. He knew I played knights and guard and I knew he played Tau. I don't blame him for coming prepared. It's no secret that I run knights. My list was more generalized as i would have played it against many different opponents. So I guess he was probably list tailoring but who doesn't when they know theyre facing knights.

I wouldnt call it tailoring if you know the faction involved. Theres a general tactic you can prepare for but the specific strat can vary enough to make it mean little or nothing.

And Knights are one of those things you kinda have to declare because thats a dick move to not mention youre bringing something humongous lol.

I wouldn't really call it list tailoring either. If you know the faction you'll be fighting then you can prepare your loadouts a bit more appropriately for the army you're fighting, as long as you don't know EXACTLY what your opponent will bring then there's always that element of surprise, since you don't know exactly what your opponent will have it prevents the worst tailoring from happening.

 Vineheart01 wrote:
I wouldnt call it tailoring if you know the faction involved. Theres a general tactic you can prepare for but the specific strat can vary enough to make it mean little or nothing.

And Knights are one of those things you kinda have to declare because thats a dick move to not mention youre bringing something humongous lol.

Yes, that's list tailoring if you know the faction. I've never had knights declared to me ahead of time. Deal with it: IK aren't even that good.

When you're playing a campaign over a long period of time with restricted lists you really cant help knowing the factions of your oppoent. Its all around a different situation than you would have in, say, a weekend tourney. In terms of a campaign, I dont think it's list tailoring at all. Its simply the nature of a campaign.

In fact, in most cases other than a tourney, its kinda hard not to know what faction you're playing against, if you're playing with friends or store acquaintances, you probably know what armies they play anyway. A tourney or a random pick up game are really the only instances where you wouldn't know unless you were specifically making it a point to remain in the dark.

I dislike playing Knight armies pretty immensely myself. It's just not a fun game. Either the Knights are dead so fast that its kinda over before it begins or else they stomp everything out of existence.

But in the case of the Tau empire player, knowing its Knights makes it easy to plan, and it is what it is when your enmy's selection is that small. "Hmm...Do i take anti armor ....or....anti-armor... Hmm..."