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The Tau also benefit from forward planning, where the Imperium never had that luxury.

Was man’s original exodus to the stars planned in advance? Almost certainly. Identify the nearest habitable worlds, send a colony ship, rinse and repeat.

But The Great Crusade was trying to reunite what already existed. And that was necessarily somewhat haphazard. And in the aftermath of the Heresy, what then remained was even more scattered as rebel worlds got a right kicking at best, and destroyed at worst. And it’s never really consolidated things since then. Partly due to internal disorganisation, partly due to being under perpetual siege from multiple hostile parties.

The Tau plans are undone by their innocence all the time. They are only just working out that Demons are real; that the Warp is a thing; that the Imperium is actually really massive; has insane tech and resources AND are bonkers insane and Xenophobic

The Imperium does have forward planning; the issue is its mired in dogma, rhetoric, fear and internal power struggles. Which causes the plan to falter and shift all the time. It's also so massive that it will never have a single plan; it will always be layers of different levels of plans.

Such as how a group of Marines might plan to protect a world; but the Custodes will plan to destroy it to save Terra

I'm not sure how true that is anymore.

They are in their 5th Sphere of Expansion, they had multiple wars against Chaos forces and learned how to hunt Chaos cults. They control a stable Warp gateway and several of their client and allied civilizations have their own psykers.

People overfocus on the Tau's initial reactions to stuff like Titans and Hive Worlds, but the Tau learned how to fight Titans and nowadays they have worlds that put most Hive Worlds to shame.

Yeah. That Tau’s naivety has rapidly diminished. They recognise Psykers as mind science,

But their expansions are still planned carefully.

And whilst you raise some interesting points about the Imperium’s internal nonsense? It doesn’t change that it’s scattered and fragmented territories aren’t a direct result of that. Rather, it’s a legacy of its creation. Sure, the latter has made the former far worse. But it’s not the original cause,

 Tyran wrote:
I'm not sure how true that is anymore.

They are in their 5th Sphere of Expansion, they had multiple wars against Chaos forces and learned how to hunt Chaos cults. They control a stable Warp gateway and several of their client and allied civilizations have their own psykers.

People overfocus on the Tau's initial reactions to stuff like Titans and Hive Worlds, but the Tau learned how to fight Titans and nowadays they have worlds that put most Hive Worlds to shame.

It thematically doesn't work IMO, but apparently some Tau worlds now have populations in the trillions.

Which, in terms of current timelines, means they went from being shocked at populations in the double digit billions to having trillions themselves in something like a decade.

Not a fan.

Well, one Tau was shocked at that if memory serves?

Which is a bit like someone from my town expressing shock at how densely populated Tokyo or Beijing is. Yes to that person it’s a truly bizarre number of people, but not representative of the UK population’s experience as a whole.

Yeah but we are very had at understanding near or exponential growth.

the tau have a cultural breeding program that provides governmental support for child rearing (creches) and have made reproducing for the greater good, they are going to produce populations that explode in size.

2.1 is replacement. So say they were producing 3.1 children per woman. A planet with 8 billion people, of which 50% are female and (at least in humans) 2 billion are capable of having children. 3.1 X 2 is 6.2 billion children. Half of which will also have 3.1 children which is another 9.61 billion children.

If you have continual population growth it picks up very quickly.

Now they also have population movement in a way humanity doesn't. They wouldn't breed to a trillion people in a decade, but they would get their if they were importing people for greater good reasons.

10 planets with 2 billion women all producing 3.1 children each is an additional 62 billion children. 31x3.1 is another 96 billion people. Collectively in less than 100 years those planets have created 158 billion more tau.

And tau live shorter lives so they would reproduce at younger ages to a human.

 Hellebore wrote:
Yeah but we are very had at understanding near or exponential growth.

the tau have a cultural breeding program that provides governmental support for child rearing (creches) and have made reproducing for the greater good, they are going to produce populations that explode in size.

2.1 is replacement. So say they were producing 3.1 children per woman. A planet with 8 billion people, of which 50% are female and (at least in humans) 2 billion are capable of having children. 3.1 X 2 is 6.2 billion children. Half of which will also have 3.1 children which is another 9.61 billion children.

If you have continual population growth it picks up very quickly.

Now they also have population movement in a way humanity doesn't. They wouldn't breed to a trillion people in a decade, but they would get their if they were importing people for greater good reasons.

10 planets with 2 billion women all producing 3.1 children each is an additional 62 billion children. 31x3.1 is another 96 billion people. Collectively in less than 100 years those planets have created 158 billion more tau.

And tau live shorter lives so they would reproduce at younger ages to a human.

I don't have a problem with Tau reaching larger population sizes. My issue is with them having such a dramatic increase in such a short time, especially as the quality of life for citizens of the Tau empire is generally shown as being fairly high, which would be much harder to sustain with dramatic population expansions.

Whilst we don't know what Tau reproduction times are (extrapolating from Earth critters is always going to be problematic for aliens), the limiting step is not going to be the actual Tau, it will be the infrastructure that supports them.

When it comes down to it, Tau society was portrayed as being fairly low population, with exceptionally-high levels of automation making individual Tau very productive and the lives of Tau generally valued highly. Quality vs the quantity of the Imperium. Then it suddenly jumps up to very high population levels, which is possible to do with a reasonable quality of life (if the Earth was covered with a city similar in density and amenities to Tokyo, for example, it would approach 1 trillion in population), but not in such a short time frame. The logistics and engineering required are immense, and if the Tau can build ecumenopoli in a decade they have a level of industrial output that I don't think any of the other factions can hope to match short of the Tyranids and will conquer the galaxy in short order.

In practice I don't think whoever wrote that lore put much, if any thought into it, but here we are. It is particularly annoying, because logistics and handling annexing hyper-popopulous Imperial worlds was previously an interesting discussion point for the Tau Empire and their challenges in breaking out of their region of space. Now that has apparently been handwaved in short order.


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 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Well, one Tau was shocked at that if memory serves?

Which is a bit like someone from my town expressing shock at how densely populated Tokyo or Beijing is. Yes to that person it’s a truly bizarre number of people, but not representative of the UK population’s experience as a whole.

There were a couple of sources, but the one I'm referencing was from a mid-level Tau diplomat and mid-ranking Tau commander who stated the Hive population of 12 billion was more than the population of the entire Sept they were currently in. So they had enough awareness to know what population their Sept had. This was a frontier Sept, but I don't see any particular reason to think they'd react in such a way if the Tau Sept or one of the other major Septs also routinely had single cities with populations in the billions.

IIRC, the other main source for Tau struggling with grasping Imperial population sizes was around the invasion of Agrellan, later renamed Mu'gulath Bay by the Tau. This was a hive world.

Is the infrastructure not also down to their planning?

I mean, in the modern world we tend to see a depressing amount of Short Termism. Nothing seems to be arrange on a predictive or anticipatory model.

The Tau have a star empire, and all the resources that bring. And an entire caste dedicated to building and developing whatever it is they need.

Now, I want to make it clear, just in case, that I don’t think we can assume an equal percentage of population across each caste. So I can’t put any kind of number of how many Earth Caste their might be.

But from what we see, and with drone/AI support? They’re clearly and evidently up to the task. Not just for weapons and equipment for war, but all the necessary infrastructure of the wider society.

And best of all? From what we can see, absolute cooperation.

Again, I have no problem with the Tau developing an ecumenopolis. They certainly have the dynamism, organisation, and approach to technology to achieve it eventually. I have a problem with them apparently doing it on such a scale in essentially the blink of an eye.

As I said, I'm pretty confident this was due to thoughtless writing throwing out numbers willy nilly, but here we are. Trillion is a very big number, we are talking on the scale of hundreds to thousands of present-day Earth in population. It requires planet-wide Tokyo at the very least.

The only way to rationalise it is as you say, the Tau Empire has dedicated the entire resources of its empire into deliberately creating an ecumenopolis as quickly as possible.

Why? Shrug. They may wish to have a large population reserve for soldiery etc. Doesn't really match their previous style of a highly-automated economy that reasonably values life, but maybe they've recognised they need to have more bodies to throw into the meatgrinder of the Galaxy.

Is it actually reasonable they've done that at the same time as expanding with many new colonies, fighting major wars on multiple fronts including on home turf (which means rebuilding from war), and generally improving and fortifying other existing colonies and septs? Probably not, but it is lore now.

Did they confirm its pure Tau population and not Tau+others.

Cause if its "Tau" in that it includes other species that they've absorbed into their population then that would easily account for some of the very rapid population rise.


Tau are very clearly in an expansionist phase; rising populations supported by a war machine that's expanding their boarders and gaining rapid and fresh resources to bring into the fold. Even if they have to develop worlds they take; they are clearly expanding on all fronts with a boom situation.

You also need a large population to drive expansion. I mean, the bods in your colony have to come from somewhere. There seems little point trying to setup a new colony by overly denuding an existing settled world of able bodies.

I don’t know if we’ve background numbers, but presumably each new colony includes representation from each Caste, because their society demands that to work. And it’s by no means demanded it’s only a lucky few. We could be talking colony populations in the millions to begin with.

Part of the issue is the scale of the setting - its just so far outside of anything we normally deal with that breaks our brains a bit.

Even in video games that deal with 4x civilization building; most will represent population in really small relative numbers. They don't have you managing billions upon billions in numbers and balancing their growth/reduction on that scale. You're normally dealing with way smaller values

So in a sense even if GW does get the numbers right; most of us have no real foundation to actually assess if those numbers are right or wrong. Couple that to timescales in the setting always being a bit of the very wonky side of things; couple to warp manifestations; unreliable narrators; undisclosed elements and so forth and sometimes you have to regard the lore as less hard numbers and more as numbers being used to convey an idea