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D-Day is a good example of a calculated risk.\

That’s not to say it went off without a hitch. Rather that there was a lot of planning that went into it, including feeding false information about the target beaches to ensure minimum resistance for the early waves.

Any attack against entrenched positions is going to be costly. But sometimes, that’s the best and most time effective plan available. And that’s what memes and lazy armchair historians often choose to miss. And of course the dishonest claims that if they followed that persons advice, it would’ve gone much smoother.

And then there's mistakes born out of ignorances, like can you imagine the extra amount of US casualties that would have resulted as part of Op Downfall if it had gone through? The plan was to wait for 48 hours after a nuclear detonation before sending people in.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
D-Day is a good example of a calculated risk.\

That’s not to say it went off without a hitch. Rather that there was a lot of planning that went into it, including feeding false information about the target beaches to ensure minimum resistance for the early waves.

Any attack against entrenched positions is going to be costly. But sometimes, that’s the best and most time effective plan available. And that’s what memes and lazy armchair historians often choose to miss. And of course the dishonest claims that if they followed that persons advice, it would’ve gone much smoother.

Dont forget practice. The Normandy beach landings were the culmination of the Beach Landings in North Africa and the Beach Landings of Sicily.

For some reason, a lot of people kind of just fail to grasp that fighting a war means sending your own men to die. Their death's aren't your objective, but they are the price you pay to get what you really want. Bleeding heart generals make good heroes in fiction, but are terrible more often than not IRL. Heartless bastards make good villains in fiction, but you have to be at least a little bit of a heartless bastard to order men to their death's. Men in the middle there are some of history's best generals but they tended to be treated like heartless bastards of some form or another in the course of doing their jobs (Sherman and Grant of the American Civil War both get hit by this in pop culture. Grant being characterized as a butcher, and Sherman as a bastard even though they were very easily among the war's best generals, if not the best).

Though in terms of 40k fiction, the Guard definitely comes off a lot like their upper echelons are WWI style generals who don't know of a creative way to win and simple order men forward without any semblance of a real operational plan.

Tyel wrote:

 Orkeosaurus wrote:
Do the Tau all just hide in one corner to minimize casualties and let the Orks score unlimited victory points?

I mean.. lore wise yeah?

The Tau are (effectively) hiding in one small corner of the galaxy.

Galaxies don't have corners, they're round. What does have a corner is the table on which you play 40k, hence the "in an actual game of 40k" in the preceding sentence which you forgot to quote.

In grand strategy terms they barely exist as a footnote.

My post was in operational terms though wasn't it?

(Also there are presumably more Fire Warriors in the galaxy than there are Cadians so this objection doesn't make sense anyways.)

There’s also a good plan going awry because your opponent had a better plan. You may well still win the battle, but at an unforeseen cost.

It may be that you had tried to pull your troops out, but it wasn’t possible.

As Captain Picard said, albeit not about a battle? It is possible to commit no mistakes, and still lose.

I wouldn’t like to be a military commander. I’m generally quite the pacifist. And even in righteous cause, I don’t think I could stomach knowingly sending people to their death. But I can respect those who’s job it is to just that that.

I’m surprised three pages in no one has mentioned one of 40Ks most pervasive and annoying bits of meme bait - Dark Angels are traitors, or Dark Angels = emo.

 Orkeosaurus wrote:

Tyel wrote:

 Orkeosaurus wrote:
Do the Tau all just hide in one corner to minimize casualties and let the Orks score unlimited victory points?

I mean.. lore wise yeah?

The Tau are (effectively) hiding in one small corner of the galaxy.

Galaxies don't have corners, they're round. What does have a corner is the table on which you play 40k, hence the "in an actual game of 40k" in the preceding sentence which you forgot to quote.

In grand strategy terms they barely exist as a footnote.

My post was in operational terms though wasn't it?

(Also there are presumably more Fire Warriors in the galaxy than there are Cadians so this objection doesn't make sense anyways.)

Some Galaxies aren't round, like W2246-0526.

 totalfailure wrote:
I’m surprised three pages in no one has mentioned one of 40Ks most pervasive and annoying bits of meme bait - Dark Angels are traitors, or Dark Angels = emo.

Good catch , I had totally forgot about the Emo Marines.

Mod edit - removed, show some class.

It's a wonder that the Dark Angels have time to be anything, given that 110% of their time is spent HUNTING THE FALLEN according to GW's flanderization of the Chapter.

Which isn’t the case.

They’re still Marining their way around the Galaxy. They just have propensity to drop everything and head off if they find themselves on the trail of a Fallen.

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
Some Galaxies aren't round, like W2246-0526.

Yeah but I don't consider him a true galaxy, if he was then he'd be round.


But it only occurred to me a little bit ago that it is also not true that the Tau Empire is "hiding in the corner" of the galaxy in a grand strategic sense either. They're aggressively expanding, conquering worlds formerly claimed by the Imperium, and they're willing to sustain significant casualties to do so. It's actually the Imperium that's on the back foot and trying to minimize losses, though obviously in terms of planets rather than Guard companies.

So to bring things back around to the thread topic, most of the whole "nice-guy Tau don't fit with 40k" rhetoric comes from the simultaneous meme-portrayal of every Imperial as a psychotic Witch Hunter or Kriegsman and the Tau as some kind of pacifist John Lennon race. When the reality is the Tau are currently way more militarized and expansionist than the Imperium is, albeit more on account of their ability to mobilize than ideology.

The Tau fight like a modern military while the Guard fights like a WW1/WW2 one.

I feel part of the issue is the larger cultural meme of manly WW1/2 warfare vs sissy modern warfare. Also see battleships vs aircraft carriers and missile destroyers.

 Orkeosaurus wrote:

Yeah but I don't consider him a true galaxy, if he was then he'd be round.


But it only occurred to me a little bit ago that it is also not true that the Tau Empire is "hiding in the corner" of the galaxy in a grand strategic sense either.

Well, if a galaxy is round, hiding in the corner is a bit tricky...

Although the Imperium is ostensibly an expansionistic empire, it seems to be doing a lot more holding or retreating than anything else.

By comparison the Tau seem to be doing nothing but expanding. Whether that's through manly WWI/II methods or sissy logical strategy, they certainly seem to be doing more taking and holding than the imperium.

I believe the Tau Empire has the relic "Weeb plot armour"

They have the benefit of being an irritant that the Imperium never has time to finish off.

The first effort to wipe them out got put on hold because Hive Fleet Behemoth rocked up. That gave the T'au space to breathe and make contact with various Xenos races to bring into the Empire.

Then as the various crisis affecting the Imperium snowballed the T'au were also able to absorb more human worlds as well.

It's not plot armour it's actually a fairly natural progression.

Prob helps them that those alien races are the ones that have survived waves of genocidal campaigning by humans. They fought them off, ran, or hid. Or is overlooked heard about it from the remnants of others.

 Gert wrote:


It's not plot armour it's actually a fairly natural progression.

I dunno... 'Oh no! Our expansion has been blunted by space literally catching fire! Never mind we'll just muster an entire additional expansion fleet and... Oh no! Our fleet has been swallowed up in it's entirety by the warp! Never mind they've been sent to the Startstride Nexus, birthed some sort of minor warp god, the space fire has gone out, and actually we're better off now than we were before!' isn't entirely natural.

 Lord Damocles wrote:

 Gert wrote:


It's not plot armour it's actually a fairly natural progression.

I dunno... 'Oh no! Our expansion has been blunted by space literally catching fire! Never mind we'll just muster an entire additional expansion fleet and... Oh no! Our fleet has been swallowed up in it's entirety by the warp! Never mind they've been sent to the Startstride Nexus, birthed some sort of minor warp god, the space fire has gone out, and actually we're better off now than we were before!' isn't entirely natural.

Are you arguing for Chaos to be Natural now?

Tau's expansion I think would be better if we saw more Xenos models in the army lineup and thus more in the lore appearing. We know they've got more than Vespid and Kroot in their ranks.
Personally I'm all for a Tau secondary army for their allied forces. Humans, Vespid, Kroot and other factions all put together into one effective fighting force. Right now Tau is very much mechsuits and such with a couple of other races, but mostly Kroot for close combat and such. The army is diverse and well supported and doesn't have room for anything else without tripping over itself. So having a splinter force would be awesome to see.



But the other angle is you can argue that Tau has plot armour; just like the Imperium has Plot Armour to not implode in on itself; or Tyranids can just pull another hive fleet out of nowhere; or Eldar manage to just not die fast enough that they are still a threat etc... Every faction has some degree of plot armouring because this is a setting where you can't follow the natural conclusion of genocidal warfare to the end because otherwise people get grumpy that their army got Squatted (And then had to wait 20-30years for them to come back)

I'd agree that the Tau are aggressively expanding "on their terms".

But we have the galactic view. And in that they barely feature. They occupy a small area (corner!) in the bottom right of the galactic map.

So the Imperium has lost some planets to this expanding alien Empire. Well they have a million worlds to get through.

They were compelled to perform Exterminatus on the Hive World of Agrellan/Mu'gulath Bay. That's clearly much more serious - but they have something like 32,000 such worlds. Since the fluff is a bit uncertain, we could be generous and say the Tau have captured a dozen hive worlds. That's still 12/32000=0.0375% of the Imperium. Compare this with the rather more limited number of Tau Sept worlds that are very clearly identified.

(There's also the weird point that relatively quickly the Tau Empire would become a fundamentally "Human Empire" - with humans vastly outnumbering the Tau, Kroot etc. I can't imagine GW wanting to go down that line for modelling purposes.)

I realise any discussion of 40k and numbers - be it if planets or populations - all tends to get silly. But I think the fluff is clear on "Imperium very big, Tau very small."

 BorderCountess wrote:
It's not like generals in the real world haven't thrown waves of bodies at their enemies. It certainly feels like the general plan for D-Day was to have more bodies than the Germans had bullets.

Well not quite - the planners had no doubt they would take the beaches. Their concern was then being pushed back into the sea. So it is all about turning up with as much as possible and resupplying as fast as possible to stop that. SO you have your chosen beaches. But you expect X casualties, so you need more beaches to increase the flow of men, but that means more casualties, etc.

Overread wrote:... Every faction has some degree of plot armouring because this is a setting where you can't follow the natural conclusion of genocidal warfare to the end because otherwise people get grumpy that their army got Squatted (And then had to wait 20-30years for them to come back)

Im still waiting for my Squats to be unsquatted...

And NO, the abomination that is Votann are NOT SQUATS!!!!

I'm still waiting for someone to present evidence that 40k exists in a bottle on some Warhammer wizard's shelf. Everyone insists it's from an old rulebook, a novel or an issue of White Dwarf.

Santtu wrote:
I'm still waiting for someone to present evidence that 40k exists in a bottle on some Warhammer wizard's shelf. Everyone insists it's from an old rulebook, a novel or an issue of White Dwarf.

So - the opposite of the oldhammer fan theory that Sigmar was a lost Primarch.

Or that the Warhammer world exists in the 40k Universe.

 Lathe Biosas wrote:

Or that the Warhammer world exists in the 40k Universe.

That's mentioned in Slaves to Darkness so it was canon for at least some time.

Santtu wrote:

 Lathe Biosas wrote:

Or that the Warhammer world exists in the 40k Universe.

That's mentioned in Slaves to Darkness so it was canon for at least some time.

Really? I need to find that. If you can remember a page number or anything I will give you my greatest gift: Horrid Dad Jokes.

My mistake, it was in The Lost and the Damned, not Slaves to Darkness. Page 77, under Cosmic Monoliths.