Tau vs New Nids Tip (with only one Vassal pic)

Hello Internets!

Just some quick thoughts on the new Nids, as I recently picked up some of their models. I wound up running a vassal game between one of the scarier new Nids list I've seen with my Tau army. Playing Tau FTW! And it was a strange game, almost a deja vu experience, teleporting me back to the days of 5th edition.

Woah... This is crazy!

So, I was running my typical Tau list, which tries to cram in as many non-giant-MC toys as possible:

Commander O'Mortal: 

Ethereal

x3 Crisis: x2 MP

x3 Crisis: x2 Plasma

x3 Crisis: Fireknife

x11 Firewarrior

x1 Devilfish: dp

x12 Firewarrior

2x13/x1 Kroot/Hound

x2 Piranha: fusion

2x7 Pathfinder

2x1 Hammerhead: railgun/sms/dp

x2 Broadside: railgun/sms

Around 1850-2k points, this is pretty much what I like running as a take-all-comers list. It has lots of shooting, special ability synergy combos, and so forth. I feel like it has a bit of limitations regarding mobility, but I guess I can't win them all, right?  So, the Nids list I faced looked something like the following:

Flyrant w/ hive commander

2x13 genestealers

x20 devilgaunts

x30 gaunts

x1 tervigon
hive crone
trygon prime
exocrine
mawloc

Aegis w/ Comm

I've been pretty vocal in RL about hating the new Nids dex, but I haven't actually written any of that stuff down. Suffice to say, I think Tau is going to be a super nasty match-up for the bugs until they get some sort of decent way to get across the table without having to footslog it. 

So, on to the summary of the game ... and I can't find the pictures, so I recreated what the map looked like at the end of turn 6: 

As Tau, I went with the old split deployment strategy from 5th, setting up two separate castles in the corners. And... it worked! Even with infiltrating / deepstriking all the broods they can, thats a lot of shooting before they can do their thing. And, most importantly, synapse becomes really limiting!

The nid dex comes in two flavors: dangerous and synapse. There aren't that many synapse creatures, and any list that overloads on them underloads the dangerous broods. So, since Tau die to a stiff breeze in close combat, splitting deployment seems to be the key.

When deployment is split, nid broods have to not only run across the board / deepstrike in enemies face, and then divide broods and synapse creatures and get into assault fast enough to neutralize the opponent. As this picture shows, it didnt work this time.

So, until I find those pictures, that is all for now!

Shas'el Mike