Hey Guys! I am continuing my blogging journey with a description of my latest video. In this specific video we are trying to beat the Tau which are very well known for the ranged firepower. We are playing the Blood Angels who are mainly specialized in Melee. Question is: Can we close the gap quick enough?
Can We Beat The Tau With Only Melee?: VIDEO LINK
My Youtube channel: Learning General-40k that I created based on this passion. With that being said, let’s jump right into it!
Can We Beat The Tau With Only Melee?
We are playing Blood Angels. But with a twist. Not only are at a disadvantage with 500 army points less. But we are also try a challenge. Zou see, we are only using Melee units. While our opponents the Tau are specialized long range weapon users! I think this could be an interesting match up.
We are playing this time around a seize and control mission and we will be the attackers, while the Tau will try and defend the territory. It will be interesting who can prevail. The long ranged tau or the melee Blood Angels.
We assembled our army as follows: 2 Sanguinary Guards, 2 Terminator squads, those units will be our main damage dealers. 2 sanguinary priests and 2 sergeants in order to keep moral and health high. The rest of the army is filled up with 6 assault squads.
Going into turn one our strategy was simple. Split into two groups: the 6 assault squads supported by a sergeant and a priest. This group will try and occupy the area at question in order to gain the points we need. The second group contend of our damage dealers, will try and stay hidden until we know our targets, then use the Teleport and Jetpacks in order to decimate our enemy before he can push us out of the zone again. In theory, easy, but in practice it is always a bit difficult, especially with 500 army points less. And so turn one ended by setting our strategy up, not more and not less.
Going into turn 2 we planned to execute the first step of the plan. Since we have not seen our enemy so far, our damage dealers don’t really have an option than to stay back. However, we can push them a little closer to the center of the battlefield This map gives a great opportunity of overseeing the battlefield and so we decided to push our units a few inches up. This would allow us to intervene in the next turn if needed. As far as our point gathering group goes, we had to start scoring. So we send as many units into the needed area as possible. We even had to use some of our action points to get them into the scoring area. Saying that, we tried not to be blank to an enemies counter and so we tried stay as far away as possible from the enemy. Ending our turn we had 3 units in the score area.
But the Tau were not sleeping themselves. They immediately send drones and ships to counter our troops in the zone. They even started to mark down our units in order to be able to hit them better. Fortunately for us, they were not able to delete any of our units. Unfortunately for us was that they managed to maneuver 3 units into the zone which lead us to a whopping 0-0 score into turn 3.
And this is where the pace started to pick up! Now that we knew what we were dealing with we would be able to adjust our strategy. But to be honest, it was so well planned out, we did not have to. Instead we were finally happy to dullen our swords on some metal! The first thing we did is to utilize the Jetpacks of our Assault squads. We jumped straight into the occupying units. Those drones should not stand a chance. By doing that we also managed to have a considerable amount of units in the scoring area. Going at this rate, the Tau would have trouble keeping up scoring! The drones were quickly defeated and only the ship was left. This had to wait until next turn as we were out of attacks in the middle. However, we still had our damage dealer group that was waiting in the back of our field. We decided to teleport the terminators right in front of the connecting tau army. This way we would cut ff their way to the scoring zone and allow us to accumulate points faster. It would also mean that those terminators would be sacrificed and one point. But this point would be far in the future since they are very resilient. And so we used the Terminators teleporting ability to get us as close as possible to the Tau army and cut them off. We also decided to hold off the Sanguinary Guard one more turn in order to give us some flexibility in case something goes south.
The Taus answer would follow suit They started to work their way through my terminator squads. However, even though 90% of all firing power was directed towards them, both units were able to withstand the damage. Ending turn 3, we accumulated a very comfortable lead of 25-4 and it would get only better from here.
Lets remember we had 500 army points less, but I felt confident we could pull off a win here. Turn 4 was the turn where we needed to decide if this battle is going to be a long or a short one. We decided for the latter. We send in our Sanguinary Guard in order to enforce the choke position we created with the terminators. We utilized the Guards power to gain another Action Point and with that we were able to clean up some of the units that sneaked past our terminators. The next step was to get rid of this annoying ship that was holding us back making more points the zone. We managed this with easy although the explosion afterwards cost us some HP. Last but not least we maximized the units in the zone in order to gain even more hold points by the end of the turn.
The tau had to come up with something special in order to push us away from the winning trajectory. In their defense, our strategy was pretty good and in their turn 4 they tried absolutely everything to get back into the game. They were finally able to defeat one of the terminator units. And they started to target more units in and around the scoring zone. But it seemed like their firing power was swindling down. While we suffered a few more casualties the score going into turn 5 was 50-27. They were falling behind.
Going into the fifth and final turn our mission was easy. Keep the units in the zone alive, get more units into the zone and try to get rid of as many Tau units as possible to mitigate the risk of losing my own units. We started picking apart the easy targets and collecting the low hanging fruits. We were successfully able to reduce the Tau army strength and consolidate our troops in the zone. To be honest, I was not completely happy with the turn around here but the hope was that the Tau would not be able to reduce our army size so much that they catch up in points. Their last turn was brutal they managed to gather another 18 points but fortunately for us, this was not enough. We were able to gain another 35 points which pushed us above the targeted 80. With that last turn we managed to pull off a hard challenge and once again the good strategy before the fight helped us gain this win.
Published by ga38jem on
Hive
On 3rd October 2026