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Now I’m just thinking about destroyer missile.

Will it be Str 9 ap-3 2D6 damage?

Sad that Crisis Suits are still not great and Missile Pods (on said suits) are still ghetto autocannons, but I'm happy for the other buffs, especially as it looks like Riptides might actually be good without being completely OP now. I haven't worked out the cost of the Stormsurge with the new information yet, but it might be good as well (here's hoping!). Looks like Bork'an is going to be the go-to sept for competitive play (kind of like Alpha Legion, Cadia, Alaitoc, etc.), which sucks as I want to run Longstrike and/or Darkstrider and they are T'au sept (and that trait is not great). Sky Rays might actually be good now that they dropped in points and their missiles got a massive buff (which means the Stormsurge's D-missiles might be stupid powerful now).

As for the concern that Kroot might be invalidated by the drop in cost of Strike Teams, I'd say they still have a place for blocking deep strikes, as they have that nice Scout move to allow them to be a cheap screen unit. Not as good as SM scouts or Nurglings because Infiltrate>Scout, but taking one 20-man unit (or two 10-man units) to screen forwards might be a good idea for 120 points.

 ZergSmasher wrote:
Sad that Crisis Suits are still not great and Missile Pods (on said suits) are still ghetto autocannons, but I'm happy for the other buffs, especially as it looks like Riptides might actually be good without being completely OP now. I haven't worked out the cost of the Stormsurge with the new information yet, but it might be good as well (here's hoping!). Looks like Bork'an is going to be the go-to sept for competitive play (kind of like Alpha Legion, Cadia, Alaitoc, etc.), which sucks as I want to run Longstrike and/or Darkstrider and they are T'au sept (and that trait is not great). Sky Rays might actually be good now that they dropped in points and their missiles got a massive buff (which means the Stormsurge's D-missiles might be stupid powerful now).

As for the concern that Kroot might be invalidated by the drop in cost of Strike Teams, I'd say they still have a place for blocking deep strikes, as they have that nice Scout move to allow them to be a cheap screen unit. Not as good as SM scouts or Nurglings because Infiltrate>Scout, but taking one 20-man unit (or two 10-man units) to screen forwards might be a good idea for 120 points.

Kroot are terrible still. Even if you for some reason decide that kroot are better than stealth suits for anti ds shenanigans, pathfinders are better in every way that matters and have the same scout move.

New Necron Admech boxed game with two Armigers and the new Cryptek in a new thread here. Very cool.

Really disappointed that the Tau buffs all seem to be "make it cheaper" instead of making Tau units good at their jobs per model. We are not orks FFS!

 Peregrine wrote:
Really disappointed that the Tau buffs all seem to be "make it cheaper" instead of making Tau units good at their jobs per model. We are not orks FFS!

Wait for the strategems and full view.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Points haven't overall shifted that significantly. As it stands my 6k force drops by c.30 points.

rtb02 wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:
Really disappointed that the Tau buffs all seem to be "make it cheaper" instead of making Tau units good at their jobs per model. We are not orks FFS!

Wait for the strategems and full view.

Stratagems don't fix the fluff. Suits/vehicles should be BS 3+ by default, with commanders up to 2+, and should ignore all movement penalties. None of this idiocy of the elite of the shooting army hitting on ork BS.

To briefly interrupt the Tau chat. It seems the order of releases will be tau, dark Eldar, necrons, forgefire box, imperial Knights. Possibly something else before the Knights codex.
This is extrapolating from the comments of a b&c user who correctly guessed the name and contents of the forgefire box a few weeks ago.

Chikout wrote:
To briefly interrupt the Tau chat. It seems the order of releases will be tau, dark Eldar, necrons, forgefire box, imperial Knights. Possibly something else before the Knights codex.
This is extrapolating from the comments of a b&c user who correctly guessed the name and contents of the forgefire box a few weeks ago.

Good thing I have 1++ rerollable against all that to save my wallet Knights were close but seeing they aren't likely to get 30k rules illogically dodged that one too.

 casvalremdeikun wrote:

Felcat wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 FirePainter wrote:
Somebody doesn't want Tau playing with suits. I guess we are an infantry army now.

Or maybe they just want Suits to be an elite unit, whereas the majority of Tau forces be their - wait for it - troops!

Well it would be nice if Crisis Suits had the stats to be truly elite units then.

Tell that to my Terminators, Sternguard, and Vanguard Veterans that have the same BS and WS as a Scout. There really isn't any sort of rules that reflect elite units other than perhaps a better Armor Save or an additional attack, or maybe a slightly better piece of Wargear.

That is the game.

Remember when people were raging because scouts didn't have the same bs as normal.marines? How could gw have known that what we really wanted were bs4+ marines....

 axisofentropy wrote:
Looks like the Necron vs AdMech rumors were true.

100% getting this. The included Knight Armiger sealed it for me. I won't even ditch the Necrons. They are on of the easier armies to paint, and I do want a Xenos army. I do need more Rangers too.

So the army that is marketed using Crisis Suits continues to have garbage rules for said Crisis Suits?

The idea of a Tau book that addresses commander spam (as it should) but then does not address the useless XV-8 teams makes the priority on selling infantry kits over making a solid book so obvious. Really frustrating that the flagship unit for the army seems to continue to be pointless.

Hopefully some of the missing detail makes this all make sense.

The Forgefire box is very tempting considering I play both armies.

Still no ork Codex in sight?
Cool.

I wouldn't worry about that. Orks'll be one of the big 'un releases. Lots of new kits.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
I wouldn't worry about that. Orks'll be one of the big 'un releases. Lots of new kits.

Allegedly there's going to be a Kult of Speed codex in December. Take that with a grain of salt, but with a box set with no Space Marines confirmed anything feels possible.

rtb02 wrote:
Are seekers still 1 shot? If not then my double skyrays are a new staple

Thank you for all you've shared

Why wouldn't they be? They're now identical to Hunter-Killer missiles Imperium armies have.

 Peregrine wrote:
Really disappointed that the Tau buffs all seem to be "make it cheaper" instead of making Tau units good at their jobs per model. We are not orks FFS!

The Ghostkeel (Ion Raker) and Riptide (both main guns) buffs are quite significant. Lots of points shaved off from the Broadside as well (which, IMO, makes sense to me. Broadsides, while not supposed to be spammed, are not super-special-snowflake suits like Riptides and Stormsurges. You're supposed to be able to take a couple into an army without running yourself dry on points).

Now I gotta figure out whether I want a safe Fusion Collider + Target Lock + Shield for my Ghostkeel or go full balls to the walls with overcharging Ion Raker + ATS + Target Lock. Think I'll keep my Commander safe with triple Fusion Blaster and Shield Gen though. And I'm definitely going to get a Riptide next month

Think my army is going to be a Batallion of Fire Warrior squads and some Pathfinders with Fireblade and then a Vanguard detachment full of various flavours of battlesuits (Crisis/Ghostkeel/Stealth/Riptide for now) led by the Commander.

I'm a little salty that it feels like Games Workshop is trying to force T'au to be focused entirely around Gunlines and the knee-jerk reaction for fixing "Commander Spam" by going against the design philosophy of Detatchments ("You can make an army out of whatever you feel is cool!")... But I am excited to buy the damn Codex and read/play my precious T'au.

And my god, that AdMech/Necron thing looks really cool. I wonder if it will be a mini-game with "free" models or another Dark Imperium.

Looks like a 40k version of the Stormcast vs Nurgle set, complete with scenario/bacground book.

 Galas wrote:
Yeah is confusing how the logic of "They have better stats because they have better training/more experience" applies to Conscripts/InfantrySquads/Veterans , and Flash Gitz compared with normal orks, and... nothing else in the game that is not an HQ/Elite character, really.

A Sternguard shoots just like a Devastator. A Tau Suit Pilot shots equally to a Tau Firewarrior. Even as Kanluwen said, the pilots of a baneblade are worse shoters than a IG Veteran.

It doesn't make any kind of sense.

Not saying this to complaint about Tau suit pilots being 4+BS. I can live with that. But is an inconsistence that I have never understood.

It's an eternal dilemma that applies to all game systems with an extensive background. Do you give units stats based on their background or based on what's the most healthy for the game? Often it's primarily the latter because most people are of the opinion that a fun and balanced game > every stat being in accordance with a certain units' fluff. If we went purely by fluff every Space Marine would have the stats of a Custodes (and basic Custodes troops themselves would probably have the stats of Daemon Prince...) and basic boltguns would probably have a profile of S5 AP -2 D2 or something. Besides, a D6- based system leaves little wiggle room to make units unique as far as their hit and wound rolls go because there's only 6 possibilities to choose from. If it was, say, a D12 system it might have been easy to give Fire Warriors a BS 7+ and Crisis Suits a BS 6+ to represent that Crisis pilots have more combat experience than Fire Warriors. D6 leaves no other choice than to put everything at 4+.

 Peregrine wrote:
Stratagems don't fix the fluff. Suits/vehicles should be BS 3+ by default, with commanders up to 2+, and should ignore all movement penalties. None of this idiocy of the elite of the shooting army hitting on ork BS.

No. Just no. If anything, commanders should go to 3+, it makes no sense they have same accuracy as best SM veterans with centuries of experience who are far superior to humans, and humans still have much better sight and coordination than normal Tau. That was always my big problem with Tau, humans use blueprints stuff from impossibly advanced age, for Tau guns to be better than that (when their best stuff was badly reverse engineered human gear in old fluff...) was utter nonsense introduced in last two editions by writers who dumped all over past fluff.

Tau might know how their guns work, their stuff might be more reliable, and can be mass produced, but it should be bulkier, have worse stats, and lots of drawbacks as they push their gear way beyond what it can achieve to match Imperial stuff. Doing otherwise makes utter mockery of one of the fundamentals of the setting, the STCs, making mockery out of it as these mechanicus morons could have just abducted a few Earth caste scientists and asked them to write new, better STC and be done with their 'quest of knowledge' in an afternoon...

Well, no change to crisis suits kills off the crisis suit. They are nowhere near as good as custodians (same cost bracket, similar stat block). Unless the weapons are near enough free, I'll pass.

I wonder if we might see what the Jet Pack keyword is for in this codex, that might explain the absence of a cost change for crisis suits and no direct change on the profile.

I think broadsides and fire warriors are in, Fusionkeels are in, HBC'Tides are in. The cost reductions, profile improvements and the Borkan Sept trait massively favour gunline Tau over battlesuits.

The skill stats are pretty broad. 5+ for untrained, 4+ for professional, 3+ for anywhere from guard veteran onward for the most part with 2+ reserved for outright legendary things like leaders and venerable dreadnoughts. The only army I can think of that gets 2+ handed out like candy is custodes, and those represent the emperor's ridiculously resource intensive supersoldier project that can't be mass produced on a useful scale.

It's not out of place for Sternguard to be 3+, most things with any degree of veterancy should be 3+.

 Irbis wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:
Stratagems don't fix the fluff. Suits/vehicles should be BS 3+ by default, with commanders up to 2+, and should ignore all movement penalties. None of this idiocy of the elite of the shooting army hitting on ork BS.

No. Just no. If anything, commanders should go to 3+, it makes no sense they have same accuracy as best SM veterans with centuries of experience who are far superior to humans, and humans still have much better sight and coordination than normal Tau. That was always my big problem with Tau, humans use blueprints stuff from impossibly advanced age, for Tau guns to be better than that (when their best stuff was badly reverse engineered human gear in old fluff...) was utter nonsense introduced in last two editions by writers who dumped all over past fluff.

Tau might know how their guns work, their stuff might be more reliable, and can be mass produced, but it should be bulkier, have worse stats, and lots of drawbacks as they push their gear way beyond what it can achieve to match Imperial stuff. Doing otherwise makes utter mockery of one of the fundamentals of the setting, the STCs, making mockery out of it as these mechanicus morons could have just abducted a few Earth caste scientists and asked them to write new, better STC and be done with their 'quest of knowledge' in an afternoon...

The thing holding back the Mechanicus is their dogmatism, not their aptitude. They could easily outdo Tau Earth Caste engineers if they didn't deem any hint of progression or innovation to be HERESY and worthy of the death penalty or even worse.

 Irbis wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:
Stratagems don't fix the fluff. Suits/vehicles should be BS 3+ by default, with commanders up to 2+, and should ignore all movement penalties. None of this idiocy of the elite of the shooting army hitting on ork BS.

No. Just no. If anything, commanders should go to 3+, it makes no sense they have same accuracy as best SM veterans with centuries of experience who are far superior to humans, and humans still have much better sight and coordination than normal Tau. That was always my big problem with Tau, humans use blueprints stuff from impossibly advanced age, for Tau guns to be better than that (when their best stuff was badly reverse engineered human gear in old fluff...) was utter nonsense introduced in last two editions by writers who dumped all over past fluff.

Tau might know how their guns work, their stuff might be more reliable, and can be mass produced, but it should be bulkier, have worse stats, and lots of drawbacks as they push their gear way beyond what it can achieve to match Imperial stuff. Doing otherwise makes utter mockery of one of the fundamentals of the setting, the STCs, making mockery out of it as these mechanicus morons could have just abducted a few Earth caste scientists and asked them to write new, better STC and be done with their 'quest of knowledge' in an afternoon...

I would agree with most of that - Is it still Canon that Tau super tech compensates for poor depth perception, however I do like the idea of Tau ignoring move penalties as it fits their fluff / tech.

BS 2+ Characters, super Elite (Custodians)
BS 3+ Elite (Astartes, Sororitas, Aspect Warriors, Tau Commanders and Vet Suit pilots, Guard Vets, Scions etc)
BS 4+ Regular and well trained (Fire Warriors, Guard, Crisis suits)

The problem Tau have always had, rules-wise, is that it's very hard to find a niche for them that's not either Guard or Eldar.

Tau originally had really strong shooting on fairly fragile but very mobile platforms which relied on tricksiness like jump-shoot-jump to stay safe. Of course, that's just Eldar. Tau tended to have longer range, but that was it. It wasn't really a sustainable design.

More recently, Tau have been less mobile and more Guard-like. The vision for Tau in 8th seems to have been big suits shielded by a mass of expendable drone bodies. With these new changes they're wanting to de-emphasize gun drones as jetbike equivalents and I guess promote more line infantry. I doubt that Fish of Fury will come back -- none of the traits really seem to support it -- and I feel like the design is aiming for armies to be a bunch of big suits screened by Fire Warriors.

I think their BS has always been a reaction to this tension. At BS3+, lots of Tau units are just re-skinned Eldar. BS4+ lets them feel like a more elite version of Guard. In 8th, it also makes them susceptible to the Raven Guard trait, which seems to have been intended specifically to counter the two big long-range gunline armies.

 Irbis wrote:
That was always my big problem with Tau, humans use blueprints stuff from impossibly advanced age, for Tau guns to be better than that (when their best stuff was badly reverse engineered human gear in old fluff...) was utter nonsense introduced in last two editions by writers who dumped all over past fluff.

Imperial technology is trash. Tanks with no suspensions that a WWI engineer would be embarrassed to design, guns with absurd rocket shells that are hideously inaccurate, etc. It's just one step above orks on the "trash, but because magic and faith it works" scale. The only redeeming quality the Imperium has is quantity. Their gear might be trash, but if you throw a few trillion soldiers with flashlights and t-shirts at a target eventually you win by sheer numbers. The BS 3+ of space marines represents the best of the best managing to overcome the limits of their technology and fight at a decent level.

Tau technology, on the other hand, is supposed to be reasonable and practical. It works, and it works better than what the Imperium has. In a shooting match between a Tau veteran commander armed with their best gear and a space marine with some half-functioning power armor and a pointy stick the Tau should win every time. And without the scale issues of 40k (distances are not 28mm scale) the space marine probably never even knows what hit them as over-the-horizon seeker missiles annihilate them. And TBH even BS 2+ is probably conservative when compared to real-world tanks/guided missiles/etc. They should probably just auto-hit fluff-wise, but for balance we can scale it back a bit.

making mockery out of it as these mechanicus morons could have just abducted a few Earth caste scientists and asked them to write new, better STC and be done with their 'quest of knowledge' in an afternoon..

You're missing a rather fundamental point of the setting. They can't do that because space Jesus said it isn't ok. It isn't the holy STC, and therefore it is the foulest blasphemy against space Jesus. Practical concerns like "it's better at killing people" do not matter, only the word of space Jesus. Now report for conversion into a servitor, so that you may aid the crusade to recover a rumor of a STC fragment for a pointy stick.

 Peregrine wrote:

 Irbis wrote:
That was always my big problem with Tau, humans use blueprints stuff from impossibly advanced age, for Tau guns to be better than that (when their best stuff was badly reverse engineered human gear in old fluff...) was utter nonsense introduced in last two editions by writers who dumped all over past fluff.

Imperial technology is trash. Tanks with no suspensions that a WWI engineer would be embarrassed to design, guns with absurd rocket shells that are hideously inaccurate, etc. It's just one step above orks on the "trash, but because magic and faith it works" scale. The only redeeming quality the Imperium has is quantity. Their gear might be trash, but if you throw a few trillion soldiers with flashlights and t-shirts at a target eventually you win by sheer numbers. The BS 3+ of space marines represents the best of the best managing to overcome the limits of their technology and fight at a decent level.

Tau technology, on the other hand, is supposed to be reasonable and practical. It works, and it works better than what the Imperium has. In a shooting match between a Tau veteran commander armed with their best gear and a space marine with some half-functioning power armor and a pointy stick the Tau should win every time. And without the scale issues of 40k (distances are not 28mm scale) the space marine probably never even knows what hit them as over-the-horizon seeker missiles annihilate them. And TBH even BS 2+ is probably conservative when compared to real-world tanks/guided missiles/etc. They should probably just auto-hit fluff-wise, but for balance we can scale it back a bit.

So this is what Movie Marines fanboyism looks like when applied to other factions.

BS 4+ on most Tau-units is fine, as long as they don't pay for 3+ BS.

I haven't read Tau-fluff for quite some time, but I recall them as having poor depth perception, which explained the poor BS (back then 3, now 4+) despite being a shooty futuristic army.

I recall them having BS 3 (4+) on most of their army when they where released back in 4th, with a few units being able to purchase a +1 BS upgrade. It should be the same now: Some units should be able to get BS 3+ with some tech-upgrades, but they shouldn't be to cheap that they're auto-include, and they shouldn't be spammable. Tau is a shooty army, but that doesn't mean it should have more than average BS.

As for Tau's niche, I've always seen them as some strange mix of IG and Eldar:

More maneuverable than IG but not as maneuverable as Eldar.
More high-tech than IG but not as high-tech as Eldar.
Better Ballistic Skill than IG but not as good as Eldar.
Cheaper than Eldar but not as cheap as IG.
Tougher than Eldar, etc etc.