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Totally new to tau and Im about to pick one up. Before I dig and and go nuts on assembly, I wondered how you all wold suggest building the box to get the most value from it. Keep in mind I want to go with a fluffy list surrounding Farsight. THank you in advance for any help!

With magnets on both weapon hardpoints so you can run any loadout you feel like on the crisis. That's always the solution, regardless of FSE or TE. Same with riptides.

Firewarriors would probably be better as strike teams instead of breachers in farsight, since you've got troops plasma crisis to do a similar job to the breachers, but backfield objective campers supplying bulk str 5 AP5 are better coming from strike squads with a turret than burst cannons on crisis IMHO, since your crisis have better things to do.

If you run a somewhat mechanised army with some skyrays, breachers in a fish could do some good work for you though.

Crisis suits, Riptides, and Farsight himself obviously. Maybe a dash of Ghostkeels for the Ghostkeel Wing formation.

Thanks for the help,

I suppose I can clarify, what weapon loadouta are effective for tau?

Breachers or strike team?

Hey there, I'm actually currently slowly building and painting a Tau army that will be a Dawn Blade Force (Farsight), but more competitive, so feel free to check out what I'm doing in my blog.

As for what you should do with the start box, well as others have mentioned buy some magnets to magnetize the weapons, and buy some extra weapons for the Suits since the kits don't have enough to field two of each for each suit currently. Generally the weapons you'll be using are Missile Pods, Plasma Rifles, and Fusion Blaster, the Burst Cannons are common in Tau so they're not as appealing, and the Flamer isn't very good, so with those two you can get away with having less copies since you're probably not going to be running as many of them, the same could be said with Fusion Blasters. As for a Cyclical Ion Blaster or Frag Burster, I'm not a huge fan of them, but you can pick them up too since they're not bad and can be run in multiples now.

You can even magnetize some things on the Suits you like as well, I magnetize the little shield thing as I don't ever equip them with Shield Generators but think they're rather cool, though if an event is very strict about modeling, I can always take them off so they're not in the way. I can also always use them as a wound counter, since Suits have two wounds I can remove the shield bit to signify a missing wound if I so want.

As a Farsight army, you're probably not too interested in the Ethereal of Fire Warriors in the "Start Collecting" box, but they're not terrible and come at such a big discount with that box that really if you're planning to buy Crisis Suits you might as well buy that box set and get those other things almost for free.

Edit: Strikers are generally better, Breachers require a lot more work and effort to be effective, they also really benefit from having a Devilfish transport and function as a sort of suicide squad in that case.

I'm going against the norm and building breachers. I'll be buying two devilfish though and will have haywire grenades for them. Think the devilfish is not an assault vehicle but the threat should be enough to dictate movement

The suits themselves are fairly easy to build, but I think you're asking about what weapons to give them...

If you don't like magnetising them (trust me I've been there too) and you want to glue the guns on, then you need to seriously consider your meta. Play against MEQ armies with hoards of termies? Dual plasma all the way! Horde armies a problem? Burst cannons or missile pods. Armour an issue? Fusion blasters.

I cannot stress how important it is to NOT generalise with suits. "Oh I might need to pop armour thirteen but he does have a lot of troops so I'll take a burst cannon and a fusion blaster!..." NO.

The most common suit I have is the dual plasma suit. Your opponents face when each suit unloads 4 plasma shots at rapid fire into a squad of termies is priceless especially now my meta is 60% marines.

I've seen some players dual plasma with missile pods, it's not to my personal taste, but it wrecks light armour and costs less than dual plasma.

Breachers are use impaired. You'll struggle to do anything with them due to their terrible ranged weaponry. Missile Pods and Fusion Blasters are the premier two choices for XV8's. Missile pods as a general all around weapon and fusions for cracking tanks to get to that tasty core.

As far as I can tell from the pictures, the only difference between breachers and normal fire warriors are the weapon arms and the helmets. The helmets don't differ too much. So if you don't care about this little detail, you can just pick a helmet and magnetize the weapon arms to get breachers and strike teams out of one kit.

Now that the Cyclic Ion Blaster is standard issue wargear (take as many as you want) I think it makes missile pods on Crisis Suits all but obsolete. Double plasma or double fusion is still the more role fulfilling load out for a Crisis Suit but if you want some bult Str 7 shooting then double Ion Blaster is a fairly good option. 18" range isn't a big deal for a model that can deep strike in and JSJ. Magnitize your Crisis Suits, its super easy to do (buy a bunch of neodemian magnets off ebay, drill holes in weapons/suit hardpoints with a hand drill, glue in magnet). Only thing hard about it is keeping track of polarity so I would recommend you lay out all your magnets with the same pole facing up, paint the tops of all the magnets, and now you can very easily identify their pole (scrape off the paint after you glue it on if you want).

As for the Fire Warriors I am personally not sold on the value of Breachers when they are incredibly reliant on having a transport to get in close (Devilfish aren't cheap) and if you really want some Str 6 AP face melt weapons then double plasma Crisis Suits seem like a less restrictive unit. I would stick with Pulse Rifles unless your wanting more Devilfish then maybe consider Pulse Carbines (18" with 2 shots +pinning instead of only 15" with 2 shots). When in doubt go with pulse rifles as their superior range and general well rounded profile makes them quite useful in most situations where as carbines and breacher guns are much more niche use.

As for the box set itself, it depends on what you want to do but the power of the Tau codex is so high that you can really do whatever you want and it will work fairly well. Considering you want to play Farsight then you really want more Crisis Suits. Start with a CAD with the 5 man FWs filling the troops until you have enough models to make a Retaliation Cadre or Hunter Cadre. An Ethereal isn't really all that useful for a Farsight Enclaves Detachment as the only way to fit one in is in the 3+ ethereal formation which is of dubious value and a huge "shoot this to win game" target.

Missile pods have way higher range so not obsolete at all depending on tactics. They're still very good though.

Good luck getting 6 of them for a three man team though.