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I like Tau. I am building a Tau army. I imagine I will have the same success (or lack of) that I have with everything else.

striderx wrote:

Kilkrazy wrote:I don't think there is much doubt that Tau are currently among the bottom two armies in the game, the other being Necrons.

And I m afraid you are wrong. In fact, VERY wrong.

I m guessing you OR the crowd you are playing with are still learning the game (not as in the rules, but higher level tactics and strategy). Tau will not excel in the hands of those.

Do you believe that all the codexes are equal in power?

This thread makes me want to curl up and cry for losing so miserably to Tau...

Kilkrazy wrote:Do you believe that all the codexes are equal in power?

How did you get the idea that I implied something like that?

Luco wrote:This thread makes me want to curl up and cry for losing so miserably to Tau...

Why do you have to? You lost to a competitive codex that was played well.

Mannahnin wrote:That's not true. Tau have some unique tricks, particularly to do with cover saves. Proper use of Kroot and Pirhana for movement interdiction is crucial, but they are certainly a competitive army. The range of power between the top and bottom army books in 40k isn't enormous, although the power range between a badly-built army and a well-built one is enormous.

Guard with cover save tricks: Reroll coversaves orders and Collossus
Kroot and Pirhana movement interdiction: IG combined platoons, sentinels, chimeras

Guard can do what Tau do but a bit cheaper.

But I do agree with what you are getting at but with the addition of this comment: Its what the player can do with the army that makes it powerful.

striderx wrote:

Kilkrazy wrote:Do you believe that all the codexes are equal in power?

How did you get the idea that I implied something like that?

.

Your statement that my statement that the Tau codex is weaker than some other codexes was wrong.

They were pretty good when all I was going up against was my friend's IG Armored Company. Aside from that, not really.

Kilkrazy wrote:Your statement that my statement that the Tau codex is weaker than some other codexes was wrong.

I m pretty sure your statement wasnt something like "weaker than some other codexes", but rather "bottom 2 codexes".
There is a difference between the 2, you know that?

Why don't you answer the question?

Do you think all codexes are equal?

Emperors Faithful wrote:
You didn't think Santa went down the chimney did you?

It's the 2002 Copyright that really sells this image, thank you =)

striderx wrote:

Kilkrazy wrote:The Tau codex is mid 4th edition, and it wasn't strong back then.

Kilkrazy wrote:I don't think there is much doubt that Tau are currently among the bottom two armies in the game, the other being Necrons.

And I m afraid you are wrong. In fact, VERY wrong.

I m guessing you OR the crowd you are playing with are still learning the game (not as in the rules, but higher level tactics and strategy). Tau will not excel in the hands of those.

striderx wrote:

Kilkrazy wrote:Your statement that my statement that the Tau codex is weaker than some other codexes was wrong.

I m pretty sure your statement wasnt something like "weaker than some other codexes", but rather "bottom 2 codexes".
There is a difference between the 2, you know that?

Dude quote function.
True KK said 'Tau are currently among the bottom two armies' but the statement itself gives doubt to the very existance of the 'bottom two armies'.
By the same token KK, what is the 'power curve' to put words in your mouth, then?

Tau are undoubtedly less able to deal with "FotM" armies than Orks. ORks are already being maligned into 'not very good' in some circles I see, what does this say of Tau?
If one looks at the cost of broadsides, and how they perform against AV (of infantry) what are the point comparisions from other codex?
I don't see tau winning out in any of these aspect there are few tricks that they can pull for less points, and on the whole to function as a cohesive FoC in the current 5th situation is very difficult for them. Firstly to put enough of each weapon onto the board. The next struggle is to place them in such a way that the units will weather 5 turns of unfocused fire. Then is to put them in positions such as these so that one's opponent can't a) deploy against one's limited unit spectrum or b) shoot at one's limited unit spectrum turn one.
After all these bits come Ld, which hangs around 7/8. Then BS which is only 3 (true to be higher would make the codex 'a lot' better). And that the army could be considered crippled by certain dedicated transport rules. One has a wholly up-hill battle.

I would be tempted to say Tau have something similar to have *really should be an "up to" in there* a 10Ppm disadvantage against many armies - which can be surmounted through 'good war' but in the same instant will lose to an erratic dice roll.

Kilkrazy wrote:Why don't you answer the question?

Do you think all codexes are equal?

I can answer you anytime, but you are not showing how this has relevance to the issue at hand. So I don't see the need to.
But I ve explain why is it that you + most average players think Tau is a weak codex, and why you are flawed

If you can answer me anytime, why do you persist in not doing so?


Automatically Appended Next Post:

ChrisCP wrote:

Dude quote function.
True KK said 'Tau are currently among the bottom two armies' but the statement itself gives doubt to the very existance of the 'bottom two armies'.
By the same token KK, what is the 'power curve' to put words in your mouth, then?

Tau are undoubtedly less able to deal with "FotM" armies than Orks. ORks are already being maligned into 'not very good' in some circles I see, what does this say of Tau?
If one looks at the cost of broadsides, and how they perform against AV (of infantry) what are the point comparisions from other codex?
I don't see tau winning out in any of these aspect there are few tricks that they can pull for less points, and on the whole to function as a cohesive FoC in the current 5th situation is very difficult for them. Firstly to put enough of each weapon onto the board. The next struggle is to place them in such a way that the units will weather 5 turns of unfocused fire. Then is to put them in positions such as these so that one's opponent can't a) deploy against one's limited unit spectrum or b) shoot at one's limited unit spectrum turn one.
After all these bits come Ld, which hangs around 7/8. Then BS which is only 3 (true to be higher would make the codex 'a lot' better). And that the army could be considered crippled by certain dedicated transport rules. One has a wholly up-hill battle.

I would be tempted to say Tau have something similar to have a 10Ppm disadvantage against many armies - which can be surmounted through 'good war' but in the same instant will lose to an erratic dice roll.

In my view the top armies are IG and SW, the bottom armies are Tau and Necrons. The rest of the armies are in between. I reckon Orks are one of the better middle rank armies. I would not try to place Deldar, they are too new.

If we rate the top armies at 100/100, the spread is between 100 and 80. In other words, a second rank army is around 90 and has a 10% disadvantage compared to a top army. A bottom rank army has a 20% disadvantage. This is not wide enough to create an automatic lose condition, but it will always act as a drag on the lower rank armies.

Yeah, there's an obvious point (for me) where gereralship come into play in place of the ofeerings from the book. A game can be won on few skewed dice rolls true, but when one is literally forced to sacrifice rolls for the same options it becomes this tether on the book. Demons is a middle of the ground example, with good commanding 5++ and the Deamonic Assault rule is enough to overcome the costing on unit in the codex.

An interseting experiment would be to see how many points a bad army needs to ensure victory. I think it would actually comes down to unit saturation - something a high basic Ppm trys to prevent.

4th Edition was my Tau's friend, the old skimmer rules coupled with armour 13 at the front and there was no rear armour assault rule meant that they were much better than they are now.

What lets Tau down is, as everyone says they are purely shooty.

They have no option to take heavy weapons.

Seems strange that in the fluff they're supposed to be highly adaptable and willing to try new things but at the same time they dont allow firewarriors to be incharge of heavy weapons.

All they're pictures of Hammer heads or Devilfish show them rocketing around in the air, however they're only movement 12. (thats a tiny thing really though, probably to keep them from being too much like Eldar)

Nurglitch wrote:I disagree. I know they're significantly different given the design philosophy espoused by the Design team. User-friendliness is moreso the user's ability to account for risk and reward. The Tyranid Codex is a step up in useability from the previous Codex, but carries no reputation for being over-powered.

I maintain this was a fluke.

I've been a Tau purist for the past few years (as in I've only just got a SoB army!) and find I'm about 50/50 win to loss ratio.

When the rolls go right or your opponent makes a silly mistake then you can have a field day and really take apart armies. Especially with the old Fish of Fury tactic. If you could pull that off with two DF it really hurt anything it went up against.

One of the biggest hurts was TLoS. Our biggest advantage was the ability to JSJ in and out of cover. This frustrated people more than anything I've ever witnessed in a game and often got calls of cheese.

However, let us be hopeful, for if the latest Codex's are anything to go by we shall have a good amount of toys to play with. (and possibly Elites that are BS4!!!!)

Kilkrazy wrote:If you can answer me anytime, why do you persist in not doing so?

What's the point of answering something which you don't even know why you are asking for

Kilkrazy wrote:In my view the top armies are IG and SW, the bottom armies are Tau and Necrons. The rest of the armies are in between. I reckon Orks are one of the better middle rank armies. I would not try to place Deldar, they are too new.

My friend who just started 40k last week told me he THINKS necrons are broken.
Just to illustrate that you view is potentially no better than my friend's random thought.

Kilkrazy wrote:If we rate the top armies at 100/100, the spread is between 100 and 80. In other words, a second rank army is around 90 and has a 10% disadvantage compared to a top army. A bottom rank army has a 20% disadvantage. This is not wide enough to create an automatic lose condition, but it will always act as a drag on the lower rank armies.

I m pretty curious how you come up with your figures, and how Tau scores 20% lower. Why not you reveal your scoring criteria, and show how 20 is arrived ?

striderx wrote:

Kilkrazy wrote:If you can answer me anytime, why do you persist in not doing so?

What's the point of answering something which you don't even know why you are asking for

In other words you cannot answer me and you are finding excuse after excuse for it.

I started with Tau when I got into 40k and stayed with them until my 5th ed losses really become too much. I had a decent record back in 3rd and 4th ed, and could utterly wipe out some armies as well. Come 5th and I find that every trick I was using to win, as a 'unique' advantage of tau, and someone is now doing at a lower price and more consistently.

Tau have never been about volume of fire but precision and quality. In the previous editions this was fine and a unique quality of the army. Tau can put high quality, accurate firepower on any target on the board at almost any point in the game and reliably destroy it. That was fine when you could point your guns at 1-3 high priority targets and know you are hitting the targets that matter.

Now, armies rely on spam of key units to win. In competitive lists, there are no single units that are winning games, its the 3-4 repeats of the same unit that are all equally threatening. The tau method just doesn't work when that unit you wiped out has identical clones spread across the board and plenty of other units that are all just as scary. Hell, winning tau lists are just spam of 2 or 3 key units that are all completely identical, because they have to be in order to win.

In 4th ed, a firewarrior was something to write home about: the pulse rifle was a feared weapon and a 4+ save actually counted for something. Now, tau troops fail to compare to literally any other codex save necrons. IG has troops that are cheaper, more plentiful and will out-shoot and out-fight both firewarriors and kroot (often at the same time).

In 5th ed, troops are absolutely vital to winning most games. The problem is that tau troops were never designed with that importance in mind. Kroot and firewarriors are 'gap fillers', giving you relatively cheap rapid fire or lots of bodies to put on the board, but not much else. Other armies can win on the strength of their troops alone, whereas tau could never win without relying on their elite and heavy support choices.

The tau codex is broken because it was built to showcase 4 special units that make the tau unique: pathfinders, crisis suits, broadsides and hammerheads. They represent literally all of the tau's fighting power. Every other unit is a filler or distraction to keep them alive, because when they die, so does your army. None of them are troops, and none (save pathfinders) are all that unique anymore.

When you have less railguns than the other army has heavy tanks, you're fighting an up-hill, losing battle from the start.

striderx wrote:I m pretty curious how you come up with your figures, and how Tau scores 20% lower. Why not you reveal your scoring criteria, and show how 20 is arrived ?

Problems with Tau in 5th edition

1. No melee capability when melee armies were improved by the Run rule.
2. No space magic offence or defence.
3. Skimmers became more vulnerable to assault.
4. TLoS hurts the JSJ tactic of the Crisis suit, which is a very important unit.
5. Restricted choice of viable units in the codex.
6. High cost of units compared to 5th edition armies.

These are all problems with the Tau which do not affect IG and SW, for example.

Tau used to feature in the upper ranks of GTs under 4th edition and don't any more.

I use these factors, comparative points costs, and my 35 years of wargaming experience to make an educated guess at their relative value.

Kilkrazy wrote:In other words you cannot answer me and you are finding excuse after excuse for it.

LOL, whatever floats your boat. I m not obliged to answer your question if you don't even know what you are asking for. I will appear quite stupid responding to a random question. How about I ask you how old is your dog, or if you have any.

Kilkrazy wrote:
Problems with Tau in 5th edition

1. No melee capability when melee armies were improved by the Run rule. - You don't need to shoot to win a game of 40k. MANY current IG lists are build without CC capability AT ALL. They work just as fine.
2. No space magic offence or defence. - No ones is familiar with funny words created by yourself.
3. Skimmers became more vulnerable to assault. - As if vehicles aren't venerable to the same extent?
4. TLoS hurts the JSJ tactic of the Crisis suit, which is a very important unit. - You don't JSJ behind vehicles? And yes, don't argue that you can see the suits. You won't, at least not when I m the one placing them.
5. Restricted choice of viable units in the codex. - You don't need 8 out of 10 units in a codex to be good to qualify the codex for being a good one. EVen if a codex can trump using a single build, it's a powerful codex, because that army CAN WIN.
6. High cost of units compared to 5th edition armies. - Crisis Suits, Broadsides, Piranhas, kroots are high cost? Seriously, how cheap you want them to be? Devilfish are almost fairly priced after taking that 5 points D pod upgrade

Kilkrazy wrote:
These are all problems with the Tau which do not affect IG and SW, for example.

So anything that's worst than IG and SW will be ranked bottom 2? I see...

Kilkrazy wrote:
I use these factors, comparative points costs, and my 35 years of wargaming experience to make an educated guess at their relative value.

I lost my first game of 40k to my friend, who played the game for 10 years. After that, he never won me again. Just to show you that number of years has not much significant meaning.

striderx wrote:

Kilkrazy wrote:In other words you cannot answer me and you are finding excuse after excuse for it.

LOL, whatever floats your boat. I m not obliged to answer your question if you don't even know what you are asking for. I will appear quite stupid responding to a random question. How about I ask you how old is your dog, or if you have any.

I'll ask you again a different way.

Do you think the Tau codex is equally as strong as all the other codexes?

Kilkrazy wrote:
Do you think the Tau codex is equally as strong as all the other codexes?

No, just like IG is not equally strong with all other codexes, SW is not, Eldar is not, Necron is not ,etc.

Are there differences in strength between codexes?

Kilkrazy wrote:Are there differences in strength between codexes?

Before we continue spamming random replies here, don't give single liners.
Explain how this question of yours leads to answering whether Tau is a broken codex.
I ll go to sleep and give you one night to think about it.

You may have a great record of winning striderx, but that isn't the discussion here. Killkrazy is saying, rightfully, that his 35 years of experience enable him to see that army X is simply not as strong as armies Y or Z.

Again, congratulations on winning, with tau I assume, because you're doing better than me in that regard if so. But you aren't addressing the fact that tau players operate at a disadvantage to any 5th ED codex.

Pretty much everyone else on this thread agrees that tau are weaker than several, if not almost all other armies in 40k. Can you win? Yes, and I do have 5th ED victories with them. However I got tired of my majority losses and switched to IG and haven't looked back since.

If you answer, honestly, that tau are weaker than several armies ( in my opinion most) then you have to agree that they are a lower rank. Its as simple as that.

Bruteboss wrote:Again, congratulations on winning, with tau I assume, because you're doing better than me in that regard if so. But you aren't addressing the fact that tau players operate at a disadvantage to any 5th ED codex.

I did, scroll up.

Bruteboss wrote:Pretty much everyone else on this thread agrees that tau are weaker than several, if not almost all other armies in 40k.

And I explained why majority thinks that way. Read first page of this thread :-). Now, if majority are high level players, it will be a different story.

Bruteboss wrote:If you answer, honestly, that tau are weaker than several armies ( in my opinion most) then you have to agree that they are a lower rank. Its as simple as that.

I see. I don't know how many your SEVERAL means. If SEVERAL = 2, then Eldar are lower rank, so is Dark Eldar, Daemons, CSM, Necron, Tau, Orks, etc.

Surely the ultimate answer to this back and forth is how Tau bear out in Tournaments? Presumably there are statics about how popular they are, win/loss ratios, that sort of thing?

silpheedpilot wrote: Would you rather play with cool looking troopers that wear pretty slick looking armor instead of sweaty human beings with the tactics of a WWII infantryman? Tau are where it's at.

This, I just like the Tau society, if you had to pick a faction you had to be citizen of in 40k, it would be Tau.

One other point that hasn't been mentioned is that the Tau have a great deal of difficulty holding objectives. Their Troops choices don't have the kind of performance necessary to hold objectives:

1. Leadership is a problem; they're just not very reliable.
2. If you keep Firewarriors in a Devilfish for durability, they're not shooting at all.
3. Kroot are T3 with no save.
4. No special or heavy weapons that help the units perform better.

The codex was designed when non-Troops could control objectives. Now the Troops are critical to the game, and the Tau troop choices simply don't cut it in a competitive environment.