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Thoughts on the games and Tau list
I’ve had a real problem with armies that can air assault or teleport which, let’s face it, most armies can to some degree. It was only bad luck that stopped Tim’s teleporting Chosen deciding the game on Turn 1 I think, and I’ve been thrashed by Space Marines in the past. When I play with my Guard and I get air assaulted I know it’s going to hurt, but I also know that I’ve got plenty of formations that don’t mind getting up close to sort things out afterwards if they have to. The Tau don’t have anything that wants to stay close to the enemy (I guess there’s kroot, but I haven’t used them, so can’t really comment), so once the air assaulters are amongst you, it causes real problems as it disrupts your whole back line badly.
I've found it quite difficult to win games through goals with the Tau, especially by the third turn. They are good at shooting stuff, so can often get BTS, but the aggressive goals (Blitz and Take and Hold) can be difficult as the Tau like to hang back and don’t have much ability to force the enemy off objectives with assaults. The defensive goals can be better for the Tau, but I find these generally hard to achieve as they are often easy for the enemy to deny you. This can make things difficult for the Tau – unless they manage to just shoot everything on the table of course.
Both my Moray and my Scorpionfish got killed against Tom, and the Moray got killed again against Tim. They both have a 75cm range for their key weapons, which is obviously quite long, but it’s not so long that they can stay completely out of harm’s way if they want to be effective. Tom’s HQ (the BTS) redeployed so my Scorpionfish had to move forward a bit to bring its missiles to bear (it was still only about 20cm from my table edge, but out of cover). This exposed it to a doubling Baneblade Company late in the game, and it was taken down.
The Moray is very powerful – I can see that a list with three of them in would be horrible. But they aren’t unbeatable, and they can be seen and shot from everywhere. In the game against Tom it was killed by the Shadowsword at the second attempt – first one was saved by the deflector. Tim took it out with shooting from a doubling Death Wheel. The deflector is pretty poor against ordinary fire, so anything with a significant amount of decent ranged firepower (such as a Leman Russ company) could cause problems. I think Dobbsy’s suggestion of increasing the Moray to 350 pts is probably a good one, to prevent you taking more than 2 in a 3000pt game.
The one occasion that the Tau army felt in it's element was when I called co-ordinated fire with my Scorpionfish and Stingrays on Tom’s Regimental HQ. They were in range of my missiles by then, and markerlit, so I needed 3+ with the Scorpionfish’s AP missiles on sustain, ignoring cover. The Stingrays are also particularly good at taking on mech companies due to their mixed payload. Those two formations ripped the heart out of Tom’s HQ and it was polished off later in the turn to earn me the BTS.
However, in general my experience is that the Scorpionfish doesn’t achieve a huge amount, even when the enemy is markerlit – it did almost nothing against Tim’s army. It only fires 6 guided missiles at long range. I suppose if you had three Scorpionfish and maybe 6 markerlight sentries to saturate the enemy half it could start getting silly. But then you wouldn’t have a lot of support slots for other stuff. I like the idea of them (and I’ve converted a model!) so would like to see them stay in the list.
I like the way Crisis suits feel. They have to get quite close to use their powerful weaponry, but then run the risk of getting caught, so it’s a fun balancing act using them. I haven’t seen a real problem with the jet packs rule yet, as my crisis suits have still been caught in firefights sometimes (and in base to base by infiltrating daemons against Tim). However, I wouldn’t mind testing the suggested rule of jumping 10cm after firing – if the Crisis suits get their MW FF attack back, they would need something like this to tone them down.
That's about it for now.
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