more tau?

I would be extremely careful with what you do with a Battlesuit-heavy cadre. Especially with so little support. I personally found Battlesuits an extremely poor choice for a core to a Tau force. Yes initially they can seem awesome but also consider who you were fighting: a Dreadnought army.

Tau do exceptionally well against slow-moving vehicle armies like that. When they first came out in 3rd Edition, they slaughtered the tables really badly. Rhinos cost 50 points apiece, and you were either a mindless onrushing horde or a static firepower force. Mechanized was unheard of at the time. Only the Eldar were a bit weird in that regard but they were either firepower, rushing, or a mix. When the Tau came out, this concept called 'mobility' was born. Fast Attack options flew off the shelves. This whole new concept urged existing players to buy more models to new armies and a new appeal to new players.


As for your victory, it's nice that you beat a BA army, but a large Dreadnought force is not very impressive, not with Tau and certainly not with Battlesuits. Your real problem is going to show up against armies with a better core around Troops and fast heavy choices. Then you will find that your victories will come only ever so often.


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The very first thing you need to do with your Tau force is throw away the concept of looking at individual units. You cannot do that with a Tau cadre and be consistently successful. That is what most other armies can do. You look through the Codex and pick out units by asking, "What can you do for me today?" By doing so, you think your Fire Warriors are weak and your Battlesuits are awesome. A lot of units begin to start looking pretty worthless. That's because you are only looking at raw firepower.

Tau, at least before the new Necrons, were the only 40k army to build a destructive force based upon the mechanics of buffer units, or as what military strategists call force multipliers. Since the society in Asian culture is built around the collective, it was genius to make the Tau the same way. Let me explain:

If you live in a developed country around Europe or the Americas, you will live in an individualistic society. Bosses at the work place look to the individual and wonder how much work he can do by himself to help create success. They rate how many units you can move or work per minute. But Asian cultures do not do this. In fact, how good you are by yourself doesn't matter. They want to know how good you are as a collection. By taking Tau units and declaring their usefulness by themselves, you are destroying the purpose of a Tau force and halving the effectiveness.

I see what you're trying to accomplish with buying 6 more Battlesuits, but I must caution as to what you're doing.

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Something you don't see is a correlation between how much your Battlesuits cost, and how much they're actually destroying. Let's take the very common and well-liked Fire-Knife variant and apply some mathhammer. (If you don't know, mathhammer is calculating the averages based upon dice rolls and your odds of success.)

= 3 Fire-Knife suits cost you 186 points =
(Missile Pod, Plasma Rifle, Multi-tracker)
Missile Pod:
Shots: 6
To hit: 4+
To wound: 2+
Save: None
Range: 36"
Deaths: 2.50

Plasma Rifle:
Shots: 6
To Hit: 4+
To Wound: 2+
Save: None
Range: 12”/24” (3 shots a 24")
Deaths: 2.50

So if you are within 12" of the target unit, you are killing an average of 5 models per shooting phase. If you were fighting Orks, that would be about 30 points. If your Battlesuits stayed alive for 5 turns, and were able to shoot at Orks continuously at 12" (which would be a bloody miracle), they would kill for you 25 Orks. For a mob of 25, assuming there's a Nob with a Power Klaw (always is) and a few special weapons, yes managed to kill around 200 points. But again, that is assuming for 5 turns your Battlesuits managed to stay within 12" of the Orks at all times, and the whole Ork unit was wiped out by them. A good Ork player knows to bring at least 40 Orks with him per 500 points. So every turn you are killing 5 Orks. In a 2,000 point game, you've still got 155 Orks left to go. After 5 turns, 135 Orks are still unaccounted for in the rest of your force. Sure you can take anti-infantry builds for slightly cheaper, but even then you might not be killing enough fast enough because you need to get close to use those weapons.

The reality of it is that you will get 1 shot at a distance greater than 24", and maybe 2 shots within 24". And by the time you're within 12" of a huge Ork mob, you're pretty screwed, and your effectiveness goes down the toilet in close combat.

Alright, what about Space Marines? 5 Marines are about 90 points. Not bad, made up half their worth in a single shooting phase. But a big difference between Marines and Orks is that the Marines shoot back; at a BS:4. A single krak missile can easily end a full suit, cutting your point-gain destruction by a third. Not including a wave of Bolter Fire or squads/tanks armed for Tanks diverting to your Battlesuits (as there seems to be fewer tanks in your army).

And Guardsmen? Assuming you kill a full squad in two turns (which is acceptable average without being lucky), now you are receiving on average about 80 points back (assuming a handful of good upgrades). Again, not bad, but being within 12" also means being within rapid fire of 40+ Lasguns. A static Guard army can be even harder to fight because of the huge number of heavy weapons they pack in there. The Guardsmen at that point just act as bodyguards for their weapon teams, so killing 5 is not stopping them from effectively killing you.

Two squads of Guardsmen armed with Missile Launchers and Meltaguns costs 150 points, 75 points each. For 10 guys, with twice the range and greater squad-killing firepower, costs a mere 12 points more than what you would be taking for a single battlesuit. And if you are within 12" of them, even after you killed ten, and they have FRFSRF, you will lose an average of 4.33 wounds, 2 of which are instant death, which would essentially be your whole unit of 3 suits... in a single shooting phase.

So yes, two, 10-man units with only 2 special weapons in each, not only costs 36 points LESS than your three Battlesuits, just made up for their points in a single shooting phase, AFTER losing 10 models. You won't make up for your cost for at least three turns of shooting, with zero [miraculous] losses.

And that unit isn't even Bonded, has no drones, and no Shas'vre. That means they've got a decent chance of just outright running away as soon as you lose 1 Battlesuit, and possibly never coming back.

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Ok, that is laid out. If you have 3 units of 3 Battlesuits, costing an average of 180 points (which is really, really cheap actually if you have a Commander with Bodyguards), that means 540 points of your army list is being taken up by a total of 9 models, each which need at least 3 turns of shooting, without losses, to make up for their points. And adding it up makes it even uglier.

You would be throwing 540 points away at killing 15 models a shooting phase. That doesn't include models with Invulnerable Saves, models with a 2+ armor save, inside a hardy transport.

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So what good are Battlesuits? You have to take them to tailored for the rest of your cadre. Trying to build a force upon a firepower support basis will not bring you enough hurt because they are so very expensive. Their BS:3 and lack of saves is really what kills your effectiveness the most. You have to choose between defense (shields/drones), firepower, or skill. Battlesuits mop up the enemy or press the main source of killing firepower against the opponent's main units. They are also great for plugging holes in your army as a source of back-up and great as a counter-attack unit.

Against a horde army, you will want heavy Battlesuits for things like the monsters or vehicles where they will make up for their cost more effectively. And you only want 1, maybe 2 units (and one of those ought to be 2 suits with drones to cheap the cost). Even with a Farsight army you will need Fire Warriors and a vehicle to handle the bulk of an enemy's forces.

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Right, so what are you supposed to do with Fire Warriors? Most Tau players wrongly waste them at using them to build screens for their Battlesuits (them and Kroot). It's why the Tau have sucked so hard in 4th and 5th.

I take 2 Hammerheads and a Sky Ray, an Ethereal, Vespid, Pathfinders, full unit of Stealthsuits and generally the only Battlesuit I have is my Commander. I rarely lost with that force. In fact, I slaughtered so many people with it, online through Vassal and at my local store, that I got tired of them. I won more than 90% of my battles, against every single Codex and every single army type. The only exception were Blood Angels, in which I could destroy a Blood Angels army, I just couldn't beat it.

Nidzilla, Ork Nob Biker Army, every Eldar Craftworld specialty including Wraithwall, Faith-strong Battle Sisters, even Terminator-heavy forces... if it was considered cheese, I would specifically find a veteran player and beat them with my Tau, just to prove to other players that army lists don't win battles: players do. A Blood Angels Dreadnought army would've been a breeze.

I killed 10 Terminators in a single turn with that army, a 'Death Star' unit costing over 500 points, including Abbadon the Despoiler. They just Deep Struck right into my battle lines. And I finished them off with a charge into close combat.

Dark Angels bike army? My Stealthsuits proved their worth in that game, killing over 300 points. My Stealthsuits are one of my most valuable units units in the game. I've seen them through killing a Chaos Marine Khorne army to a man, and in that they were extremely useful, again thanks to a close combat charge. Six Tyranid Monstrous Creatures, two with 6 wounds and one with 5? No sweat, my Vespid and Ethereal had him turn his Carnifex and run for cover in hopes of saving it.

Trygons, Wave Serpents, Eldrad Ulthran, Drop Pod armies, 100-model strong Guard armies, elite Guard armies, Manticore Missile Launchers, you name it, I fought it, and I beat it.

.

How?

Force multipliers. Markerlights. Position. Bait. Every opponent I fought was the same. They believed they could crush Tau; most claimed they never lost against Tau. I would get them talking up their army as I would talk up my cadre. I would use closeness as a lure.

One player mocked me as I started moving Fire Warriors away from his unit to make way for something else. I glared at him, and then began moving them back where they stared, and then closer to him by a full 6". Then I realized that gave way to new options, and I killed every single unit to a man within 12". Rinse and repeat. Opponents think, "Tau, bad in close combat. Yeah, if he's so stupid to move them closer, I'll just move my best guys closer the full distance and slaughter everything he has the next turn." Well, then when my Shooting Phase happened and I moved even closer, everything that was right there, every unit he depended on breaking through my Tau were completely or nearly destroyed. Mopped up or stopped completely in close combat.

Take out his long-range firepower. Then realize every upgrade he takes for close combat is a waste of his points. Don't try and play keep-away, sissy-slapping him. Don't even hold back a single unit. Don't try and outright flee all the time. Lure enemy power units into designated killing zones in LOS and range of most of your cadre and wipe them out in a single go. It will weaken your opponent's resolve, and he will either get desperate or fearful.

Keep your Fire Warriors off to the side. Don't stand them right on top of key objectives, but use the objectives as lures for these killing zones. It's why most of my objective placement in 5th Edition was out in the open and close to my opponent's deployment as possible, with 1 always really far back in the case of multiples. He would move all his forces to try and capture an objective that had no terrain with it and I would just gun them down.

Tau military philosophy rings true: Tau don't care about holding ground: once the enemy is destroyed, ground is open for the taking.