Tournament Round 3 – Eldar vs Tau

Into round 3 folks and I was feeling up against it on this one.  Fresh from my almost win which turned into a loss vs cron air I now had another army to face that I had never really played before, the Tau. 

To really make my day it was the relic, which I hate, using diagonal deployment, which I really hate.  My opponent then won every roll-off, picking the good side of the table and to go first.  Yay.  (As you may be able to tell, I wasn't really 'feeling' this game lol).

My oppo's army was roughly as follows:

Commander with 6 markerlights
Ethereal
3x 10 fire warriors, 1 in devilfish
5x pathfinders
Riptide
2x 10 kroot, one with sniper rifles
2x Broadsides
Hammerhead with special character

I deployed as much in cover as I possibly could, my plan being to seize the relic with my wraithblades and then move them out of harms way.  The usual units stayed in reserve.

Turn 1

There was predictably little movement from the tau apart from a unit of fire warriors moving onto the relic in their devilfish.  They then managed to wipe out my wraithblades using markerlights (usually people have to get rid of my wraithlord first, but by stripping cover saves the tau found it easy) and my relic-taking unit was gone!  2 reapers died to the kroot rifles, as did 3 rangers (who then ran away like the pansy space elves they are).

I rallied my rangers, and moved my reapers into cover, and everything else out of cover to get some shooting on!
Which I failed at, to be honest.  I got his riptide down to 1 wound, and removed a markerlight drone, however some good cover saves stopped the rest of my forces from doing much.

Turn 2

The kroot moved up into the same cover as my reapers and his fire warriors took the relic, but apart from that there was no movement.  Shooting was obviously bad, my rangers took another beating and got wiped out, a wound was knocked off my wraithlord and my wave serpent got shot down, along with the prism cannon being removed from my fire prism...

And then all of my reserves arrived, but with twenty-million units intercepting/skyfiring my crimson hunter went down before it could even shoot.  I dropped a large blast from my hawks grenade packs on all his fire warriors/general/broadsides/pathfinders in the big blob, and caused a couple of wounds.
I then hit on an idea, I zoomed my fire prism in front of all his big blob to block their line of sight, hoping he'd take the bait...and I jumped my warp spiders next to his fire warriors devilfish. 
The devilfish ate monofilament, and crashed down via glancing hits, and his pesky riptide bit the dust too.  A few kroot died to my reapers, and my jetbikes took down the hammerhead by shooting it's rear armour.

Turn 3

The fire warriors ran further away with their relic, but there was no movement apart from that.  The shooting phase started with the broadsides taking the bait right in front of them and shooting the weaponless fire prism, exploding it 6" (result!), taking a wound each, 4 markerlights, 6 fire warriors and 2 pathfinders.  What was left after that shot down all of my warp spiders and 4 swooping hawks.  And the bloody kroot of all people took out my jetbikes.  He then assaulted my reapers, killing them with his second kroot squad.

I was drastically short of numbers, and I now only had one objective - block the relic, draw the game.  My fire dragons and autarch moved up to the blob of tau units (having been de-meched last turn) and my hawks moved up close to the relic-toting fire warriors.
My wraithlord managed to torch all the remaining kroot that had killed my reapers with it's two flamers, and the last of the pathfinders died to the dragons heavy flamer (it overlapped with the broadsides and general) and my other fire dragons took down the tau general.
My hawks assaulted the fire warriors, killing two with hammer of wrath and then another 3 with their attacks, for no reply (impressive for only two aspect warriors!).  The tau were fearless however due to the proximity of an ethereal.....

Turn 4

He wisely moved his other kroot away from my wraithlord, and piled everything except his broadsides into the combat with my hawks, attempting to stop my plan.
Everything shot my fire dragons, wiping them out,including my autarch, and then it was basicallt game over.  Even had I contested the relic, the tau would have won 2-1 on secondary objectives, but we carried on regardless.  My two swooping hawks went on to survive until turn 6, facing 4 units of tau in combat and battering the relic-holders down to just 1 man over the course of the combats.  Heroic is not the word!

Tau 5- 1 Eldar

Conclusions

I ended up 11th out of 16 after the three games, far lower down than I was hoping for.  The irony is that my 'balanced' glass hammer list is very well suited to taking apart space marines, and normally you would expect to face more marines than anything else!  It's very good in a way that there were only 3 power-armoured armies out of 16, with plenty of xenos on show.

I can give all the excuses in the world for a poor show, for example the missions and terrain didn't help me, but in the end I was beaten by better players with better lists.  One day I shall return, and finish in the top ten!

Adios for now,

Neil