Fear the Tau!

So my buddy Josh and I just played a quick game of Warhammer 40,000 the other day, armies around 500 pt, and no objectives.  Just to see which would win in a fire fight.  I came away very disappointed with the performance of the Emperor's elite.

Now mind you, this was just an experiment, so we didn't use objectives or victory points to calculate the win, just who did more damage.

The game started off well enough, we were playing a 4x4 board, plenty of scenery for cover, lots of strategic potential.  I fielded a force of a Razorback with twin-linked lascannons, a run-of-the-mill Dreadnought, no upgrades, a ten man tactical squad, and a captain with plasma pistol and power fist.  My buddy Josh had a XV-8 Commander with twin-linked , two six man fire warrior squads with a drone each, and a unit of drones with 12 drones.

So, he out numbered my space marines two-to-one, but that doesn't matter, they were space marines, right?  Well, it turned out it did matter, it mattered a lot.
At first it was the XV-8 commander that seemed to pose the biggest threat, taking out my Razorback in roughly two turns, but it ended up being the drones that did me in.  Those twin-linked pulse carbines are vicious!  By about turn 5 all I had left were two marines, and my captain.  The XV-8 commander had destroyed both my Razorback and my Dreadnaught, and those pesky drones had decimated the tactical squad.  We didn't even engage with his fire warriors.  

Which is what the Tau are supposed to do, I guess.

In all the fluff, the Space Marines are depicted as these giants among men, able to hold off armies with a single soldier,  powerful enough to destroy worlds.  But on the tabletop, they fell flat.

Our next match, my buddy will be reversing rolls and playing the Space Marines, and I'll be taking a Genestealer cult cull him.  Let's see if the Marines have a problem, or if I just don't know how to play as Space Marines.  Let's find out