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Kroot are kinda bad. A good friend of mine likes to play kroot however, so our gaming group got together and thought of a way to make them a bit better. Here is what we came up with:

Profile Uprgades:
+1 Attack
+1 Leadership

Weapon Upgrades:
-1 AP on their melee attacks

Special Rules:
Feral Toughness: 6+ feelnopain essentially

Adaptive evolution: at the start of the game roll one D3 for every kroot unit in your army:
1-2: +1 Strength
3-4: +1 Toughness
5-6: improve this units feelnopain to a 5+

Stratagem (2Cp/3Cp depending unit unit size):
Hyper adaptive evolution: at the start of the game roll two times when determining the benefit from the adaptive evolution table. Keep both results, can't get the same buff twice. Roll again when you get the same result.

Too much?

Kroot are pretty bad, but then so are T'au as a whole, at the moment.

I really hope their 9e codex takes a step back and asks what Kroot are actually meant for. They used to be screeners and counter-attackers; you'd bring them in to shield your squishy shooters and get in the way of assaults. They've become progressively less effective in that role over the editions, due to changes in shooting, charging, fighting, and the metagame of movement and assaults.

These changes are a fine way to approach an overall buff, but the most important parts for me are the durability buffs, because they make Kroot more viable as a cheap Objective grabber. It gives them something to do.

With Adaptive Evolution I'd be nice if a Shaper could let you choose a new one for a single unit within 6 inch every turn.

Tiberias wrote:
Kroot are kinda bad. A good friend of mine likes to play kroot however, so our gaming group got together and thought of a way to make them a bit better. Here is what we came up with:

Glad to hear you have a group that's okay with tweaking the rules! Overall, I like what you've got. Some thoughts:

Weapon Upgrades:
-1 AP on their melee attacks

Mechanically, this is totally fine. Lore-wise, it feels a little undeserved. To the best of my knowledge, kroot don't have any special tech that makes them better at crafting swords than some aeldari. But then again, apparently ork craftsmanship is sufficient to warrant -1 AP, so what do I know? Then again again, I kind of wondered if the -1 AP on choppas is meant to be a nod to the old timey rules where a sufficiently high strength score gave you better AP. Like I said; mechanically fine. Just a bit awkward that you have sharper swords than my harlequins.

Special Rules:
Feral Toughness: 6+ feelnopain essentially

Adaptive evolution: at the start of the game roll one D3 for every kroot unit in your army:
1-2: +1 Strength
3-4: +1 Toughness
5-6: improve this units feelnopain to a 5+

Stratagem (2Cp/3Cp depending unit unit size):
Hyper adaptive evolution: at the start of the game roll two times when determining the benefit from the adaptive evolution table. Keep both results, can't get the same buff twice. Roll again when you get the same result.

Too much?

Probably not too much. I do feel like you could probably get rid of Feral Toughness just for the sake of having one fewer special rules floating around.

The +1 Toughness and the 5+ FNP are thematically and mechanically very similar. One of them is probably straight up more useful in a wider variety of situations (though I'd have to crunch some numbers to tell you which one), and they both boil down to making your dudes slightly harder to kill. And if your intent is for players to end up with both of those benefits at once to be the "right" level of durable, I feel like randomizing which buffs a unit gets is just creating an opportunity for luck to interfere with your goal. Also, from a lore perspective, it seems a little weird that your kroot band would have different squads on different diets. If they've all been fighting on the same battlefields, wouldn't they be consuming more or less the same DNA and developing more or less the same traits as a result?

Some possible adjustments from someone with questionable tau-related credentials:
* Don't randomize what bonuses Adaptive Evolution Grants. If wyches can pick their drugs, kroot can pick their evolutions.
* Pick either +1 Toughness or 5+ FNP. I'd lean towards the former because it will matter against everything strength value between 2 and 7 (except 5). And because it cuts down on dice rolling.
* Add something to the evolution list that helps vary this unit's playstyle. You have an offense boost and a defense boost. How about a mobility boost? Reroll Advance and Charge rolls maybe? Or the ability to heroically intervene with non-characters up to 6"? (To help them serve as counter-chargers for your shooty tau.)

I miss kroots' ability to outflank, but maybe they're cheap enough these days for Strategic Reserves to be enough. Thanks for sharing your excellent work.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Jarms48 wrote:
With Adaptive Evolution I'd be nice if a Shaper could let you choose a new one for a single unit within 6 inch every turn.

That would be cool. Seems like it would make for a good stratagem.

SNACK STASH - 1CP
Select a Kroot unit within 6" of a Kroot Shaper. That unit immediately loses one of its current Adaptive Evolution benefits and gains a different benefit instead.

Or, hard mode: create several stratagems for various 40k races, and let each one grant a benefit reflecting that faction's characteristics. Use the stratagems when you kill an enemy unit while within engagement range. So you might get something similar to Stalwart or Transhuman Physiology if you eat Astartes/Heretic Astartes, bonus movement and attacks for eating speedy Aeldari keyword units, a Strength/Toughness boost for eating orks, etc.

Thanks for the feedback and suggestions. I really like the idea to create stratagems for each enemy race that gives benefits depending on the faction characteristics.