Alpha T'au Omega: Alpha Legion vs Farsight Enclaves

 Rematch! Kasfunatu's implacable T'au tore through me the last time we played, and we decided that a swap of sides was in order. 

Sadly, we didn't quite manage to map or photograph this, we had enough going on with all the battle excitement and it skipped our minds. So there's just a few nice pics I found on the internet, hopefully without upsetting anyone's copyright, to set the tone. 

The armies are exactly the same as last time, but I've switched allegiances. So I have the T'au today, and Kas has the Alpha Legion. We're playing a Tempest of War with the new deck, but none of the latest balance changes, so traits and relics are still freebies.

Farsides Enclaves - Patrol and Super Heavy Detachments, 9 CPs

• HQ - Coldstar Commander, Fusion Blaster, Shield Generator, Thermoneutronic Projector, Target Lock, Positional Relay, Warlord with Precision of the Hunter trait, Onager Gauntlet
• HQ - Enforcer Commander, Promising Pupil with Exemplar of the Mont'ka, Resonator Warheads, Missile Pod, Solid Image Projector, 2 Shield Drones
• Troops - 10 x Breacher Team, Markerlight Drone and Guardian Drone
• Elites - 5 x Crisis Suits, each with Plasma Rifle, Tau Flamer and Fusion Blaster, then two Target Locks, a Counterfire Defence System, a Shield Generator and Iridium Battlesuit upgrade and an Early Warning Override, then two shield drones
• Fast Attack - 10 Pathfinders, three with Rail Rifles, two shield drones
• Fast Attack - 2 Tetras
• Heavy Support - 3 Broadside Battlesuits with Heavy Rail Rifles, two with twin smart missile systems, leader has a seeker missile and plasma rifle instead, three shield drones and two missile drones
• Flyer - 2 Remora Stealth Drones
• Lord of War - Stormsurge Battlesuit with  Cluster Rocket System, Counterfire Defence System, 4x Destroyer Missile, Drone Controller, Early Warning Override, Pulse Blastcannon, 2x Smart Missile System, Target Lock, Twin Burst Cannon and a Kitchen Sink for the pilots

Alpha Legion Patrol and Super Heavy Detachments

• HQ - Dark Apostle (and Disciples), We Are Alpharius with Master of Diversion trait, Mindveil Relic, Mark of Tzeentch, Benediction of Darkness and a couple of others he didn't use
• HQ - Sorcerer, Warlord with Warp Lord trait and Hydra's Wail relic, jump pack and combi-melta
• Troops - 10 Chaos Cultists
• Elites - Decimator with Mark of Slaanesh and twin Soulburner Petards
• Elites - 8 Khorne Berserkers, Icon of Wrath, Chainswords and Chainaxes, Sarge has a Power Sword and Lightning Claw
• Fast Attack - 5 Bikers, two with meltas, two with combi-bolters, sarge has a combi-melta
• Fast Attack - 5 Warp Talons
• Heavy Support - 5 Havocs, Sarge has a melta, the others have two lascannons, a missile launcher and a Reaper Chaincannon
• Dedicated Transport - Terrax-Pattern Termite with twin heavy flamers, all the meltas and a whacking big drill
• Lord of War - Great Brass Scorpion with all its usual goodness

Terrain and Deployment

It was a fight in a ruined city! In the future! So it might have looked a bit like this.

Hard to describe this, but the cards gave us the short edges, but a diagonal approach out towards the middle. It's a city fight, at any rate, with massive shattered ruins all over the place, and plenty of Obscuring terrain to hide behind. 

Three cards a turn would give us our secondaries. None of us started on Objectives - Kas had warned me that one of the mission cards demands that you stay on an objective if you're already on it, and it's better to have the flexibility of moving on to one instead of being stuck on one if you already are, so we were all poised to leap on at a moment's notice but not actually there yet. 

The cards gave us a straightforward fight over 5 Objectives, with the Primary Mission being the good old fashioned 5 VPs for one, for two and for more. Our twists are that we can never use the Heroic Bravery strat, so we have to abide by the morale rolls, and that any reserves might get delayed for a turn. Bad news for all our deep strikers!

I set my guys up with the Enforcer and Broadsides shielding the Stormsurge in the middle. Pathfinders set up in ruins just to the north, behind which were the Remoras and Tetras. My south flank had Breachers up front, then the Coldstar and Crisis suits behind them - nobody was going to risk getting delayed for a turn, so there was nobody in the Mantas!

Kas had meanwhile placed the Scorpion on the north flank, and a deal of his hopes with it - all the characters were in support, with the Havocs watching over it from the upper deck of a nearby ruin. He'd be running over fairly open terrain, straight at my big guns, and crossing his claws to make it across intact. To the south, the Cultists lurked at the back alongside the Decimator and the Termite full of Berserkers, then the Biker squad. Only the Warp Talons risked deep strike. 

Kas got first turn, and we went straight at it!

The Game

Kas got off to a solid start, grabbing his own backfield objective with Cultists, whilst the Scorpion raced forwards with Warptime and scored an early bonus of grabbing my backfield as it slammed into the Broadsides. 

Not the brass scorpion I was looking for, but close enough

Shooting on the way in had damaged one of the big suits, and the Scorpion itself had murdered most of the Pathfinders nearby, but the combat was far from decisive - even with Daemonforge in play, Big Brass could only claw through a lot of drone parts and bring down a lone Broadside, leaving him standing proud in a sea of large guns. 

To the south, though, it was better news - my Breacher team got entirely wiped out between the Bikers and the Termite, which served me right for placing them in the open early on. 

My first turn was similarly uncompromising. Using the Mont'ka to give me speed without sacrificing firepower, I sent the Tetras and Ramoras forward to harass the characters the Scorpion had left behind. Everything else surrounded the Scorpion as the Broadsides fell back, and I poured on the firepower like gravy. Two wounds remained as the dust settled - a hefty pounding indeed, but not as fatal as I'd hoped!

From here, Kas had to keep the pressure on and hope the Scorpion could make it through. It wasn't to be, though, he took a Rail Rifle to the face as he charged the last remaining Broadside (the others were shot down previously, as were the few remaining Pathfinders). The Bikers and Termite surged towards the south side and the Crisis team, shooting their drones and a suit down as the Decimator added its firepower. And the Havocs cleared away the Remoras as the Sorcerer jumped into the central objective and scored a few more points for scanning it. 

I was so relieved the Scorpion hadn't exploded in the middle of my army, I was counting my relatively high casualties so far as a win. With the pressure now off my back line, I shifted the Coldstar and Crisis suits back south to face off against the Bikers, and shot them apart with surprising ease. Only one was left to flee. The Enforcer had also shifted south to hold my backline objective for points, he helped out against the bikes too. 

Likewise, the Termite burst apart as the Stormsurge and Broadside flexed their muscles, leaving the Berserkers high and dry in the middle. I did try and gank the Sorcerer by throwing the Tetras on to the middle objective, but there wasn't much space to land. When their shots bounced off him, he could Intervene, and promptly smashed them both to flinders. My losses were getting painful by now, although I was very glad I still had the big guy up and running.

Kas kept pushing forward, the Berserkers rushing towards the Crisis Suits with the Decimator covering them. Most of the battlesuits died to its guns, but using the Repulsor Field strat I managed to deny Kas the charge the Berserkers needed. The Havocs failed to kill off the last Broadside, and that was all Kas had for this turn. 

By now, however, he had a clear thirty point lead on me, mostly from Primaries (which I hadn't scored much on at all) and a few bad rounds of card draw from me. I was definitely feeling the pinch - if he was getting a bit thin on the ground, so was I (apart from the pristine Stormsurge), and I'd need good draws and ground grabbing to get anywhere. 

My first mission turned out to be to kill the Decimator, so both Commanders and the last Crisis Suit jumped about to do that while I had the last remnants of my Mont'ka ability up. It proved a bit harder than I hoped - the plan was to shoot it to bits, then hurl the Coldstar into the Berserkers and pummel them to bits, but I had to charge in to finish the Daemon Engine in the end. Elsewhere, the Stormsurge started lumbering forwards, blowing holes in the Cultists and Havocs but not finishing them. Again, the Enforcer had jumped sideways to help with this, leaving his Drones behind to hold the objective by using a strat.

Now it was Kas's turn to get a rough deal with the mission cards - it wanted him to get units into my deployment zone, which meant running the Berserkers forward at my Enforcer instead of clobbering the Coldstar that they were right next to. Not that they specially wanted to run at his flamer-style gun, mind you! 

The Sorcerer jumped in to help them, Warptiming them round the corner for a shorter charge. But for the second time, the Berserkers fell foul of the Repulsor Field strat, and failed their 7" even on the reroll. That was rotten luck, and also the final (butcher's) nail in their coffin - the Stormsurge blew most of them away in the next turn, with firepower to spare on the Havocs. 

Simultaneously, the Crisis suit bounded up and took out the last Cultist, stealing the objective from Kas, and the Coldstar Commander mullered the Sorcerer with a Fusion Blaster before slapping the last few Berserkers about with his super fist. 

This left us in the last turn, and the gap had closed a lot. I'd bounced back on primaries and secondaries, and with so little left, Kas was struggling to score. But he was still ahead of me...

His last turn was just squatting the Dark Disciple on an objective for a few last points. I had a full hand coming to me, and needed to score two for a win. 

And I could! The Coldstar Commander could use his bounding jump to grab the centre objective, I was now holding all of No Man's Land, and I'd maxed out my Primaries after a late start. A last minute win for the T'au!

Locker Room

But wait! Hold everything!

Turns out, maxing out my Primaries was actually a problem! I could only score 45 from that, and Kas had generously given me 50 without realising. So what we actually had was a draw - Kas had kept me off the scoreboard early on just long enough to stop me getting ahead. For which I could blame myself - in my first turn, the Pathfinders had opted to stay still and shoot the Scorpion. 

A whole chest of draws!

Instead, they could have taken that objective off the Scorpion, for a ten-point swing, which would have won the game! You know, if the Scorpion had died as it did, and their firepower did contribute to that, so who knows - but I felt I had a scapegoat for having the win slip through my fingers. 

An absolutely cracking game otherwise, hard played and close to the bitter end. Our lucks had evened out over time, but Kas was stopped by his slowpoke Berserkers. A single connection from them would have turned the tide in his favour. As it was, I clawed my way back into the game with a combo of raw firepower and extreme agility. The T'au were great fun to use, far more so than their previous incarnation, and I look forward to trying more with them another time. 

Armour of Contempt (despite being a fiddly, sticking plaster sort of rule) is a actually a welcome addition, too - it really helped the Chaos Marines against the barrages of low ap-firepower I could throw at them, and made them a good deal less frail than they have been. Obviously their new codex is going to be a huge shift for them, though, so I'm anticipating a very different experience next time I encounter the traitors!