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I have updated the Forces of the Tau Codex and Tau Auxiliaries Codex with some of the suggestions I have received. I am working on a change log now. I think people will be happy with the changes and the balance achieved through them. I really liked the feedback so far. Please keep it coming.

Offsite link to PDF's hosted on 4shared.com
http://www.4shared.com/office/JnEG4dYK/Tau_Auxiliaries.html
http://www.4shared.com/office/wuom5_mL/Forces_of_the_Tau.html

Drone Guidance Systems: Probably better as a Drone Upgrade than an armywide special rule. Infringing on Blood Angels here.

Dynamic Entry: How can I not like this ?

Precise Maneuvers: This is very ambiguous and poorly worded. If your intent was to have it be something similar to the Positional Relay, just use the Positional Relay's wording.

Regulated Thrust: Sure why not.

Tactical Shift: Very fancy!

Tau Commander: Unnecessary: Just make the units with Tau Commander be a 1+ slot (I'm assuming they're the Shas'El and Shas'O)

Tau Auxiliaries: Any army can already take allies under 2000 points.

Untainted by the Warp: Fluff might be off a bit - it's not the amount of taint, it's their presence entirely.

Overall: There's a lot of special rules here. I'd say, after the auxiliaries, choose the 3 you feel best suit. You can apply more specific rules, like Regulated Thrust, to the units that use them.

Tau Commander: Either describe the special rule in the HQ slot, or at the beginning. It doesn't need to be in both sections (See directly above).

Wargear note for Commanders: You're misreading splitfire. ONLY ONE MODEL from the unit gets to splitfire. Also, XV-3 suit mentions Reliable Thrust, which I'm assuming was changed to Regulated Thrust.
Drone mention: The wording on this is ambiguous and poor. "Can join other units as normal" for an independent character STILL MEANS HE WOULD HAVE TO LEAVE THE DRONES.

Combat Link: Really needs some heavy rules-intensive revision. I have no clue what this thing does outside of a vague 'feeling'.

Celestial Wrath: Reword the scatter clause. Use a similar weapon for reference.

Double Dealings: Doesn't state that they no longer arrive on 3+. Now enemy units arrive on 5+ AND 3+. Ammending this to "instead of normal" would fix.

Death Oath: Makes his death penalty/benefit sort of useless. That's all. Is also really expensive.

Ethereal Guardians: They don't have targeting arrays. They have target arrays.

Crisis Suits: W3 for no points increase? In fact, a points DECREASE? These are now worth it just to load em up with free burst cannons or cheap fusion guns and go nuts, even assaulting with them! D: Also, again what's with all the splitfire - it doesn't do what I think you think it does. Also, why does every other character for normal squadrons cost 10, while the shas'vre is only a 5 point bump? Regardless, these things will take out 2-3 marines each in close combat.

A quick note on markerlights: You've given Fire Warriors the ability to kill anything in the game. Sniper + S5 Pulse Rifle = for 2 markerlight tokens, you get BS4 firewarriors with S5 snipers. Wat. It gets better, battle link 4 firewarrior units together - the shasuis can take markerlights for 5 points, and with the current wordings, can all fire their markerlights at one unit, and then 1 firewarrior team fires at that unit while the others gain its benefits against all the other units they decide to fire at - meaning you have 4 teams of (11 firing) bs4 S5 snipers firing at 4 different units from 30" away for a mere 482 points. And they're all scoring and ignore night fighting.

definitely advocating a rework on Markerlight effects and their interaction with Command link or whatever it is.


I'll get to the rest later, good work so far but you might want to reconsider how you've costed a few things. It's best to start with overcosted and chisel down, than to go at it undercosted and bulk up.

Tomorrow night I will start looking to fixing those things. The grammar really has me upset, I should have proof read better.

As for splitfire, I am aware of how it is intended to work, I was trying to make it so Target Locks let anyone who owned one use their splitfire rule regardless. I see now that is overly cumbersome and will edit out the splitfire rule from the units and make it a addition given by target locks.

As for markerlights, they need to be worked on. A unit is not meant to benefit so strongly. I will make the benefits more of a tiered system. I will make it clear that removal of a counter for a squad benefit is done before firing and so benefits are added up when the unit fires. I will remove twin-linked, tank hunters, and sniper benefits.

I should limit Combat link to two units and only in the shooting phase with the two units gaining a benefit like twin linked rather than the same markerlight counters.

I will make Drone-guidance a Missile-lock mechanic to the Sub-munition Rail cannon shot and other scatter roll with blast markers but not it in their weapon profile.

Naming the Warp resistance problem was a pain.

A few nights ago I addressed the following things:

Grammar: an ongoing battle.

Raised some point costs, particularly the Firewarriors from 8 to 10, Pathfinders from 10 to 12, Crisis suits raised by 5

removed Drone Guidance as an army wide special rule and applied it to the Rail Cannon Sub-munition

Added Inertial Guidance System wargear to reduce scatter dice from two to one.

Fixed Independent characters and Drones

Fixed the Scatter wording for Orbital Strike

Add the following to the Ethereal ability Double Dealings, "as oppose to normal"

Changed Ethereal ability Death Oath to give Fearless to all Tau Units with a line of sight to the Ethereal. Still 60 points, I am considering changing this because the Fearless ability invalidates the Ethereal Influence ability.

Added Missile Lock to Strike Missile Launcher

Removed the Splitfire rule from all units and reworked Target Locks
Target Locks mow give automatic Splitfire and allow every model in a unit with a Target Lock to use the splitfire rule and shoot at a different target.

Removed tau commander rule completely, no unit in the army i required.

Edited Tau Auxiliaries rule to reflect the ability to take multiple Ally Detachments in a force under 2000 points.

Traded Precise Maneuvers for Precision Timing, now select d3+1 units in reserves to arrive in any round from 1 to 5 without a reserve roll. (I want opinions on this especially)

Fixed some pricing discrepancies.

MArkerlight fixes- Now a tiered system. We only remove markerlights to fire Seeker and Sunburst missiles. 5 Tiers: 1 +1 BS, 2 Target enemy unit ignoring night fighting, 3 tau unit gains Ignore Cover, 4, Reduce Leadership score vs pinning by number of hits tau unit causes with pinning weapons, 5 Combat-linked units gain twin-linked, Target Lock equipped models gain Sniper.

Reduced the Seeker Missile Racks on a Sky Ray from 2 to 1 reduced points from 155 to 125.
Reduced the Strike Missile Launchers on a Copperhead from 2 to 1, no point change

Changed the Melta ability on Fusion Blasters, Fusion Cascades, and Multiple Weapon Pods to Armour Bane, raised the prices of all weapons by 5, this way we haven't 35 point crisis suits with two Fusion Blasters annihilating Terminators at low range, instead it now costs minimum of 50 points per Crisis.

Changed Sunburst missile from Str 4 AP 5 heavy 1, blast, blind --to-- STR 5 AP 4 Heavy 1, Blind

Removed "linked" ability from Combat-link. It was clumsy and hard to express rules wise. Making Markerlights into a tiered system also invalidated it. Instead Combat-link allows units so equipped to count as scoring, and control and deny objectives at a distance of 6" rather than 3". I see this as very helpful to the Tau for competing in th Everlasting War missions.

All drones now have relentless, this was done so Sniper drones can move and shoot, and so that Firewarriors and Pathfinders could benefit from Marker Drones while remaining mobile. It makes sense to me because independently each drone is a Jetpack equipped model.

Added Nautilus Defense Platform as a Fortification.

Attempted some different formats for showing units. Please tell me which ones you guys like.

Reduced font from 8 to 7. I would like to change Font type but it will require reformatting the entire document.

Fixed Naming discrepancies.

Thinking of changing Regulated Thrust into a free piece of wargear to get it out of the special rules section.

Sup? Just checking in. Drinking a beer, reading your 'dex. Neat.

This should be a good example of how much cheese this codex contains.




Overwatch on full BS is stupidly OP, and the vehicle with 4 ion cannons is insane. It only cost 160 points, a little more than a ionhead.

I would recommend toning down the levels of cheese in this codex.