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I've heard constantly that the Tau don't do melee, yet I've seen minis and pictures of them weilding swords. Are they just bad at melee, or is there some game play joke I'm not understanding here?

They are really bad at melee, AND they're heavily incentivized to keep their enemy at range (for the greater good, etc). There are just a couple exceptions to this in the entire army.

OK, so I may be completely and totally wrong on this one, and someone please feel free to correct me. But, I just looked through all of GW's T'au line (didn't look through FW), and I don't see a single melee unit. Yes, a few of the HQs do carry ceremonial blades that, yes, can be used in combat. But, they aren't the greatest in the world. And, with how few HQs you'll probably be running outside of battlesuits, I don't really see the T'au having any Melee abilities.

Again, someone please correct me if I'm wrong.

SG

 Jazzylee wrote:
I've heard constantly that the Tau don't do melee, yet I've seen minis and pictures of them weilding swords. Are they just bad at melee, or is there some game play joke I'm not understanding here?

The blades are usually symbolic (in past editions they gave an Ld boost if the squad leader hand a bonding knife).

Tau basically treat melee as a dump stat, in favor of mobility, firepower, and wargear shenannigans. Farsight has a big sword, but its an artefact he found and adapted, an extreme exception.

Most blades in Tau society/models are indicated as being ceremonial. Even Aun'shi's dueling blades are actually for ceremonial blade dance of sort (from 3rd ed Tau codex I think). The only true exception to this trend of steering away from melee are onager gaunlet, dawn blade, and the more recent fusion blades.

There's also a total of two melee relics, which is still bewildering if you ask me. Especially when those have the same opportunity cost as better relics and have such limited attacks to use.

I mean, am I really gonna take the Onager which only ever does one attack over something else? Hell nah.

T'au are really bad at melee.

But that just makes it *even more satisfying* when your Fire Warriors beat something to death because your opponent overreached.

I saw an animated short years ago in which a Fire Warrior was shooting at a charging Guardsman, but ran out bullets/guns jamming/stopped working whatever.

So the FW pulls a cylinder from his belt and struggles to read the instructions: "Use in case of Clo- Clos- Close Combat, whatever that it?".
So he throws the cylinder at the still charging Guardsman, which hits him and falls to the ground. The Guardsman stops, picks up the cylinder, presses the button on its side and ignites the electro-magnetic laser sword.
The Guardsman then proceeds to annihilation the Fire Warrior.

I always felt this was an accurate representation of how T'au react to melee.

-

Guys. Commander farsight.

Commander farsight is just a dude with a big honking sword that choppy choppy orks.

There is ritual combat between Ethereals.
Tau have a vision impairment, can't remember what is was, that plays a part in them being horrible at close combat.

A lot of the Knives you see are Bonding Knives which are used in a, surprise, bonding ritual where they cut themselves to draw blood and pledge they will look out for each other on the battlefield. Nothing to do with actual fighting.

I've always thought T'au being "bad" at CC wasn't really true in an absolute sense. They're probably about as good as a "modern" rifle soldiers should be. It's just that everything else is so stupidly *good* at CC.

 ServiceGames wrote:
OK, so I may be completely and totally wrong on this one, and someone please feel free to correct me. But, I just looked through all of GW's T'au line (didn't look through FW), and I don't see a single melee unit. Yes, a few of the HQs do carry ceremonial blades that, yes, can be used in combat. But, they aren't the greatest in the world. And, with how few HQs you'll probably be running outside of battlesuits, I don't really see the T'au having any Melee abilities.

Again, someone please correct me if I'm wrong.

SG

Commander Farsight does a lot more work in melee than he does with shooting. Also he buffs the melee of other Farsight Enclaves models near him, which only really matters on other Commanders because they are semi-passable in a fight but is still a thing. Farsight in combo with a Fusion Blades commander can get some useful work done in combat. The Eight (from CA18) can slice their way through units of Primaris Marines (or similar) in combat surprisingly fast.

Ethereals are technically competent at melee and have zero shooting but really their statline is awful so they are not a melee unit.

Kroot hounds are not bad at melee for their points cost. Which is to say they are pretty bad but are *really* cheap.

Bharring wrote:
T'au are really bad at melee.

But that just makes it *even more satisfying* when your Fire Warriors beat something to death because your opponent overreached.

You don't know happiness until you watch Fire Warriors beat Abbadon in combat.

In 6th, I saw a DP charge a sole T'au, lose all but one wound in Overwatch, then get punched to death by a single T'au model before it could punch back...

Well there's more to melee than close combat. Eg stealth suits or a ghostkeel could and should charge a gun line to tag tanks or artillery pieces if they can. But yeah, not really making them gold at melee but can still be meaningful to charge with them.

They have fish knives, but the scale is off.

 Ordana wrote:
There is ritual combat between Ethereals.
Tau have a vision impairment, can't remember what is was, that plays a part in them being horrible at close combat.

They are said to have poor depth perception, which is odd; as they have two eyes...

Farsight has seen the necessity of HTH in his conflicts with the Orks, giving us this famous quote-

Learn to shorten your reach. If the foe can come close enough to negate your striking power all strategem is lost. and when all strategem is lost, the battle is lost.

What about the giant TREX? Or is that just DoW?

From what I have gathered the Tau are extremely pragmatic in battle and very sensitive to losses. Melee is hard to control and leads to a bloodbath if anything goes wrong: there's no room to retreat. Engaging at range is both safer and more efficient for the Tau as their battle doctrine and allows room for withdrawal with minimal losses. However, the Tau are fully capable of training for CC as evidenced by Farsight, especially since battlesuits more than make up for their weaker physiology. The onager gauntlet for example was very effective, however, the casualty rate for the users was unbearably high and so its use was halted.

As far as the worse eyes argument goes, Tau eyes don't dilate (which according to GW makes them bad at depth perception but that doesn't sound right to me), but they have a wider visible spectrum meaning they can see more into UV light and infrared. Of course, their helmets and sensors should be able to help their perception anyway so it doesn't seem like an actual issue to me.

 FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:
What about the giant TREX? Or is that just DoW?

I presume you mean a Knarloc, which is a subspecies of Kroot and not a Tau.

 Ordana wrote:

Tau have a vision impairment, can't remember what is was, that plays a part in them being horrible at close combat.fighting.

Afaik Tau have no depth perception, at least in older fluff.

 Grimtuff wrote:

 Ordana wrote:
There is ritual combat between Ethereals.
Tau have a vision impairment, can't remember what is was, that plays a part in them being horrible at close combat.

They are said to have poor depth perception, which is odd; as they have two eyes...

Welcome to 40k ;-)

 FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:
What about the giant TREX? Or is that just DoW?

DoW massively increased its size, the FW model is rather small

 Kap'n Krump wrote:

 Grimtuff wrote:

 Ordana wrote:
There is ritual combat between Ethereals.
Tau have a vision impairment, can't remember what is was, that plays a part in them being horrible at close combat.

They are said to have poor depth perception, which is odd; as they have two eyes...

This makes EXTRA no sense because I feel like a creature with poor depth perception would be worse at range than up close.

Well not necessarily. Imagine us playing a FPS on a screen. That's probably close to what the Tau sees.

Due to the lower gravity of their homeworld, even robust Tau Fire Caste are weaker than baseline humans. Note that's baseline humans, not baseline human SOLDIERS. Human armies tend to keep their soldiers in pretty good shape and they're hot garbage in melee combat compared to most 40k armies.

Massively?



Both are about two kroot tall, game one just has slightly larger head if anything...

Its a bit smaller than I remember, but bigger than what the model would be. Compare it to Tau vehicles

All vehicles in DoW 1 were made slightly smaller to avoid pathing issues and to not drown out infantry on screen, though. Also, relic units were slightly bigger to make them more prominent. See for example demon princes dwarfing Rhinos in size:

The T'au Fire Caste, physically speaking, are roughly equivalent in strength, speed, and durability to similarly trained/conditioned humans, with a broader spectrum of vision but slower focusing (the latter of which is compensated for through T'au technology, and is essentially a non-factor).

The issue that the T'au have with engaging in melee has always been cultural, because actively hacking people apart is somehow considered barbaric, horrific, and downright uncouth. They aren't good at swinging blades around because they don't train for that - instead, they train in disengaging from melee and using their technologically potent weapons instead of trying to use merely human strength against the panoply of inhuman foes that makes up the vast majority of WH40k aliens, or best yet, not letting the enemy past that last meter that separates T'au victory from T'au blood splatter.

It doesn't help that the T'au populations are closer to Astartes-levels of absurd, rather than the sort of prolific human or ork population levels that allow quantity to truly be a quality all its own. Between mere-human T'au physiology and an extremely limited population, it just doesn't make sense to engage in melee.

The Eldar, at least, have the excuse that they're absurdly fast and have the time to become absurdly skilled. The T'au don't have that excuse, and they only really develop the potential to be relevant once they're suited up in a Xar'vesa (hence why all the direct melee options are ultimately battlesuit weaponry, mostly experimental given their utter distaste for the practice).

Which is not to say the T'au are always disinclined to get up close and personal with the enemy. FAR FROM IT. We've already had Farsight's quote, but this isn't purely a Farsight Enclaves phenomenon. The T'au are certainly happy to stay outside of the enemy's effective fire range and take potshots all day (See the T'aros campaign), but they're also willing and able to get right in the face of the enemy to employ their overwhelming firepower after they can see the veins in the whites of the enemy's eye.

Breachers are the clearest example here. T'au find hacking people apart to be barbarity of the worst kind, but they have absolutely no qualms about blasting them into itty bitty pieces that splatter all over their stylish armor, and Pulse Blasters are pretty much designed to be fired from extremely close ranges FOR extremely close ranges where keeping things at range is, at best, an idealistic approach.

XV-9s are also a clear example of the T'au designing around their distastes, mostly by making something that tricks barbarians into engaging in melee, punishing them as they approach, then getting the hell outta dodge so they can keep on punishing them from nearby.

The T'au prefer gun fights, and are happy to let reckless, barbarous idiots bring knives to a gunfight. The T'au aren't as naive or idealistic as they used to be, but they aren't barbarians, so they still don't bring knives to a knife fight - instead, they bring highly effective shotguns and pistols that make bolt pistols seem like popguns to a knife fight, and for the most part, they do well enough to be a larger (albeit still relatively small) galactic player than ever before.

Also, they have auxiliaries to engage in barbarity if tactics absolutely require it. Despite being worthless in melee on the tabletop, the Kroot in fluff are actually pretty damn badass (they'll engage Astartes and do reasonably well, FFS), as are their offshoot species (Krootox, Knarlocs, Greater Knarlocs, and Hounds). Vespid are known to have claws that can cut through rock (again, not reflected well on the tabletop). There's doubtlessly other species the T'au have incorporated that can be similarly effective.

But that isn't reflected in the tabletop, for the most part, because the theme of the army's playstyle is far more important when GW is developing unit stats than such minor inconveniences as lore.