Building Tau scenery

In one sense, Tau scnery is extraordinarilly easy to make. In another sense, it's hard as hell.

Let's start with the easy: do you have any frisbees, tupperware, empty containers of sour cream or yogurt, flower pots, washers, and dry wall anchors lieing around? Then you have a Tau city and you just don't know it. I like to take two such things, cut up one and lay it on a complete model of the other so as to make panneling or removable sides so you can look into the Tau structures, but whatever. Seriusly, this is beyond easy and should take you little time at all to get it all going.

Of course, Hirst arts will help you immeasurably with the interior of the building, but that's something else.

Hard? Well, yes, if you listen to anyone who makes Tau scenery. What the hell are those directions? Cut shit out of foam, cover it with spackle, and carefully, over a series of a hundred weeks, sand it down so that it's smooth like plastic? Why not just use plastic? I've now tried the spackle way and here's what I found. It chips. It's uneven. It has the consistency of a birthday cake's frosting, and then when you sand it down, it sands down to nothing before it looks right. I add spackle to syrofoam to give it texture, precisely the opposite affect I want on my Tau structures--which raises the obvious question: why not just leave the styrofoam unspackled and paint that?

If you're out there, and you make Tau scenery, could you let me know? I'd really like someone to fill in the blanks here.

Here are some pictures of two of the buildings on my most recent job. You'll notice that I didn't use spackling for the buildings, but I did for the ground if that's any help.

Pictures 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

My New Tactic

Here's my new tactic and we'll see how it goes. What it relies on is absolute and speedy death. Here's how it works. You need guardian jet bikes and you'll need either shining spears or mounted farseers. The trick is to surround transport tanks up to and including land raiders (especially if you're using the farseers in this tactic).

The guardian bikes are really not there to fire. You don't need to upgrade them. If you do this right, they'll probably either be unable to shoot because of their movement or because they are locked in hand to hand.

Instead their goal...their ONLY goal is to surround the tank and block off all exits. As they can move 18" and then an additional 6" during the assault phase this should not be a problem. Surround the exits.

Now, this means that either the farseer, seer council, or shining spears need only score a penetrating hit on the tank. They don't have to destroy it. On a pen, everyone must evacuate and if the exits are closed off, they die automatically.

Hee hee hee!

The best version of this tactic involves a mass mob of jet bikes, shining spears, and farseer. That way, if they actually do get into trouble, the shining spears can hit and run and come back in with power weapons. Note also how durable this tactic is. On the round that the jetbikes haul ass, they will have a 3+ invulnerable save, and if they are followed by a farseer, they get to re-roll missed saves (fortune). This will lock up any enemy that attempts to hurt them for at least that round.

disasterously fast attack

Bad moves. I got my ass handed to me the other night by Chris and his Space Marine/Daemonhunters which really sucked because I thought my list was pretty good.

It consisted of:
5 fire dragons and an exarch with firepike and tank hunter loaded in a falcon with vectored engines, holo field, spirit stone, and two shuriken cannons

5 shining spears- 1 exarch with star lance, skilled rider and withdraw

Farseer w/ runes of warding, witnessing, spirit stones, jetbike, doom, fortune, guide, mind war

6 jetbikes- 2 shuriken cannons+ 1 jetbike mounted warlock with conceal

9 Dire Avengers- w/exarch: defend, bladestorm, power weapon and shimmer shield
in a wave serpent with twin linked scatter lasers

5 harlequins w/kisses and a shadowseer

3 dark reapers.

Here's what I was hoping to do. I wanted to use the bikes as a meat shield for the farseer who would follow up the shining speers making them a formidable fighting force. The firedragons and dire avengers would be popping around the board to blow up big stuff as necessary leaving the harlequins and dark reapers as mop up.

Here's what went wrong. Everything could get into hand to hand combat in the first round, which turned out to be too fast. Crap blew up, that's true, but then I'd find myself somehow locked in combat with terminators. The enemy troops that weren't engaged could effectively pick and choose what they wanted to get into hand to hand with and the skirmishes blocked line of sight from my mop up crew. It all turned out very badly.

Cool tool

One really cool tool that's likely to slip your attention is the fabric cutter which essentially looks like a pizza cutter (a pizza cutter would probably work just as well). The roundness of the blade makes for really easy straight cuts. In addition, it's absolutely great for scoring plastic (cutting it enough so that it will snap apart) and will cut through the really thin sheet stryrofoam without much difficulty. Otherwise, you have to score plastic with a razor (pretty hazardous) or cut the styrofoam with a hot knife (hard to cut a straight line). It's a $.99 solution to both of these problems.