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.

3^rd 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.