How do AM deal with Tau?

[bozo69pd]

I have heard a few rumors that AM can put up a good fight against Tau. No batreps though... can anyone confirm this? It makes sense that 2 shooty armies may have quite a fight... but what is the optimized set up?

 

Is it possible to take a list that can fight Tau and also Eldar decently?

[Truesight]

Tau are shooty, more shooty than guard even, but they are mid range.  Guard can level you from across the board.  As for Tau and Eldar, we have some units they dread, eradicators and wyverns are cheap, and absolutely murder their infantry options.

Both armies have abundant high strength shots (Scatter bikes, riptides), but will have difficulty removing multiple large blob squads if they heavily invest in that.  

Forgeworld helps if you have access to it, if not we can still do decently.

 

That said, if either is going for the throat, no friends style (double riptide wing, multiple wraithknights) Guard will struggle.  Everyone struggles.

[bozo69pd]

Usually I'm against 1 wraith knight or 1 riptide wing. I keep bringing a shadowsword but it always gets murdered by turn 2. My 1 imperial Knight usually dies turn 3 then I concede lol. I'm considered spamming the new Psykana formation instead of bringing lots of veterans and possibly investing in Wyverns, but wyverns don't do anything against WK and riptides?

[march10k]

As a player of both armies, the only thing the guard has to fear that much is the optimized stealth cadre.  And there's a systematic methodical way of dismantling that:

 

1) Wyverns take out the stealth drones on turn one.

 

2)  After that, the ghostkeels are easy to kill, and your highest priority target.

 

3)  Once the ghostkeels are killed, the stealth teams are just regular old stealth teams.  No more shots hitting rear armor, and the tau are hard-pressed to handle AV14.  

 

4)  Regular or extra crispy?

 

Yeah, I suppose you have to worry about a stormsurge or a buffmanderbomb, but the stormsurge isn't really all that great once the four D missiles are gone (I'd field a knight just to bait those missiles!), and the buffmanderbomb is really expensive wyvern bait.  

[bozo69pd]

1. Gotta get me some wyverns

2. Can 200 lasgun shots kill a ghost keel? How about psychic shriek?

3. My only vehicles are my Shadowsword and Knight so far

4. Depends if I'm using a regular or Heavy flamer. I like flamers.

[M@verik115]

The only thing I have come to struggle with are riptides. Everything else can be easily dealt with with wyverns and leman russ battlecannons. 

Riptides are a mission though and they can easily disable half of your vehicles before you kill one, though I find punishers quite apt at taking them out just through sheer weight of number shots. 

[WarriorFish]

Agreed, we're an older codex so if they bring the beard Guard will struggle but in a straight up fight we can take them if you stick to the tenets of Guard: numbers and fire power. All their fancy weapons and tricks count for little when shooting up cheap units, just got to make sure you protect your heavy hitters with said cheap units so they can do the winning.

[Frater Cornelius]

Emperor's Wrath will send Scatbikes and most Tau units go home weeping in their body-sized japanese anime pillows. Being able to give the Ignore Cover order to a Basilisk and to make it twin-linked by several means is nothing to be sneered at. Barrage means it will bypass pesky tanking units and double out Crisis, it will deal with Jink and cover bonuses and it outranged everything either faction can bring. Hide them behind a Void Shield to make it even tastier.

 

Riptides usually fall to massed Plasma that Guard is able to bring. As for Wraithknights... yeah, that's an issue. Just keep on it, full auto, and hope that it drops sooner rather than later. Without Grav it is rather hard to drop it.

[march10k]

Without Grav it is rather hard to drop it.

 

...and that is the way 40k is supposed to be.  All-comers lists for everyone, and you'll win some games and lose others.  When you start building a custom list against each opponent, things get stupid fast.  Marines will probably have grav in their lists by default.    When the opponent says "hmm...I'm playing against marines on Saturday, I'd better drop the stuff that's vulnerable to grav and load up on AP3," the fun is gone.

 

 

The only thing I have come to struggle with are riptides. 

 

Interesting.  They've never really bothered me.  Pask in a vanquisher with a hull lascannon is enough to keep them penned in a ruin, and a pair of demolishers is enough to ensure that the ruin is in a deep corner of the table...then I simply ignore them unless they offer themselves up.  To be honest, as a tau, guard, and marine player, I find them overpriced underperformers.  A single guard-like pieplate for the price a of a land raider (once you give it FNP and stuff...which is essential)...they're certainly far more dangerous to marines than they are to guard.  They are nice to look at, though...and as a tau player, they attract a lot of attention and fire, which is great if that's your plan and it keeps the heat off of other units that you plan to win the game with!  But their offensive performance certainly doesn't justify fielding one.

[Truesight]

 

Interesting.  They've never really bothered me.  Pask in a vanquisher with a hull lascannon is enough to keep them penned in a ruin, and a pair of demolishers is enough to ensure that the ruin is in a deep corner of the table...then I simply ignore them unless they offer themselves up. 

Vanquisher Pask with hull lascannon only does .697 wounds a turn on average though, meaning it'd take him over 7 turns to kill it (Math below if you want to check), and that's if the Riptide doesn't give himself a 3++.  Riptides can be a whole lot nastier than that too, Y'vahra are utterly terrifying in the ease they can just delete our tanks and infantry, and can't be held in combat.  Also the new riptide formation (which has a minimum of 3...sigh) means they fire twice in the first turn now, four times with secondary weapons if they ripple fire.

 

They are a real problem.

 

Having said that Vanquishers are the solution, but it's Armoured Battlegroup Vanquishers with Coaxial Heavy Stubbers and Beast Hunter Shells.  One shot kill potential will keep them honest and stop them bullying your army.

 

Pask Math

88% chance to hit vanquisher shot

77% chance to hit lascannon shot

 

wounding on 2's with preferred enemy

97% chance to wound=1.6 wounds

 

5++=1.05 wounds

5+ Feel no pain=0.697 wounds

 

0.37 vanquisher wounds

0.32 lascannon wounds

[march10k]

~sigh~  Always with the mathhammer.  Pasquisher doesn't kill the riptide, he deters the riptide.  It works.  

 

I agree that beasthunter shells are better...and they're more acceptable in normal games than Y'vahra.  Due to moving around a lot, I've frequented a dozen different LGSs for months at a time over the last 18 years, and I haven't yet been "resident" at one where forgeworld units with the "experimental" stamp were welcome without prior coordination.  The beasthunter vanquisher would be hit or miss, some places are happy to allow pretty much everything forgeworld that's lacking the "experimental rules" caveat in everyday play...but only recently has it become anything but vanishingly rare to allow forgeworld rules in competitive play (local leagues, weekend tourneys, etc, not just talking about GTs)

 

Honestly, even triptides don't really bother me as much as a single wraithknight or imperial knight does.  Even novaed, a single S9AP2 large blast against AV14 isn't much of a threat, and my troops are all forward sentries, meaning they usually have 3+ cover saves.  If you want to go to the trouble of eliminating that save and then pieplate ten veteran guardsmen with a riptide, by all means, go for it.  The riptide wing gives you six riptides for the price of three, in terms of shooting, if you give up JSJ, which definitely helps with the idea that they're overpriced for the number of targets that each one can address...but it doesn't make the individual shots more threatening to AV14.  They're still large blast lascannons when novaed.  The large blast makes it harder for them to miss and makes it possible for them to hit multiple tanks with each shot...but in terms of one riptide shooting one tank, it's effectively a 250 point BS5 lascannon...  

 

Even with the formation rules, I would LOVE for a tau player to spend 750 points on riptides when I'm spamming tanks.  Of course, if you're talking about the riptide wing, that allows in the emperor's fist (tanks and an enginseer) and emperor's talon (outflanking armored lascannon or plasma cannon sentinels with "preferred enemy: your riptide wing", in this case) formations.

[Truesight]

Spamming tanks does not work against new Tau.  They are honestly the last army you would want to do that against these days.  I don't want to be a negative nelly here, but if we are talking about counters, Leman Russ' are not it. 
Want some more non mathhammer proof?

Here is a battle report with the Emperors fist (a bad formation) against said Riptide wing in a game: http://www.twitch.tv/frontlinegaming_tv/v/37897380

 TLDR Rundown:https://www.frontlinegaming.org/2016/01/29/tuesday-night-fight-post-game-tau-vs-astra-militarum/

 

The game was honestly a joke and Guard got stomped with no ability to counter play.  

[Frater Cornelius]

These days, Artillery and Blob guard seems to be doing better. Granted, I have not seen any Guard in a while but going by the last ETC, where the only Guard were blob guard. We are talkin 2-3 full Platoon Guard. With some fire support and not a single Russ. The wonders of D and Grav :D

[Goonbandito]

~sigh~  Always with the mathhammer.  Pasquisher doesn't kill the riptide, he deters the riptide.  It works. 

How does he deter a Riptide?  It's not much of a deterrence if he can't effectively threaten it.  Punisher Pask on the other hand...

 

 

 

The main thing I find when playing against Tau is to take care of Markerlight support first.  Without that, their BS is generally no better than yours and they can no longer Ignore Cover all over the place.  Luckily Wyverns and Eradicators are excellent at deleting Pathfinders off the board.

[march10k]

Spamming tanks does not work against new Tau.  They are honestly the last army you would want to do that against these days.  I don't want to be a negative nelly here, but if we are talking about counters, Leman Russ' are not it. 

Want some more non mathhammer proof?

Here is a battle report with the Emperors fist (a bad formation) against said Riptide wing in a game: http://www.twitch.tv/frontlinegaming_tv/v/37897380

 TLDR Rundown:https://www.frontlinegaming.org/2016/01/29/tuesday-night-fight-post-game-tau-vs-astra-militarum/

 

The game was honestly a joke and Guard got stomped with no ability to counter play.  

 

An anecdote is a piece of  anecdotal evidence, it's not proof...let alone "more non mathhammer proof."  There's a world of difference between proof and evidence.  

 

And what a turd of an anecdote.  It has almost nothing to do with what I was talking about.  I'm talking about fielding nothing but leman russ variants and outflanking armored sentinels.  This "proof" is about as far from that as it is possible to be.  The whole guard army had FIVE russes, total.  It had the assault company, which actually is terrible in the context of facing riptide spam. And it had a CCS as the decurion HQ, direct quote here from the idiot in the video "company command squad because you have to take one."  Wrong. You can take a tank commander or a CCS.  Five tanks is the bare minimum for an emperor's fist.  I guess he didn't have seven russes to do the tank commander with.  Then he says "oh, and I took a stormtrooper squad because I had points left over."  So clearly, he's just throwing whatever crap he has on the shelf on the table.  

 

On the other side, we have a riptide wing, the experimental cheese-tide Y'vahra, a stormsurge, and 16 marker drones.  It's an elite tau list versus whatever the guard guy had on the shelf.  5 random assorted russes versus 5 carefully chosen monstrous creatures with markerlight spam that the guard player didn't have an answer for.  The game was over in the list building phase, that has ZERO to tell us about how good AV14 spam is against 250 point lascannons.

 

"spamming tanks doesn't work against tau," you say, and then your 'proof' (evidence) is a game of WAAC tau against a random collection of IG models that happens to include five russes?  That's not "spamming tanks!"  Five is the minimum I'd field in an all comers list, it's certainly not spam.  Actually, I can legally get a dozen russes for 1850, but I promised russes and sentinels (and frankly, the combo is stronger than pure russes), so let's look at an example with nine (7 is probably the extreme low end of "tank spam"):

 

Here's what I can get in a cadian battle group, legally, for 1850, designed to counter riptide spam (The only thing not in my model collection is four of the vanquishers -I have enough tanks, just not six vanqs, but LRBTs are visiually similar, that'd leave me one short- and none of my horde of sentinels have plasma cannons):

 

Pask in vanquisher with two vanquisher wingmen, all with lascannons (all preferred enemy: you)

 

Second tank commander with two wingmen, all with lascannons (all BS4), all in vanquishers

 

two demolishers with extra armor

 

one eradicator with extra armor

 

nine outflanking armored sentinels with plasma cannons, all with preferred enemy "your riptide wing" and the ability to shoot and then run behind cover.  

 

Now...you have to admit, that's a list that looks a lot different than the "I fielded the models on my shelf" crap in the video, no?  

 

 

I've played IG since 1998 and tau since 2003, and I'm still playing both of them.  Both are armies you can build strong lists with, but spamming riptides, while it's great against some armies, it's not that hot against armored company guard.  The emperor's fist isn't a great formation. I don't use it, but against riptide spam, it's fantastic.  Riptides can't effectively threaten AV14, they have one nova charged lascannon pieplate per landraider-costed model to work with, it's a joke.  The optimized stealth cadre is much, much, much better against mech guard.  Two keels, one of them being targetlocked, and both with burst cannons, plus 2x6 stealth suits with no upgrades, it's four dead tanks per turn for roughly the points cost of four tanks.  It's cheap enough that you could squeeze two into a list (which you would only want to do against leman russ spam).  The emperor's fist isn't great for killing riptides, it's great for ignoring them as long as they stay back.  If they come out in the open, it has no trouble packing in the correct guns to kill them.  

 

 

 

How does he deter a Riptide?  It's not much of a deterrence if he can't effectively threaten it.  Punisher Pask on the other hand...

 

 

 

 

When you're the owner of that landraider-priced monstrous creature, you don't want to risk Pask stripping two wounds in a single round of shooting, that's how he deters them  You're also worried about losing two HP to each wingman....  Mathhammer routinely gets the piss beat out of it by human psychology.  Very few players are cold enough to run that riptide out into the open with a plan for the suit to end the game with two wounds remaining.  

 

Punisher Pask is a terrible idea.  Get within 24", and you're trapped, you can't outrun riptides, they will run up and punch you.  Especially when there're three or more of them. Goodbye warlord.  Even worse, to get within 24", you have to get within JSJ range of fusion blasters.  More likely, though, jump towards you, run, jump towards you, assault you with a monstrous creature the next turn.

[Truesight]

 

An anecdote is a piece of  anecdotal evidence, it's not proof...let alone "more non mathhammer proof."  There's a world of difference between proof and evidence.  

 

On the other side, we have a riptide wing, the experimental cheese-tide Y'vahra, a stormsurge, and 16 marker drones.  It's an elite tau list versus whatever the guard guy had on the shelf.  5 random assorted russes versus 5 carefully chosen monstrous creatures with markerlight spam that the guard player didn't have an answer for.  The game was over in the list building phase, that has ZERO to tell us about how good AV14 spam is against 250 point lascannons.

 

"spamming tanks doesn't work against tau," you say, and then your 'proof' (evidence) is a game of WAAC tau against a random collection of IG models that happens to include five russes?  That's not "spamming tanks!"  Five is the minimum I'd field in an all comers list, it's certainly not spam.  Actually, I can legally get a dozen russes for 1850, but I promised russes and sentinels (and frankly, the combo is stronger than pure russes), so let's look at an example with nine (7 is probably the extreme low end of "tank spam"):

 

Here's what I can get in a cadian battle group, legally, for 1850, designed to counter riptide spam (The only thing not in my model collection is four of the vanquishers -I have enough tanks, just not six vanqs, but LRBTs are visiually similar, that'd leave me one short- and none of my horde of sentinels have plasma cannons):

 

Pask in vanquisher with two vanquisher wingmen, all with lascannons (all preferred enemy: you)

 

Second tank commander with two wingmen, all with lascannons (all BS4), all in vanquishers

 

two demolishers with extra armor

 

one eradicator with extra armor

 

nine outflanking armored sentinels with plasma cannons, all with preferred enemy "your riptide wing" and the ability to shoot and then run behind cover.  

 

Now...you have to admit, that's a list that looks a lot different than the "I fielded the models on my shelf" crap in the video, no?  

 

 

 

You don't have to tell me about how it is a bad match up.  I told you it wasn't.  -You- mentioned how you would love to face riptides with tanks, and specifically use the emperors fist.  And yes that list is different, but it isn't good.  You kill one riptide if you fire everything in your army into it, and that's assuming every pie plate in your army connects, and it has to be out of cover, and not using it's defense.  In return they will be trashing tanks in swathes.  Let alone trying to deal with storm surges and D missiles. Also, 9 Russ and no supporting infantry?  Even those riptides will be closing in and smashing you in close combat, let alone anything else in the game.

 

I notice you continually move the goal posts and critique "Mathammer" and "turd anecdotes", yet fail to provide anything yourself to back up your claims.  

 

 

 

 Riptides can't effectively threaten AV14, they have one nova charged lascannon pieplate per landraider-costed model to work with, it's a joke.  The optimized stealth cadre is much, much, much better against mech guard.  

 

This is telling.  Competitive lists don't use Ion accelerators, they use Heavy Burst cannons, and 24 strength 6 rending bs 4 (it will be bs 5 ignores cover) shots do hurt AV14.  And everything else.

 

 

Don't misunderstand, I like tanks, see that "Armoured Regiment" next to my name?  It's because I used to use a lot of them.  

I've gotten tired of just picking them up off the table against Tau and Eldar, the difference in toughness between heavy armour and monstrous creatures has gotten to such a point that vehicles, unless they are cheap and MSU, are not really viable in a competitive metagame.

[Frater Cornelius]

I actually have to agree that even the most carefully chosen Leman Russ Tanks have a bad match-up against Tau. They have this Formation where they always hit the rear arc, regardless of facing, they their own D on top of the usual stuff like deep striking Fusion Blasters and so forth.

Not saying that winning is impossible. Just saying that AV14 doesn't mean as much as it used to.

Spamming Chimeras on the other hand is another topic. IG can put up more targets than even Tau can handle. Remove their Markerlights and just play the mission. That is the reason why blob Guard is popular. You can not possibly kill them all.

[WarriorFish]

Discussion is good, but please keep it civil and try to address everyone's points. Proof is a nebulous concept across the Internet, so some trust is required in order to debate reasonably.

[Nicodemus Doloroso]

I admittedly have limited experience, but have faced dual Riptides at 1500 points.

 

Frankly, I found that ignoring them and beating on the rest of his army was the better course at least at that level. Riptides do not deal enough damage to warrant the amount of firepower that must be devoted to taking them down. Of course these battles where a while ago and I think we against their previous codex ...

[Lukash_]

Second tank commander with two wingmen, all with lascannons (all BS4), all in vanquishers

 

Have I been drunk since the 6th ed 'dex came out, or does only the commander get BS4? I could have sworn it's the latter.

 

I actually have to agree that even the most carefully chosen Leman Russ Tanks have a bad match-up against Tau. They have this Formation where they always hit the rear arc, regardless of facing, they their own D on top of the usual stuff like deep striking Fusion Blasters and so forth.

Not saying that winning is impossible. Just saying that AV14 doesn't mean as much as it used to.

Spamming Chimeras on the other hand is another topic. IG can put up more targets than even Tau can handle. Remove their Markerlights and just play the mission. That is the reason why blob Guard is popular. You can not possibly kill them all.

 

Eh, the Optimized Cheese Cadre is idiotic but it's also expensive. Maybe it has to do with our local Tau player not being a twat but I've never seen it.

 

Spamming Chimeras? I'm not totally convinced; Missilesides will remove Chimeras like it's their job. The amount of S5/6/7 shots Tau can put out makes that a bit shaky, I think.

 

I admittedly have limited experience, but have faced dual Riptides at 1500 points.

 

Frankly, I found that ignoring them and beating on the rest of his army was the better course at least at that level. Riptides do not deal enough damage to warrant the amount of firepower that must be devoted to taking them down. Of course these battles where a while ago and I think we against their previous codex ...

 

This. Yes, Riptides are far too hard to kill for their price. Their markerlights are not.

His 600+ points of weaboo battlesuits are cool until all they do is shoot at cover-camping guardsmen, killing barely a tenth of that a turn. I've said it before and I'll say it again.

[Goonbandito]

 

How does he deter a Riptide?  It's not much of a deterrence if he can't effectively threaten it.  Punisher Pask on the other hand...

 

When you're the owner of that landraider-priced monstrous creature, you don't want to risk Pask stripping two wounds in a single round of shooting, that's how he deters them  You're also worried about losing two HP to each wingman....  Mathhammer routinely gets the piss beat out of it by human psychology.  Very few players are cold enough to run that riptide out into the open with a plan for the suit to end the game with two wounds remaining.  

 

Punisher Pask is a terrible idea.  Get within 24", and you're trapped, you can't outrun riptides, they will run up and punch you.  Especially when there're three or more of them. Goodbye warlord.  Even worse, to get within 24", you have to get within JSJ range of fusion blasters.  More likely, though, jump towards you, run, jump towards you, assault you with a monstrous creature the next turn.

 

My point is that a Vanquisher Pask threatens nothing aside from being able to ID some Crisis Suits/Broadsides.  Your argument that it can potentially do 2 Wounds to a Riptide is kinda meaningless - you know what else could potentially do 2 Wounds?  An Autocannon.  Hell, a Lasgun shoots twice in Rapid-Fire.  That still doesn't mean they have a great chance of doing anything.  The Tau player doesn't have to do anything about Vanquisher Pask - they can and they should just simply ignore it and use the Riptide to kill the rest of your army.  Punisher Pask on the other hand poses a threat to almost any unit in their army, and consequently is something they do have to deal with.  Yes, Punishers have some severe downsides in their limited range, but that can be mitigated somewhat with an infantry bubble wrap which might force the Tau player to have to deal with first.

 

However, the same is also true for you - you don't have to deal with the Riptides either.  Focus on killing their Markerlight support first and Riptides become significantly less scary.  I think we're actually talking the same thing here, in that AV14 tanks used correctly are still pretty effective against Tau, because to kill them they need to get close and that tends to go against a Tau player's general thought of mind.  I just don't see Vanquishers as the way to do it, because single shot weapons in this game suck in general but suck even harder against Monstrous Creatures (Beast Hunter Shells notwithstanding).  Hey, I actually like using Vanquishers because I love the idea of Tank Destroyer Russ', but I don't expect them to do much for me on the battlefield.

 

 

[Ulrik_Ironfist]

An Armored Battlegroup Command Vanquisher with Beasthunter shells should do a pretty good job of removing MC's like those riptides. The riptide will get a 5+, but should it fail, it insta dies. It's also a blast marker, so it can be used against the battlesuits as well. Anything with multiple wounds, which is all tau battlesuits (save the little stealth ones) will just die to a S8 AP2 instant death small blast. Sure you'll have to deal with cover and invuln saves, but you'd be contending with that anyway.

 

Throw eradicators into the mix with all that heavy flamer goodness for all the ignores cover. Or hell, go ham and take a hellhammer.

[Nicodemus Doloroso]

On the theme of killing marker lights, might not hell hounds be quite helpful for some decent ranged cover save ignoring goodness that will roast those pathfinders nicely?

[Goonbandito]

On the theme of killing marker lights, might not hell hounds be quite helpful for some decent ranged cover save ignoring goodness that will roast those pathfinders nicely?

They would, if they didn't cost as much as an Eradicator which gives you basically the same effect (S6, AP4, Ignores Cover) but on an AV14 hull and a bigger threat radius.

[Truesight]

In the interests of research, lets put out a challenge:  What is the cheapest means to kill a riptide with feel no pain in one round for guard?

Opponents stats: 6 Toughness, 5 wounds, 2+ Armour, 5+ invulnerable, +5 feel no pain.

 

My entry:

Elysian command Squad, 4 plasma guns, 1 plasma pistol

Elysian Command Squad, 4 plasma guns, 1 plasma pistol

 

260 points.

 

Both deep strike in and give themselves a Bring It Down! order, doing just over 5 wounds on average.

 

I'm kind of interested in this unit now, as 18 deep striking plasma shots with tank hunter/monster hunter, or ignores cover sounds pretty good to me.