How much do the Tau know about the Galaxy...

Well, the Tau aren't a threat like say an Ork Waaargh! or some attack from Chaos. Well, or a Tyrnaid fleet leviathan. I imagine the Tau are kinda like the Eldar on the Imperium threat list. They're filthy xenos but they're not an immediate empire ending threat. Hell, I imagine [New] Necrons are a bigger threat.

Well you sound like a right party pooper

They sure know a lot about mecha anime.

That legendary robot designer of theirs must be a pretty fucking huge fan of Godzilla and the like.
>Ethereals tell him to make a stealth suit.
>OKAY.webp
>Builds a fuckhuge robot carrying a massive payload that can barely move.
>Ethereals shrug and let the robot duke it out with the Kaiju... I mean Tyranids.
>Tyranids get their shit kicked in, Ethereals commend the based otaku and ask for more.

Honestly, if you don't view all of Tau lore as one massive doujin, you're doing it wrong.

...

To be totally honest, i'd watch it. Pacific Rim but marginally more animu? justshutup.jpg

Imperial policy seemed to be 'We're gonna build a wall around the Damocles Gulf, and we're gonna make the tau pay for it'

the wall turned out to be plasma, though

>which they believed to be a major foe with about a dozen worlds.

Lets review this post. The Tau have a spy network that spans Ultima Segmentum. News from all the way from Segmentum Terra and Obscurus reaches the high command of the Tau Empire. It's stated that the Tau know the Imperium is a mighty empire of unbelievable size.

Lets ignore everything in the Imperium outside of Ultima. The Tau know for sure that the Imperium basically dominates the Ultima Segmentum. How many worlds are there in Ultima? Fucking thousands.

The Tau themselves have taken dozens of systems from the Imperium.

So the question here is where the fuck do you get you fluff? Your ass?

...

That's all headcanon and doesn't follow the lore.

Not really. Ignore everything that guy said.

Actually, according to the latest fluff, the Tau ascended to be a major player in the galaxy. The High lords of Terra who realized that the Tau have gone to the next therhold of threat level ,after curbstmoping the marines and getting two major and crushing victories in Agrellan and Prefectia, ordered a massive crusade to be launched to kick back the Tau acoss the Damocles Gulf. Naturally, the crusade seemingly failed and the Imperials withdrew with their tail between their legs. They left a parting gift before escaping.

Now the Tau have defended all their holdings and gains beyond the Damocles Gulf except for Agrellan which was nuked to ash. However, their holdings are cut off from the main body of the empire thanks to the Imperial parting gift. BUT the Imperial retribution have been thrown off successfully. So that's the plus in all of this mess. another plus is that the imperium has entered its final days so there won't be any more Imperial relations in the future. All the Tau have to do is consoldate their gains and figure out a way to circumvent the firewall, and hope that the local Tyranids or Necrons don't rise to be a great threaat.

So what is exactly stopping the Tau forces from being stretched too thin aside from their alien auxiliaries and drones?

They need to spread out to be spread thinly.
The Tau isn't fighting a expansive war as much as a very aggressive defense.

According to the fluff, their forces an manpower is indeed stretched then by their wars and campaigns of expansion.

Which is why the Tau are targeting populous Imperial worlds to fix their manpower problems. Hiveworlds are a major target for the Tau for all the masses of humans that can help fuel the Tau expansion. They already conquered three Hiveworlds already. Their humans were shipped deep into the worlds of the Tau Empire.

>The Tau isn't fighting a expansive war as much as a very aggressive defense.

Again, this goes against their fluff as shown in the 6th ED codex. Please stop spreading misinformation, you racist. The Tau are the aggressors in a rapd war of expansion and it is taking its toll as shown in Kauyon.

Don't get so wound up. The Tau are still tiny fish in the big galaxy. Truth is if any of the opposing factions so much as breathed heavily in their direction, they would crumple back into the stone age. Everyone just ignores them because they're too insignificant to bother with.

In that god awful Mont'Ka release, the Tau thought they killed the King of The Space Marines.

They really, really, REALLY don't know jack shit.

This is a person who takes the Tau way too seriously. Everyone, point and laugh.

>Spy network.

How. The Tau don't have psykers or ways to combat Psykers asides from god-like firepower from extreme range. All it would take is a cursory sweep from a decently powerful telepath to root them out. I'm gonna have to ask you to back this up with a reference before I believe it.

Wrong. It's said that that it would take a massive effort on the part of the Imperium to wipe out the Tau and even then it would not be a sure thing.

Sadly your racism enables you tpo ignore what's written in the lore.
>the Tau thought they killed the King of The Space Marines

That's what the propaganda machine said. In the same paragraph it says that many of the Tau civs didn't buy it. Clearly, the Tau high command especially Shadowsun and Farsight who have fought against the likes of Logan and Calgar know that the hobo that was the Raven Guard Chaoter Master was nothing but a glorious human buffon.

>Everyone, point and laugh.

I would like to point and laugh at the anons here with poor grasp of the lore or those who hate a fictional faction this much that they are trying to derail discussion about them with lies. Seriously, you have issues.

Damocles Anthology. The story with the Gue'la and the story about Water Caste main bad guy. The anthology features Inquisitorial agents who defected to the Tau side.
The 4th ED codex where news of the 13th Black Crusade reached the Tau.
The 3th ED codex where Admech worry that Tau technology that being sold in the Imperium is bugged and sending information back to the Tau.

Continued....

I would like to point that the Imperium brought their A-game in Kauyon and Mont'ka. The whole conflict featured one the largest tank battles in Imperial history. It's up there with Tallarn and whatever. In the end the Imperials were defeated. So you folks should stop with if the Imperium got serious business. They got serious and were sent packing.

Ahhh...forgot something.

The Tau used their Nagi allies to extract information from high ranking Imperial dudes. A Raven Guard had his mind probed by the mindworms and got cracked open.

An Inquisitor was revealed to have switched sides for the Tau. He had a Nagi advisor. So whether it was by his own will or is he mind controlled by the worn, it left for the reader to decide.

>Imperials were defeated
The Guard and the marines were defeated.
Everything went better than planned for a certain other faction within the Imperium.

>All it would take is a cursory sweep from a decently powerful telepath to root them out.

In the FFG Deathwatch game, it was shown that Tau sympathisers and infiltrators are a huge problem in that RPG campaign. It lead to the blockage of whole planets, the purging of command staff several times, and the termination of millions of Imperial Guard.

So if it as easy as you say, then how come the fluff doesn't portray it as such.

>Everything went better than planned for a certain other faction within the Imperium.

Shhh....

FW book soon. The Tau will be taking a new Forgeworld as compensation

At this point, the Tau could just send a handyman over to Terra and fix the golden throne for them. Each new release is more depressing than the last, and it's been at least 15 years since things started getting depressing.

Didn't the Admech just fill up the cargo holds on a few ships with Tau tech and left the imperials for dead?

Thats cool, sometimes fanfic is so much better than gw fluff.

>implying the Tau wont get stomped by rampant beep boops
We haven't even gotten to see the tech-priests deploy most of their good shit yet.

>Unpacks my railgun
>Deepstrikes 1000km away
>Shoots you
>psst..nothing personell gue'la

Rockets behind his head? how is this s´posed to work?

Earth caste field engieers when?
I would love to be able to repair tanks like the Engiseers can for the Imperium

They also got the once in a ten millenium oportunity to test out a warhead that literally set the entire damocles gulf on fire, making the Tau victory pyrrhic at best.

As I said, even better than they planned.

But hasn't the Tau already found a way to pass the gulf unharmed? Maybe they just, you know went under/above it since space is 3d albeit in small numbers

...

They have but the failure rate is high.

You seem to be under the impression that the admech care about this from a tactical perspective.
The point wasn't to use the weapon to combat the Tau, it was just to use the weapon against live targets. The Gulf was just a petri dish to the tech-priests, a sand pit where they could finally use the toy they'd been hanging on to 'till a rainy day.

The first telling of the Damocles Gulf Crusade ended thusly:
>The Imperium had learned to respect the Tau skills of war and the Tau had discovered the true scale and bitterness of a galaxy that they had previously thought to be theirs for the taking.
And this has remained the case throughout all the editions since. That's not to say the Tau know everything, but the only chance of them thinking the Imperium has "about a dozen worlds" was before they actually realised it existed.

>So you folks should stop with if the Imperium got serious business. They got serious and were sent packing.

"Serious business" is "devote all their efforts to reducing the Tau to nothing." The Imperium has not done that, for the exact same reason it hasn't done it to the Orks, Tyranids, Chaos, Eldar, or Necrons - in doing so they would open up their other fronts to other threats, and would be torn apart from without and within.

The Tau have withstood a full-blown Crusade - barely - but there are much bigger things than a Crusade when it comes to the Imperium.

Dude admit it, with the Tau's piss poor FTL tech and absolutely hilarious miniscule size, the are almost no threat to the Imperium, and if it wasn't for literally every other faction fighting the Imperium, the Tau would already be extinct.

That's your headcanon.

The fluff says otherwise.

Racism..against a fictional race..alright user, whatever you get off too at night.

A massive crusade and I wouldn't say barely. The Tau tore through that crusade piecemeal. There were complications but it would have been a glorious victory if the Admech fuckery did not happen.

The point is that plenty of guys keep claiming the if the Imperium got serious, then the Tau would be toast.That's not true, clearly.

Nobody is saying that the Tau can take on the WHOLE Imperium. The Tau and Imperium do not exist in a vacuum.

You must abandon your hatred for blue people.

>Head canon
>Tau canonly have the slowest and second most inefficient FTL method of all the factions
>Tau canonly only have a couple dozen worlds in their "Empire"
>Headcanon
What I'm most suprised about is the fact that I could understand you around all that blue dick you're sucking.
btw screaming "MUH HEADCANON" doesn't make what I said any less true

>posting haremshit

I hope GS doesn't get a anime it certainly doesn't deserve it.

Are you seriously expecting from WH40k lore to make ANY sense at all?

dude must have a thing for communists.

>>Tau canonly have the slowest and second most inefficient FTL method of all the factions

The Tau upgraded their ship engines in the TSE and have been rapidly expanding.

With their current speed they are outmanoeuvring the Imperial fleets and outplaying them.

>>Tau canonly only have a couple dozen worlds in their "Empire"

The Tau are 100+ worlds. Imperial and Tau logicians theorized that if the Tau rate of expansion continues, then they might increase their holdings by more than a double.

To put this in perspective, the largest Necron Dynasty, the Sautekh, hasa 500 worlds. See how much space they control.

Get facts instead of headcanoning.

Kauyon and Mont'ka give a pretty good description of this. The Tau kill the chapter master of the Raven Guard and they think they killed the leader of all space marines everywhere. They legitimately thought they could trounce the Imperium. Then the Imperium launched a counter-attack on Mugulath Bay and, while they lost, they obliterated most (or at least a large portion) of the Tau military and killed Aun'va. The only reason the Tau survived at all is because of Farsight. After that, the Tau had a better idea of how huge and powerful the Imperium is.

>The Tau kill the chapter master of the Raven Guard and they think they killed the leader of all space marines everywhere.

The propaganda spread this. Everyone in high command knows this bullshit and plenty of the populace.

>After that, the Tau had a better idea of how huge and powerful the Imperium is.

They already know.

And they did trounce the Imperium. Mont'ka the Tau were caught by surprise by the sudden arrival of Imperial reinforcements. They struck unexpectedly at Mugulath Bay while there was a small garrison on the planet. So you saying that the Imperials destroyed a large portion of Tau forces is kinda silly.

guy, get that blue cock out of your ass, it's embarassing. the tau are still incredibly insignificant on the whole. i look forward to when they actually get to face a real threat instead of the tokens they've been facing.

Headcanon please go.

They faced the Imperium and won a victory. Though, it was marred by the Admech weapon, a victory is still a victory. The Tau outfought and outthought the Imperials almost the whole way.

that's not a particularly impressive feat. the orks do that on a regular basis. come back and talk when they've actually destroyed a hive fleet, not just tendril. or put down a full waaaggghh or cleansed a few deamon worlds.

Actually, it is. It was a massive crusade. It had forces comparable to the forces guarding the Cadian Gate.

>they've actually destroyed a hive fleet, not just tendril

Hive Fleet Gorgon

>or put down a full waaaggghh

Great War of Confederation.
War of Dakka.
And plenty more.

>cleansed a few deamon worlds.

No daemon worlds nearby the Tau.

Tau get plot armor larger than a emperor titan.
>Rather young race.
>Almost no smack downs
>bad stuff has no long term complications
>tries to attack the big players
>big ones retaliate
>magically turn retarded and lose

Perfect lore. Not like the Imperium did not exterminate aggressors like that for ten millenia now.

It's almost as bad as the new AdMech lore.

It was mainly for the qoute and not the material. I picked it up on my latest monthly venture into /a/. So far they seem to regard him as having Doomguy levels of murderboner.

The fluff gets worse by the edition. GW really can't handle their own idea of making a minor galactic player playable...

You know, I can respond to this but I bored out my skull at the moment. Got tired of debating you for now, bluehaters.

Time for some Overwatch. Good night!

Gorgon was a minor fleet. And thery still lost every engagement without Imperial help.

Everybody in 40k has a bunch of ridiculous shit handed to them to make them cool and badass and could-totally-kick-the-other-factions'-asses. Honestly, the Tau at this point mostly just lack some kind of primordial being that will automatically win at 40k in some unknown point in the future.

The japs are masers at this, they make an amazing introduction to a series only to fuck up shortly thereafter.
GS is going to be another SAO mark my words.

This.

Granted, all the lore is turning increasingly retarded.

>almost as bad as the new AdMech lore
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How would they know about the eye of terror?
If they observe the universe the same way we do, they just watch the light of stars that died millions of years ago.
The light produced by the EOT has not reached them yet, so they cant observe it, also its on the other side of the galaxy, which for their warp engines would be at least several hundred years of one way travel.

They may know the same phenomena we know and a bit more, but they don't know what lurks in the subspace which they only caress gently each time they warp.

>new AdMech lore.

?

>Faggot can't handle the fact that nobody's buying his bullshit
>Decides to bury his head in the sand
I hope you like chocking on that blue dick

Probably

le salt

>A massive crusade
It was a pretty standard Crusade. Crusades are not little affairs, user. Just because it had the largest tank battle in the Imperium doesn't mean they necessarily had more tanks than a standard Crusade - only that they deployed them in much greater numbers.

>With their current speed they are outmanoeuvring the Imperial fleets and outplaying them.

No, they just operate very differently, making their ships difficult to detect. Also, since they use no Psykers to fly their ships save the Nicassar they are far more difficult for Imperial Psykers to detect.

They still have no fucking clue how the Warp works, because the Warp is literally incomprehensible to them.

>a victory is still a victory.

It was the literal definition of a pyrrhic victory. They won, but at an atrocious cost, and one that will take them a long time to recover from.

Don't get me wrong, I loved the old relative open lore of them. The stuff of FFG were perfect for them.
Then GW came along and wrote them as: LOL SO DUMB XD.

>If their science is so good, how can they not know the scale of the galaxy and all the civilizations therein? Don't they have deep space probes, astronomy, etc.?

You have to remember that space is FUCKING HUGE. In fact, space is so FUCKING HUGE that it takes a ray of light over 100,000 years to travel from one side of the galaxy to the other.

The Tau FTL drive has been put at around 1/5 the speed of Imperial warp travel, but Imperial warp speeds vary considerably depending on the geography of the warp. The Imperium knows warp routes which allow them to cross the galaxy in the course of a couple of years, but local warp travel within a sector can take weeks or months. Local scale warp travel is what applies for the Tau, so this would indicate it takes the Tau months or years to travel dozens or hundreds of light years. This means it would take the Tau decades of traversing hostile, unexplored territory to travel at a significant scale. Galactic crossings the Imperium can pull off in a few years would take them centuries.

The Tau can't know much about what exists beyond their own little corner of the galaxy, because everything else is just too damn far away. Captured Imperial data stores are probably their best source of info about the wider galaxy, and those will be sparse due to censorship and general ignorance. Odds are they will assume the Imperium's claims of ruling a million worlds spread across the entire galaxy are simply propaganda.

>the largest Necron Dynasty, the Sautekh, hasa 500 worlds. See how much space they control.

Necrons have access to the webway. That map does not describe the space the Sautekh "control", just the space they have access to. Going by that map, their territory spans about 30,000 light years at its longest. The 500 worlds they control would be scattered throughout that space. Between those worlds will be vast tracts of space filled with Tyranids, Orks, Eldar, Humans, and random other alien races.

The Tau, by contrast, have a slow FTL drive which confines them to a small area of the galaxy. They control 1/5 as many worlds as the Sautekh, but all of those worlds are within several hundred light years of each other. The territory the Tau have access to is likely less than 1% of the size the Sautekh range.

But those Na'vi faggots make me rage, can I hate them?

Time to unleash the Admech's Better Than Space Marines Now With Jump Packs™!

alternate

>Literally human brains linked to machine bodies that subject their minds to continual, unimaginable agony
>The Tau have to fight this

... Are humans the bad guys in this war? That sounds pretty damn evil.

user, in Warhammer, Humans are always the goodest bad guys. Everyone else is a different shade of bad guy, but Humans are still better than everyone else.

Last I checked the Tau didn't rip out your brain and shoved it in a death machine that fed off your suffering.

In the grim darkness of far future, there are no good guys.

Nah, the Tau sterilize and brain-control their non-Tau populations, and send them as first-wave troops so their Ethereal controlled Tau populaces whose lives are dictated to them from the second they are born can be sent in when there's less resistance and secure victory.

Also, the Thallaxii only cause slight and slow mental degradation. Not pain involved! Quite the opposite in fact, since the only thing that's left of the occupant is their brain, skull, and spinal cord!

The Domitar is a Battle Automata and has nothing but it's machine-spirit!

daily reminder that the brain has no nerve endings, just neurons, and therefore cannot actually 'feel' pain.

The eyes have neurons.

They kept the eyes.

The Tau are evil because of their incredible arrogance. They assume they know everything, and assume they can handle everything the galaxy throws at them, and that their Greater Good is the only path to existence. They are willing to do terrible things to their own people if it means preserving their ideology (mass disappearances and society-wide mind control being two major things). They know fuck all about reality, and are too blind to even realize it.

The Imperium is evil because it has to be. 30,000 years of humans getting fucked over left and right by all different threats has made the Imperium what it is, and their rules exist for a very good reason.

AI are banned? Blame the Men of Iron.

Xenos are to be eradicated or at best barely tolerated? Blame the Eldar and Orks for shaping early human-xenos relations, and how both societies nearly annihilated humanity independent of each other in the Dark Age of Technology Also blame Erebus, because everything is his fault, always

Knowledge is to be suppressed? That is because the Imperium has discovered things that Mankind literally cannot know without becoming insane due to Warp shenanigans.

Technology must be sanctified through religious rituals, and strong deviation from STC's are extremely taboo if not outright heretical? That's because building machines in a certain way literally invites Chaos to possess them and warp their Machine-Spirits to their will. Also, Machine-Spirits are a very real thing for most machines, with things like orbital stations and starships having such complex Machine-Spirits that they're nearly sapient.

Tau laugh at the level of Imperial tech, but they don't realize that the Imperium learned long ago that the road to literal Hell is paved with ignorance of reality.

Humans are always the good guys by default.

Humans are literally feeding people to their dead god though.

Compared to the rest of the setting,that's a walk though the daisies.

because if they lose one major war they will be wiped out

sounds like a soviet tank

At least they're humans.

Know about the Eye of Terror? Huh. You know that makes me think. Can you observe the Eye of Terror? It is luminous as far as we can tell but does that light follow the rules of how light works? It is light from the Warp after all.

Logically, the Eye of Terror should be unobservable because it is 10,000 years old and the Tau exist on the other end of the galaxy. Light should not have had enough time to reach the Tau. But its Warp light. By that same logic, does simple light from the Warp cause corruption in beings that observe it? Is there a wave of corruption spreading out in every direction from the Eye of Terror at the speed of light? Never really thought about the physics of it. Hell, if it works by the rules, the Tau might be able to witness The Fall from where they are.