Battle Experiences, Mech Eldar Reflections

I've notched two more games with the mech-tau build.

Honestly, both of them were pretty extreme in their results. This is largely due to the dice.

Thursday was against Xardian's footslogging Chaos.

his foot-chaos is something like...

2 Large Khorne-marked tac squads (PF, 2x melta)
Plague marines on foot
Tactical Squad on foot w/ PF, Lascannon (he'll be modeling one with pom-poms to give you an idea of what that squad's meant to do...)
Daemon Prince (no upgrades)
Summoned Lesser Daemons
2x3 Oblits
8 Havocs (2 missile, 2 autocannon)

Board was mostly open in the middle, with terrain we could shoot through but mostly give each other cover saves. I got turn one in capture the flag.

I crank out ~10-11 instant-death wounds on Oblits, most of them AP2. I kill one Oblit.

Needless to say, I start losing 1-2 tanks a turn, and I think by the end of the game I have maybe one tank.

It turns into me defending my objective, and having one Dire Avenger squad barely on it. Gotta work on NOT clustering up so much when there are heaps of plasma cannons going out there...Then again, I was also very good at failing 3+ saves, so....

All in all, the lesson was that Eldar skimmers have speed as armor. Got to deny them shots; even with a lot of skimmers and the occasional cover save, AV12 is NOT exactly survivable, and the heavy support tanks have it bad against lascannons.

Friday's game got called partway through on account of weather.

Jon's mech-orks. Mech-orks don't do well when you pop both battlewagons and a Trukk on turn one when you go first. Even worse was that one Battlewagon's corpse more or less blocked off one of his loota squads.

Beyond that, I moved back to deny him Loota shots in spearhead/capture the flag, but it was a pretty solid tie. I blew away a lot of stuff, and we dediced it was pretty much over when none of his penetrating hits got better than a '1' on the damage table. Other lowlights included his Warboss w/ Combi-Skorcha lighting up 7 Dire Avengers, needing 2's to kill them, and seeing four 1's.

Between that and the weather (...had some truly nasty hail, and other random crap and winds...) we called it to grab cover early.

Overall lessons learned:
-Speed is armor
-Not being seen is great armor
-exploit the hell out of the 48" range on Falcons and 60" range on Fire Prisms. There's no need to expose them to danger past that.

I suppose the Falcons have just gotten a little bit of love over the Wave Serpent, what with the whole range advantage. Falcons get three S8 shots at 48", or 2 S8 and an S4 blast template. I guess I have to give them props for hammering lighter armor, as Fire Prisms are pretty much dedicated anti-infantry.