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Pretty much the title. I want to start a new race to go along with my Imperial Guard and Primaris Marine forces, but I want a race that's similar on the tabletop in battle and cool in design to those factions. I don't like Eldar, so that leaves me with....

Orks - Cool units but all melee basically
Tau - Not a huge fan of the design but closely mirror Primaris Marines in gameplay style.
Tyranids - Great design but too different, I'm not good at painting biological bits
Necrons - Lots of shooting and assault, high strength/toughness units.
Wait for a new faction....?

Necrons really aren't that tough I hate to tell you.

Nids look a lot harder to paint then they actually are.

It's very forgiving of some sloppy dry brushing because the organics having a blotchy or rough coloring is good for a entirely organic not human entity to give the flesh some good variety.

It actually looks odd when it's too perfect.


Just saying in case painting was your one negative against nids.

Tau, but avoid the over-the-top Battlesuits.
I snorted a little when you said they mirror Primaris Marines, just whom do you think those Marines are trying to copy?

 JinxDragon wrote:
Tau, but avoid the over-the-top Battlesuits.
I snorted a little when you said they mirror Primaris Marines, just whom do you think those Marines are trying to copy?

Soon we will have our revenge. They will remember who they are copying and why we do it better.

 JinxDragon wrote:
Tau, but avoid the over-the-top Battlesuits.
I snorted a little when you said they mirror Primaris Marines, just whom do you think those Marines are trying to copy?

You mean the riptide and broadside?

 RyanAvx wrote:

 JinxDragon wrote:
Tau, but avoid the over-the-top Battlesuits.
I snorted a little when you said they mirror Primaris Marines, just whom do you think those Marines are trying to copy?

You mean the riptide and broadside?

Fire warrior gun lines with cadre blades and pathfinder drones can lay down quite a bit of pretty good dakka. You don't need much in the way of suits besides a few deepstriking commanders or crisis suits to act as surgical strikers. Round out the list with some hammer heads and you can deal with pretty much anything.

 RyanAvx wrote:

Orks - Cool units but all melee basically

We've got lots of shooting units actually, probably more than close combat oriented ones. But with the new rules competitive orks lists are boyz, other units that are basically sneaky or faster boyz (kommandos and stormboyz) and characters that buff boyz. Maybe when the codex drops many other units will become viable, including some shooty ones.

If your meta is a fluffy one go with orks, you can build a lot of lists that are not close combat only.

GSC would be my suggestion. They ally with IG and gives you the ability to expand into Nids later

To make necrons work you need forge world stuff sadly the index units are not enough on their own.

Nids are super simple to paint. Basecoat, Drybrush and then dip it in a shading ink. Sorted.

I would say Orks or Nids personally.

Similar in play style to Guard and Primaris? So gunline gameplay?

If that's the case, Tau is likely your best candidate.

Personally however, I'd suggest Drukhari for a new army. Other than being cheap to buy, they have some beautiful models, some great conversion options, give you that shooty army you like but with a completely different style of play due to mobility and squishiness.

Playing 3 armies that have the same playstyle sounds very boring.

GSC for sure.... they can actually play with your Guard, you can make them look like your theme or different w.e you want, but GSC would be the best pick.

RyanAvx,
Broadsides are fine with me, and while the original riptide still pushes the line... no, it is more the other monstrosities that have been unleashed onto us during 7th Edition.
The KV128 Stormsurge as an example of over-the-top modeling if there ever was one, and Forgeworld is ripe with all sorts of 'Oversized' battlesuits to T'au reputation even worse.

 JinxDragon wrote:
RyanAvx,
Broadsides are fine with me, and while the original riptide still pushes the line... no, it is more the other monstrosities that have been unleashed onto us during 7th Edition.
The KV128 Stormsurge as an example of over-the-top modeling if there ever was one, and Forgeworld is ripe with all sorts of 'Oversized' battlesuits to T'au reputation even worse.

There are no suits bigger than the Riptide at Forgeworld other than the beautiful Ta'unar. I have no idea what your talking about.

BomBomHotdog wrote:GSC would be my suggestion. They ally with IG and gives you the ability to expand into Nids later

Amishprn86 wrote:GSC for sure.... they can actually play with your Guard, you can make them look like your theme or different w.e you want, but GSC would be the best pick.

Agreed. Genestealer Cults are a great fit if you already have Guard since they can borrow certain units to reduce the start-up costs. Visually they are also very distinct with their industrial-themed units mixed with Tyrannic influences.

 Gamgee wrote:

 JinxDragon wrote:
RyanAvx,
Broadsides are fine with me, and while the original riptide still pushes the line... no, it is more the other monstrosities that have been unleashed onto us during 7th Edition.
The KV128 Stormsurge as an example of over-the-top modeling if there ever was one, and Forgeworld is ripe with all sorts of 'Oversized' battlesuits to T'au reputation even worse.

There are no suits bigger than the Riptide at Forgeworld other than the beautiful Ta'unar. I have no idea what your talking about.

Well if you consider the Riptide oversized....

Riptides and stormsurges are the only REALLY big suits outside of the couple forgeworld ones that are not just crisis suits.

Ghostkheels are like... dreadnaught/carnifex sized.

everything else is smaller.

I have no idea why people think all Tau suits are big. The vast majority are small. Though I have no doubt GW is just itching to give us some big ones again someday. There is also the lore of the Earth Cast Engineer building a line of titan class platforms. So you know there will be one bigger than the Ta'unar someday. I hope that is a sooner to today someday than far away someday. Given they can't even get FoC out though I don't think it's happening any time soon.

Isn't it a new species not race?

I'm with you on the Tau, the basic troops are cool but all the Gundam/ Zone of the Enders stuff is pretty silly.

However, you could collect the Kroot. A bloke in my area had a massive Kroot army back in 3rd edition with some really cool conversions and it was a joy to play against.
Orks vs Kroot turns into a bloodbath very quickly though as you can imagine!

Take Orks

Take Shoota Boyz

Model your trukks off of Dark Eldar Raiders

Give all yer boyz pirate hats

Boom, Freebootas.

I do consider the Riptide to be over-sized: The size chart within the Codex showing the sudden size increase and a standard T'au Firewarrior being knee height will be my evidence there.
I saw a similar lineup done with Space Marine Models, a similar jump in size between Dreadnaughts and Imperial Knights with the same sort of 'standard Marine almost to knee' comparison.

It really isn't the fact the T'au have access to Battlesuits the size of Imperial Knights, maybe they decided to mimic the Gue'vesa, it is how fast these Knight and Larger sized Battlesuits went from 'experimental' to the corner stone of their entire military!
So many other Units have been ignored, simply due to the fact someone in Game Workshop's marketing team believes they can more easily push over-sized humanoid models to the newer generation that likes that sort of thing, right?

In full disclosure though:
I have a thing for multi-barrel artillery pieces, and that Ta'unar Supremacy suit... well she has a restraining order against me.

Again, there are very effective Tau lists based on firewarriors.

rapid fire 30" guns with cadre fireblades giving them an extra shot and pulse accelerator drones provided by pathfinder teams increase the range of the firewarriors guns by 6" making for a gun that is 2 shots at 36" and 3 at 18".

With even a single markerlight the entire army can be rerolling 1s against the marked target. Tau have the easiest access to rerolling 1s army wide and drones which are the cheapest and most reliable ablative wounds in the game.

Use stealth suits and ghostkheels to act as forward surgical strke units and give the stealth teams a beacon to deepstrike in some crisis/commanders.

Hammerheads to taste.

You can easily threat overload while gunning everyone down.

 JinxDragon wrote:
I do consider the Riptide to be over-sized: The size chart within the Codex showing the sudden size increase and a standard T'au Firewarrior being knee height will be my evidence there.
I saw a similar lineup done with Space Marine Models, a similar jump in size between Dreadnaughts and Imperial Knights with the same sort of 'standard Marine almost to knee' comparison.

It really isn't the fact the T'au have access to Battlesuits the size of Imperial Knights, maybe they decided to mimic the Gue'vesa, it is how fast these Knight and Larger sized Battlesuits went from 'experimental' to the corner stone of their entire military!
So many other Units have been ignored, simply due to the fact someone in Game Workshop's marketing team believes they can more easily push over-sized humanoid models to the newer generation that likes that sort of thing, right?

In full disclosure though:
I have a thing for multi-barrel artillery pieces, and that Ta'unar Supremacy suit... well she has a restraining order against me.

Uh the lore says they were testing all of these for years and then they went to the field trials phase which were all very successful given the results of the Gulf war 2. Of the new suits the Riptide is mentioned the most, but honestly if you read through the books they mention crisis suits plenty. Especially in Mont'ka. Crisis suits are still the iconic Tau choice for suits even above and beyond Riptides. They also had tons of mentions of Stealth suits. Heck the Stormsurge didn't even come in to the last act of the book when the IoM was already showing signs of being on the ropes in Kau'yon. The Riptide is mentioned plenty because well it's a frontline suit. It's going to be one of the most common ones. Also they even give the smaller suits and even troops some showtime by saying some of the larger suits couldn't follow the Raven Guard into the ruins at one point as they went into the old Imperial sewer system.

I don't think they are portrayed as the main piece of the Tau at all. Not one bit. They play the part of assault suits and seeing as some of the thickest fighting where they should be, but that's all. Also the Tau produce new technology at a constant pace. This is well established since forever. Eventually someday it's not improbable they could create a gun drone that could kill the Primarch's with enough time. This is why the Tau are so threatening. The IoM can only ever advance so much where as the Tau have no limit. Even today the US military is constantly upgrading their gear to be better. The US abrams line of tanks may look the same as when it started but you couldn't be more dead wrong. A current generation abrams tank would be near indestructible going up against even two generations old of an abrams.

Of all the suits Broadsides seem to see the least amount of love in the fiction. Despite having cool models.

Edit
In Mont'ka the story of Longstrike and his Hammerheads is longer and more important than any mention of a Riptide or Stormsurge.

Take all the lore you just stated, with words like 'field trails' and count in one thing:
A formation allowed us to field an Army of nothing but Riptides... and it was so powerful Opponents refused to play against it.

How does that match up to your narrative?

Are you trying to build your army in 8th based on formations in 7th?