Battle Report: Imperial Guard vs Tau Empire 1850 pts

Alright got a game in this weekend, tweaked my army a little bit, wanted to see how it would do minus a CCS squad and add weapons and gear across the army to compensate.  Three of the vet squads have plasma guns now, took an astropath, and a few other things for my platoon and the Inquisitor.  Nothing too major just the lots of little things that make a big difference.  So I faced off against one of the regular gamers against his Tau army.  He does not play the typical Tau list and I really like his and think a lot of Tau players are missing out with some of the great options in the book by going with the "standard" build.  So he had commander batman, no iridium armor, two riptides, a crisis team, two fire warrior squads (9-12ish), two kroot squads with 3x krootox and hounds, a large drone squad with markerlights, two pathfinders in devilfish's with their special drones, and a sniper drone team with three controllers and three sniper drones.  We played dawn of war deployment, the scouring, night fighting first turn, I won the roll of and deployed first.


First sorry I don't post detailed lists, I'm against net listing so if this gives you a good idea for a direction to go in then great, but not going to give something for a copy and paste.  If you would like to know more details on my or my opponents list, let me know and I'll try an answer them. 

I placed my aegis on my right flank, placed my skulls two forward on the center line and one back behind my aegis.  I deployed my platoon with my inquisitor on my left flank in the ruins, seen above, with a mortar squad behind them.  The rest of my army was behind my aegis.  I regret not giving him the first turn, would have benefited me to go second with night fighting.  My inquisitor rolled for the orbital bombardment, 2 games in a row now, I can get used to this.  He kept his firewarriors, crisis, and pathfinders in reserve.  Riptides deployed away from my aegis and across from the ruins with my platoon, he tried to infiltrate forward with kroot but the servo skulls kept him at a nice arms length.  He did a great counter deploy and set up most of his army on my left flank against my weakest units.  My hope was to have my reserves show up and turn the tide.

Turn 1
I moved my platoon up to get a nice position in the ruins and get some fire down range.  Moved my vet squads on my right around to get in some good positions.  Other than that I ended up firing, my platoon opened up on the kroot, did a little damage but the were just far enough away to get good cover saves and he was rolling those well.   Mortars did decent knocking some kroot down, as well as my grenades from my PCS.  My lascannons in my vet squads lined up some shots and killed a drone despite a 2+ save.  MoO scattered and unfortunately onto the drone sniper team and did nothing against their 2+ cover :(.  He passed all morale checks.

He moved up his kroot and markelighted my Platoon and PCS.  One kroot squad opened up on them and wiped them out, first blood.  Then he proceeded to kill 13 of my 20ish platoon, with combined fire.  That was about it.  I had lost a good chunk, though I had cut him too.

Turn 2
Both marbo and my vendettas come in, they fly across and marbo deploys by the building in the far right corner, there was an objective and my plan was to have him contest it when his fire warriors came on. I moved my platoon around and shifted a few guys in my aegis area around. Now I opened up and orbital blasted his commander scattering a tiny bit luckily and he failed his look out sir, his commander died and I got slay the warlord.  I continued my shooting and was unfortunately not as successful, my vendettas decided they didn't want to hurt anything today and missed a bunch besides being twin linked and then didn't feel like wounding and when it was all said and done the riptide only lost one wound :(, not good.  I killed more kroot and a few more drones and another sniper drone and drone controller.

He got lucky as heck this turn.  His crisis team came on and so did his two fire warriors and one path finder.  His crises deep struck right behind my aegis and even though he would have miss happened had he scattered just a couple of inches, he hit and landed perfectly right behind my mortars and creed. His Kroot moved up to try and finish off my platoon and inquisitor.  Other kroot moved back and his pathfinders moved up in the devil fish on the left by my mortars.  He opened up and my mortars died, the rest of my platoon died and all I had left was my lone inquisitor, he failed a morale check and fell back.  Luckily.  His kroot tried to assault but he rallied and they failed their distance.  No charges happened but he jumped around.  Best he could do was one glance on a vendetta.

Turn 3
I continued my vendettas towards his riptide and dropped my guys out, one behind the center hill and the other between the two ruins on the left.  I was trying to push him back on the left and really needed my vendettas to finish off his one riptide, it had failed its nova charge and wounded itself so only had 3 wounds left. The inquisitor moved up in an attempt to stall the kroot.  Now we made a mistake here and I forgot to correct him.  He intercepted my vets, and killed quite a few, but since they had moved on from reserves the turn before, he couldn't do that.  Oh well I forgot about it and while it would have made a huge difference for me, as I prob would have destroyed his one kroot squad.  You live you learn.  I ended up doing more damage to his kroot but no where near enough.   My guys got revenge on the crisis team but I still had to spend a lot of firepower removing them.  The inquisitor assaulted and rolled abysmally, killing one kroot.  They did a wound on him and he failed armor and we kept fighting.

He now moved up and tried to press his luck against my left more.  Pathfinders dropped out and he tried to marker light my vendettas, thankfully he was very unlucky and did not get as single one.  However his kroot were one fire and got enough hits despite that and knocked a vendetta out of the sky, killing two kroot in the process.  He wiped the remainder of the vet squad and in cc my inquisitor biffed it tremendously again and did nothing and then died to return attacks because I can't make a 3+ armor save.  Even with psychotroke grenades he did horrible, goes to show you really need more than just him to do anything in CC and don't rely on him to be carrying the day alone.

Turn 4, I moved the vendetta around and tried to knock off a few of the drone controllers and sniper drone and here I found luck killing them.  I moved my guys around onto the hill and onto to the objective, trying ho hold him there and keep him from rolling me all the way up. Rest of my shooting was ok I killed a few kroot and drones, other wise nothing great other than put a wound on the other riptide.  Oh I forgot I had dropped the other riptide to its last wound, again I had bad rolling and got just the number of wounds I needed to kill it and he made on invul save :(.  Dice were not favoring me.  He passe all his morale for the fourth turn and kept on coming.

He moved his one riptide with the wounds on it up and attacked my one vet squad getting into cc with it and the retards decided to hold and not run,  I fracking needed them to break and this was about the end of the game here.  He had a good part of the objectives and I had just very little troops left.  His fire warriors shot at the building that marbo was in and got enough glances to force wounds on him and I failed my saves and he died :(.   So much for my plan.  He caused my vendetta to lock velocity and because of where it was meant it would go into reserve.

Turn 5
Well my guys had decided to be dumb and hold in cc instead of running.  I did what I could and attempted to kill his devil fish and other riptide, again I could not pull through.  One infantry squad fired at his fire warrior squad and killed 7+ of them, they held though.  My guys died in combat and left it to him to finish the job.  My one vet squad moved up to take the objective in front of my lines worth 4 pts.  So at this point I had 7 points and he had 9+2.  I needed to hold on and knock him off a couple.

He moved his riptide up and his firewarriors and his kroot.  He nearly killed my guys in the center but they held and had a few left.  riptide missed a few and he mostly moved around to take objectives and win the game if it ended.  It kept going.

Turn 6
Ok fucking magic time lets do this.  Mortars fired on the firewarriors, I was luck and hit both squads, killed a couple and he failed both morale checks and they left the board! ok that's two points left but I still had a riptide.  I fired and killed it with one squads lascannon and plasma and lasgun fire. Bam!.   Next was the kroot squad on the hill,  I fire and blast them off, one left running!!  Oh god I might make it, I need to drive him off one more objective.  My vendetta comes on from ongoing reserves and fires at his last three drones on an objective because I was retarded and realized they were fast attack at the end of the game (fuck me). So I got three hits, three wounds! Did they all die? One lived, fuck.  And he decided to be brave and stay put.  We decided to call it, I rolled to see if the game would of ended and it did, so  there was no point doing his turn, he had me at 9-7 and def would have knocked me off one of my objective.  So close, one more dead drone and I would have gotten an extra vp and he would have been knocked off a 3 pt objective.  I could have won!!!  Maybe!! I can dream!!

Oh well it was a great game and was a lot of fun watching some football and drinking some beer while BSing and talking about cheating Tau.  I made more than few mistakes, first off, I should have gone second and deployed closer, I left my two flanks just too far apart to support each other.  Ok I love big LoS blocking terrain.  As you can see it had a huge effect as it blocked each others shots and made our maneuver so important.  I should have moved men over towards the left flank earlier.  Oh well, its good to lose sometimes as you can learn a lot more.  Overall I like having the added wargear but the lost MoO really hurt too.  Skulls are awesome, and the inquisitor is ok, I am going to tweak his wargear as I think I can drop a few things from him.

Good game and his kroot just over performed and carried the day, taking out a vendetta and forcing the other off the board, an inquisitor, a platoon and pcs, a vet squad, they were just awesome.  And no sniper rounds, honestly this is the best configuration of kroot I have seen with 3ish hounds and 3 krootox and then some kroot, they were extremely flexible and the hounds could move up fast and slingshot the rest of the squad forward.  So next game I will not be letting them live.  And I will remember to kill the things that give me extra points.

I have said it many times boys and girls, play the objectives and you will do fine.  I forgot what some of my objectives were and didn't realize till too late.

GG