A hearty hear, Hear! to the former.
I have played a raven guard-like army, and while it can hold it's own against most other melee armies, it really suffers iif you don't have some support stuff. Assault squads are expensive, pointswise. A 10 man squad with an attached Chaplain can eat up up well over 400 points, which means you can easily find yourself badly outnumbered, even by other space marine armies. Alll your opponent has to do is kill about 22 models and you find yourself with few or no scoring units left. And unlike their Chaos counterparts, the Raven guard can't get meltaguns, which means enemy armour can be troublesome. Tyranids are tough to deal with, and I got my clock cleaned by a World Eaters army.
Tau have trouble with them, though. A friend who plays a bunch of suits found that his usual jump-out-and-shoot-then-hide tactics didn't work so swell when my guys were able to run him down. That 12 inch move gets you across the board in a hurry and plasma pistols ignore armour saves. I have also had good luck against terminators. If you have a chaplain and a veteran Sgt with a power fist or power weapon, and 9 regular assault marines, you can usually massacre a a five man terminator squad and take few if any casulties in return. (a couple of plasma pistol shots, 8 or 9 bolt pistol shots followed by 5 high I power weapon attacks and 27 regular attacks with rerolls on the misses, and 3 power fist attacks to clean up with
usually will do the trick.)
Where you run into trouble is when you have to fight a big gribbly with high toughness, or when the enemy has lots of shooty units. IG can be tough when spread so that you can't keep your guys hidden in assaults. They may have 10 or 12 squads to your 4 or 5, and after you kill one of their 80 point squads, their comrades dump a bunch of shots into your squad, usually rapidfiring and always with a bout load of heavy weapons. |