Monday, October 27, 2014

Militarum Tempestus Tactics: One, Two Punch


This is going to be based off of my recent tournament experience and is a good expanded tactics for an all Scion army.  Basic idea behind the formation is going to be revolving around the  Ground Assault Formation.  Then the rest of the army is deep striking most of the time.  The ground assault formation is going to run you around 1000pts or so, depending a lot on the type of Tauroxes.  I like three missile and a gatling, but you can do fine with three standard tauroxes or whatever mix you like. 

The idea here is to use the formation at the start to unleash an early volley at a piece of your opponents army.  Then hit them with the rest deep striking in.  Your going to want plasma and melta in this group and maybe some volley guns.  If you keep the squad sizes in the tauroxes small, this will leave you with a lot more points to spend on the main force.  To help with reliability there are a couple of things you can do, one is to take one or two auger arrays on the tauroxes, and the other is a comms relay through the cheapest way possible. 

You don't always have to deep strike, if you are facing an army that is bringing overwhelming force, you can keep a good portion of the CAD on the board as your front line with the tauroxes acting as a mobile reserve and fire base.  If you get the infiltrate warlord trait on strategic, this is also good to take advantage of most times as well.

A couple of full squads in the main force is a good thing as you are going to use these to deep strike onto objectives.  They have move through cover so auto pass dangerous terrain tests which helps out a lot here.  You don't want to get too MSU as you will be only be able to get so much, but even then you can have 12 5 man squads counting the ground assault squads (this includes the command squads).  Personally I like bigger squads, but smaller will leave more room for special weapons and have options for valkyries. 

Big weakness is AA, even if you squeeze two valkyries in, they are not amazing at this role especially against heavier flyers.  Most of the time this will be little issue, very few armies are going flyer heavy, and you cen generally ignore one or two and go after their main force.  The TL autcannons on the tauroxes can work in an emergency, not great but throw dice at it and you'll get a few hits.  My list has a valk in it, and with some modifying I could fit another and still have room for more scions.  This gives you another option for squads to deploy in, but I find that deep striking can be safer as a mishap has much lower chance of them dying than an exploding valkyrie.

The ground assault formation you want to focus on medium range weapons, maybe one melta squad, I like having a flamer squad with a gatling taurox to clear out infantry mobs, and TL flamers are not bad at all when they jump out. 

The basics here are to draw your opponent in with the ground assault formation, then hit them with deep strikers turn two and three.  Its risky as reserving a large force can be, but you can deploy more of the main force if you are playing against an army that can't shoot them off early.

If you are wondering why no specific list, that's because there doesn't need to be one for this.  Plasma and melta are the main stay of scions, I would say that two melta command squads in the CAD is a good choice to bring a lot of melta love in and order TL on themselves to ensure knight/vehicle destruction.

This will fail badly though when it doesn't work.  If you have crappy reserve rolls (this guy), you can be left with a piece meal force, that why I recommend keeping the ground assault on the board.  Unless you are facing wave serpent spam or ignores cover heavy armies, the tauroxes can hide and use cover to keep them going.

Hope this gives you some ideas.

GG

8 comments:

  1. Thanks for posting the tournament summary, and this formations tactics post. I am finally getting around to putting together my tauroxs (tauroxes? Tauroxi?) and I am curious what you treat the side mounted weapons as for a firing arc (auto cannons or volley guns). A quick Internet search has made the issue less clear rather than clarifying. So assuming I am running a taurox prime, with either the turret battle cannon, or the Gatling guns, what can I actually shoot with side hull mounted weapons?

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    1. I treat them as hull mounted weapons with a 45 degree arc of fire. Pretty much you can hit stuff in front of you. Some model the weapons on the turret, I'm not a fan of that as I think it crosses the line into modeling for advantage, as its pretty clear where they are supposed to go.

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  2. Would you consider a aerial assault formation good for a tournament purpose? or is it better to just stick to deep strike units.

    While talking about aerial assault, would you take a skyshield landing pad with it to have flyers start on the board?

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    1. I would, just make sure to have a good ground force and some reserves help. Unfortunately you can't use the sky shield as the aerial assault formation can't be split up, they all have to be in reserve.

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    2. Ah okay I did not know that, thanks.

      Well not in tournament, in a big game with multiple fortifications, like the scenarios from Stronghold assault, In could see one person deploying the whole formation on skyshields, and other person trying to destroy the landing base :D. Would make for a great narrative mission!

      Yeah I think with aerial assault you would really want some IG allies behind an aegis to get a comms relay. As well as some vendettas/vultures to get much more firepower. Vultures with either 4 multiple missile pods or BS4 twin linked punisher cannon is just simply death to hordes, while vendettas kill air targets and vehicles. Thing you would want to support that is some plasma scions to kill MCs and some flamers to disrupt the gunlines and score objectives...

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    3. The aerial assualt really works well with IG, its ok with a scion main force but it gets expensive fast so your main force can be small and easy to table before the formation comes on. That would be awesome though with all those skyshields!

      I do love vultures and really want one, whish it was in the scion book :(

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  3. Im still not sure which version of Taurox Prime choose. Rocket launcher is clearly superior and more versatile...but 20pts is a lot and battle cannon is not so bad... It can hit weaker vehicles and crush infantry... Did try basic Battle Cannon version? And did it perform?:)

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    1. The standard version is still pretty good, they work well in numbers. Definitely take the autcannons on them, gives you 3 S7 AP4 shots, one being the blast. For its price it def does well, I go back and forth between using it and the missile version

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