Tau stronghold

[Malazan]

Does anyone have any tips for beating the Tau stronghold as space marine? My base seems to just get overrun before I can really accomplish anything.

[Latharion]

I usually take out the Mont'ka command post first, because their hammerhead hover tanks tend to tear up my armor. Next I head to the other command post to remove the annoying gorilla dudes.

Before you invade, ensure you have a healthy group of honor guard squads. Take your time. Rushing the Tau stronghold only leads to sadness and frustration. Build up to Termies and tanks, then move out. Be sure to leave some back as you are essentially fighting a two-front war. Eventually, you will want to take the middle to gain access to the Land Raider. After that, storm the holdout located opposite your base and that should be that. It isn't easy, and you will want to use your termies to teleport up to rooftops to eliminate those annying cloaked scout dudes that are stationed at regular intervals down both legs of the base.

Also be ready for repeated waves coming down both sides of the base. They occasionally hit simultaneously. Also holding on to the strategic points located near the middle of either side toward either leg of the base is difficult. For some reason, the Tau value those more highly than the sub-bases so if you take out a sub-base, and build a base of your own, you can often times hold it with just a few turrets and a marine squad. Those others tend to receive the full tau wrath though, so they tend to get smooshed.

[oH HorizoN x]

Tau was always one of the toughest as SM and IG in my opinion. The lack of units that can detect infiltrated units at the beginning of the tech tree really hurts.

Another tip I would add is to get the ability to drop in structures ahead of your deployment. Starting out with an armory helped me a lot.

And of course, as many honor guard as you can muster.

[qrosa]

you've probably finished it by now, but in case you haven't, i'll just dump my playthrough:



firstly, you can capture the points next to your HQ before the initial attack reaches your base (start capturing as soon as the mission starts).
you probably want to wait with building listening posts on these points until the first wave has been taken care of.



after the initial wave, i prioritized economy in order to reach the last tier quickly. i simply turtled until i was satisfied with my defense.

i ended up with two predators (both with all 3 anti-armor upgrades), a whirlwind, a land speeder, and i believe 4 marine squads (upgraded with heavy bolters).
also important were 3 scout teams that i had planted around my base, primarily to extend visibility for the whirlwind, but also to make me aware of incoming attacks, and what those consisted of.

if you decide to use predators, you could consider upgrading only the twin-linked lascannon so that they still have some good anti-infantry power.

i left my honor guard (including commander) at my base to help defend.

if there were hammerheads attacking, i'd always have my predators focus fire on them. otherwise, they focused skyrays.

for the most part, i manually gave the whirlwind targets. the disruption and morale damage of its attacks are truly awesome, and by itself the tank can nullify the majority of infantry of each attack.

if you prefer, you could equip the space marines with missile launchers, while using land speeders or/and hellfire dreadnoughts to deal with infantry. i opted for the predators however, because i prefer their tankiness. :-)



once my defense was complete, i got myself both terminator teams and 2 dreadnoughts, and started moving north-west towards the kauyon post.
as SM i had a much harder time dealing with the tanky daemon creatures (the predators worked incredibly well against the relatively squishy tau tanks), so i decided to go for that post first.
on my way there, i just ignored all enemies. it also didn't matter if i lost units, as long as i kept at least something alive to retain line of sight (for deep-striking).
(edit: grey knights deal absurdly high melee damage against knarlocs and krootoxen. don't forget!)

once i reached the heightened part between the strategic point and the kauyon post, i deep-struck a skull probe in to help my guys get rid of the stealth teams up there.
once the platform was clear, i dropped in a builder unit and had him build an HQ and a machine cult, to allow for faster reinforcing.
(in case my explanation was unclear: https://i.imgur.com/DyaSUxu.jpg)

from that point, it was just a matter of damage. i focused the hammerhead and skyrays, then took out the rest.
the tau might send some patrols to attack your strike force, but i'm pretty sure they do not actually reinforce the lost units that were defending the post. so whatever you destroy, will not come back.



after the kauyon post is gone, you can kinda do whatever you feel like. i went for the minor bases at this point, rather than the relic or the mont'ka post.
once i destroyed all 4 minor bases, i took the relic, built the land raider (which replaced one of the dreadnoughts), and started moving towards the mont'ka post.
at this point the pressure on my base was very low already, but because of the map layout (small pathways and such) i decided to get rid of the mont'ka base with that same small force.

once the second post is down, you've basically won the mission. they'll continue to send some stuff out from their main base if all of the others are gone, but it will just be infantry that they're sending.
so now you can just surround the last base, and have some fun with it. :-)



small reminder: assault terminators have a chance to stun enemies, so if they surround a knarloc or hammerhead, it will most likely be stunned indefinitely, as long as you can keep the squad intact.
you could consider including them in your defense for when you get attacked by knarlocs or krootoxen.

[TotalRiggerDeath]

As necron you can ignore the stealth shooters on ledges and just spawn in any lost troops. The initial assault is pretty hard but the rest was pretty easy and I attacked them pretty early. Lost most my honor guard in the initial defense. The final base has alot of long rage artillery and mele units lost all my army due to the games ♥♥♥♥♥♥ pathfinding but I took out most there forces and mopped up it up with a commander and flayed ones spam.