Friday night, fight night...

It was that time again... time for a brawl... time for a fight...

You can see my Tau deployed across the table, with Longstrike's hammerhead in the left corner, accompanied by 5 pathfinders and 2 broadsides with heavy rail rifles and 2 missile drones. Next to the building they are standing on is a devilfish with a unit of firewarriors inside. The riptide is smack in the middle of my deployment zone, ready to engage targets on either flank.

Occupying the Aegis defence line are two squads of firewarriors, the left-most is joined by the fireblade. Behind the bastion are the two crisis suits with dual missile pods.

Reserve forces are comprised of 10 Kroot with sniper rounds and a squad of Stealth suits.

Tyranid forces surged forwards as soon as the game began.
There's a 20 critter strong squad of gargoyles accompanying a completely hidden winged hive tyrant in the big ruin on the left. Behind them are a mama Tervigon with 10 of her babies. On the Tyranid left flank is a brood of 3 hive guard and another 10 termagaunts.

Tyranid reinforcements consist of an outflanking Tervigon, a podding Doom of Malantai (insert some ' in the name) and a podding brood of 20 devilgaunts.

After the initial Tyranid surge forwards, the gargoyle brood got wiped out by an entire army's worth of shooting. Tyranid reinforcements popped up behind my line, as they tend to do, but apparently, the devilgaunt brood took a wrong turn somewhere and didn't arrive with the others.

After an extra Tau shooting phase in the Tyranid turn (which was completely uneventful), the Doom spelled doom for my forces and started racking up the wounds on both firewarriors squads. Also, the Pathfinders on the bastion were wiped out.

With the Tyrant landing behind my lines as well, things were looking grim for my Tau. The Riptide tried to use his Nova reactor to bail but failed and took a wound. The other quads also tried to get out of harms way, but there were too many Tyranids nearby so eventually, both Firewarrior squads, the Fireblade and the crisis squad succumbed to Tyranid mind games, fire and assault.

My reinforcements arrived behind the Tyranid lines to try to cause as much havoc as possible, hopefully securing the rearmost objective. Despite a valiant effort, even destroying the initial squad of Termagaunts, the Tervigon and podding devilgaunts proved too much for the Stealth squad and Kroot.

I finally managed to kill the Tyrant, but had to give up any hopes of keeping my left flank objective, leaving the Tervigon with 3 squads of her babies to capture the objective.

Going into the final phase of the battle, the Tyranids had their claws on 3 of the objectives while my remaining forces (Longstrike, Riptide, Broadsides and a couple of firewarriors and pathfinders) occupied a fortified position (and objective) near the right flank of what remained of my firebase.

After withering some more fire from the encroaching Tyranids and with a bit of luck, I managed to shoot the occupying termagaunts off of 2 objectives, snatching a (slightly undeserved) draw out of the jaws of defeat. Had the battle lasted for another turn, or a scatter dice pointed in another direction, I would've been defeated.

Final tally:
Tau: 1 objective, First blood, Slay the Warlord
Tyranids: 1 objective, Slay the Warlord, Linebreaker

After all, another enjoyable battle