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One player at games club has started bringing a whole army of various Leman Russ tanks and I was wondering just out of interest what the best unit in the game is at taking out a whole force of leman Russ tanks? Someone at the club recommended Broadsides but what are your thoughts?
Thanks
Blofeld

I'm assuming your playing Tau?

blofeld wrote:
One player at games club has started bringing a whole army of various Leman Russ tanks and I was wondering just out of interest what the best unit in the game is at taking out a whole force of leman Russ tanks? Someone at the club recommended Broadsides but what are your thoughts?
Thanks
Blofeld

drop pods with melta does the trick.

Loads of arco-flagellants charging out of a stormraven. Love watching the look on peoples' face when 60 s5 attacks hit their tank units. Bonus points if you add a psyker and pull off hammerhand.

LR are slow and vehicle squads are limited in what they can shoot at a turn. Regardless of army you want fast, mobile, and plentiful units.

If you're playing Tau you have several good options. The best is probably the Optimized Stealth Cadre. Take two units of Stealth teams and a unit of ghostkeels, the formation gives the ghostkeels and any units of stealth teams within six inches of them the ability to ignore cover and always hit the rear armor of vehicles. With a BS of 5 each ghostkeel and squad of stealth teams should glance to death a Russ each.

Alternatively you could use crisis suits with fusion blasters to attempt to blow up a Russ from the front, the odds are very good you'll destroy at least one a turn, with the possibility of destroying more of them.

Another possibility is deep striking a team of three crisis suits with Cyclic Ion Blasters. With markerlight support they should average ten glances against rear armor, enough to take down three Russes.

All of these have their pro's and cons, but any of them should be able to destroy tanks fairly reliably.

Assault them. Then you're hitting AV 10-11 and they're screwed. It's the Leman Russ's only real weakness.

You can always try for weapons that have high rate of fire and glancing abilities too, but that's more of a numbers game.

If he's running pure tanks, he has no bubblewrap to protect his tank, so you should also be able to drop in with deepstrike units behind or beside him and take him out with melta type weapons.

Just run your Riptides up the table and punch them to death in Melee. Unless the Guard player is using Armoured Battle Company from Imperial Armour (ie Beast Hunter Shells), they've got nothing to deal with Monstrous Creatures. Even Tau will handily defeat vehicles in Close Combat - it's the huge weakness of Vehicles.

Hell, if you can manage to get Firewarriors in (zoom up the board in jinking Devilfish perhaps?), they will tear them to pieces with EMP grenades.

Or just full cheese it with Optimised Stealth Cadre.

If you are a Tau player, it is fairly simple.

1) Take Crisis Teams with dual Fusion Blasters and Deep Strike them near the tanks. They will tear right through the squadrons in record time.

2) Get into melee with your monstrous units or, if they have the means to do so, Fire Warriors with Haywire/EMP grenades. Leman Russes are so darned easy to destroy in melee.

3) Take the Optimized Stealth Cadre. If your opponent is a "meanie" then using this is advised as it will ruin their day pretty quickly, it just annihilates tank armies. However, it's kind of a bad sporting move so unless you want to embrace the cheese I would skip this one.

4) Stormsurges backed by Markerlights. AV14 Leman Russes don't care about Strength 7/8 spam, but they most certainly care about Destroyer weapons. Light them up with Markerlight-assisted Destroyer missiles and watch the carnage.

5) Play to the objectives. A few variants aside, Leman Russes are not that scary in terms of actual damage output for their points. They are inaccurate, unreliable and their guns generally aren't quite as strong as they could be. What they do best is being cheap and tough with moderate shooting capabilities, so play that to your advantage. "Monster" Tau can pretty easily just play the objective game against Leman Russes that are slower than normal tanks and pick apart the variants that are actually a threat.