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As the title says, I don't even know what to do anymore. EVERY GAME I play vs AM is the same- they deploy in masses of infantry and tanks and completely decimate my much smaller army with massed firepower. It's not even close. I've beaten good players before, I'm not clueless, but I really don't know how I am expected to do this. My standard response to heavy armour, the fusion commander, is all but nullified- they hide their tanks behind blobs of infantry, putting them out of range from my fusion blasters. And even if I do get in range, T8 means I'm not likely to destroy or even bracket a russ in one round of fire.

I legitimately have no idea what to do. All the long range fire options available to me completely pale in comparison to the sheer amount of damage output AM has. Coupled with stratagems and orders, the sheer volume of fire is impossible to withstand.

I'm not here to complain- I'm here to ask if anyone, anyone at all, knows of a viable strategy or list composition that can actually handle a cadian gunline. Because I'm out of ideas.

I've always found Tau to be a win hard / lose hard army. They either wipe the floor with you or they are the one the floor is being wiped with. The new Guard are very, very powerful, but beatable. I've find that taking down their tanks first is important, as well as knocking down their LOS-ignoring firepower. Those are the primary damage dealers and everything else tends to be board control and objective grabbing. Their massive firepower gets seriously cut down by -1 to hit modifiers, so damaging and not destroying vehicles is good too, just for that, or try to force their vehicles to move. Tau are a bit better at handling heavy cover sure to their high number of flying units, so flood that board with terrain! Lastly, you have access to snipers, so take advantage of them to take out key characters like psykers, commissars, and commanders.

That's about all I got.

The exact same way the Imperial Guard handled Tau over the last two editions:
learn your opponents army, learn how to play, get good and get lucky.

The new Guard are very, very powerful, but beatable. I've find that taking down their tanks first is important, as well as knocking down their LOS-ignoring firepower. Those are the primary damage dealers and everything else tends to be board control and objective grabbing.

But I can't take down their tanks. They're too damn tough, too damn resilient. All my lascannon equivalents are super expensive and rare and will usually die immediately. And how would I take out their LOS-ignoring units when there will be blobs of infantry right in the way?

Their massive firepower gets seriously cut down by -1 to hit modifiers, so damaging and not destroying vehicles is good too, just for that, or try to force their vehicles to move.

...how?

I'm not expert at Tau or Imperial Guard, but your comments make it sound like you are not bringing a tool to handle the masses of infantry your opponent is taking.

Does your force have enough Pulse Rifles/Carbines, Burst Cannons, and Smart Missile Systems to kill the screens so that your anti-tank can drop in and kill the tanks on Turn 2 or 3?

Tau have some mechanical issues. Some of their stuff is legitimately overcosted, some of it doesn't quite work right (like Markerlights, too many hits required to get benefit for many mechanics).

In general though, anything that can generate -1 to hit modifiers is going to given an IG army fits, and Tau can at least do that. Sniper Drones are a great option against IG, they wound them on 3's, have a long range, and can pick out support characters, can can be made reasonably resilient against IG.

I don't play Tau but my experience of playing against them under 8th would tell me the following - you probably need more fire warriors than battle suits. I think the days of battle suit based armies if probably long gone. You need the cheaper massed small arms fire to bring down the enemy infantry and then use the big guns which you have hidden behind terrain or held in reserve to come in and blast the big stuff.

One of my friends plays Tau and his first few 8th edition games he got his backside handed to him with ease. He grumbled and complained that Tau got nerfed under the new edition. It took him a few more games and finally clicking in his head that he had to change tactics and army composition with these rules for him to start winning again. He's still about 50/50 with just the Index list but a change of perspective has helped him a lot.

Generally speaking you can't do much, not if your friend is competent and you aren't using a tailored list. Tau are one of the weakest index armies and guard is one of the strongest codex armies. The actual good ways tau have to deal with armor, such as deepstriking commandos, can easily be shut down by guard that screens well due to how cheap their infantry is. Most long range solutions are overcosted, and your fire warriors/gun drones are exceptionally mediocre compared to guard infantry but still better than most of your army. To round things off, Tau can't even fall back on allies this edition.

Your best bet are probably stealth suits and ghostkeels with the crisis commander, some drones, and maybe a flyer or two. But honestly you need your codex rather badly, not much else can be said.

Imperial Guard, right now, is just a better version of Tau. Theres nothing Tau can do that Imperial Guard can't do better. Quantity of fire, Quality of fire, even in movility and deepstrike shenanigans they are better.

From what i have seen, the answer is currently forge world. I can double check in the new year when they are back in town. But what i have seen.

He has a pair of those riptide flame thrower yavara things

the xv9 battlesuits with the double fusion , and blasters for infantry are like pow 5 ap 1, 16 shots, can plink armor after he mulches the bubble wrap. They did a number on my troupes.

Then a bunch of commanders and fire warriors with marker lights.

Wait for a Codex, spam Stratagems. Same as the rest of us.

 SevenSeasOfRhye wrote:
But I can't take down their tanks. They're too damn tough, too damn resilient. All my lascannon equivalents are super expensive and rare and will usually die immediately. And how would I take out their LOS-ignoring units when there will be blobs of infantry right in the way?

I don't know Tau well enough to tell you what your anti-tank stuff is, but you don't need Lascannon equivalents to kill tanks. Plasma-gun equivalents are good too. If you can knock off just HALF of their wounds, you'll knock them down to a -1 to hit. Three wounds through Plasma, or two average Railgun wounds will do this. Anything like that. How much damage do Missile Pods do? What about the single-fire missiles? Things will get this through, it will happen, you just gotta go for it.

 SevenSeasOfRhye wrote:
...how?

For myself, it's been forcing them to move away, or move to engage a better target, due to Line of Sight. If it's impossible to hide your tough stuff from 1 model, you definitely don't have enough LOS on your table. A single LOS blocking piece in the middle of the table gives you a great "dance around" terrain piece that you can move around to force your opponent to engage you at a different angle. Take a terrain piece and just experiment with your movement speed around it so you can see where your vehicle can draw LOS from and too as you go around. You should find that being close to it grants you more protection, and gives you better angles on anything in a back field position. If they get close to it, you Battlesuits or meltas can hop over the piece to engage them at close range destruction.\

And don't Tau have some suits and big suits that automatically impose a -1 to hit penalty against them?

Tau are a worse IG. Do not even bother.

First. Grab a big box of tissues and dry your eyes. Some of us are doing fine against IG, as we have adapted play styles from 7th and are not just trying to ram the same old triangular T'au tactics into a square shaped 8th edition hole.

Guard tanks are tough but I've found a combination of 3 Hammer Heads with Longstrike, wrapped with mass firewarroirs and complimented by a few deep striking suits to be pretty efficient against AM. Coldstar commanders are also something to be considered.


Perhaps you could provide us with some of your lists, run-through some of your games. What missions are you playing, what is the terrain you are using?

 alextroy wrote:
I'm not expert at Tau or Imperial Guard, but your comments make it sound like you are not bringing a tool to handle the masses of infantry your opponent is taking.

Does your force have enough Pulse Rifles/Carbines, Burst Cannons, and Smart Missile Systems to kill the screens so that your anti-tank can drop in and kill the tanks on Turn 2 or 3?

The infantry isn't the problem. My army can kill them off just fine. The problem is the tanks- that I can't really deal with because they're too damn tough, too damn many, and take too many damn turns to deal with. In a contest of firepower, I lose every time, and I'm not talking about infantry.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 BlackLobster wrote:
I don't play Tau but my experience of playing against them under 8th would tell me the following - you probably need more fire warriors than battle suits. I think the days of battle suit based armies if probably long gone. You need the cheaper massed small arms fire to bring down the enemy infantry and then use the big guns which you have hidden behind terrain or held in reserve to come in and blast the big stuff.

One of my friends plays Tau and his first few 8th edition games he got his backside handed to him with ease. He grumbled and complained that Tau got nerfed under the new edition. It took him a few more games and finally clicking in his head that he had to change tactics and army composition with these rules for him to start winning again. He's still about 50/50 with just the Index list but a change of perspective has helped him a lot.

I would agree, but most battlesuits are either mediocre or just total ass. Riptides, broadsides and crisis should just never be bothered with- overcosted and inefficient. It's been made plenty clear that battlesuits are no longer the way to do.

What change of tactics, exactly?

 SevenSeasOfRhye wrote:

 alextroy wrote:
I'm not expert at Tau or Imperial Guard, but your comments make it sound like you are not bringing a tool to handle the masses of infantry your opponent is taking.

Does your force have enough Pulse Rifles/Carbines, Burst Cannons, and Smart Missile Systems to kill the screens so that your anti-tank can drop in and kill the tanks on Turn 2 or 3?

The infantry isn't the problem. My army can kill them off just fine. The problem is the tanks- that I can't really deal with because they're too damn tough, too damn many, and take too many damn turns to deal with. In a contest of firepower, I lose every time, and I'm not talking about infantry.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 BlackLobster wrote:
I don't play Tau but my experience of playing against them under 8th would tell me the following - you probably need more fire warriors than battle suits. I think the days of battle suit based armies if probably long gone. You need the cheaper massed small arms fire to bring down the enemy infantry and then use the big guns which you have hidden behind terrain or held in reserve to come in and blast the big stuff.

One of my friends plays Tau and his first few 8th edition games he got his backside handed to him with ease. He grumbled and complained that Tau got nerfed under the new edition. It took him a few more games and finally clicking in his head that he had to change tactics and army composition with these rules for him to start winning again. He's still about 50/50 with just the Index list but a change of perspective has helped him a lot.

I would agree, but most battlesuits are either mediocre or just total ass. Riptides, broadsides and crisis should just never be bothered with- overcosted and inefficient. It's been made plenty clear that battlesuits are no longer the way to do.

What change of tactics, exactly?

Spam drones and crisis commanders. The only way to play tau.

 Jaxler wrote:

 SevenSeasOfRhye wrote:

 alextroy wrote:
I'm not expert at Tau or Imperial Guard, but your comments make it sound like you are not bringing a tool to handle the masses of infantry your opponent is taking.

Does your force have enough Pulse Rifles/Carbines, Burst Cannons, and Smart Missile Systems to kill the screens so that your anti-tank can drop in and kill the tanks on Turn 2 or 3?

The infantry isn't the problem. My army can kill them off just fine. The problem is the tanks- that I can't really deal with because they're too damn tough, too damn many, and take too many damn turns to deal with. In a contest of firepower, I lose every time, and I'm not talking about infantry.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 BlackLobster wrote:
I don't play Tau but my experience of playing against them under 8th would tell me the following - you probably need more fire warriors than battle suits. I think the days of battle suit based armies if probably long gone. You need the cheaper massed small arms fire to bring down the enemy infantry and then use the big guns which you have hidden behind terrain or held in reserve to come in and blast the big stuff.

One of my friends plays Tau and his first few 8th edition games he got his backside handed to him with ease. He grumbled and complained that Tau got nerfed under the new edition. It took him a few more games and finally clicking in his head that he had to change tactics and army composition with these rules for him to start winning again. He's still about 50/50 with just the Index list but a change of perspective has helped him a lot.

I would agree, but most battlesuits are either mediocre or just total ass. Riptides, broadsides and crisis should just never be bothered with- overcosted and inefficient. It's been made plenty clear that battlesuits are no longer the way to do.

What change of tactics, exactly?

Spam drones and crisis commanders. The only way to play tau.

Except, you know, for all the other ways.

3 Stealth Teams with Homing Beacons
3 Commanders with 4 of the Melta Equivalents and Shield Drones

Deploy Stealth teams in cover as close to the enemy as possible. Drop the commanders in withing Melta range of enemy tanks. Obliterate enemy tanks/HQs/psykers.

Use the rest of your army to do useful things like secure objectives

 SevenSeasOfRhye wrote:

The new Guard are very, very powerful, but beatable. I've find that taking down their tanks first is important, as well as knocking down their LOS-ignoring firepower. Those are the primary damage dealers and everything else tends to be board control and objective grabbing.

But I can't take down their tanks. They're too damn tough, too damn resilient. All my lascannon equivalents are super expensive and rare and will usually die immediately. And how would I take out their LOS-ignoring units when there will be blobs of infantry right in the way?

Their massive firepower gets seriously cut down by -1 to hit modifiers, so damaging and not destroying vehicles is good too, just for that, or try to force their vehicles to move.

...how?

So, to better answer the question here I've provided an image from a game I played a couple of days ago between my adeptus mechanicus and a friend's guard. In this shot, you can see a bit of our terrain setup. For both the large and small stones, we used the "statuary" rule from the rulebook, which, IMO, works far far better than "ruin" in terms of enabling general gameplay and is pretty much what I have replaced Ruin with for my "when in doubt, call it this" in 8th ed. Both of our armies had pretty significant gunline components, with him fielding a Wyvern and four Leman Russ tanks and me fielding a pair of Kastelan Robots, a squad of grav/phosphor servitors and 2 neutron laser onager dunecrawlers. Despite that, thanks in large part to the terrain setup it never felt like anything was being nuked from orbit without any counterplay. Several times he was able to use the rocks and central VSG (which we were using as our main objective for the mission) to block the LOS from 1-2 of my major gunline hitters so that I couldn't focus fire on one tank and take it down in a single phase, and I was able to hide my deep striking and mobile elements from the vast majority of his tanks or at least with my dragoons force them to come around corners to hit me where they would be in threat range of my assault. Because we used Statuary, anything 3" away from a rock was in cover relative to the Wyvern (which was parked, as expected, directly behind one of the los blocking stones).

This setup, and a mission that involved a lot of different objectives kept the game from devolving into just a murderfest. There were a couple feels-bad moments (two leman russes got essentially oneshot by supremely lucky onager damage rolls, and I learned by charging into combat with them how supremely trash the hydraulic claw "upgrades" are on breachers) but overall it was a really fun, tactical game which at no point felt like just two armies sitting there and plugging at each other.

I know the game culture is different everywhere. I know this was a comparatively casual game, as his force did not feature the ubiquitous wall o' lasgun screen and mine did not have the cawl+Dakkabot spam auto-include. but honestly it just goes to showcase how much of a difference two players who come into the game actively trying to create several hours of fun times pushing models around can make, rather than just having "win the game, no matter how short/lopsided" as a goal.

So Imperial Guard are very strong right now, that's a fact.

The Tau always struck me as the elite, fast shooting army with few but very powerful guns that uses speed and agility to get its weapons where they need them to be.

Conversely, Imperial Guard are the huge, unwieldy shooting army with tons of guns but fairly low mobility, relying on simply having enough guns that "some are here. some are there, hopefully one or two are were I need them to be" instead of moving to bring them to bear.

The problem is twofold, imo:
1) 8th Editions fairly terrible terrain and indirect fire rules means that a Leman Russ in 1 corner might have a single spot, possibly two spots, that are "LOS shadows", but can otherwise see clear across the board, and since you can't get cover unless you are in it, it can be very difficult to get cover even if a gun is shooting between a unit's legs.

2) 8th Edition also has increased the power of hordes pretty significantly. I think the meta has shaken out fairly much by now, and hordes have gotten much better than in 7th, and elite units have gotten much worse. The question becomes whether that is a failure to adapt (e.g. people are still trying 7th Elite spam) or actually a rules issue (e.g. hordes are just better because of a huge confluence of rules). I am inclined to believe it is a combination of the two, but that's just an opinion.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
So Imperial Guard are very strong right now, that's a fact.

The Tau always struck me as the elite, fast shooting army with few but very powerful guns that uses speed and agility to get its weapons where they need them to be.

Conversely, Imperial Guard are the huge, unwieldy shooting army with tons of guns but fairly low mobility, relying on simply having enough guns that "some are here. some are there, hopefully one or two are were I need them to be" instead of moving to bring them to bear.

The problem is twofold, imo:
1) 8th Editions fairly terrible terrain and indirect fire rules means that a Leman Russ in 1 corner might have a single spot, possibly two spots, that are "LOS shadows", but can otherwise see clear across the board, and since you can't get cover unless you are in it, it can be very difficult to get cover even if a gun is shooting between a unit's legs.

2) 8th Edition also has increased the power of hordes pretty significantly. I think the meta has shaken out fairly much by now, and hordes have gotten much better than in 7th, and elite units have gotten much worse. The question becomes whether that is a failure to adapt (e.g. people are still trying 7th Elite spam) or actually a rules issue (e.g. hordes are just better because of a huge confluence of rules). I am inclined to believe it is a combination of the two, but that's just an opinion.

I disagree with both points.

1) While this is somewhat true, it was just as true before the Guard codex when Leman Russes were lacklustre. While Guard tanks are really strong now, I don't think that they are OP or gamebreaking. And when the Tau codex gets out, I am sure that Tau will destroy tanks just fine.

I agree with you, that the terrain rules are bad, but I don't think that is what is in play here. 8th edition cover rules actually benefits elite infantry much more than light infantry.

2) I don't think that there is anything inherent in 8th edition that favours hordes over elite infantry. If that was the case, the solution for the Tau player would be to double up on kroot. But it is definitely true that GW has generally overcosted T4 and 4+ or 3+ armour saves compared to T3 and 5+/6+. And unlike the tanks I actually think that Guard infantry is somewhat OP. I wouldn't know how to deal with 120 Armageddon Guardsmen as Tau, for example.

1.) The issue with guard is more tanks/artillery that ignore LOS rather than those that need LOS. Because LOS blocking is the real defense terrain gives is this edition.

2.) There are absolutely things inherent in 8th that favor cheap wounds.
a.) Multi-damage weapons - lascannons, plasma, autocannons, all kill at most 1 cheap infantry model per shot, they can also kill the same number of more expensive models per shot despite those models having multiple wounds.

b.) The S v T changes made T3/4 better than they previously was, because it gets wounded on 2s by fewer weapons while T5 is not as strong as it used to be.

c.) The AP changes - Lots of weapons used to be AP 5 so they would kill 5+ save models outright, now most of those weapons have no AP. Making those models 33% more durable, whereas there was no gain for Elite models with 2+ and 3+ saves.

d.) allowing fall back from combat, elite units can no longer hide in combat to avoid being shot at, on top of which there is no sweeping advance so it is rare for elite units to delete large squads in 1 assault turn.

e.) With deepstrike being reliable and plentiful, taking up space on the table is hugely important as a defensive tactic.

As a Guard player, I can tell you what would disrupt me. At 1500 points, I drop in a couple of Scion Squads to move forward / assassinate critical components. I use some Infantry, Russes, and Sentinels to move to centre, to contest / claim objectives. I use some Infantry with Artillery to hold my deployment zone, and to provide ranged fire support.

All of my infantry have support characters. Super, easily, Sniped characters. The very first thing I'd take against Guard would be some sniper type weapons, or abilities that would let you take out the Characters in the first turn or two of shooting.

With Characters out of the way, create an area of concentrated force. Do not engage the Guard board-wide. Flank, or do a dedicated drive up the middle, which is less ideal. By focusing on a board side, you can create pockets to drop your Deep Striking elements into, to gain favorable targeting on Guard's vehicles. Don't shoot the guys in front, necessarily. Shoot the guys in the back, to open those pockets.

I don't know Tau pricing exactly, but I'd suggest transports for the highest output infantry you have. If you can keep them safe from fire for one turn, you should be in position to drop and spray.

Turn 3, drop your heavy hitters. Do everything you can to eliminate board control elements in the first couple turns, so you can gain the advantage there. Guard tries to stop you from being where you want to be. You have to fight against THAT, not kill everything. Crippling vehicles goes a long way to reducing damage output.

FRF, SRF is less scary than you think. Roll 100 dice, and see how many FW it kills. Lasguns are mentally scary for volume of fire, but they have terrible odds of actually taking down anything. On average, 100 lasgun shots should take down 12 Fire Warriors, assuming their stats are the same as before. 8 if you're in cover. Focus fire to eliminate upgrades. DO NOT spread the shots around. 90% of Guard Infantry's damage output is in the last 3 or 4 wounds.

Guard excels at punching above it's weight. The bigger the targets, the quicker they grind things down. Bring numbers to even out the board advantage that IG brings.

The only way I can compete with my bro's Guard as a SW player is to get lucky with the objectives. Weve also started playing with the cards that give wrinkles or twists to the game. These have helped as well. But I get shot off the board more times than not. Guard is tough to handle especially without a codex of your own with a full compliment of stratagems.

Take it on the chin... from what I understand the roles have been reversed for the past couple of editions with Guard being the low man on the totem pole.

edit: gak I forgot. my bro wont even use stratagems until we all have our codex. hes still rollin.

I'll pile in on wait for a codex.

You didn't get point drops in CA. It is destined to be quite soon.

My friend plays tau, I play guard. All games at 1500 and I've won them all. When we play singular missions its an easy win for guard, get the objective and hold it.

We have been experimenting with more terrain and also maelstrom and the games much closer now. Our last game had loads of Los blocking and we use house rules when it comes to cliffs so lots of +1 to save.

Hammerhead and firewarriors with a couple commanders. Stay back, take out my tanks, drop in on my basilisk and I'm screwed.

Considering how many 7th edition Tau armies just spammed Riptides and Storm Surges, I'm not surprised when some of them feel out of depth in the current meta.

You don't. Tau are woefully under-armed and outgunned for what they actually pay. You might be able to scratch an IG player every once in a while, but by and large, everything you can do, he can do better and cheaper.

Don't count on a codex as a magical panacea. Basically all power armor lists autolose to IG even with codices.

Martel732 wrote:
Don't count on a codex as a magical panacea. Basically all power armor lists autolose to IG even with codices.

ITT:
Chaos (the space marine kind obviously) autoloses to Imperial Guard, despite literally mountains of evidence to the contrary.