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Dakka,

I have a Tau player at our "house" that seems really good. I noticed that he uses the terrain to his advantage by placing alot of it on his deployment side and sitting in it while i advance my swarms. But that aside, what are some solid tactics i can employ against this Tau menice?

Outflanking?
DS?
Swarms?

His army changes a bit every game but he mainly uses his skimmer tanks and these body suits. Thank guys!

If he sits in terrain every game, try spore pods with Doom of Malan'tai/Devilgaunts or Ymgarl Genestealers to pop out of terrain.

Bring the fight to those silly Tau!

Also, how are you guys dividing up terrain? If you guys are picking table halves first and then agreeing to do narrative terrain (you guys just place it wherever) and he proceeds to deliberately saturate his side of the table with it, then something might be up...

A couple of Mawlocs popping up under him will soon get him thinking, plus they should give enough distraction for your force to close in, ymgarls popping up around him will hurt him badly, and either wipe out or tie up some of his most threatening units.

Ymgarls, spore pods with warriors or devourer gants, and flying hive tyrants will bring the fight to him and quickly

 tetrisphreak wrote:
Ymgarls, spore pods with warriors or devourer gants, and flying hive tyrants will bring the fight to him and quickly

The key to beating tau with nids is in this post, but not even in the units mentioned, it's the word 'quickly'. Tau need to keep armies at range and have their high strength weapons pick your units off, but get some units in their face as fast as possible and you will disrupt them and they will quickly fall apart.

Use the rulebook's terrain deployment rules as written, it'll lead to more equitable placement.

Barring that, find something that gets you into combat without requiring you to cross the table. Tyranids have plenty of options there; Mycetic Spores, Trygons, Ymgarl Genestealers...

Biovores do terrible things to fire warriors. Ignoring there armor and bypassing LOS cover "such as that pesky ADL" they work wonderfully to pick off characters in the squads and pin them.

Doom also hurts tau and there low leadership. Doesnt take long to reach 10 wounds when your wiping out fire warriors left and right.

Running swarms at fire warrior gunlines leads to excessive wounds. Same thing for deep striking or outflanking things that have to sit for a turn before they can do anything "Mawlocks and genestealers" those S5 shots can hurt even MCs if left out in the open. Spore in things that damage first turn. Devilgaunts do this well as they both provide a slowed volume of fire and cause leadership tests with debuffs against the taus already low leadership.

Biovores work wonderfully against Tau, and Ymgarls are always great.

When it comes to terrain, if you're going by the book, you'll be alternating placement of terrain. Use your choices to "fill up" his terrain slots (1d3 per 2' square) with terrain that doesn't help him.

Line-of-sigh blocking terrain helps create "dead spaces" where your nids can advance in (relative) safety, and won't slow you down.

Remember that Move Through Cover allows you to ignore Dangerous Terrain, and that a fair number of your nids have it. I've had quite a bit of success (and amusement) at covering the board with as much dangerous terrain as possible, blatantly ignoring the danger while forcing opponents to still make their saves.

Wow thanx guys! I didnt really think about mass spores. Can the ymgarls assault when they come out?

Ymgarls can assault out of cover, which makes them already better then generic genestealers.

Hive guard are also useful for facing tau vehicles so they don't get those pesky cover saves.

Tervigons and the gaunt cannon mean you can get the tau units into combat by turn 2 and stop their shooting while you get the rest of the units up the board.

tyranidswarm wrote:
Wow thanx guys! I didnt really think about mass spores. Can the ymgarls assault when they come out?

Yes they can. ^___^

Ymgarls can indeed assault

 lord_bobbington wrote:

Hive guard are also useful for facing tau vehicles so they don't get those pesky cover saves.

They also do quite a number on our crisis suits and broadsides.

I can attest to the usefulness of genestealers. 3 or 4 10 strong units outflanking with the tyrant's +1 reserve power is excellent. As everyone has said, it's about QUICKNESS and saturation. That's why my 'stealers are always accompanied by something cheap that flies or pods.

On a 3+ you're going to get a lot of things on the board--if you have 5 or more things to roll for that is.

 Grunt_For_Christ wrote:
I can attest to the usefulness of genestealers. 3 or 4 10 strong units outflanking with the tyrant's +1 reserve power is excellent. As everyone has said, it's about QUICKNESS and saturation. That's why my 'stealers are always accompanied by something cheap that flies or pods.

On a 3+ you're going to get a lot of things on the board--if you have 5 or more things to roll for that is.

Put the Swarmlord in there and its a 2+, another useful distraction you can use is a Mawloc, hide it in cover first turn, burrow it. Comes in auto 2nd turn, chances are the way Tau box up, you'll do some damage on your deep strike, it will either weather a full turn of shooting and allow the rest of your army to move up into combat range unscathed, or he'll ignore it at his own peril.

So very true.

My favorite tactic against parking lot Guardsmen funny enough. Especially running a pair of them.

I was thinking about infiltrating a squad of normal genes maybe 10 strong. then outflanking with 25 or so horms then use the ymgarls for that surprise. Of coarse have a couple spores coming in and the walking of terms and tervs. Decent melee?

Remember that you can't assault from outflanking anymore, so anything that comes in from the sides is going to take a turn being shot at by anything they could charge.

I'd stick to Ymgarls and drop pods for shooty units (devgants are brutal against Tau) and just run the hormagaunts up across the board.

Outflanking a Tervigon would be cute, however, especially if you can get it behind some cover so that it can start pushing out babies from the flank next turn.

Yeah because the Ymgarls have the added bonuses of Paranoia and assualting the turn the arrive

I was figuring they could either shoot the inf genestealers or the mass horms that will surely get there by turn 2 or keep starting at the oncoming trygons either by DS or just walking. Make him think i guess

Tau will have LD 7-8 for everything except HQ and HQ will generally be 9. If you push up, he'll be pressed further against the board again. All that's left is firing enough to force morale and watch them run.

That's probably my suggestion for suits too. Try and pop 1 per squad and hope they run.