The Tau of Khuster

The tyranid player in my group of Thursday night guys took on the new Khusters Cav the other night.  Just for fun, we threw in the tactical objective cards and had a blast.

Deployment was probably the hardest part of the game for me, but aside from a few tactical errors, namely missing a hit and run opportunity to secure an objective, the game went well.

Final score:  Tyranids 9, Khuster 6.  We made it through turn 2.

In an after battle breakdown, had we played the full game, I would have taken quite a bit of the rest of his army in the next few turns and it would have been a very close loss at the worst.  It would have most likely come down to tactical objective cards or kill points.

Even though I lost, it was clear his army peaked in the first two turns.  He had models with multiple wounds all over the place, and I was able to put a good amount of wounds on each.  But my army started peaking just before we ended.  I still had more than half my army on the board if we had started turn 3, and enough room to stay out of close combat.

I'm noticing that my best damage is actually coming from overwatch.  This army is really taking on the spirit of Custer's Cav, and I enjoy that.

So how did the Tau do?

Very well.  I intentionally did not use the nova reactor on the riptide, because I wanted to see its base strength.  The Cadre Fireblade and Fire warriors did their job.  They sat on my only backfield objective and got me a couple points.

The Broadsides and missile drones were the biggest help.  My opponent had to focus solely on them with a couple of his nasty units, and it saved a good amount of bikes.  The Broadside shooting phase wasn't the best, but it was at least average.  The riptide did its job well.

Of the Tau group, I only lost 2 Fire warriors, 2 broadsides, a missile drone, and 1 wound on the riptide.

I'm going to work on modeling this force next, since I'm confident in the new list being effective at The Harvester.