Tims wargaming blog

Hey guys, Tim here, and its been a while, sorry about that. Merry belated Christmas (or happy belated Chanukah or Kwanzaa). Anyway, we have another installment off the unused tactica, in which we are discussing tau gun drones. Now, almost every tau army has gun drones in it, aka on their devilfishes, but no one takes a squadron of gun drones on their own. Many people say that that is because they are contending with pathfinders and piranha skimmer teams for a place in fast attack. We all know that they are useful with crisis and broadside suits to provide extra wounds in the squad to keep your suits alive longer. Anyway, lets look at the pros and cons of the gun drone squadrons:

Pros

• cheap, at 12 points a model, for squad size of 4-8
• decent weapon, with twin linked S 5 Ap 5
• Pinning! (that is so important that it got a bullet point of its own)
• they are jump infantry (jet pack), so you can move out of cover, fire, and then return to cover.
• Can deep strike
• decent initiative

Cons

• horrible ballistic skill (2)
• no combat skills whatsoever (WS 2, S 3, T 3)
• only Ld 7 with a 4+ save

Now, there are two ways you can use your gun drones in game. Most people use them to screen their units from assault by placing them in front of their units. However, there is another way to use them, especially if they are in a gun drone squadron and not off a devilfish. You can deepstrike them in close to the enemy (or advance quickly with your total movement of 12″ a turn) and try to pin enemy units, especially those whose Ld is somewhat low. This is incredibly useful to slow the enemies approach, as you now will have to deal with less units to take care of immediately.

(edit: sorry it has taken so long for a new post, I promise that I have a bunch of new content just waiting to be posted.)

hey guys, Tim here. This is a new series of posts i’m starting about some of the least used units in the warhammer 40000 codexes (codices?). Here is the list of units in the tau codex that I will be talking about:

• vespid stingwings
• gun drones
• ethereals
• stealth suits
• sniper drones
• sky ray gunship

Now, on to the Vespids. It is common knowledge on the internet that vespids are horrible. But why do vespids get such bad press, let’s look at some pros and cons:

Pros:

• vespids are fast. Being able to move 12″, and also have fleet, so they are the fastest infantry in the tau codex.
• vespids are also skilled flyers, so you may re-roll dangerous terrain tests, which is very useful
• Their Neutron blasters are S 5 ap 3 assault 1 weapons
• They have toughness 4 and initiative 5
• They can be taken in size from 4-11

Cons:

• regular stingwings only have leadership 6, and the leader has leadership 9, so you need to keep the leader alive
• their Neutron blasters only fire 12″
• they only have a 5+ armor save
• the stingwings cost 16 points and the leader cost a full 22 points

Overall I still believe the vespids are useful, you can drop them down with deep strike and have them harass the enemy army, and if nothing else, they can be used as bait, as your opponent would have to deal with them.