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| From warhammer40k.wikia.com |
With the nerfing of power weapons and the greater inclusion of night fight we are bound to see plenty more terminators. This has prompted me to ask two things:
A. What advantages has the rulebook given to us?
B. What can we do to counter this threat?
To address the first question, we have 2+ saves of our own in the form of broadsides, Iridium armor donning crisis suits, and the added option of including Shield Drones with either the Broadside or the Iridium armor (For those of you that noticed the XV-89 option in the Forge World Tau Update, good on you). Though we can go on and on about how the rulebook changed our codex, I would like to talk about the second question. Though this is not the only way to deal with terminators, I found it can be one of the most surprising for your enemies. I often think back to fourth edition to my brother playing his Imperial Guard. He often stated "I found the best way to deal with your Broadsides is to never try to out shoot them with heavy weapons. In fact elite infantry seem to do less with their power weapons. The best way to deal with your broadsides is to overwhelm them with infantry in close combat". It hit me, use our basic infantry, fire warriors. Overwhelm them with small arms fire. But my two squads of Fire Warriors aren't your normal fire warriors. They have Ld 10, in addition to BS 5, twin-linked pulse rifles, nightvison, re-roll failed wounds on the Terminators, and force the terminators to re-roll all successful saves. If you read your codex: Tau Empire as religiously as I do, next to your 6th edition faq/errata update, your going to say "Hey I didn't see that". Well don't bother, because all your going to find is how to give them night vision (black sun filter) BS 5 (markerlights), and Ld 10 (if you want to bunker down your very mobile commander taking away one of his greatest strengths or take the gambit of having your Tau running away with the Ethereal). Some of you that read my last post will think, "Oh great, another Forge World rant", but that's not what i'm talking about. In fact you won't find what i'm talking about in the rulebook either... sort of.
The place you will find these rules is in Codex: Eldar and in the allies section of the rule book. Oh yes my friends, i'm talking about our Vesa (helpers). If you wanted to figure out my riddle, 2000 points, two detachments, 2 farseers and spirit stones, the rest is pretty self explanatory. The concept of using other races in conjunction with our Tau is supported by fluff (kroot, vespid, demirug, niccasar, tarellian, Gue'Vesa (guardsmen). The fact that we can now use other common armies as small detachments is really a piece that I have been looking forward to and wishlisting since I saw the Kroot do it for other armies back in White Dwarf 2002 (where most people are shocked by the new allies rules, the Kroot have been doing it for over a decade). But for the most part i'm ecstatic. Before I used to play friendly games where we would use 2 seperate detachments of 1000 points as allies. But I found that the thing that I was thrown me off by how the units visually clash. Whereas the kroot used to do this, they also were normally only used with Tau, so they were just for us and looking dirty was the flavor. The vespids wore armor that could be painted with the army colors. When I played these games I noticed that the units I used didn't really feel right. When I started writing this I didn't really understand just how much there was for each ally when you consider rules combinations, so I made up my mind to write separately for each army, which you will see soon if you choose to follow my blog.
The Double Edged Sword
Unfortunately since 6th edition came out, the only ally I seem to see is Tau. But who can blame them, 2+ armor save on the best tank killing weapon in the game is an addition everyone should be fighting for. Luckily Games Workshop made the intelligent move of foreseeing this and limited the broadsides, making it so they can only rain death on one vehicle/squadron a turn by removing the Target Lock. Though that hurts us a little, we still have the option of taking two more squads. Take comfort though friends, no one knows the Tau Empire's weaknesses better than a Tau player.
I Didn't Realize I Was Cheating, I Misinterpreted The Rules
Before you guys go crazy with rules, there was one thing that I realized, for lots of other codices I only know the basic idea of the rules. I never noticed that the codex: Eldar has spells that are Eldar specific. This means we can enhance Fire Warriors effectiveness by hitting an enemy with "Doom", but on the other hand "Fortune" can only be used on Eldar Units, not Tau. This also means that if I hadn't looked this up I wouldn't have known, so some Dark Eldar player could have re-rolled his 2+ invulnerable save from his battle brother ally and I would have had no idea because I only understand the general idea behind the spell "Fortune". So if you want to continue to be competitive you need to pull some Football Coaching and get a hold of the other players rulebooks and watch his videos. Fortunately for us this isn't Football, we won't be chastised because it isn't cheating in this game. So if you want to really understand the weaknesses and strengths of a specific army you have 4 options.
1. Get a hold of the codex, nothings better than getting to the nuts and bolts.
2. Find a blog or another website dedicated to that army, you'd be surprised how often someone posts "Need help fighting against Tau". Under this section you will find tactics that you can build a strategy to counter. You will even find people giving advice on what to avoid when it comes to Tau (i.e. what you need to exploit)
3. Watch youtube battle reports. If you type in something like "Eldar Battle Reports, by date" you'll get the most recent Eldar battles, which will give you a feel for how they play and compete with other armies
4. Follow my blog, i'll do the above 3 for you and you can exploit my labor for free
I'd like to leave you with some inspirational conversions i've been looking up for the last couple years. Hopefully this will inspire you to blend your new allies more with the Tau look
Imperial Gue'Vesa
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| I don't remember where I found this but not mine |
Tau Necron blend
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| from advancedtautactica.com |
Tau Sniper Bike, a few adjustments and you have a counts as Eldar Jetbike
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| from double-eagle |
Thought of the Day
Eldar Unit casts fortune on itself. My Psyker successfully casts misfortune on the same unit. I say we play the way the rulebook tells us. I wound you, you throw the dice look at all the dice that could have been, then you pick them all up and roll them again.
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