First full game with new Tau
I finally got in a full game of 40k with the new Tau codex, thanks to the patience of Jason from Battlefront Games, who was willing to stay up far later than he should have. My thanks, sir! My army consisted of 3 squads of basic fire warriors, a single squad of kroot snipers, an ethereal, a crisis team with missile pods and fusion blasters for anti-armor, a pathfinder unit, a commander with drone controller escorting 8 marker drones, one bomber, and one of each heavy tank option.
Jason's force was 3 tactical squads of space marines in drop pods, an ironclad dreadnought in another drop pod, a land raider full of assault terminators, a thunderfire cannon, Vulcan, and another special character I'm not sure of: Master of the Something-Or-Other.
The game was Relic, which never moved the entire game! Basically, Jason's drop pods would come down, their contents would kill some of my stuff and get to touch the relic, then I would aim most of my firepower at it and wipe them out. Then the next drop pod would come down and we'd repeat the process. It reminded me of my early chess games against a computer where the computer decided, for some reason that was never clear to me, that it absolutely, positively had to have a particular space. We would alternate threatening the space with one piece after another until one side either decided that the trades offered were acceptable or that avoiding them was impossible, and about a third of the total pieces on the board traded in rapid succession. In the end, we ruled this game a Tau victory when an overcharged blast from my ionhead forced Jason's last four scoring models to either die or go to ground short of the relic. Since I had First Blood and Slay the warlord from an initial misunderstanding of how Instant Death worked on models attached to artillery, and now that Jason couldn't claim the relic, we called it there.
What worked:
Commander Longstrike in a railhead. BS5 and tank-hunter, with a couple of markerlights to deny a coversave was able to kill the land raider in a single shot. An expensive unit, but worth it, and I'm glad I chose to put blacksun filters on all the tanks to ignore night-fighting.
A squad of gun drones escort by a commander with drone controller. BS 5 markerlights jump-shoot-jumping all over the place, Hell yes! This was helped by rolling the warlord trait that gives the commander 3d6 for thrust moves, but that configuration is solid gold even without it. I think future versions will add iridium armor on the commander, and possibly a couple of shield drones to make the unit more resilient.
Massed pulse fire and an ethereal. 3 squads of fire warriors all firing overwatch and getting an extra shot makes assaulting a Tau gunline extremely hazardous. Admittedly, the assault terminators and the dreadnought were able to do so, but the fire warriors held the line remarkably well. Pre-overwatch, the defensive grenades on Tau were worse than useless, but at least in this game overwatch softened up the assaulting enemy enough that the fire warriors held for several rounds.
The ion cannon. The ionhead is no longer cheaper than the rail gun version of hammerhead, but it's also a lot more powerful. The ability to drop a strength 8 AP3 large blast on the field, even at the cost of a Gets Hot roll, has to be giving Blood Angels and other Space Marines players nightmares!
What didn't work:
Kroot snipers. I've heard people rave about how many sniper shots you can get, and how cheaply, using kroot, but they didn't work out well. Maybe against a slower enemy they might have been useful, but 24 inch heavy weapons are pretty useless unless you can predict where the targets are going to be at deployment (well, infiltration), and that's just not possible against a drop pod force.
The sunshark bomber. I can't blame the model, which I think is still a viable Fast Attack choice, but the dice were unkind to it. When I roll a 3 or less on 7 of 8 dice, you can't really blame the model's stats! As this was my first attempt at using a flyer I clearly didn't maneuver it very well, and the front-mounted network markerlight was never able to fire at a good target. Fortunately, the other three weapons were all turret-mounted, although I'm still unsure how the interceptor drones are handled.
The pathfinders. Mostly, I hugged the cover too much and left them too far away from everything else to be useful. Also, their reduced armor save means that a heavy flamer is not required to annihilate them. A regular flamer works just fine! I'm not swearing off that unit at this point, but they really didn't do well this round.
What I learned:
Don't be quite so concerned about hugging cover. Yes, there are a lot of things that deny a 4+ armor save, but not so many that you should bunch up in the cover and be annihilated by heavy flamers that ignore that too! Spread out a bit, and maybe use an exposed squad as the lure.
Keep the kroot mobile. The still have Infiltrate, so infiltrate them in front of everything else. They can't use supporting fire, but everything else can use supporting fire for them. With that much overwatch, they might actually be able to survive the assault and finish off the enemy.
Put the overwatch thing on all the vehicles. If you're going to go vehicle heavy, let those smart missiles overwatch since so much of your firepower is in the tanks.
Seeker missiles can actually fire without a markerlight now. They will fire at the vehicles normal ballistic skill rather than their usual BS 5, and they don't get Ignores Cover, but they can fire. There will be times when it's worth risking the seeker on a non-guaranteed hit if there's something you really need to take out.
And finally, non-Fast vehicles SUCK! I've never had to run vehicles without Tau multitrackers before, and the reduction in firepower while moving is huge. I'm sure that's why secondary weapon systems are all twin-linked now, because most of the time you're going to have to snap-fire them. I'll have to experiment with this, but it's entirely possible that it would be worth stacking 4 or so markerlights onto a target and using them to bring a cruising-speed-vehicle like a hammerhead up to BS 5. Of course, since those shots would still technically be snapshots, you wouldn't be able to fire any of the blast options.
Modifications to the list for future battles will probably include dropping the kroot squad, or at least their sniper rifles. Tanks will get overwatch, although I might drop one of them. Unfortunately, I can't decide which one to drop as they each have a role that isn't easily filled by anything else. Longstrike is one of the best ways to kill heavy vehicles, the ionhead's AP3 large blast is incredible, and the skyray is a markerlight source, extra missiles, and one of my few Skyfire options. I might change the fusion blaster / missile pod suits in some way as they did poorly this round, but that might have been bad luck as much as anything else. They were in position to shoot the land raider, but Longstrike took it out, leaving them only moderately well equipped to deal with the terminators inside.
And that's all there is to report. More later, when I learn more about how it feels to have a recent rule set for this game!
Jason's force was 3 tactical squads of space marines in drop pods, an ironclad dreadnought in another drop pod, a land raider full of assault terminators, a thunderfire cannon, Vulcan, and another special character I'm not sure of: Master of the Something-Or-Other.
The game was Relic, which never moved the entire game! Basically, Jason's drop pods would come down, their contents would kill some of my stuff and get to touch the relic, then I would aim most of my firepower at it and wipe them out. Then the next drop pod would come down and we'd repeat the process. It reminded me of my early chess games against a computer where the computer decided, for some reason that was never clear to me, that it absolutely, positively had to have a particular space. We would alternate threatening the space with one piece after another until one side either decided that the trades offered were acceptable or that avoiding them was impossible, and about a third of the total pieces on the board traded in rapid succession. In the end, we ruled this game a Tau victory when an overcharged blast from my ionhead forced Jason's last four scoring models to either die or go to ground short of the relic. Since I had First Blood and Slay the warlord from an initial misunderstanding of how Instant Death worked on models attached to artillery, and now that Jason couldn't claim the relic, we called it there.
What worked:
Commander Longstrike in a railhead. BS5 and tank-hunter, with a couple of markerlights to deny a coversave was able to kill the land raider in a single shot. An expensive unit, but worth it, and I'm glad I chose to put blacksun filters on all the tanks to ignore night-fighting.
A squad of gun drones escort by a commander with drone controller. BS 5 markerlights jump-shoot-jumping all over the place, Hell yes! This was helped by rolling the warlord trait that gives the commander 3d6 for thrust moves, but that configuration is solid gold even without it. I think future versions will add iridium armor on the commander, and possibly a couple of shield drones to make the unit more resilient.
Massed pulse fire and an ethereal. 3 squads of fire warriors all firing overwatch and getting an extra shot makes assaulting a Tau gunline extremely hazardous. Admittedly, the assault terminators and the dreadnought were able to do so, but the fire warriors held the line remarkably well. Pre-overwatch, the defensive grenades on Tau were worse than useless, but at least in this game overwatch softened up the assaulting enemy enough that the fire warriors held for several rounds.
The ion cannon. The ionhead is no longer cheaper than the rail gun version of hammerhead, but it's also a lot more powerful. The ability to drop a strength 8 AP3 large blast on the field, even at the cost of a Gets Hot roll, has to be giving Blood Angels and other Space Marines players nightmares!
What didn't work:
Kroot snipers. I've heard people rave about how many sniper shots you can get, and how cheaply, using kroot, but they didn't work out well. Maybe against a slower enemy they might have been useful, but 24 inch heavy weapons are pretty useless unless you can predict where the targets are going to be at deployment (well, infiltration), and that's just not possible against a drop pod force.
The sunshark bomber. I can't blame the model, which I think is still a viable Fast Attack choice, but the dice were unkind to it. When I roll a 3 or less on 7 of 8 dice, you can't really blame the model's stats! As this was my first attempt at using a flyer I clearly didn't maneuver it very well, and the front-mounted network markerlight was never able to fire at a good target. Fortunately, the other three weapons were all turret-mounted, although I'm still unsure how the interceptor drones are handled.
The pathfinders. Mostly, I hugged the cover too much and left them too far away from everything else to be useful. Also, their reduced armor save means that a heavy flamer is not required to annihilate them. A regular flamer works just fine! I'm not swearing off that unit at this point, but they really didn't do well this round.
What I learned:
Don't be quite so concerned about hugging cover. Yes, there are a lot of things that deny a 4+ armor save, but not so many that you should bunch up in the cover and be annihilated by heavy flamers that ignore that too! Spread out a bit, and maybe use an exposed squad as the lure.
Keep the kroot mobile. The still have Infiltrate, so infiltrate them in front of everything else. They can't use supporting fire, but everything else can use supporting fire for them. With that much overwatch, they might actually be able to survive the assault and finish off the enemy.
Put the overwatch thing on all the vehicles. If you're going to go vehicle heavy, let those smart missiles overwatch since so much of your firepower is in the tanks.
Seeker missiles can actually fire without a markerlight now. They will fire at the vehicles normal ballistic skill rather than their usual BS 5, and they don't get Ignores Cover, but they can fire. There will be times when it's worth risking the seeker on a non-guaranteed hit if there's something you really need to take out.
And finally, non-Fast vehicles SUCK! I've never had to run vehicles without Tau multitrackers before, and the reduction in firepower while moving is huge. I'm sure that's why secondary weapon systems are all twin-linked now, because most of the time you're going to have to snap-fire them. I'll have to experiment with this, but it's entirely possible that it would be worth stacking 4 or so markerlights onto a target and using them to bring a cruising-speed-vehicle like a hammerhead up to BS 5. Of course, since those shots would still technically be snapshots, you wouldn't be able to fire any of the blast options.
Modifications to the list for future battles will probably include dropping the kroot squad, or at least their sniper rifles. Tanks will get overwatch, although I might drop one of them. Unfortunately, I can't decide which one to drop as they each have a role that isn't easily filled by anything else. Longstrike is one of the best ways to kill heavy vehicles, the ionhead's AP3 large blast is incredible, and the skyray is a markerlight source, extra missiles, and one of my few Skyfire options. I might change the fusion blaster / missile pod suits in some way as they did poorly this round, but that might have been bad luck as much as anything else. They were in position to shoot the land raider, but Longstrike took it out, leaving them only moderately well equipped to deal with the terminators inside.
And that's all there is to report. More later, when I learn more about how it feels to have a recent rule set for this game!
You might consider the early warning system on the ion-heads. Especially against deepstriking Marines, dropping the large ap3 blast on a squad right after they get out of their pod could significantly reduce their effectiveness that round. After looking at the stats for it, I just couldn't find any use for either of our flyers. They take up a slot better used by pathfinders, and the bombers large blast is str 5 ap 5 which means almost everything you face will take an armor save against it.. I know you didn't get much use out of your pathfinders, but properly positioned I think they are way more useful than the bomber. Especially if they are behind your gun line where they would get 3 shots in overwatch with the aid of your ethereal and shooting the markerlights through your troops doesn't matter.
ReplyDeleteGlad you were able to get a full game in after Trystan and I had to bail.
Hmmm, Interceptor with the 8/3 blast. Yeah, that would be nasty! Depending on how far the Marines moved you could hit both the pod and the occupants, and that overcharged blast would have enough juice to damage both.
ReplyDeleteHere's a revelation that should have occurred to me earlier. When you upgrade kroot to sniper rounds for 1 point each, that's a cost of 1 point each. ... Not one point AND your ability to fire regular shots! It's an additional firing mode, not a complete ammo replacement. I feel kinda stupid about the several shooting phases where I was snap-firing the heavy sniper rifles because I moved the unit. I'm still not sure if the sniper choice is a good one, but at least I'm no longer sure it's a bad idea!
ReplyDelete