How to reliably kill a competent tank?

[kooarbiter]

Tanks are incredibly melee resistant and have a lot of damage potential, what strategies do you all use to kill them, assuming they also have an infantry escort?

[ThesoldierLLJK]

First you need to wipe out the infrantry support and trap it in a bad area where all it can do is retreat.

Boiler gas and crushers/ravager combination
Gas the tank, have the crusher ram it, and during the confusion try to have a ravager/lurker group slash it.

[Lil Mayo]

Being a Queen and screeching while blocking the tank stuns the infantry support too, due to Screech LoS requirements.
Also, having a Crusher can reliably destroy the tank, while you, as Queen, block it's front. The Crusher blocks the rear.

It depends on the tank's loadout too. LTB Arty with Flamer will request either a good Crusher-Rav combo, a huge alien swarm, or the Queen herself. Tanks lacking the Flamer will be an easy prey against Crushers.
The hardest tank to tackle on is the IWSA LTAA loadout. You need to flank the tank and overwhelm it; you have no chance to destroy it by swarming it's front. This loadout is really susceptible to Acid Spit damage; I've played a round as TC with this loadout and a Spitter and a Prae took our armor to 38%, and we did almost no damage to them.

You also don't need to wipe out the infantry, you just need to bait the tank in a position where the marines can't reinforce it.

[Build_R_]

It seems that rushing it quickly is the best option. A long, drawn out fight will get more xenomorphs killed than a few quick rushes. Making proper use of T3s (boiler, crusher, maybe ravager) to deal damage to the tank and drive off the infantry supporting it should do the trick.

Sometimes if the tank has rambo'd off alone you can deal damage to it as a runner just by running circles around it and slashing.

[Xennith]

There's another secret to fucking with a tank that I don't see used nearly often enough: the humble Hivelord.

It's less of a problem for the LTAA than the LTB, but essentially an excellent Hivelord, with a bit of help from combat castes, can cut off and surround a tank's position with thick resin walls.
How you go about this is very map dependent, and it's honestly the most difficult on Ice because of the snow layer, but Ice is not a map xenos usually complain about.

Pretty much all it takes is being able to rotate the direction that the tank is being distracted from by your crushers, boilers, and possibly the queen, and then have the Hivelord flank from the opposite direction to spam out thick resin walls like ye olde tank traps of WWII.

Once you whittle down the tank's supporting infantry (necessary in ANY tank-killing strat), you essentially get to just creep your walls closer to the tank as their surrounding marines dwindle, and if you have appropriate supporting xenos in your tank trap areas, you can keep it from getting reinforced from that direction in a lot of cases.

Once you have tank traps ready in one direction, essentially sealing it into your main force, you loop around and creep them in front of the tank too.
This is one of the few times having two hivelords can really become tactically important.

Thick resin walls are a huge problem for the tank, because trying to run them over is actually a lot more damaging to the tank than even a few slashes from smaller castes, and you essentially get to create minefields that will make the tank desperate for different directions it can go.

The LTAA is obviously really helpful for the tank in these situations, but even so it must now face walls from one angle and spend time shooting at them instead of xenos, which gives you ample time to spit, slash, and generally fuck with it from every other direction.

I don't see Hivelords doing this enough, but creeping resin walls in around alleys where marines are pushing with the tank can really fuck with it, and will fuck with the marines a lot too.

[GoliathTheDespoiler]

You can only kill the tank if it's:

a. The last marine unit remaining
b. You've got it stuck between 2 crushers or a wall.
c. It's out of ammo.

Otherwise it's pure luck and incompetence on the tankers' parts.

[Sulaboy]

This is how you kill a tank.

August 31 2018

Spookydonut updated:
Tank Crew disabled as an experiment for a few days.

[BillyBoBBizWorth]

Yeah, looks like Spooky is most reliable way to defeat a tank.

[MattAtlas]

Trap it with the Queen, pray it isn't competent. No, crushers don't work, they die to LTB + TOW or flamer.

Or destroy its treads while it's in the DS cargo door.

Or swarm it if it's the last thing alive.

[Ruse]

Their not that fast but what your gonna need is maybe a crusher/rav team to do hit and run tactics and have drones near by to make it even more annoying like tight spaces and yes I know the tanks can run resin walls and doors over use things like buildings or welding fuel tanks and water tanks I mean I’m just throwing things out there and yes I know they limited the things you can pull as Xenos but that doesn’t mean you can run into it and push them around