Tau UK Best General

The UK Masters 40k tournament has just been and gone, however looking round the Rankings HQ site I noticed that I have the icon for the UK Tau Best General.

Now this is not going to be an ego stroking blog post because I know I am far from the best Tau player in the UK, so I'd rather look at the reasons behind this state of affairs.

One possible reason is that a lot of tournaments aren't on Rankings HQ. However I don't believe this to be true, as looking at the site it has the majority of tournaments on it. Strangely enough my two best tournament results from last year (Basingstoke's ASMoH & Bracknell's 40k Online) where I came 3rd (out of 40) and 5th (out of 24) aren't on the website. Given that including those results would have made my ranking even higher, it must be something else.

The answer is actually quite obvious. Players with Tau armies are either not attending tournaments or using other armies when they attend tournaments.

Two good UK examples of very good Tau players taking other armies to tournaments are Adam of Warhammer Tau and Stu who came 3rd at the 40k Masters with his Dark Eldar.

Adam is waiting till a new codex to redo his Tau. He likes the way they play and their fluff, but thinks it's hard for Tau to compete at the top levels. Adam is currently concentrating on his Space Wolves and heads up the excellent Space Wolves Grey Blog.

Stu recently went back to his Tau for the recent (Oct) Rapid Strike tournament. Stu came an impressive 10th (out of 52). The other three Tau players came 42nd, 44th (me) and 50th. I was interested to talk to Stu and see what his take on Tau was. Speaking with him before the tournament I knew he took more broadsides than me and also used a large kroot squad. However he said he thought there were too many armies the Tau struggle with, and that he would be returning to his Dark Eldar.

But what do you do if you still want to play Tau ? My advice is to go ahead and play them. The armies you face in the top half of competitive tournaments is nowhere near the normal army you'll face in a shop or against your mates. I still won more than I lost of my tournament games over the year. I just found they struggled against certain armies and when they got to the top tables, however that may have been because I was facing better players (as well as better lists) rather than just the Tau couldn't compete.

So why can't Tau compete at the top ? Well to me it's partially the increase in mech armies (particularly Guard, Wolves and Angels). Tau have the wonderful railgun but only in small numbers, and the missile pod is best at suppression rather than actual tank killing. Also some armies are just faster than we're use to (eg. blood angels) or have more firepower than our expensive crisis suits can handle (eg. Guard or missile heavy wolves).

There is some disagreement against the common view that Tau aren't that competitive. Both Stelek and Kirby rate them. However I believe Tau can compete better as you get to closer to 2000 pts. At that points level you can have 3 units of broadsides, 3 units of fireknifes & kroot screens, while still having points to have pihranas to run interference to add a further layer of defense and stalling time.

So what's your few on Tau performance in tournaments ? Are.they really struggling in your area, or do the Tau in your area.hold their own ? It would be great to hear ideas on how to reverse this trend of less and less Tau seen at tournaments.

Rathstar