Commissar Benny wrote:If you are going for a fluffy Tau list & want to make lots of friends, add some Kroot. Kroot are some of the coolest units in the
40k setting & yet, I have never...ever seen a Tau player use them. They are a very important part of the Tau empire but are never represented on the tabletop. Sure they are not Riptide broken/
OP but they are extremely fluffy, will make your army that much more interesting & I'd wager you will find alot more people willing to play.
Kroot look cool, despite being 15 years old. But they're no more interesting than any other Tau unit. 6th edition gave them sniper rounds and most people will field them with such. Seeing as this gives them heavy weapons, they just sit amongst the gunline and throw relatively ineffective fire downrange alongside their Tau overlords. I don't see why having a beak, no armour save and a sniper rifle is any more fluffy than a firewarrior squad. Kroot just don't do anything on the table - no survivability, no damage output, no even necessarily cheap, and they're not even on the rungs of the ladder with bottom tier assault infantry that the fluff makes them out to be - what happened to their S4 and 2 attacks? :( In fact, their rules are so appalling, I actually tend to use the 30 Kroot I own as an allied in mob of Shoota Boyz (they're green, armed with a rifle type weapon and from a fluff stand point have eaten a few too many orks and thus absorbed their belligerent humour and innate combat style into their pack).
For a fun Tau list:
1) Play objectives, especially maelstrom missiles
2) Field an army that actually leaves your deployment zone
3) Don't use formations for cheesy bonuses (OSC, Cadre Firebase etc)
4) Limit yourself to 1
MC - he'll still likely carry you through the game
5) Play aggressively - use your movement phase, use your additional moves. Make your opponent react to your gameplay rather than watching passively while you roll buckets of dice.
6) Engage with your opponent and have an enjoyable game, the fun is about the shared experience, not the winning or the losing. This goes for any army but it's especially important to remember it with armies like Tau/Eldar.
As for fluffy Tau lists: There's far less fluff about Tau than about
IoM. The Horus heresy series does a lot of flesh out the backstory of the
SM/
CSM factions and their characters, and forgeworld does a lot to bring these characters to the tabletop. That's simply the nature of
GW's focus on the human factions in the game. Tau simply don't have the variety of characters in their backstory to create these sorts of coteries on the tabletop - there aren't enough relatable humanised characters for people to want to field specific people aside from those few named with special models. This likely also comes down to the majority of the named Fire Caste members being battlesuit pilots and therefore having similar if not identical outward appearances. Unlike
IOM characters who are more personalised in their appearance with a strong fluff to back them up. Really though, when you field a Tau army, it's highly likely that will be a "fluffy" list, provided it has no more than 1 of any experimental battlesuit type. A list with a few squads of Firewarriors, a few battlesuits, a hammerhead and riptide is a "fluffy" list because it all fits within standard Tau doctrine in a way. Similiarly, a list that contains only battesuits is arguably "fluffy". What I'm trying to demonstrate is that Tau lists are inherently fluffy until you start fielding duplicates of rare and experimental technology.