Install Steam
login
|
language
简体中文 (Simplified Chinese)
繁體中文 (Traditional Chinese)
日本語 (Japanese)
한국어 (Korean)
ไทย (Thai)
Български (Bulgarian)
Čeština (Czech)
Dansk (Danish)
Deutsch (German)
Español - España (Spanish - Spain)
Español - Latinoamérica (Spanish - Latin America)
Ελληνικά (Greek)
Français (French)
Italiano (Italian)
Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian)
Magyar (Hungarian)
Nederlands (Dutch)
Norsk (Norwegian)
Polski (Polish)
Português (Portuguese - Portugal)
Português - Brasil (Portuguese - Brazil)
Română (Romanian)
Русский (Russian)
Suomi (Finnish)
Svenska (Swedish)
Türkçe (Turkish)
Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese)
Українська (Ukrainian)
Report a translation problem
The author of this topic has marked a post as the answer to their question.
Discussions Rules and Guidelines
Report this post
It's a bit hard to advise you without knowing more about the settings.
Is it a team game or 1v1?
What map size?
Is the landmass very high ?
What game speed? (medium? Fast? Wrong?)
Any specific settings that vary from average (like outposts?)
If you mostly face vehicles with wraiths, your best friend is the Hammerhead.
Depending on the amount of flayers, maybe you'll want some Crisis. Doubtful if he really focuses on barges and wraith.
Note that crisis are good against barges, but they are also a bit squishy towards them, so I'm not sure it's the right idea to make them unless the number of flayers is really important.
Now that we know who is our best friend, we want to have a lot of them.
You will want to quickly have one vehicle building on each of your three cities, with enough energy to build the hammerheads (you can buy ore, you can't buy energy until T7. So energy is crucial).
A build order like:
- Book
- Vehicle
- Energy
- Double builder drones
- Ore
- Influence
- Pop
- Vehicle
Might be good. With your second and third cities doing Vehicle-energy-ore-influence-vehicle, or some such (maybe making the second vehicle faster if you have enough resources to do so).
Piranhas are very good at spamming drones, seeker missile and finishing barges, so don't overlook them. They're THE early tool, and you may want to produce a few of them when the first ones die.
Without knowing your settings, maybe my claim is wrong, but being able to build 4 cities and still have enough army to beat you means you're not playing as agressively as you should. Go ♥♥♥♥ him up instead of giving him all the time in the world.
Depending on your speed setting, turn ~40 should see you have one or two hammerhead and several piranhas. That's enough to teach him the meaning of the Tau'Va. Or whatever.
Instead of teching Sky Rays, take the Seeker Missile on Hammerhead (and piranhas). It's also good to take the move through cover tech because you can go woosh, both to attack and to retreat.
1v1v1 (Though I didn't really fight the Orks. Was it the right play to let them die?)
3 player map size
Medium Landmass
Medium Game Speed
Tier 1 Research Unlocked, Research Costs Low (base time of 4?), 4 Research Required per Tier, Simultaneous Turns
The real problem with the Wraiths was that he continually sent them to harry my backlines (stealing outposts, relics, etc.) and I couldn't (or didn't feel like) I could spare anything to go kill them. Even a full Ghostkeel didn't kill one.
Yeah, my energy economy was garbage that game, there were no deserts on my side of the map.
Interesting! I have indeed overlooked Piranhas. I've always found them really bad against most neutrals (with the exception of their drones, but infantry can spawn drones too).
Thank you for the build orders, those are always helpful.
I do indeed struggle with aggression, especially as Tau. Unfortunately the Orks were caught between me and the Crons, so I thought I could get behind the Crons (over the water) and start attacking cities, but that's when I lost 2 thirds of my army.
Thank you!
6-7 at once? With more in reserve. All level 5 and higher from murdering Orks.
I eventually mostly killed them once I got the Sky Rays, but by then he phased them out for Doomsdays.
You can do nasty stuff with Sky Rays vs Necron vehicles, before they get Quantum shielding 3 Sky Ray missiles can almost destroy a Doomsday ark and 2 can almost destroy a Annihilation Barge, bring in some Piranhas and you finish them off with their missiles and avoid overkill with the Sky Rays. Kill a couple of vehicles and they are going to be moving with yellow morale for a while.
If you markerlight them you can fire at 4 range otherwise 3 range, it puts a lot of pressure on the Necron player because you can keep killing targets for free every 5 turns and then running away, if the Necron commits with the Doomsday Arks and moves them point blank range they lose half of their damage (and range) and have to attack with yellow or red morale.
If the Necrons are doing 4 cities your eco should be far stronger than them unless you let them chill for like 100 turns, if you are not afraid of getting rush down early on a Fireblade can improve your eco once he gets level 6 to a hilarious amount (if you are not confident you can keep him alive in combat send hin to the base at lv 6 for ever). You should be ahead on research and resource production, make sure you have the military production to spend it.
Oh yes, I had 4 Sky Rays and 3 Hammerheads by the end of it. They were doing work, but 5 turns is too long of a cooldown, so it was just going slowly- even more so considering that he had 2 lvl 5 Crypteks that were using lvl 3 Chronometron every single turn. Plus a seemingly endless reserve of Influence in order to keep them healed.
I tried to pull off the Markerlight thing so they wouldn't get damaged, but Stealthsuits were the only way to do that effectively and they kept either dying (Infiltrate is substantially less effective in Simultaneous Turns) or I would incorrectly place them (and no, Markerlight drones weren't an option, they died immediately).
We were just over a hundred turns at this point. Looking at the graphs, our economies were roughly equal and I was much ahead in research...
Okay, I guess I should mention that I surrendered the match for the sake of time. So I wasn't actually defeated, but he had high level Wraiths and an Annhilation Barge in my backlines, and if I didn't feel that I could afford to pull anything back. thought it was only a matter of time until he started sniping my cities, and then I would be screwed.
I know about the Cadre Fireblade. Love, love, LOVE those. Hero buildings are usually what I build first. Especially for Tau. And Space Marines. Any faction really. Well, except Eldar.
Does no one else struggle with these unkillable monstrosities?
Look... I get ancient undead robots that don't die is their whole schtick, but this is a GAME. It's supposed to be balanced. There has to be a way to win.
I... think I uploaded a bunch of screenshots? I still don't know how that works, but I tried. All the endgame graphs, an image of my final stand, and the map we played on.
And I know a whole lot of people are going to jump immediately to the economy thing because "professionals talk logistics, amateurs talk tactics" but the problem is not economy, the problem is units, BECAUSE NECRONS. DO NOT. DIE.
Not to Fire Dragons, not to Shining Spears, not to War Walkers, not to Wraithknights, not to Wraithblades, not to *anything* in a favorable ratio (like, say, 1:1). They just keep on ticking, keep picking up XP, and he just builds more and more and eventually it doesn't even matter if he's running a deficit in Ore because he's already won.
Am I alone here?
The necrons have one of the strongest "early" games due to their infantry being able to heal every turn. I don't know if you chose that setting or if your opponent did but that was a recipe for disaster.
How about you play the next one with research set to default settings? One of the things that separates a good player from the rest is that they can pick the things they need to blast through the research tiers quickly. It's nice to have some of the low tech stuff but not if that comes at the cost of your opponent getting to tier 7 when you are making tier 5 units.
It also sounds like you are relatively new so I would suggest you don't have an AI wildcard in what is essentially a 1v1 game +AI. Or if you are going to have AI why not have 2 players and 2 lone AI on a 4 player map?
Imagine if you said : let's play a game with no volcanic and no desert tiles. That would be hell for Necrons because there would be no bonuses for the tiles their cities need.
I picked that setting, I thought it would stop him from getting Annihilation Barges faster and force him to rely on lower tier stuff. That clearly hasn't been working though.
We used to play on default settings for research, but that always ended in swarms of Tesseract Vaults... though I guess there's not much difference at this point, so I'll go ahead and change it back.
There is no AI wildcard, it's a third player.
1. Against necrons, make extra effort to outright kill units. If you let a unit pull back and repair, all that overwatch damage or spread out damage is completely useless.
2. As Tau you should be going as wide as you possibly can with your cities. You can comfortably go to 5 cities without a lvl6 Fireblade, with one of each building per city. With multiple lvl6 Fireblades there is literally no limit.
3. As you are going to have a very mixed force vs a single focus force, you have a simple objective ahead of you: make anti armour units. Those are (for each production building): Barracks - Stealth Suits (a bit squishy, but can take surprising amounts of damage when in cover), Pathfinders (mark target is incredibly strong, abuse it), Crisis Battlesuits (solid all-round unit really); armoury - Sky Rays, Hammerheads, Piranhas, and perhaps Devilfishes full of Stealth Suits (Sky Rays are perhaps the best option due to their great range against marked targets, the 5-turn cooldown really isn't a problem when you can pick off one or two units per turn); Crisis Centre - Ghostkeels (just spam them, they're crazy good against armour); airport - anything (all aircraft are solid against armour, and Tau get them early enough that you can throw dozens of them at any given problem)
4. Your most valuable units in this matchup are: Drones (for soaking overwatch), Marker Drones (for that extra damage from Mark Target), Ghostkeels (for great armour-popping potential).
5. Handling back-capping wraiths is pretty simple - send a couple of Piranhas out onto your flanks and keep the wraiths slow using the Gun Drone's suppression. If there's more than one or two at a time, send a Devilfish full of Fire Warriors or Pathfinders.
6. You should be overflowing on Influence income as Tau, so be sure to spend that influence buying up whatever you're short on in the moment in order to keep production going.
7. Attrition is deadly in this game and Necrons are the best protected from it. Don't lose too much to attrition or it's game over by default.
8. Builder Drones can heal infantry as well as vehicles.
I'm gonna skip what went wrong this time (I posted screenshots though- lemme know if those work), and just ask a simple question: Are Necrons dominant in y'alls multiplayer games? Should I just expect to get atomized, flayed, and electrocuted?
After this I won't bring this thread up anymore. Like the Necrons, it needs to die.
Your settings are bad.
The low landmass (anything below very high is low) hampers a lot most factions. From what I saw of your screenshots, you also seem to always play the same map, and if I read it correctly, your ork friend is sandwiched between you and the necron, which prevents you from you using the FFA most powerful skill: Temporary alliances.
And also your ork friend must spend a pretty bad time.
Your tech settings are also really favouring the Barge spam.
You have the cost low (so -25% cost), but you need twice as many techs (so +100% cost).
In net, you need 50% more research to reach the same point in techs.
Barges are a very strong T3 tech, but it usually gets countered because the necrons don't have the eco to mass produce them immediately and other factions have the time to produce strong counters.
Except you don't, because they get barges after already having set up their eco and you don't get your counter until you're already outspammed by barges.
Now, I don't want to tell you how to have fun, so you do you, but having the landmass on very high, and the techs to normal settings might help, in addition to following advice about countering the necron units (Piranhas with drone to tank overwatch, Hammerhead to explode barges and wraiths)
Alright, thanks. I'll try that next time.