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I am getting the feeling this particular faction is very unpopluar. In fact, the reason they are so often played is because they were overpowered in 5th to 8th edition. The producers have made very little effort to publicize the Tau. Now, you can say the same thing to the Dark Eldar, but the Tau should be more marketable and appealing to the mass.

No Tau is featured in supplement campaign books like Valedor or Damnos.

Tau only has 1 shooter game and that one was bad. They appear in Dark Crusade, Soulstorm, Retribution Last Stand and Battlefleet Gothic Armada, but these games aim to feature as many factions as possible. There is no Tau in the campaign for both the latter games.

Very little mention of the Tau in the current lore such as Gathering Storm and Indomitus Crusade. We know they are planning another invasion after their Fourth Sphere went wrong, but we don't get much of what the remnant of their fleet are doing after being flung across the galaxy by the Warp storm. The Tau are quite close to Ultramar, so you would expect Papa Smurf to have a word with them over territorial disputes.

Imperial players are just upset that there's a faction closer to "Good" than they are. It's a lot harder to see your space Nazis as good when there's a faction that doesn't genocide entire planets of humans or entire alien species on a daily basis.

Tau is quite popular! In my FLGS there are 4 Tau players.

Also, Tau featured in a campaign supplement - Damocles

 EmpNortonII wrote:
Imperial players are just upset that there's a faction closer to "Good" than they are. It's a lot harder to see your space Nazis as good when there's a faction that doesn't genocide entire planets of humans or entire alien species on a daily basis.

Tau would be more popular, if they would look more like your Avatar.

Part of it depends on what brought someone into the game. The tau have a very different aesthetic from the other armies. Also I'd wager a lot of people get turned off when they find out about needing markerlights to be able to shoot properly.

 EmpNortonII wrote:
Imperial players are just upset that there's a faction closer to "Good" than they are. It's a lot harder to see your space Nazis as good when there's a faction that doesn't genocide entire planets of humans or entire alien species on a daily basis.

From what I have been told it is that, and the fact that at some point in time tau players were countering eldar armies, and eldar players didn't like that.

I'd wager their shootiness also rubs people the wrong way

Tau are dishonorable cowards who refuse to participate in glorious melee combat. Farsight Enclaves are a'ight, though.

 Bobthehero wrote:
I'd wager their shootiness also rubs people the wrong way

But aren't all the good lists in w40k ungodly shoty to begin with? Some are also very good at melee, but there are no good lists, or at least I haven't heard about them, that are just good melee.

From a fluff perspective, the 40k setting doesn't lend itself to there being any good factions.
Every faction is their own brand of completely horrible, so eyebrows are raised when one faction is put above the others and presented as 'the good guys'. Really though, in a lot of fluff the tau are shown to be fairly monstrous by most standards. It's just presented more subtly than some would like. Their self-important 'enlightenment' is undermined by the offhand hints at brainwashing of alien races, mass sterilizations of worlds, and so on. I don't really have a problem with them here.

From a crunch perspective, I personally find them just a bit obnoxious to play against.
Regardless of how strong they are at any one time, their 'all shooting, all the time' gameplay is rather one dimensional. All assault armies are similarly dull. But to a lesser extent, as they're somewhat more interactive, and a bit less common.

A lot of the dislike has to do with bad experiences with them.
Basically to play against Tau armies can be either extremly enjoyable or extremly annoying. Take these as exemples:

Older Players that have suffered through what has been dubbed the fish of fury have understandable antipathy torwards Tau.

5-6th ed was combat suit spam, which made for a relative boring game.

7th Ed players will still be annoyed at either Taudar or rapetides.

8th ed is markerlight spam and as soon as a table has not enough cover will end badly for most armies against tau, since weight of dice is combined with quality of weaponry. Shooting arguably has always been better on average then melee/ assult.

My point. Tau either had massive balance issues or could abuse rules of a eddition to the point where it was simply put blank cheese. It does also not help that everytime a new tau codex get's out a massive ammount of new toys come with it for the list to play, often times doubiously balanced (anyone remember the new and imroved support suits with the rocket batteries? Riptides ?).
Additionally Tau are often a skew list, as in can you beat the gunline? No, you lose. Really bad was this during 7th where Tau would just win Eternal war missions, but could not really win in regards to objective holding missions, since their transport was terribly overpriced.

Frankly their aesthetic is uniqe and a fun Tau list that includes differing units (not just firewarriors but also kroot etc.) is always a nice round to have a go against. The same can atm be said about a IG army. One that does not spam mortars and hellhounds.

 EmpNortonII wrote:
Imperial players are just upset that there's a faction closer to "Good" than they are. It's a lot harder to see your space Nazis as good when there's a faction that doesn't genocide entire planets of humans or entire alien species on a daily basis.

If you think your faction is good in 40k then you're seeing things wrong. The closest to good is "not evil".

I think it's partly because they used to be a bit different in their attitude of not holding ground and not using big suits but then GW scrubbed it for sales.

Two reasons:

1) People don't understand what "grimdark" means and assume that it requires skulls and purity seals everywhere, completely missing the more subtle references in the Tau and how they are not in any way a "good" faction. They're pragmatic enough to offer you the opportunity to surrender before killing you (after all, slaves are profitable additions to the empire and war is a drain on resources) and use technology to build better guns, but they're also a totalitarian and aggressively expansionist empire with a rigid caste system and a whole lot of hints at real-world colonialism.

2) Tau are a shooting army and don't rush straight into the middle of the table to have both sides roll dice at each other in a giant melee blob until someone wins. This is extremely frustrating for people whose entire knowledge of 40k tactics consists of "move directly at the enemy and declare charges". Unfortunately this is a significant majority of the 40k community.

Karol wrote:

 Bobthehero wrote:
I'd wager their shootiness also rubs people the wrong way

But aren't all the good lists in w40k ungodly shoty to begin with? Some are also very good at melee, but there are no good lists, or at least I haven't heard about them, that are just good melee.

In the current meta you can only succeed if you have very powerful shooting and very powerful assault components. What's top tier competitive isn't really relevant though, it's more the design philosophy of a faction that shuns every phase of the game except one.

 Peregrine wrote:
Two reasons:

1) People don't understand what "grimdark" means and assume that it requires skulls and purity seals everywhere, completely missing the more subtle references in the Tau and how they are not in any way a "good" faction. They're pragmatic enough to offer you the opportunity to surrender before killing you (after all, slaves are profitable additions to the empire and war is a drain on resources) and use technology to build better guns, but they're also a totalitarian and aggressively expansionist empire with a rigid caste system and a whole lot of hints at real-world colonialism.

2) Tau are a shooting army and don't rush straight into the middle of the table to have both sides roll dice at each other in a giant melee blob until someone wins. This is extremely frustrating for people whose entire knowledge of 40k tactics consists of "move directly at the enemy and declare charges". Unfortunately this is a significant majority of the 40k community.

HAHAHAA now that is a strawman, friend.
Mind if i just remind you of the broken i can shoot under my antigrav transport / tanks at your units withouth them getting cover whilest you can't?
You know that one time a whole edition and a half?

Taus have fluctuated wildly in effectiveness, and have suffered from very bad internal codex balance, so the best-performing Tau lists have often ended up being spammy or annoying to play against.

GW designed them as a small faction to do shooting above all else with Kroot around for the hacky slash moments.
The issue GW has always had is balancing Tau as they only take part in 1 phase shooting and occasionally 2nd being movement.

Right now Tau are way less mobile than they have been for a while IMHO.

But as what was a mobile shooting heavy army, playing against a well played Tau army was probably super frustrating.

They also by way of having no pshycic phase even defensively and no meaningful assualt unit need to do all their damage in the shooting phase. Which in editions with pshycic phases of doom and assualt T1 ment they had some very one-sided match ups.

Also 8th edition mechanics have removed a lot of mobility and durability from Tau and changed ip what used to be good core units to unplayable trash so if your tau army was from 6/7th you would need a new army for 8th.

there are also the annoying Tau fanboys, you guys know the ones, the ones who GENUINELY belive that the Tau are "good" and insist there is no "sinister subtext" and insist that the Tau could take on the IoM in a straight up fight because "their tech is so much better"
and yeah I've had people try to claim that.

There's some good points here already.

Yes, people dislike playing against Tau largely based on previous editions where they were OP and so no fun to play against. This is not the case now though.

Yes, people (many of them the same as above) dislike their fluff because it is superficially less grimdark than the other factions. Personally I think that's pretty silly for two reasons. Firstly as mentioned above there are plenty of hints in the lore that it is just superficial and that they are in fact a totalitarian dictatorship who brainwashes their entire population. Second because without a little light the dark loses all impact. I call this 'grimderp', the idea that everything has to be totally horrible for everyone all the time. I think that's so silly. It's so much more horrifying if you have the contrast to people doing better.

Anyway, what hasn't been dealt with particularly is why we don't see more of them from GW. There's a simple answer, but one you probably won't like much. Tau are a side race. They are colour for the setting, but they are not the subject of the setting. The galaxy feels bigger for them existing, but at it's heart 40k has and will always be about the Imperium Vs Chaos.

Stux wrote:
There's some good points here already.

Yes, people dislike playing against Tau largely based on previous editions where they were OP and so no fun to play against. This is not the case now though.

Yes, people (many of them the same as above) dislike their fluff because it is superficially less grimdark than the other factions. Personally I think that's pretty silly for two reasons. Firstly as mentioned above there are plenty of hints in the lore that it is just superficial and that they are in fact a totalitarian dictatorship who brainwashes their entire population. Second because without a little light the dark loses all impact. I call this 'grimderp', the idea that everything has to be totally horrible for everyone all the time. I think that's so silly. It's so much more horrifying if you have the contrast to people doing better.

Anyway, what hasn't been dealt with particularly is why we don't see more of them from GW. There's a simple answer, but one you probably won't like much. Tau are a side race. They are colour for the setting, but they are not the subject of the setting. The galaxy feels bigger for them existing, but at it's heart 40k has and will always be about the Imperium Vs Chaos.

Also the Tau are restricted to a small part of the galaxy. "I want to fight Tau" automaticly forces you to set the story in the eastren fringe

Not Online!!! wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:
Two reasons:

1) People don't understand what "grimdark" means and assume that it requires skulls and purity seals everywhere, completely missing the more subtle references in the Tau and how they are not in any way a "good" faction. They're pragmatic enough to offer you the opportunity to surrender before killing you (after all, slaves are profitable additions to the empire and war is a drain on resources) and use technology to build better guns, but they're also a totalitarian and aggressively expansionist empire with a rigid caste system and a whole lot of hints at real-world colonialism.

2) Tau are a shooting army and don't rush straight into the middle of the table to have both sides roll dice at each other in a giant melee blob until someone wins. This is extremely frustrating for people whose entire knowledge of 40k tactics consists of "move directly at the enemy and declare charges". Unfortunately this is a significant majority of the 40k community.

HAHAHAA now that is a strawman, friend.
Mind if i just remind you of the broken i can shoot under my antigrav transport / tanks at your units withouth them getting cover whilest you can't?
You know that one time a whole edition and a half?

Pots and kettles. Eldar, DE, and Marines (or you know, literally everyone with a skimmer. These rules were not unique to Tau. they were the basic rules of the game) could do this. Just because Tau made good use of it is no reason to get salty. For many editions Tau had brought a gun to the knife fight that was 40k, in that HTH was far more effective than shooting so they had to take every advantage in that area they could.

BrianDavion wrote:
there are also the annoying Tau fanboys, you guys know the ones, the ones who GENUINELY belive that the Tau are "good" and insist there is no "sinister subtext" and insist that the Tau could take on the IoM in a straight up fight because "their tech is so much better"
and yeah I've had people try to claim that.

They could though, it's just only if the Imperium decides to retaliate in the normal way of Warzones on countless fronts fighting stuff piecemeal instead of bringing the full might of humanity to bear in a single place that the Tau could take them. The Imperium could wipe out any race tomorrow if they wanted to but the bureaucracy and infighting prevents that.

I think one of the issues could be the game design behind them. For most of the time of their existence, Tau - and Necrons and Craftworld Eldar for a long time as well - had their playstyle defined by rule mechanics that tended towards griefing the other player. They were not fun to play against, and with Tau that started in 3rd edition already with the JSJ shenanigans that slower armies practically had no counters for.
To be honest, I don't remember a single game against Tau that I would classify as a fun game, but I haven't fought them in 8th edition yet, maybe it's better now.
Armies that rely on stuff that you don't get to kill to win are somewhat boring opponents because the games often feel like only the other guy actually gets to play.

I didn’t like Tau because of their visual aesthetics, and they were made just to get anime battletech lovers into the game.
White tiger zord, morph into Voltron’s butthole!

Or something like that.

 timetowaste85 wrote:
I didn’t like Tau because of their visual aesthetics, and they were made just to get anime battletech lovers into the game.
White tiger zord, morph into Voltron’s butthole!

Or something like that.

And Eldar weren't?

Eldar have just as much "Anime" design cues in them as Tau do.

 timetowaste85 wrote:
I didn’t like Tau because of their visual aesthetics, and they were made just to get anime battletech lovers into the game.
White tiger zord, morph into Voltron’s butthole!

Or something like that.

But...battletech...isn't anime...?

Imperial Knights/Titans are battletech ripoffs. not Tau.

Like, REALLY REALLY OBVIOUS battletech ripoffs.

bibotot wrote:
I am getting the feeling this particular faction is very unpopluar. In fact, the reason they are so often played is because they were overpowered in 5th to 8th edition. The producers have made very little effort to publicize the Tau. Now, you can say the same thing to the Dark Eldar, but the Tau should be more marketable and appealing to the mass.

No Tau is featured in supplement campaign books like Valedor or Damnos.

Tau only has 1 shooter game and that one was bad. They appear in Dark Crusade, Soulstorm, Retribution Last Stand and Battlefleet Gothic Armada, but these games aim to feature as many factions as possible. There is no Tau in the campaign for both the latter games.

Very little mention of the Tau in the current lore such as Gathering Storm and Indomitus Crusade. We know they are planning another invasion after their Fourth Sphere went wrong, but we don't get much of what the remnant of their fleet are doing after being flung across the galaxy by the Warp storm. The Tau are quite close to Ultramar, so you would expect Papa Smurf to have a word with them over territorial disputes.

Tau had quite some campaigns in 6th/7th edition and are one of the best supported armies in the game, probably the best supported Xenos and I'd even say better than imperial guard.

Fluffwise, Tau are irrelevant for the setting, that's why they don't feature in the Gathering Storm and Indomitus Crusade. The Tau are by far the smallest faction in the game (aside from Space Marine chapters).

Of course BT is anime. Almost all - over 40 in fact - early BT mech designs were "appropriated", from 1980s Japanese anime shows: Macross, Dougram and Crusher Joe and another I don't remember. That is the entire reason why there are still lawsuits being fought over them.

They're an expensive army, monetarily speaking, with some of the more effective builds not utilizing things that people really like the looks of.

bibotot wrote:
No Tau is featured in supplement campaign books like Valedor or Damnos.

Warzone Damocles was the tau one.
And Taros from forgeworld.

bibotot wrote:
I am getting the feeling this particular faction is very unpopluar.....

Hmm, I wonder why that could be...

 EmpNortonII wrote:
Imperial players are just upset....

I don't really need to show much beyond that, really.

And that poster is actually a pretty good person, I know they're just playing and having a laugh. All in good fun, as it should be.

But there were no shortage of Tau players that had obnoxiously bad attitudes. I call it the 'XBox attitude'. Constantly in 7th Edition, we would have guys showing up and asking "So which one of these is the top army?" And, of course, makes a Grognard like me just cringe and grind my teeth. (I'm a believer in 'the best army is the one you like'). Not only did we have people asking this, but you'd always have some other kid just like him blurting out- "You want Tau!" Now you have local Metas with kids plopping down their unpainted and slapshod-constructed Grey Gundams with sprue burs and mold lines everywhere, and doing rather well because they treat it like a video game-

Well, let's just say that some of us sometimes forget that the game isn't the same for everyone. For some folks, it's... more like a video game. To each their own. The lesson to learn from that is to just... not play with people like that, and eventually when they only people they can play with are each other- those Gundams and Fishyboys will be on eBay in a week or so.

That, or you can mandate the 'tabletop standard paint' requirement at tournaments and watch the comical lengths those sorts of guys go to just to barely achieve that standard enough to go and 'beat people at the game'.

Being on the internet wasn't much better. Literally every discussion about armies and the like was constantly interrupted by people coming in and filling up the comments or Facebook groups with poorly-spelled bellowing about how great their Tau was and how easy it was for them to destroy this and that (and many times it was evident they'd only played against a couple of guys using Dark Vengeance or Start Collecting Space Marine boxes). For perspective- every time you read a comments section related to Warhammer 40k, just replace every comment about Sisters of Battle with someone gloating about their Tau. That's the issue.

In short, there was a stereotype of associating them with people that had less... 'friendly casual' attitudes. It wasn't entirely true, I knew quite a few that were not only cool people- but competitive and were more than willing to show you the best ways to counter their stuff and help you- which was wonderful when you got to wipe the smile off the Grey Gundam Gunline boys' faces.

I can say that random online discussions are much better out in the wild without them coming in with the hyper-competitive gloating about Tau... sort of. It's not a 40k discussion unless someone whines about Sisters of Battle, someone asks about Squats, and someone comes in to yell at us about how dumb we are for not playing Horus Heresy.

One thing about Tau is that they played kind of vastly different from everything else at the time, So people were kind of annoyed at that. I've heard it said that Tau were one of those factions that really forced people to go out and buy models they didn't use before to counter them- which is kind of annoying, I suppose. I can't confirm this is true.

Otherwise- not much that you can ask for out of them. They're kinda stuck out there, and if they're going into Ultramar and Bobby G isn't concerned, that should tell you the situation is well in hand.