This would be in keeping with the design philosophy for the Tau, shield drones are generally factored in to the armour save for units.
Leaving the Arm 3+ to include accompanying shield drones and the 5+ Inv Save for the Deflector Shield?

Since the shield drones are AV and the riptides WE's, they can't really "shield" them anyway because you always have the choice to target the WEs. I guess the drones just make the riptides either harder or easier to break, depending on the situation. i.e. if you do damage to the riptides then the additional models increase the break point, but if you target the drones then they are easier to destroy.

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Yeah, but, . . . you can put the shield drones behind the Riptides and since WE block line of sight they can't be targeted. Also the Riptides have a 10 cm coherency separation distance so shield drones could also be hidden behind cover. In both cases it makes the WE formation more resilient for the bargain price of shield drones.

If you have 2 BMs and want to shoot, just pop-up a shield drone at slightly longer range to soak 1 BM and the formation fires at almost full effect. All very advantageous for just 25 pts each.

Yeah, the more I think about this, the more it seems like a good idea to remove the shield drone upgrade from the Riptides.
It's a bonus they just don't need.
Fast/shooty/resilient War Engines don't need extra buffs.

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Good feed back, thanks.

Thanks also for the battle reports, the detail is appreciated.

Just a quick check:

Are the Mantas meant to cost 625 points? Tau 6.8 have them at 650 points.

Also the Hammerhead Railgun variant in Tau 6.8 has burst cannon, AP5+ instead of smart missiles AP5+, ignore cover. And the AP5+ shoot with the railgun does not have lance.

Of course the tournament pack website has Tau 6.8 with smart missiles, . . .
http://www.tp.net-armageddon.org/army-lists/tau.html

Best get my orbital (Manta) response to ATML properly costed, organised, . . . . vs Markconz tomorrow night.

I will adjust the sheets to match the updates to Tau 6.8 in the next revision, which will be soon.

So I went for Riptide spam in my most recent game, . . . .
Battle report at Imperial Headquarters
TacCom report at Imperial Communications Hub

18 Riptide Suits (counts as Battlesuits and Broadsides) plus some support for 4000 points.
I took them without any shielded missile drones, as I suggested above.

There was a hint of a price bump, . . . how much? Needed?

That brings us to 7 Vior'la games with posted/published battle reports.
Still planning some more Orca spam games. And Riptide options.
How are you placed overall, . . . . need anything more.
My Kroot are doubtless itching for a run.

Yes I think spamming of Riptides needs some serious testing. At 325 for 6 DC, 3 macros each turn, and 3+/5++ armour, using markerlight, co-ordinated fire and fallback they were outclassing my warhounds (and everything else) pretty badly. For less than 2K points there was 36DC of very well armoured and speedy units packing lots of macros.

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The other thing I thought, was that with Riptides effectively being the Tau equivalent of Imperial/Eldar knights, and the awesome Kaiju mega-rigs from Onslaught available with multiple options, it's a shame to limit them to just one weapon loadout. Can a list with variant choices be included or developed perhaps?

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Hi Mark

That's entirely possible, I even drew up some test rules for the various weapons options, and some notes for even newer units like the KV-128 Stormsurge:



THAT IS WHAT TEMPTATION LOOKS LIKE!!



However, I have decided that the priority is to get the Vior'la Tau list finished, and that would be much easier to accomplish if changes are kept minimal so that the many playtests that have been done remain as relevant as possible.

To that end I will be posting an update to the army that I hope will be the final before it goes into the approval process.

It's been a long journey, and I'd like to get this army live

The new version of the list, Version 1.5 has been added.

There are a few changes, most significant being two changes to riptides:
Weapon reduced from 3+ to 4+ to hit
Formation cost increased from 325 to 350 points

I decided not to combine these two with the suggestion to remove of the Shield drones, as making two power-reductions to a unit is sufficient at one time. Since from a thematic point of view they're similar to the gundrone upgrade option for Crisis Suits, I'd probably only remove them for balance purposes, so the shield drones can stay in until we see the affect of the two tweaks above.

The rest of the list has been stable for a while, so it's a good time to start trying to move it from Dev to Approved.

Thanks, I hope you enjoy the latest version of the Vior'La Tau list.

Cool we'll let you know how it goes.

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I have increased the price in the Vior'la version to match 6.8.

Interested to know how many Tau players take the Hero class ( 2 x TK(D3) ) cruiser in their games?
Looking at the other army lists and comparing points for what you get, it seems pretty strong.

Tim