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Any Questions?
James asked: I will be in a league that will start at either 400pt Combat Patrol or just 500pts standard. I am a new player and I like Tau. Your website has helped a lot to shorten my learning curve. I know that there will be 3 New Orks, 4 Necrons, 3 Sisters of Battle, 3 Tyranids and 4 Space Marine players. There will be about 26 people in the league. There are currently no other Tau and no Imperial Guard. I guess my question is what style of play (such as JSJ or Mech Tau or Mobile Tau or Rain or a Hybrid) would be a better army for a new player in that environment? In addition, what would I need to look for? I am starting this army from zero, though I have some access to a loaner army. Okay, there are several important points here that I'd like to address before answering, as they will help explain the answers that I give. The league sounds interesting. There seems to be a large number of players and a fair amount of variety. I would expect that most of the remaining players will be Space Marines or Chaos, because those are the two most common armies. (Local conditions vary, obviously. I remember encountering one gaming store where about half of the players were Imperial Guard. They actually outnumbered the Space Marine players!) In that environment, you can expect a complete mix of shooting and assault, so you really can't skew everything in one direction or the other. If you only prepare for assaulty enemies, the shooty ones will totally chew you up. If you only prepare for shooty armies, the assaulty ones will break your back. I am assuming here that you won't be able to completely change your army from one game to the next, based on knowledge of what army you'll be facing. (Partly because that's frequently a feature of leagues, and partly because you are new and thus will likely have a limited number of models to choose from. Unless you are rich, in which case I will happily be your new best friend! :) ) So what we have so far is a requirement of an army that will be flexible in terms of dealing with both shooting and assault. We also need an army that can have that flexibility with a limited number of models, or at least a limited model pool to draw from in one game to the next.
Next is a brief refresher on the Tau playstyles mentioned above. First though, a quick reminder. Almost all Tau playstyles are based on the concept of Victory Point Denial. I have seen Tau armies play without using this concept and they usually didn't work very well. Don't think in terms of crushing the enemy army and leaving no survivors. Think in terms of reducing their capacity to hurt you and keeping them at arm's length. In a 500pt game, if you do 200 points of damage to the enemy and they only do 125pts of damage to you, you've won. More importantly, if you correctly identify the part of their army that can do the most damage to you (The usual suspects are fast assault units most of the time) and take that out first, you'll be ahead the whole game. Now, on to the play styles... Jump, Shoot, Jump: The basic idea here is to use the Crisis Suits and Stealth suits and their ability to move out, shoot and jump back behind terrain again. If you have decent terrain, this is a great recipe for doing decent damage and taking almost no damage in return. The primary limitation is that of terrain. If you don't have much terrain, it's hard to keep all your units protected. If you don't have terrain at the right distance from the enemy, you'll either be too close and get caught, or you'll be too far away to do real damage. Note that "real damage" is _very_ different from what other armies would consider real damage. Your units won't do a lot of damage in a single punch, but they should make up for it by doing small amounts all game and not taking much damage in return.
Mechanized Tau: The primary focus here is to get everything inside an armored hull. You then start by hitting the fast assault units and the anti-vehicle weaponry. If you can take care of those, you'll be mostly home free. Think of using the hammerheads as long-range snipers. Hide them partly behind terrain so that they can only be seen by the unit they are targeting. To keep units out of assault, use the Fish of Fury maneuver: Move out two Devilfish with FireWarriors and place them in front of the enemy assault unit. Put both Devilfish next to each other. They should be about 2.5 inches apart. (That way nothing can pass between them. Disembark the FireWarriors behind the Devilfish. FireWarriors Rapid Fire into the enemy unit and the Devilfish pour their fire into it as well. In addition to doing a lot of damage to the unit, this will keep all but fast assaulters from assaulting your Firewarriors, since they will have to try to move around the sides of the Devilfish, which will be longer than their movement. Mobile Tau: This is a relatively new concept for Tau. While it features some of the same elements as Static Tau (also sometimes referred to as Gunline Tau) it uses them differently. Basically think of a wall of Broadsides moving forward with large numbers of Firewarriors (typically with Carbines) moving up in support and Crisis Suits jumping in and out to help where needed. This is mobile, aggressive Tau, seizing objectives and taking the center of the board. There is still the essential Tau fragility to assault, though this can be mitigated a bit by Kroot and by the large numbers of Broadsides and FireWarriors. What makes this playstyle different than most Tau styles is that it has a lot of bodies and a lot of armor, meaning that it's much more resilient than most Tau armies. Because of this, it can be played much more aggressively than most Tau armies. One limitation of this list is it's newness. There aren't very many players of this style out there, which means there is very little support available from other players and so there aren't any tried and true tactics and there won't be a lot of really good list advice out there. While it can be fun to boldly go where no man has gone before, blazing a trail is hard and it makes for a rough learning curve. This can be especially harsh if you are just starting an army, since you may end up buying and painting units that turn out to be useless to you.
Rain: This is also a very new concept, but it's based a bit more on traditional Tau principles. The primary idea is to have a highly mobile army that isn't concentrated in any one spot and so is hard to get to grips with. The workhorse of this playstyle is the Deathrain configuration of Crisis Suit. With Twin-linked Missile Pods and a Targeting array, it is very inexpensive and very accurate. It also has very long range and can threaten light to medium vehicles as well as infantry. Basically, you want to play keep-away from the enemy army and use your long range and mobility to stay safe. This style has a very hard time with Terminators and Heavy Tanks, so you may need to add in things that do well against them. Hybrid: The Hybrid here generally refers to a hybrid between Mechanized Tau and Static Tau. It features a decent amount of static Firepower, usually in terms of lots of FireWarriors and Broadsides, combined with elements of mobility, usually some Hammerheads, Devilfish and Crisis Suits. The difficulty is finding the right balance between the Mechanized and Static elements. If you have too little of one or the other, you lose the benefits of having both. Okay, now we've had our recap, here are my recommendations. Mobile Tau will probably be your worst choice, since it will have a harder learning curve and will require a large number of units for you to buy and paint. Similarly, Hybrid would probably be a poor choice, since it also requires a large number of units, but at least it offers the benefit of using tried and true methods. I think that Rain, Mech Tau and JSJ could all be effective in this league. Rain, being the least tried and tested and requiring a large number of Crisis Suits, might not be your best bet as a beginner. Mech Tau and JSJ both offer effective firepower and defense. They also have a similar outlay in cash, since Mech Tau requires a lot of Devilfish and Hammerheads, while JSJ requires a lot (though not as many as Rain) of Crisis Suits, which are quite expensive.) Both of them have good information and support available, which makes using them easier. Both should do very well against almost any army you are likely to run into. I think that JSJ will do better against Shooty Armies, and I think Mech Tau will fare better against assault armies. It will be only a slight difference, though. Basically, it comes down to going with which one sounds better to you. If you like hovertanks, go with Mech Tau, if you like mechanized suits and Jet Packs, go with JSJ. If you enjoyed this, email me and let me know |
