How do we fix Tau?

Nothing. Tau are exactly where they need to be. Superior firepower and awesome mecha

It's everything else that needs to be bumped up or knocked down

Markerlights now only work on your own shooting phase, and do not benefit from any To Hit bonuses.

Does this fix them?

More giant robots. Larger giant robots.
More difference between Empire and Enclaves, maybe even different kinds of giant robots.

To balance it out, every other race gets their own giant robots, in the Imperium case separate from the Knights.

Depends on if you mean lorewise or in gameplay

Lore.

You are all retarded. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the Tau fluff-wise. Crunch-wise they are no better/worse than any of the other retarded useless/imbalanced shit in the tabletop game with the undecidedly most horrific competitive sweaty neckbeard scene in the universe.

Tau are pretty fine, desu. Just some bullshit formations, like the other high tier codices.

More focus on their xeno auxiliaries.

Chop off the dangly bits, fill in the reproduction holes. Same way you fix any other dumb animal.

you sound like a feminist.

I don't really know them that much, it seems that they need to stop getting wanked because someone decided they needed to be relevant on a galactic scale. I'd play up the fact that they're a conglomeration of various alien species, play up adaptability and quick responses to compensate for the slow juggernaut of Imperial bureaucracy, though not necessarily better in a straight up fight. Things like that.

This, this, this!

Why?

The greater good shit has been phased out since they were made. Its all about the expansion spheres now, and its mostly boring as shit. The xeno auxiliaries stopped making sense when the greater good stopped being the focus.

REMOVE BLUEBERRY

crunch wise they are broken as fuck while fluff wise they are shitte

at least we have Farsight

That's not MTG.

However, they do need less focus on them. They're a small past of the seeing that's supposed to be able to be wiped out if any faction goes after them.
Then, when larger forced DO come at them, because writers always are trying to raise the damn stakes, they need to Handwave them not getting absolutely bodied. This has happened far more often for them since they keep getting updates and fluff for their new giant robots.

I think they've lost more planets in desperate last stands than their empire has ever owned.

Just a small band of them who were enlightend by the idea of a greater good.
That of course being the emperor but sometimes you have to fight against the bureaucarcy to ebtter your home country

Depower them heavily. Drop them down to the scrappy underdogs they used to be (for a short, sweet time), instead of these fucking mood-killing mary sue shits.

>inb4 space marines are worse
Motherfucker, everyone needs their plot armour stripped off. Writer incompetence is 90% of 40k now.

*Small part of the setting*
Flippin' autocorrect

It IS comical now.

...

Have the Auxiliaries be their own army of sorts, separate from the "main" Empire army.
Have the Enclaves be more different from the Empire army, at least aesthetics wise.

More giant robots. To balance, every other race will get more giant robots too. In the Imperium's factions case, it means different and separate from the Knights, who will become a proper army of their own.

Retcon that last stupid book, have them actually suffer a major defeat for once.

Remove every single suit bigger than a broadside from the game.

>The bulk of the core of the Tau empire is in the section of the galaxy that isn't covered by the Astronomicon's beacon.

Good idea or bad idea? It would at least provide something of an explanation as to why the IoM hasn't sat on them like a duck on a beetle.

>Remove every single suit bigger than a broadside from the game
Real talk, anything bigger than a Dreadnought should stay in Epic.

Buff the flyers, Coldstar Commander and the Vespids.

More nuanced fluff rather than: And then Tau beat everyone's ass and was the best, maybe they had some trouble at first, but then innovation, fire power and teamwork and then they won anyway, also 100 billion guardmen died pointlessly and did nothing while blue berry waifu soloed space mongol bossman and space raven bossman no probs and every imperial assassin failed hilariously except the guy who was sent to kill an old fart.

Apart from the War of Dakka or the Deldar prank, every single piece of Tau v anyone fluff could just as well be replaced by playing The Trooper on repeat.

Wipe them out and just replace them with a generic Xeno alliance lead by Kroot like it was supposed to be before the weeaboos got in power.

>It would at least provide something of an explanation as to why the IoM hasn't sat on them like a duck on a beetle.

IoM hasn't crushed the Tau because the Tau are a microscope view at the "small guy" just as they're rising to prominence. There have been a dozen Taus in the story and all of them were either subsumed by the Tyranids or destroyed by the Imperium.

Their Walkers have vehicle stats because they are vehicles

Most of them were exterminated or subjugated during the Great Crusade. The Imperium is a shadow of its former self. The Tau are not alone among the independent alien empires.

Introduce more signs of some aliens pulling the strings behind Tau's anomalous rise to prominence. Make it so that the Tau are suspiciously lucky, because they are getting outside help. The Ethereals literally came out of no-where.

Maybe remnants of the Old Ones had a hand in their rise to power. They were locked in that Warp storm for a long time, and it was the Old Ones who perfect Warp travel. Maybe they're betting on the Tau to fulfill their grand plan, seeing as their other creations all degenerated into warlike barbarism.

There are spare sings of that. The Necrons believe that the Tau have been touched, if not by the Old Ones, then by one of their servant races. They don't know which.

But I wish there were more hints. Even the origin behind the powers and charisma of the Ethereals is left ambiguous.

Instead of their last campaign with the Imperium, they should have conquered a region full of ork kingdoms.

Have a gallery of flamboyant ork bosses fighting each other and the tau navigating between them. They NEED their infighting to stand a chance, so they redeploy constantly not just to avoid retaliation but to avoid weakening one boss too fast.
They win in a way fitting the tau: through unity with intelligence and high mobility. But the equilibrium can't be maintain eternally, and several bosses go down in the most outlandish fashion, each one letting entire worlds to tau, but each one concentrating the remaining orks under increasingly more powerful bosses.
The offensive end with a whole new fringe of worlds, but they have to be de-orkified and there is now a powerful ork tyrant on their new doorstep.

Maybe they could have save and used an alien race that was being hunted/enslaved by orks or something.

Add more auxiliaries to emphasize the United Federation of Planets thing they've got going. Also, replace bigger and better battlesuits with a heavier emphasis on air support to maintain their feel of "only logical faction in the setting." Or, if you insist on having bigger battlesuits, make them demiurge war robots or something that would make more sense.

Or return them to 4e marker light rules. BS buffing is capped to BS5, and you must spend one marker light token to lower a cover save by 1, instead of 2 to ignore cover completely.

One of the few mysteries left in 40k at this point

>Buff the flyers
Two current flyers are the tau bombers. New flyer kit is a jet with one variant being an air superiority fighter and the other a heavy railgun with reactors.

It'd be great if they incorporate something rightly huge like a monstrous creature race into their fold, rather than just human-sized xenos.

What we find in the Tau Empire are the more tame xenos, though, and because of that they're more human-like. We're probably not going to see anything on the same scale as the Great Crusade xenos, though, but it would be neat to see something less humanoid.

Still, demiurge war walkers or something would be great. Something more industrial than the Tau but less "SKULLZ AND TUBES AND RIVETS" than the Mechanicus.

I guess I'll be the first to say it, 2(pi) is a fucking meme!

Kroots need at least one unit of each categories:
> HQ: master shaper, potentially Elder shaman
> Elite: Kroot totem warriors/Veteran mercenaries
> Troops: ambush light melee infantry/irregular with sniper riffles
> FA: love the knarlock riders, but I'm not sure they fit any fitting role. Maybe some kroot beastmaster?
> HS: Great knarlock are cool, but same thing.

Not sure what to do with vespid, Demiurg can be heavy infantry with heavy weapon but what else?

This guy gets it

What did he mean by this?

He's our guy!

Genestealer Tau Cultists

The hybrids will be hilarious

...

What would a Tau Genestealer "cult" look like? Don't they get their religious overtones from the human population? What would be their inspiration to pass unnoticed by the Tau?

>There is absolutely nothing wrong with the Tau fluff-wise
>There is nothing wrong with Tau.

You guys are morons. The way their fluff doesn't fit and asspulls and plot armors everywhere is even worse than their powerful crunch.

>Invisibility isn't powerful enough
Kill yourself

Well, if the Tau Empire is Soviet Russia, they could behave like cells of Trotskyist dissidents. So while Genestealer in the Imperium operate like doomsday cults, the Tau Genestealers would think they're welcoming an advanced race that represents the "real" Greater Good.

Ethereals being awesome and creepily selfless.

The ending to this manga was stupid as fuck.

>Ethereals being awesome and creepily selfless.

That would be good. The implication that they're two-faced bastards is a bit of an obvious way to make them grimdark. If they believe fully in their philosophy and are prepared to die for it, kill for it, and even commit horrifying acts for it, that's more interesting.

By the way, tau should have sympathisers in Imperial worlds.
> That world where the Imperial rule is so brutal they have rebels, chaos cults, a genestealer cult and tau sympathiser insurgents.
> Tau insurgents playing the lesser evil card.

I once describe my vision of them as hiding nothing behind countless masks.
I'm sure a good writer could make them terrifying through genuine good faith.
Hypocrites are overdone and can be done in the Imperium already.

Honestly, I don't even remember it. I really liked the initial siege, and I wonder if they shouldn't have stopped there. Not everything was bad, but eh.

>I'm sure a good writer could make them terrifying through genuine good faith.

I suppose the idea that "small evils are necessary for the Greater Good" would be a good starting point for that kind of depiction.

You know, just because something is improbable in a fictious universe, does not mean it shouldn't happen that way. If your complaints are that its basically mary sue tier to keep them alive, I would direct you to the asspulls that is the rest of the universe.

The problem with Tau is there's no good reason for that shit to be happening to begin with. That's why it's Mary Sue. It's LITERALLY Ensign Mary Sue. We don't need an obnoxious faggoty character that doesn't even make sense or fit in the setting like the Tau.

let people save against markerlight hits in some way

more kroot

The Tau have been growing at an exponential rate. Tau calculate that they will double their number of worlds within a period of 50 years.

Easiest route would probably to expand upon the mysterious origins and abilities of the ethereals. I'm thinking you get around the tau's ability to last out stuck between nids and the imperium centered around warp influence of a sort. Something about how they got affected by their time getting sucked into that warpstorm way back, the journey in and out had an effect on their warp sensibility and the warp's ability to sense them.

Ethereals can do the monks in the mountains route as tau that lived up there before/while they got sucked to wherever and their training and focus in isolation changed them to subtly harness the power of the warp. Then all the tau were infused a bit with raw warp energy and its how the ethereals just came out to bring them under control without resistance. And now that they're back the tau under the ethereals dont really register in the warp because they were in there for so long, ethereals continue to use the influence in each tau to control them, maybe ethereals pull some eldar foresight shit to mess with their fate but aren't able to do it to the extent of eldar because they aren't as super attuned and psychic a race which is how they've managed to last compared to the big players in the galaxy.

Probably more details I'm not putting down but this is the basic stuff I think of to make the tau make more "sense"

Less focus on the "RARE" mech suits.
More focus on the auxiliaries that the Tau fluff talks about so much. Aren't the Tau supposed to be all inclusive and have a bunch of xeno mercenaries in their armies?

There was a xenology thing that stated tau etherals had a very very similar organ in their heads that some bug aliens queen had, that via some unknown means (perhaps pheromones) allowed them to control their hive.

It was also noted that Eldar had been noted as kidnapping the queens years ago around taus rise to power, this coupled with the necrons sensing the old ones tampering in the tau leads me to believe some group of eldar uplifted them (fuck knows why)

I was more thinking about sacrifice than evil. For example, I could see them sacrifice themselves as a pure logical conclusion. Like an ethereal could pounder a while on the situation, conclude that the best course of action need him to die and calmly walk to his doom as if it was just another task he could have done. Nothing of the emotions of an heroic sacrifice nor the blindness of fanaticism.

That's sort of what I meant as well. I didn't mean the word "evil" to imply that their actions are charged with emotion. Just that they can clinically undergo and dispense pain and destruction, if they determine it's the best course of action.

No, it doesn't.

>they got affected by their time getting sucked into that warpstorm way back
I'm pretty sure they were never sucked into a warpstorm. You may be referring to the warpstorm that prevented the imperial pest control team to clean up their world, but it blocked the road to tau, not engulfed tau itself.

Kinda like Vandire fleet got sucked into the "wrath of the emperor" warpstorm on their road to Sebastian Thor, without Thor never being IN the warpstorm.

They're Space Commies right?

Give them a space KGB and have Greater Good aligned human sleeper agents in the Imperium to explain partly why they havent been wiped.

FYI, to bad students who don't know how warpstorms work.

There are two kind of warpstrorms :

Type 1 : The storms that start in the Warp and stay in the warp. These storms have no affect on real space but they stop warp travel to the region. This is the type of storm that protected the Tau.

Type 2 : Warpstorms that burst into Real Space.. These storms smash the walls of reality and manifest in it. bathing entire regions of space in the corrupting energies of the warp and allowing daemons to spawn i mass. Such examples of thesr storms are the Eye of Terror and the Maelstrom.

Make them ballistic skill 2 for the lols.

it won't make them shoot any worse.

Nicassar psykers, Tarellian dog soldiers, Morallian Deathsworn. There are even more than that.

wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Tau_Empire#Society

they encouraged a genestealer cult taking root on their world because they where fascinated with the lifeform and wanted to learn more about it

that ended just about as well as you would expect

I'm not as versed in Tau lore as other factions so I was mostly just pulling half true details from memory. Lexicanum's quick description of the whole warp storm debacle is that the storm erupted around the planet. Then the primitive tau got along their normal primitive business unperturbed by the imperium or anyone else because warp storm. The early history description says the ethereals showed up after the strange lights appeared in the skies which I assume to mean stars became visible after the warp storm dissipated. Since none of them had any idea what stars were I assume the storm created a consistent shell around the planet so they just got bubbled in for 6,000 or so years give or take how long it took for them to get space travel to come into contact with the imperium after it showed up.

A little creative wiggling could still make this stick. Ethereals up in the mountain doing their monk-y thing getting in tune with the universe and shit getting stoned. Big hidden sanctuary that they kept out of general tau knowledge by way of having an inconspicuous ability to bend fate through the warp. Sense the emergent threat of the imperium coming to purge the shit out of the planet and lots of them get together as a collective and summon the storm. Probably lots of the participants die or the process is time consuming or needs to be channeled constantly a la astronomican so they don't immediately appear to unite the lesser tau until later.

They also live in a very dense star cluster with hundreds of stars packed together full of aliens to ally with. Maybe they were all brought there.

I doubt GW knows anything about science. However, normal star clusters tend to dissolve within few million years. Its continuous presence could mean that it is an artificial cluster.

cover saves against marker lights actually makes sense from a lore perspective and would go some way towards making coversaves useful when they're not ravenwing 2+ rerollable

>Not liking massive, impressive models
What kind of hobbyist are you.

>It was also noted that Eldar had been noted as kidnapping the queens years ago around taus rise to power, this coupled with the necrons sensing the old ones tampering in the tau leads me to believe some group of eldar uplifted them (fuck knows why)

That's from FFG Deahwatch Outer Reach: What it actually says is that the Necrons didn't detect any Old One tampering in the Tau. However, they detected the hand of one of the Old One Servants in the Tau.

This

> Nagi upgrade for ethereal, making them small psyker (the worm is the actual psyker)

>#MKGA
>Make Kroot great again!

Give them some more and better alien allies, maybe even some human allies/slaves to make them more interesting in general and make everything bigger than a broadside a Walker type vehicle.

>"Make [blank] great again" meme
>advocates for diversity

Imagine this... a whole factory full of Earth Caste engineers.

>All battlesuits produced have a trigger switch to deactivate or self-destruct
>All drones are secretly working for the cultist agenda, diverting from regular tasks for surveillance

they make great foils to the stagnant, super darkness everywhere

in most settings they would be the bad guys, but in 40k, they are the least evil race

MAKE THEM MORE ANIME

>anything bigger than a Land Raider or Leviathan Dreadnought

Fixed. Maybe Spartan can stay too but that's a pretty Epic vehicle.

That's... Actually a great idea. Orks could use a few extra books.

seconding this, you should write for Geedubs

god knows you'd do better than the crudmiester

*bitter tyranid noises*

>Blue Prints
>Does 3d printed tau parts
Cheeky

Reduce all tau units Ld by 1 and make it so whenever a crisis suit or larger is destroyed every Tau unit but drones and kroot has to take a morale check. If they have an ethereal on the table, they automatically pass. If it was a riptide or storm surge that died, it is at ld-1

Why? I know there are a lot of die-hard grimderp fans out there, but I feel the tau's way of doing things really added a deeper element to the setting