November 23, 2009

Daemons vs Imperial Guard - Battle Reports from the 9. SiG - TrotzkiHatesMe Round 3

After having received some serious pain in the last game, I was disturbed hearing that my next opponent was playing Space Wolves. I had seen several lists on the tourney that really gave me a headache (full of Thunder Wolves and Rune Priests). The last game was played with 5 objectives with long table edges as deployment zone, with my special objective being to keep one HQ and one troop choice alive. When he handed me his list I was kind of relieved that his list was quite “usual” with 3 Rhinos full of Grey Hunters (one with a Rune Priest inside) and a Drop pod loaded up with 4 Wolf Guard (combi melters). But most of his 1650 points were seated in his Land Raider Crusader that carried Ragnar Blackmane and a Killy Unit o´Doom of Wolf Guard (kitted out with everything) that really gave me a the shivers.


I won the roll to choose sides and allowed him to go first. He set up everything in one big wall of tanks and awaited my arrival. The Chaos Gods again decided to leave me with my second wave and I deepstruck them in serious distance to his units. My Soul Grinder deviated greatly taking him far into the open ready to be blown away by his melter drop pods. With almost shooting in this turn (with the exception to my flamers flaming his Rhinos destroying one Storm Bolter – whoot !) I awaited his counter strike. In his turn he drop podded the Wolf Guard next to my Soul Grinder and drove two of his Rhinos onto the objectives on his side of the table, while his Land Raider and the last Rhino speeded directly into my lines. He then started his shooting phase and went on a bad dice streak I haven´t seen like that for a long time. Of the 4 melters in the Wolf Guard unit only one hit the Soul Grinder, rolling snake eyes for penetration.


His Land Raider opened fire on my Chariot of Slaanesh dealing him only two wounds with hurricane bolters and assault cannon fire, while the two storm bolters on the Rhinos failed to even deal one wound to the flamers. In my turn everything I had in reserves arrived giving me a lot of confidence to take the upper hand in this game. I was able to destroy one of the Rhinos (housing the Rune Priest and 9 Grey Hunters) through shooting and my flamers started to chase one of his Rhinos across the map for 3 turns blowing of its storm bolter. In my assault phase the Fiends of Slaanesh nearly obliterated the Grey Hunters that left the Rhino with only one wound taken in return.


The Soul Grinder annihilated the 4 Wolf Guard next to the drop pod. So this was a real bad turn for him and this trend continued for the rest of the game. Ragnar Blackmane died in a two round combat against the Lord of Change without dealing a single wound and the big bad Wolf Guard unit inside the Land Raider proved to be two killy for its own good.
They destroyed the whole units of Fiends and stranded in the open ready to be blast away by all the shooty goodness I had. When the dust settled only two Wolf Guard had survived. His Land Raider was unable to destroy my Soul Grinder until it was to late and he was catched in assault, destroying the mighty tank. At the end all he had left was a single squad of 2 Grey Hunters, hiding behind the wreck of their Rhino. Had the game taken one more round I would have tabled him, not through good gaming, but due to his real bad luck. So I left the game with 16 tourney points and waited for the final scores.

Concluding Remarks
I left the game taking place 14 out of 27 with two wins and one loss. My goal was to win at least one game and I´m quite happy with the outcome. The Daemons proved to by better than I thought and was surprised how well they kept their ground against the armies in game 1 and 3 (I never want to talk about game 2 again…). Even though I only got my first wave in one of the games and my deepstriking results were quite unfortunate, I never had the feeling of this "completly random" - feeling thats often criticized about Daemons. There wasn´t a real "Model of the Tourney" but the Soul Grinder really suprised me in a positive way by taking an incredible amount of punsihment in all games (in contrast to many of our normal games, where he just was destroyed in the first turn after deep striking).
As real positive suprise my Daemons also won me the "Best Painted" award at the end of the day, making the whole tourney a really pleasing experience that I like to repeat in the future.


Daemons vs Imperial Guard - Battle Reports from the 9. SiG - TrotzkiHatesMe Round 2

With the first game being a very narrow win, I was in a good mood for my second game. The second game was holding table quarters and my special objective was killing the enemy’s most expensive elite unit. My opponent played space marines and has he handed me his list, I was starting to feel a sort of panic. 10 Terminators with a Null Zone Librarian (most expensive elite unit … ouch), a Land Raider Crusader (full of Assault Terminators and a Thunderfire Cannon. The list was completed by two Rhinos with Space Marines and a small five man squad of scouts.

Game started quite bad with me loosing the role to go first. My opponent handed me the first turn and to add insult to injury my second wave decided to come first, leaving me with no shooting to destroy his Thunderfire Cannon of Doom. It all went downhill from there with me learning that a +5 invulnerable save that’s rerolled due to Null Zone doesn’t allow much room for soaking a turn of firepower from any unit. The Thunderfire Cannon destroyed one unit of Demonettes and the Horrors in its first two turns of shooting with me not even denting it.


After 4 turns all I had left, were 15 Demonettes hiding behind a building on the far side of the battle field, hoping to at least keep me one quarter. Of course the game went on until round 7 allowing my opponent to also wipe my last unit and thus giving him a solid massacre with 20 tourney points for him and a uncomforting 0 for me. All my kills in this game counted up to a whooping 4 scouts and a immobilised Rhino. Well at least I learned why Fatecrusher lists are so abundant in tourney environments…

Daemons vs Imperial Guard - Battle Reports from the 9. SiG - TrotzkiHatesMe Round 1

This being the first game on my first tourney I was really nervous about the army my Daemons will meet. When the games were called I was partly relieved partly terrified to hear that I´m going to have to take on the Imperial Guard. I´ve played Guard before so I knew some of their tricks but I also knew, that they have a lot of evil tricks upon their sleeve that can hurt Daemons badly (I´m looking at you, Officer of the Fleet). Big blocks of chimeras also really scare me, because they really take a lot of firepower to get to their juicy inside and that´s exactly what my Daemons can´t dish out.

My opponents list consisted of 3 Leman russ,a basilisk, a Thunderer (basically a Imperial Guard Vindicator sourced from FW´s Imperial Armour), a Command Squad in a Chimera (kitted out with Master of Ordnance, bodyguards and Officer of the Fleet [here we go - 5+ for reserves]) and loads of footslogging infantry.



We played Capture and Control (One objective in each deployment zone) with Dawn of War setup. My special objective for this mission was to get one troop choice into one of the terrain features in his deployment zone – quite a good one for Daemons because that´s exactly where I´m going. Terrain featured a big AV14 bunker on one side and several ruined buildings on the other with some craters and trenches in between. I won the roll to go first and let him go first. He chose the side with the bunker and deployed everything he had during his turn. In my turn I got lucky and my first wave struck all over the place. I won´t go into turn by turn details but the game was very close with a lot of loses (my Demon Prince and the Lord of Change soaked many, many shots but where both sent back to the warp) for me in first turns against the overwhelming firepower of the Imperial Guard. I slowly munched through his right flank and the Officer of the Fleet proved to be more of bonus then a hindrance. Most of my unit deepstruck in later turns directly into his right flank where the bunker shielded me from much of his firepower, while my horrors held my own objective against a hell lot of fire. I was able to contest his objective with my Soul Grinder, who proved to be the absolute Monster of the Match by killing the Leman Russ squadron and absorbing 2 turns of incredible amounts of firepower without a scratch.


So I won with 1 objective to 0 but hadn´t it been for the additional victory points I collected for holding one terrain feature in his deployment zone, I would have lost by about 200 victory points in the secondary. With the 300 points for the special objective I luckily left the game with around +100 victory points (draw) and 14 tourney points for the one objective I was in the lead.

November 19, 2009

Tau vs. Imperial Guard - Battle Reports from the 9. SiG - Managarm Round 3

So the Tau got tabled in Round 1, almost tabled their opponent in Round 2. And went into the 3rd Round game with mixed feeling, who would it be? Funny enough it was the same guy that the demons had to face in Round 1.

3rd game: Imperial Guard
Pitched battle, seize ground (5 objectives)

I cant’t remember the exact list as I am not familiar with guard lists. I remember:
Command squad with master of ordnance and master of the fleet
A lot of infantry with missile launchers, lascannons and plasma rifles (nice conversions with WWII style rifle grenades!)
1 chimera (with to me unknown content)
Heavy weapons team with 2 missile launcher and 1 lascannon
Leman Russ squadron (3 with heavy bolter in the hull)
Thunderer siege tank
Basilisk
2 scout sentinels with autocannon

Again this was a very funny and exciting game with a nice opponent.
Again I lost the roll to decide whether to go first or second and he decided to start. I would have done the same. He deployed everything evenly stretched over his table half with the basilisk, heavy weapons team and leman russ squadron on the flank to my left and the thunderer on the other side. The sentinels would be outflanking. As it turned out I missed that he said that and completely forgot about them.




I was a bit unsure of what to deploy and what to put into reserves. As it was an objective based mission I held my troop choices back of course, the kroot would make a flank march. I decided to place the broadsides in the highest ruin in my deployment zone with one model in each storey so that his numerous pie-plates wouldn’t do so much harm with one hit. The hammerhead was placed on the other side on my right flank behind some cover. But as every ruin in my zone was too small to hide a tank it would be targetable from at least one lascannon/missile launcher and of course from my big concern the basilisk. As the hits on side armour with strength 9 would bring me into serious trouble, I placed the death rains next to the broadsides out of line of sight so that they could jump-shoot-jump and hopefully kill the artillery tank and maybe could target the heavy weapons team later on. The ionhead would be pretty much useless this game so I decided to use it as kind of a bait or flying cover and placed it in the middle of my deployment zone. I didn’t really know what to do with my fire knives so I placed them there too, to take some shots at the heavy weapons. My command squad would be deep striking.




So I can’t remember how each turn went on in detail. First turn of his shooting made my fire knife team lose their morale seeing one of their precious shield drones destroyed so they decided to cut and run. Cowards. Another shield drone of the broadsides was destroyed but they bravely held their ground.
On my turn I destroyed the basilisk as planned but just managed to stun one of the leman russ and destroy the battle cannon of the same. Very short turn.

And then my luck turned on me. The remaining gun drone of the broadsides was destroyed and I rolled double 6s for the morale check and again double 6s for the retreating distance so my broadsides fled from the battlefield. In addition the railgun on the hammerhead was smashed. So stripped of any kind of anti-tank capability I faced a forlorn battle as I couldn’t do much against armour 14.
So in the remaining turns my kroot outflanked and killed the heavy weapons team and another 10 men squad before being killed by an overwhelming number of guardsmen.




I risked deep striking my commander and retinue behind the thunderer and was awarded by its destruction.




The sentinels I forgot appeared behind my incapacitated hammerhead and immobilized it before being destroyed by the ionhead and deathrains.




I charged my command squad into the two squads on the right flank and tried to kill at least one of it and thereby pulling them from the objective they held until then but failing a lot of armour saves and rolling high for morale and then low for the initiative test didn’t help much. The commander and his remaining bodyguard were overrun. In the end I managed to kill enough of this squad with smart missiles of the crashed railhead so that they had to fall back and couldn’t claim that obejective. My firewarriors never disembarked and their transports armours couldn’t be penetrated by a lot of shelling so I held one of my own objective and contested the other one which was in turn contested by the leman russ’es. I lost 1 to 2 and a lot of victory points. My secret objective was to brake one of his squads in close combat so that that squad would run away from the table. Ridiculously hard to achieve with tau. But funnily my opponent didn’t achieve his objective too. He had to destroy my most expensive tank, the railhead, which was immobilized and stripped of all weapons but not destroyed! Yeehaw ;-)


So coming to the end I want to thank my opponents for mostly very nice and smooth games and of course to all who made this tournament possible.

Conclusion: 

So what do I think of my army performing in a tournament. Considering that I didn’t face only tournament-streamlined armies I am very happy with the overall performance. Against the Chaos list there isn’t much I could have done. I am not sure if a list like this could be beaten with tau, at least not with my army composition and experience. My second opponent’s list wasn’t really a challenge and marines in the open are no match against 5 plasma rifles, an ion cannon and a lot of strength 5 shots. And my last game was more a case of bad luck than of anything else. I think that I could have got at least a draw when all my railguns wouldn’t have been destroyed so early.
I think it was the right choice to take the ion cannon armed hammerhead instead of the skyray and I’ll be fielding it again in future games, at least at these point levels. At more points I might consider taking a second railhead. Another option of course is to take 3 broadsides and both hammerhead variants. I have to try this some day. And I have to emphasize the kroot. They are so great I really really recommend taking them. They give such a great versatility either by being just a cheap meat shield or by outflanking and thereby offering the opportunity to threaten the enemy’s flank. And of course they are the only choice which has something like close combat abilities. And they are scoring.
One thing which was of a concern is that a unit consisting of 2 suits and 2 shield drones have to take a morale check when one drone goes down. And that is really annoying when your precious unit flees the field of battle just because their silly drone is a smoking wreck and they are. I thought, that’s the purpose of the shield drones. A unit of 3 suits and 2 drones should be better as it would take 2 destroyed drones to force the morale check. So that’s something I am going to change.

Tau vs. Dark Angels - Battle Reports from the 9. SiG - Managarm Round 2

Well Round 1 was a bit of a let down for the Tau, so good for us there was a break. So we went to get some food and talk it over.
After some nice hot dogs we were ready for Rouns 2, and i think this was a much more enjoyable experience, but enough of me talking!

2nd game: Dark Angels
Spearhead, table quarters (at least one scoring unit and no enemy unit in one quarter)


Army List:
Interrogator Chaplain in terminator armour with combi-flamer
5 terminators (2 with shield and hammer, 2 with twin lightning claws, 1 with heavy flamer)
2x 10 marines with melta and heavy bolter/plasma cannon
5 marines with melta
10 devastors with 2 lascannons, 2 plasma cannons
Land raider crusader with multi melta
Vindicator
Land speeder with multi melta

This game was in every way the opposite of the first game and the guy I played against was very nice and a good sport.
I faced a more or less foot slogging marine army with a lot of bodies and every single unit could hold one table quarter as everything was scoring. He chose to deploy and go first and set up everything close to the middle so that his units could walk into every quarter first turn with the land raider, vindicator and land speeder coming to my quarter.



I was a bit impressed by so many marines so I decided to build a castle in my quarter with the broadsides standing on some kind of fortification with tanks and crisis suits behind that more or less out of line of sight.



As I only had 3 scoring units I decided to keep my fire warriors and the kroot in reserve with the latter outflanking. My bonus mission objective was to have more points of HQ on the table in the end so my commander would be in reserve as well.
First turn was as expected. He boosted the land speeder 24” towards my homebase and drove 12” with the land raider and vindicator, popping smoke. All marine units (all combat squadded) except the 2 lascannon dev-squad walked into the adjacent table quarters. The lascannons were the only ones able to shoot so they opened fire on my broadsides, killing one shield drone.
On my turn I jumped out of cover and opened fire. I thought my death rains could down the land speeder but I only managed to stun it. The hammerhead and the broadsides opened fire on the land raider but as the dark angels smoke launcher reduced every hit to glancing I only managed to shake it and destroy the assault cannon. The ionhead killed one or two marines of the lascannon dev-squad. In the end all suits jumped back behind the fortification.

In his second turn he continued to drive his tanks towards my little castle and his troops marched again. I don’t know why he did that, so he couldn’t fire one more turn and he even did not walk into cover (which was rare, admittedly), only the lascannons held their position. He fired the demolisher cannon at my broadsides but scattered a bit so I suffered only one wound which was saved by the shield drone. The railhead suffered one hit from a lascannon but the disruption pod negated any harm.
All railguns fired on the land raider and shook the crew, no immobilization, damn. The deathrains immobilized the speeder and destroyed the multimelta. But it still would contest my table quarter so it would take one more turn of fire to bring it down. I decided to start the push into another table quarter, so I jumped my fire knives not behind the fortification but towards the so far unclaimed quarter.

Third turn’s movement saw the land raider and vindicator continuing the push to my deployment zone and at last shooting from the marines. The demolisher shell scattered yet again and caused no damage. A few heavy bolter shells pinged off the armour of the broadsides and the lascannon weren’t able to damage the skimmers.
One devilfish and my commander arrived and I placed them to shoot at the marines in the table quarter to my right, the commander and bodyguards being able to jump behind cover in the assault phase. I destroyed the land raider with the hammerhead so the broadsides, the two fire knives and the ionhead fired on the disembarked death wing terminators, killing only one lightning claw armed one. The combined fire of the command squad and the devilfish killed 9(!) marines.


 
In his fourth turn he shot another gloriously scattering demolisher shell at my fire knives, killing none and the few bolter and heavy bolter rounds didn’t do anything as well. His terminators destroyed the shield drone of the death rains but weren’t out of assault range. I really started to feel sorry for him at this point.
On my fourth turn all remaining reserves arrived and the outflanking kroot showed up on my right hand side in charge range to the plasma cannon dev-squad. The ionhead fired at the side armour of the vindicator and destroyed it, while the fire knives killed the 5 men-squad in this table quarter. My commander used his target lock to kill the last remaining marine in front of the team and his bodyguards killed one of the devastators. The death wing terminators and the interrogator chaplain threatened my home base, so I fired everything I had at them, even the firewarriors disembarked to fire and the deathrains used their flamer. I killed everyone but one lightning claw terminator. I don’t know why he put a wound from a railgun on his chaplain. Maybe he thought the rosaries would save him. But it didn’t and the solid slug killed him instantly. The kroot charged the remaining four devastators and killed 2, losing 2 of their own. The death rains jumped in front of the firewarriors to protect them from getting charged by the last terminator.








In the remaining turns I killed the marines in his corner and all other marines on the table, wiping him out completely. In the end I only lost 3 shield drones and the death rains and 5 kroot.
I have to thank my opponent for a really kind and funny game, never losing his humour even when facing a massacre. And that made me feel a bit bad about tabling him in the end. But I think his list isn’t very suitable for a tournament environment. He mentioned he usually plays the double wing and I think that would be far better.

Tau vs. Double Lash - Battle Reports from the 9. SiG - Managarm Round 1

Hey,

so i finally got around to post the battle reports the guys wrote up and put in some pictures. I promise I gonna get you the full army lists for each game as my stupid "online codex" program isn't working as it should!
So without further talking lets start with Managarm´s Report for his Round 1 game!


Managarm here, tuning in to report of my three games during the local tournament.

1st game: Chaos Space Marines
Dawn of War, capture and control


Army List:
2x Daemon prince with wings and lash,
3 chaos terminators
2x5 chaos marines with melta in rhino 
5 chaos marines with melta in land raider with daemonic possession
3x3 obliterator

 

The standard “dual-lash-9-obliterator-I-win” list. Boring to play (in my oppinion) and boring to play against. And that was exactly how it turned out. I was a bit disappointed that I had to play my first tournament game against one of the hardest list one can field, but okay, let’s take it.
The guy I played knew what he was doing and had played a lot of tournaments so far. He won the roll to go first and did so. He placed one rhino with the side exactly at the middle line with daemon prince behind it (actually no daemon prince but a conversion from bits of the possessed and chaos spawns…so not the usual size for a monstrous creature...) and the other rhino behind some ruins in his deployment zone. I deployed nothing and kept the fire knife team in reserve to deepstrike later on, so he moved everything else on the board and the rhino and daemon prince further to my deployment zone.
I don’t want to go into too much detail as the game was not much fun to play. I made one mistake that I didn’t shoot at the daemon prince in my first turn. I don’t know why I did that. The remaining 5 turns consisted of jumping to me, lashing the suits to the daemon princes, killing them in my turn so I couldn’t shoot them and blasting the tanks to pieces with the obliterators. Rinse and repeat until no tau is left on the field. In combination with that this guy wasn’t very polite (re-measuring every second move I did is not something which makes me comfortable) and I made a mistake in close combat (I hit his prince on 4+ instead on 5+) which seemed to piss him off more than necessary I was glad when the game was over.
Of course I got no tournament points by getting tabled.

November 7, 2009

Family Photos of Tau and Daemons


Good evening,

As promised I made family photos today of Trotzki's and my army:


Chaos Daemons of Tzeentch and Slaanesh


Tau Hunter Cadre

So just a qick one this evening. Just wanted to show the finished armies. Everything is packed up and ready for tomorrow and besides I am tired right now from playing, eating and drinking wine an whisky I am more than excited how my very first tournament is going to be.

More pictures and tournament reports will follow next week.

November 3, 2009

A never ending cycle of painting tau battlesuits

Hi guys,

I am very busy with getting everything painted until saturday. Currently I am working on the last crisis suit and the ion cannon for the hammerhead.
Just wanted to show you the latest additions, another fireknife suit and my second broadside:


Fireknife XV8


Broadside XV88 MkI

Nothing too specatacular, but I hope that the converted heads and the little re-posing of the arms and legs of the fireknife gives a bit more dynamic to this model.
The great conversion idea for the head can be found here at warhammer tau. Thanks to Adam again for nice ideas and inspiration.
Pictures of the 3 other suits I painted over the last weeks are due to follow and of course a family picture of the complete tournament army will be online at friday, so stay tuned!

November 2, 2009

Tournament this, tournament that, the tournament is everywhere!

Good Morning,

sitting at work since 550am  and nothing to do, i thought i start talking a bit bout the coming tournament and the plans we got.

As the tournament day draws closer, Trotzki and Managarm put the last finishing touches on their armies, id thought that this will be a show i dont wanna miss. So i decided to take the coming friday off and travel down. This will give us the opportunity to have a 3rd person doing all the coverage. The guys have time to focus more on playing and getting their asses kicked....and i will focus on doing the rest. Mainly waking them up in time for the event on saturday and get a constant supply on coffee going, cause the plan is to get terrible drunk on friday!

So I hope to get you the full coverage of the event! Pictures, Army Lists, Interviews! Althought Trotzki allready said "If you put a picture of me on the net im gonna skin your ass!", we will see how tough he is when I stand before him. ;)

We will put some last test games in on friday, mainly focusing on the missions for the tournament and getting into the right mindset.


So lets start my rumbling on the tournament with a quick look at the setting and then i will talk about the missions, the guys will have to play on saturday.
There are 3 missions, point limit is 1650 and they got 2h15mins time for each one. I think that will work quite well. There will be 28 people playing, having 14 games played simultaneously, i hope i find the time to get more infos on the other people playing.
The armies being played by the people attending are:

Space Marines: 5
Imperial Army: 4
Chaos Space Marines: 3
Chaosdemons: 2
Dark Angels: 2
Orks: 2
Space Wolves: 2
Tau: 2
Nids: 2
Black Templars: 1
Dark Eldar: 1
Eldar: 1
Hagashîn´s: 1

So we have 13 MEQ´s that gives the guys a good chance of playing MEQ´s , which would be their favourite enemy.
2 Dark Eldar players, im really excited to see them, will they bring the infamous skimmer army of doom? I had a friend once who played DE when they just came out, we hated to play him back then. I would hate to play DE right now. Imo they just "break" the game, playing a different edition then anybody else.
The 2 Space Wolves guys, i dont know. Did they have the time to bring the new toys, aka Thunderwolves? If so people are in for a hell of a game. If not they just Marines to me.
3 CSM players, well i guess its a good guess that at least one will bring the "normal" CSM list, aka 2 lash´s, 3 plagues marines in rhinos and the rest of the points in kyborgs. The second highest rating player is playing chaos, im eager to have a chat with him, see how he feels about CSM in 5th edition.
Nids, while i feel that nids are currently in need of a new codex, the guys playing Nids at the tourney are supposed to be "good", at least if you believe in their tournament rating. So maybe i see some great armies, which will motivate me for the new nid codex. If so, I will bring out the old 2nd edition models i got for a new spin!
And we have 4 bandwagoneers, errr Imperial Guard players, will they bring "fluffy" armies, or will they bring the mech armies that the guards a infamous for atm? I just hope they spam melters and bounce off Trotzki´s invul save. Although he wont be able to do much against mech spam.
In the end i just hope to see lots of really well painted armies and meet a fun bunch of people.

You can get a total of 20 points per mission, 14 for the primary and 6 for the secondary. You can get another 8 points total for having a well painted army and fully based army with lots of conversions. 2 points are given for submiting a correct army list until the dead line. This nets us a total of 70 points. I honestly believe the guys should at least get 7 points for their armies. But well see how the judges feel about that.


All missions have a primary and a secondary, which depends on good old victory points. As a nice twist, each player gets a secret tertiary objective, which adds a amount of victory points.
First off is a "Headquarters" mission with "Dawn of War" unit placement, oh how i hate thee!
Second along comes another old friend, table quarters! With "Spearhead" placement.
Last is a 5 objective mission with placement along the long table edges.

So how do i think the missions will play out for our guys?
Im not sure they can hold, their own base while making a substantial attack on their opponents one in the first mission. So we prolly gonna see some draws here.
The second one will prolly see the Tau holding their own turf with, Kroot, Broadsides, Crisis and skimming around the edges with the other tanks. The Demons will drop all over the show, having to deal with an completely deep striking army is quite a pain for the enemy. 
The third one, well i would place 2 objectives together on my side, hold em and contest the rest. Really depends on the enemy.

So in conclussion i think, the demons will do better.  Although i believe the Tau list is more solid, most people are just not used to play against demons. Happens to me all the time, when i play Trotzki, "What can this unit do? Fleet d6", charge 12" hit me with 7 rending attacks with str 5?" Funny stuff. If i would have to make a wild guess, id say our guys will both get 1 win and 2 draws. Managarm would prolly place better with his Marines but i understand that playing MEQ against MEQ all day is quite boring.

So stay tuned for more on the tournament soon.