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today my friend and I played our first game on his kitchen table as we dont yet have a larger playing surface and we figured this would suffice, which it did.

so after an entire month of taunting me that he was going to pummel my army i showed him where the power of the Tau lies, now keep in mind i was at a bit of an advantage because i own my codex and he doesnt, so i built my army with gear and boosts and he put together his army out of the blackrock reach or whatever the marines ork combo starter box is called. we went to 540 points as thats what my total came to once it was assembled, and he matched it nicely.

i tabled a 12 firewarriors with a Shahsui leader and a sheild drone and a couple grenades, A commander Shas'o with an aribursting frag and cyclic ion blaster (i dont even know if you can do that) multi tracker (hard wired) targeting array, stimulant injector and 2 gun drones, i also played a Shasui stealth team with one upgraded to a Shas'vre all with targeting array's and my squad leader equipped a fusion blaster (which im rather thankfull for, more on that later) and 1 marker drone, i also fielded my sniper team, for which i am also thankfull.

he had a rhino, a tactical unit of 10 with a flamer a rocket launcher and a meltagun, 1 general, a dreadnought with no bonuses, and a sniper unit with a rocket launcher for a total of 544 points. and even battle by numbers and numbers alone.

i cant recall all the details enough to describe the whole battle but i do recall highlights, in round 2 he rocket launched my Shaso and destroyed my 2 gun drones without scratching my commander, and in the next round i moved my stealth team close enough to fusion blast his dreadnought into smithereens, turning it into rubble, a fortunate turn of events, i LOOOOVE stealth armour, half the time he couldnt even see my stealth team to shoot at them. we exchanged fire for a full 6 rounds and by the end of it i had lost 2 gun drones and a single fire warrior which died in the fourth round, while he had a mere 4 models left on the table, at one point he drove his rhino right ontop of my fire warriors but i remained calm and stayed in formation dodging the tank with ease, fortunate too, i was only 3 inches from the edge, twice he charged me and twice i dodged untill my snipers opened fire and disabled his guns and stunned his engines, my commander took one damage from a point blank rocket and saved one earlier in the game thanks to FNP from my stimulant injectors. Shas'o fair reasonable well n Assault, so thats good to know

now please keep in mind my friend wasnt rolling all that well and i had a few lucky breaks, which can make all the difference in the universe while playing 40k, as well as making a few rule mistakes, like rolling rapid fire while i was outside rapid fire range, we didnt know, were both learning and had manuals in hand while we played.

all in all it was a great night
thanks for reading.

its so nice to roll dice and move minis around a table without having to establish a massive story for why, though i do miss playing DnD, this is a very cool replacement.

i just hope my buddy isn't discouraged from how our first match went.

I'm glad you decided to play 40k. It is by far the best table top game made. Let me help you out with just a couple of things. First of all, you can't have an airbursting frag and a cyclic ion blaster on the same figure, and they are special issue so you can only use them on your commander. Its good that you kept your stealth team alive, but just a heads up, they can't go invisible so when you say that he couldn't see you i hope that means you were behind cover! Also how did you dodge his charge twice? Just curious! Honestly I don't like the rapid fire rules but anyways i hope this helped you out a little bit! glad you started playing!

Welcome but check out the other batreps and try to make it less of a wall of text and more of a sequence, its hard to want to read all of that...

Thanks guys,

Well first off i suspected i couldnt use both weapons but we were learning rules more than playing so i went ahead and did it anyways, i wanted to try them out basically.

With stealth suits your roll 2d6x3 to be able to see the suit and if their outside your range you cant see them to fire on them, or that's how we perceived it, were we wrong, bear in mind this was our first game ever so we're learning the rules.

And i dodged him twice by luckily rolling under my leadership when he tank shocked me twice in a row.

We've got alot of learning ahead of us so i hope the next round goes more in his favour.

Sounds like a good game. You did right by the Stealth team and your firewarriors. The way you played the rules was correct. However, your enemy (the space marines) can't take two special weapons in a single tactical squad. He could take the ML and a flamer or a ML and a meltagun, but not both the flamer and melta.

If the SM had loaded his Tactical squad in his rhino and got to a place where they could assault your firewarriors, it would have been a different story. He'll figure that out in time. Range and mobility are the best friends of the Tau.

Good luck in your next game.

he'll be chapped to know his tactical squad got a a little less tactical, though I'm relatively delighted

Actually, I've just bought the Tau Codex. It states in the army list entry (p35) that stealthsuits have INTEGRAL STEALTH FIELD GENERATORS, therefore they can be invisible!
However, this is written confusingly, as if it were integral, should it not be detailed in the XV25 armour description, p27.

Ive played Tau for awhile now and yes it does state that they have a stealth field generator but that does not make them invisible (in the all hte time way) it makes it to where that unit is always under the night fighting rules so any unit attempting to shoot at Stealth team have to roll the same amount of dice for night fighting to see if they can see the stealth team.

Also Tasslehoff I noticed in your army list you gave a shas' o a targeting array the targetting array specificly states that it raises the BS of the unit equiped with it but only to a maximum of 5 the Shas' o has a BS of 5 already so your waisting a hardpoint and points for something that doesnt do anything for you when you could of used the points and hardpoint for something else. No one else mentioned this so I thought I would.

Yeah, I knew that, looking back I should have rephrased my statement.
As the Snake-eyes god Gav Thorpe once said in WD201, "Isn't Hindsight a wonderful thing!"

Congrats on your first game! Shoot my first game was my 1 crisis suit vs. 6 man IG squad, vs. 3 Chaos Marines.

Just getting the rules down is pretty difficult, but eventually you'll get most of em down. Ironing out all the logistical stuff will take some time. (I too made some mistakes like buying Tau gear that didn't do squat).

I hope you didn't discourage your friend from playing.

And yes, I have finally learned that stealth suits are your friend.

Congratz on the first game. I remember mine was similar, in that we used the AOBR set and some guardsmen and violated most of the rules simply by overlooking or not knowing them