Planning for Team Games

[dandc]

How do you plan for teaming up with a different faction? Fill the obvious holes in each of the codexes (Tau shooting with Nid melee for example), or double down (BA assault and GSC assault, for example)?

[draaen]

The main consideration I look at when designing 2v2 lists sort of drives the rest of list building. Is one army likely to be target priority #1? A static tau gunline paired with slaanesh daemonette horde will see the daemonettes be focused first and the daemon player not having much to do after that. You have to have a pretty understanding partner to accept being effectively out of models turn 2. I recommend for maximum player engagement to look at synergies for how the two armies could play together. Plus an engaged ally is another noggin working out how best to beat your opponent.

For example my wife and I ran a White Scars / Tau list 500 points each to a tournament at the start of 8th where she ran bikes plus a few troops. I took flamer crisis suits and a horde of gun drones. We were able to move up together and be effective. The intercessor durability kept the backfield objectives held while the bikes, suits and drones were able to play aggressively up in the opponents face. It performed really well only losing one game to a list with Celestine who was a monster at that points level and perfect for the custom scenario we were playing. We both had models and were able to play as the game went on.

So I think if you can find a good core focus the two armies can do well and then leverage each armies strengths for support elements required to make it work is a very good strategy. Unless you or your ally thinks your army will be way better by sacrificing one player early to get a big bonus for the second player and you guys are cool with that.

[dandc]

That's actually really helpful, thank you! It is probably a bit too easy to just think "you can shoot and I can punch", and harder but more rewarding to do some actual joint list building.