Mordians Vs Tau

Right took my Vet IG army vs my friend's Mech tau. He had 2 HQ crisis suits (one with a bodyguard), a hammerhead, a skyray, 3 devilfish (each with 6 man squads), 4 stealth suits, and 2 piranhas.

We played Annihilation with the Dawn of War set up. I managed to steal the first turn, and proceeded to do some decent damage on rounds 1 & 2. After that, my luck kinda went downhill until turns 6 & 7. I'd penetrate his vehicles, but fail to do anything. I blew up 1 vehicle all game. I even had a squad with a grenade launcher and 2 rapid firing plasma guns against an AV10 open topped piranha. Nothing.

In the end I managed to sneak a win with kill points: 6-8. Mainly I got lucky in killing his Shas'o in melee and through a judicious use orders. All in all, I really like the vets. It's kind fun playing a BS 4 army after years of regular IG. Other wrap-up thoughts in no particular order:

• Carapace is nice. Being Tau, there was a lot of AP5 shot being hurled around, and being able to still take armor rolls was nice.
• Have I mentioned I hate the 5th ed wound allocation system?
• Orders are interesting, with some upside & some downside. I made good use of Bring it Down (reroll hits vs vehicles) and Fire on My Target (enemy rerolls succesful cover saves). The latter especially let me win the game because I could put a hurt on his guys hiding behind his skimmer. The downside is the fact you have to do the orders first. More than once I'd have a unit in range for an order that I'd actually like to fire after something else because depending on how that other unit did would depend on what the order-receiving unit would shoot at. But since I'd have to allocate the orders first I essentially had to decide my shooting for the whole turn at once.
• Those Tau Disruption Fields (or whatever makes them always count as obscured) are insane. 5 pts to carry around your own cover is just nuts.
• The Officer of the Fleet is a good 30 pts. My friend forgot to roll for his stealth suits on turn 2 (not that he needed them), but the Officer of the Fleet penalty to his reserves kept him out of it the next turn.
• The camo netting is coming off the basilisk and russ. There's just not enough cover out there to be worth the 50 pts.
• The powerfists, at least 45 pts worth, are coming back in. I ended up being close that if I'd wanted to, I could've charged a couple of times. And there was certain his Shas'O that gave me troubles with his pop up attacks.
• 3 special weapons and a heavy weapon in a BS 4 squad with a 4+ save is really a nice change of pace. (I know I said that already, but I occasionally repeat myself for emphasis) Really like playing a whole new army.
• And my Chimeras live down to their cursed reputation. One chimera fired at a crisis suit unit for 3 turns, with both a heavy bolter and multilaser, without inflicting a single wound. It wasn't until turn 7 that I finally got the sumbitch.