So, I hear a lot of shit talking on all sides about the Tau, but let's get serious for a sec

Say what you will, but the Tau only control about 115 worlds. Compare that to the million or so active Imperial worlds and the X number of splinter human worlds.

It's going to be awhile before the Tau catch up. Most likely, the Imperium will implode before that happens.

The Tau are smaller than several other Xenos empires that are in the fluff.

They really are 'That' outmatched.

How can Eldar be near extinct when a thriving race like Tau has less numbers than them?

Games Workshop has no grasp of scale. There aren't nearly enough space marines to have a significant impact on the galaxy as they've had, and many of their "apocalyptic" battles barely surpass WW2 troop numbers.

They're a hard knot in the wood. Tau are numerically inferior, but holy shit is their space DENSE. The interior of their stellar empire is owned completely by them and their auxiliaries. And they push everything out of it when they complete a "sphere" of expansion. Invasions into Tau space are thrown out because the Tau keep their major supply lines so close, and reinforcements so readily available. The reason the Damocles Crusade faltered was because they got stuck in this, the Tau keeping the Imperium forces rooted to a singular planet and halting the crusade's momentum.

Yes, they were originally meant to be an example of one of the thousands of small civilizations on the border of the Emperium.
That's been retconned a bit, due to their popularity, so they are a "major" faction. But they're still BY FAR the smallest.

Were there any other xeno/separatist factions that were mentioned but never gained fan traction?

Because GW doesn't understand how numbers work.

These are the same guys who gave the Land Raider armor on par with a WW2 tank, retconned the Necrons a form of space travel that is only slighty better than what 1960s America could have built, claim that 100 space marines can somehow conquer and hold a thousand worlds without support (it only takes 1/10th of a space marine to defend a planet! But it only takes one fairly large ork to kill a space marine in melee, so...) and thinks that a reasonable amount of technological development over the course of 10,000 years is "we have a very slightly modified 'new' version of space marine armor, a couple new tanks that are just combining the existing parts we have in new ways, and someone found a STC template for socks that is still under review."

This is a good explanation. Both the Imperium and the Eldar Empire allowed xenos/rogues to exist between systems that they owned. For the Imperium it's because of how humanity expanded and had to be reconquered, in addition to its vastness. For the Eldar, they just didn't give a shit.

Meanwhile, worlds within the Tau Empire are either run by the Tau or their alien allies, which also have Tau oversight. It would be extremely difficult to get a foothold there.

Yep. The Damocles Gulf crusade did very well against the first few lightly defended worlds they came across in their unexpected surprise attacks (because lets be honest, the Tau were in no way prepared for the Imperium to suddenly started bombing them for the crime of TRADING WITH WILLING HUMAN WORLDS) but as soon as the Crusade hit a Sept world they lost 1/3rd of their fleet slugging it out with the orbital defenses, got stuck in an extended ground war with the Tau that was costing them bodies and space marines left and right, and were forced to sign a treaty so they could bug out before Tau navy reinforcements showed up that stood a decent chance of obliterating them entirely in their already weakened state.

The Crusade basically retreated, but did so in a way that saved face. And that was against a Tau empire with no experience fighting humans or expectation that the Imperium would attack them. They have teched up and bolstered their defenses significantly since then.

Not so much that the IoM can't burn out the Tau if they really, really put their mind to it, but enough that doing so would probably force the Imperium to give up an entire segmentum to other problems to make the attempt.

One of the biggest problems with Tau is how few worlds they have. Any significant vicory against them would be devastating to the Tau empire, so GW tries to minimize any losses they take.

Plenty that got mentioned, none are super popular.
Don't think Tau got *any* mention anywhere before getting added.
They were made for the sake of showing off "xeno empires", hence all the extra xeno races.

Nothing in science fiction (if one can call 40k that) has a proper grasp of scale. It's always bullshit.

I wouldn't mind a "Xeno mercenary" Mini codex, to go along with the upcoming Agents minidex.

But that's mostly because I just want to have Rak'Gol on the tabletop.

Why is there so much more porn/fetish drawings of Tau than other races?

only if they do a better job with it than the agends dex and fix some stats, the tau auxiliaries suck ass.

i don't believe there are personally. I see plenty of eldar, good amount of chaos, some ork stuff, imperials of course, and some tau, but i wouldn't say they have more than the other non imperials.

Tau are by far the most organized faction in 40k, they are light years ahead of everyone else in terms of getting their shit together, and forming a coherent and centralized power structure.

Having said that, their power base is comparatively very small. The reason they do so well is because they can focus their might to accomplish tasks, where, say, the Imperium's might is mostly spent just trying to hold itself together fighting a war in every direction against everyone else.

Every other faction would be able to kill the others if they got their shit together, but with the Tau they have their shit together but aren't strong enough to kill everyone else.

>Tau are by far the most organized faction in 40k
U fuckin wot?

Look, I get that you like the Tau and they have their place, but don't overstate your merits here.

desu the weakest point in 40k is the space marine wanking

they could have just been tough motherfuckers that exist on the fringes and are called in when shit goes south, or for shit like boarding alien cruisers or boarding actions and stuff

but no, they had to go with the "spaaaace muhreens can take a whole city by themselves, and 100 can take a whole system, the whole imperium rests on the backs of like 3 dudes!!"

like really most of the rest of the setting almost sort of works except for the spaec muhreens - which should have been written as an elite military unit for specialized encounters and not as the one man armies they are

The Tau could be wiped out by any of the following:

1. A full scale Imperial Crusade.
2. A full scale Black Crusade
3. A full scale Hive Fleet.
4. A full scale Necron Dynasty.
5. A full scale WAAAGH!

At the very least they would lose several septs fighting forces of those size. So, yes, they are outmatched and tiny compared to most other factions. Still... they are fun and enrich the setting, so I don't get why people bitch about them so much.

It's also worth remembering that they are representative of the minor alien Empires which exist scattered around the galaxy. The existence of the Tau means the 40K galaxy is much more complicated than the table top fluff usually implies. It's not all just Eldar, Orks, and Spess Mahriens.

>should have been written as an elite military unit for specialized encounters and not as the one man armies they are

The problem was that GW wrote themselves into a corner very early on with the "only one space marine for each world in the imperium (a million), but still they suffice" line. This risked making them irrelevant to the setting unless they were one man armies. If instead they had allowed for vast number of space marines, say one chapter per subsector, or one chapter per sector, then they could back down on the one man army fluff.

115 world would make the Tau about as powerful as the Exodite Eldar. Not a significant faction but one that could do some accomplished raiding.

>space marine chapters are 1000 men
>one arty blast wipes a whole squad or 10 regularly

I sure enjoy how well the gameplay and lore matchup.

Really space marine chapters should be at least 10k.

>115 worlds

That puts them on the scale of a single Imperial Sector.

>one arty blast wipes a whole squad

Isn't that usually justified with "they are only wounded and out of the fight, not dead"

The Tau are an extremely minor faction, yes. But the purpose of them in the universe is to showcase their potential, and how it's almost inevitable that it will be wasted.

The Tau are a miraculous species, having progressed faster in less time than any other race on record. Even if their achievements are on a small scale, what they've achieved is nothing short of astonishing, and they could go on to do even greater things.

But they won't, because one of two things will happen. Either they will be utterly destroyed by outside forces, a Chaos warfleet or an Imperial crusade or an Orc Waagh, some enormous application of force they simply cannot survive. Or, in the process of fighting, they'll lose what gave them that potential, that hope, in the first place.

We've already seen it happen. From their bright, innocent future the Tau constantly step into deeper, darker shadows in the name of survival and victory. Rifles which terminally irradiate their own troops, questionably gained alien allies who might well be slaves, and other things which might be non canon but IMO aren't entirely out of theme.

The Tau are a bright young species on the verge of their own fall from grace, because in the darkness of the 40k universe a spark like theirs cannot survive- It will be snuffed out, or become just another cruel flame burning everything around it to stay alive.

>having progressed faster in less time than any other race on record
Isn't that because they were protected in a time-accelerated warp storm or something?

You know why is this? If they can simulate theoretical galactic formations why can't they simulate galactic human expansion?

Because they secretly have vaginas on their faces.

Why does Veeky Forums like vagina so much?

Humans are really bad at grasping the difference between "big" and "really big" after a certain point things get so far out of our normal frame of reference we have no way to visualize or intuitively grasp the size of things. Billions of billions sounds just as large as trillions of trillions despite there being 2 orders of magnitude worth of difference.

>You know why is this?

Because the human brain hasn't evolved to work on a galactic scale. Think of it this way: there's about 400 billion stars in the galaxy. Now try to imagine what "400 billion" looks like in practical terms. Picture "400 billion" bricks or "400 billion" loaves of bread. Can't do it can you?

Don't feel bad, no one can.

A writer hears that we're "in the milky way galaxy" and they think, "OK I'll have my human empire rule half the galaxy". The scale of what that means, however, is totally lost on them.

Also doesn't help that 40k wasn't built on a hard sci-fi foundation.

>2 orders of magnitude

Don't know why I put that. It's actually several more than 2. It's like comparing thousands to millions.

A major advantage for the Tau in this regard, is that Chaos doesn't really care about them at all. They basically only fight if they randomly stumble across each other, since neither side has anything worth directly seeking the other out for.

True, and soft scifi (sci-fantasy/space-opera) is notorious for flubbing issues of scale and math.

Honestly, I didn't really get how the Imperium would work until DnD came out with the "points of light" model for their fantasy setting; with each town a small spark of civilization in vast, dark, monster haunted wilderness. Once I had that in mind, I could get how each Imperial sector is a small interstellar empire unto itself; a clump of 100-200 worlds separated from its nearest neighboring sector by vast tracts of "wilderness space".

>orks
>There guys would have won already if not for constant infighting
The orks already united in The Beast Arises and still eventually got raped by the Imperium. They aren't a serious threat.

>Or, in the process of fighting, they'll lose what gave them that potential, that hope, in the first place.
My favorite thing about40k

It's why I think all the people trying to say the Tau were always this Orwellian dictatorship are missing the point. If they were always shit there's nothing to lose- But the real darkness of the Tau is that all their promise for the future will come to nothing, ground to dust or set aside in order to adapt and cope with such a cruel, unforgiving universe.

Basically, the Tau are sitting at that point where they *could* be wiped by nearly everyone else, but it's too much of a fucking hassle to do so and it would take a lot of resources that most of them aren't willing to commit to the task.

>what is FTL travel

Yes.

They're spaceships are supposed to be shit in a way that is profoundly significant for them as well- they're slow. This means their tactics of manoeuvre warfare don't apply to space, which combined with their limited numbers and infrastructure makes them extremely vulnerable to a concerted invasion.

They were written this way, but GW didn't really think about it until the Damocles Crusade fluff when they magically had ships as good and as numerous as the Imperium.

Also keep in mind the NEcrons were shit before they found the gods just becasue they had no FTL and couldnt maintain an empire

Well, they kinda explained that in the fluff as a change in doctrine/adaptation, you can see the difference between the old and new ship designs. And they're still under performing compared to their Imperial Navy equivalents.

The real question is, where the Tau wimmin at?!

The Tau species have a relatively low amount of sexual dimorphism. The physical differences between Castes are more obvious than the differences between genders.

Outside of Veeky Forums fanart, anyway. And you could sorta justify particularly masculine or feminine Tau as Water Caste entertainers, propaganda experts or ambassadors. It would be entirely designed and artificial to achieve a purpose, but it could still happen.

>I just want to have Rak'Gol on the tabletop

Tau own over 300+ worlds

Because they attract weebs.

It doesn't matter because Chaos will win anyway.

Why does everyone think that. The warp storm just made it too dangerous for imperial ships to travel through, so they just moved on from T'au. Nothing more

in the case of the tyranids, its still true.
behemoth was fighting against the IOM, tau, necrons, eldar, chaos, and probably other factions all at once. thats a big reason why it failed and why the tau were able to survive the nid invasion of their space. albiet with several planets sacrificed

Right, so they were protected for 8,000 years by a warp storm that kept other races from showing up and destroying them.

Give the Imperium 8,000 years without every Tom, Dick and Harry trying to fuck them over and I guarantee they'll produce an army capable of conquering the galaxy.

Want proof? That's exactly what happened, except it only took humanity 5,000 years.

You spelled Orks weird

>1. A full scale Imperial Crusade.

No, the Tau defeated two massive Imperial crusades. The last crusade featured one of the largest tank battles in Imperial history

>3. A full scale Hive Fleet.

The Tau defeated Hive Fleet Gorgon.

And before you speak, other hive fleets needed a multi-factional effort to defeat.

>5. A full scale WAAAGH!

The Tau defeated several large Waaaagh!. Like War of Dakka Waaaagh! and the Waaagh! of the War of Great Confederation.

You know nothing about the lore. Get out.

The simple fact of the matter is that of you like TAU, You're weak And your bloodline is weak.
They won't pass their genes to the next generation, And neither will you.

>The Tau are an extremely minor faction, yes.

Recent lore says the Tau became a major power in the galaxy.

Ya'll need to start posting lore. Because user's opinions are biased as shit.

>Warboss Grukk Face-rippa leads a rampage against the Tau Empire! The Tau have seen plenty of conflict during their brief ascension to the status of major player in the far future, and quite a lot of that conflict has been with Orks.

-WD 108 (digital)

White Dwarf issues around and after the Kauyon and Mont'ka releases claim that the Tau are among the major players in the galactic scene. One of the super powers vying for galactic domination.

So, uh, on the subject of Tau and power... My store is going to be starting doing Kill Teams, so I picked up pic related. What's the best 200 point Kill Team I can make out of this?

Proceeding further. The white dwarf articles (picture related) say that had the Imperium and the Tau put their differences aside and allied, they would become an unstoppable force in the galaxy. But alas the reason why this didn't happen is Imperial unreasonable racism and xenophobia. The Tau extended the hand of friendship to the Imperium countless times and the Imperium either ignored it or slapped it aside.

"The human brain hasn't evolved for that" is the nerd's own reductio ad hitlerum.

I like how you rephrased that to ignore the fact that the Tau are also unwilling to accept aliens as equals.

further further.

The Mont'ka war features one of the largest tank battles ever fought by the Imperium (which they lost by the way. Longstrike FTW).

Plus the Imperial Knights saw that the Tau large suits were more deadly than the Ork and traitor walkers. The Knight House fighting in that war lost more knights to the Tau weaponry than they ever lost fighting in the Horus Heresy.

>unhealthy interest in warp technology

chaos tau when

Tau's idea of extending the hand of friendship is subjugating planets and gelding milions.

It's not like the imperium are just assholes.
The imperium's structure is supposed to be simply what is necessary to survive in the universe.
Their hatred of xenos is learned behavior after the daot and hh.
The tau really break this narrative though.

>Imperium aren't actually good they're just evil faggots and anything good about them is just propaganda from the Imperium's point of view
>TAU ARE SO GOOD THOUGH THEYRE NOT EVIL ANY EVIL TAU FLUFF IS JUST IMPERIAL PROPAGANDA TAU ARE TOTALLY GOOD THERES NO WAY ITS TAU PROPAGANDA

Taufags

In the Cain novel "The Greater Good", the Tau as a token of goodwill, rebuilt an Imperial world and clothed and fed its populace free of charge.

>‘What haven’t I been told?’ he asked, with an understandable touch of asperity.

>‘The tau have made an offer of reparations, which His Excellency the governor is minded to accept,’ I said, in my most diplomatic tone.

>‘Because His Excellency the governor is a self-obsessed, inbred imbecile, who can’t see the trap for the honey,’ Zyvan added, not diplomatically at all.

>‘What sort of reparations?’ Braddick asked, in tones which told me all too clearly that he shared the Lord General’s opinion of the Emperor’s anointed representative on Quadravidia.

>‘Assistance with the reconstruction effort,’ I told him. ‘Resources, expertise and civilian advisors to coordinate everything with the Administratum and the Adeptus Mechanicus.’

>‘Preaching subversion and heresy the whole time, no doubt,’ Braddick snorted.

>‘No doubt,’ I agreed, ‘and I’d keep a particularly close eye on a bunch of human renegades calling themselves “Facilitators” if I were you.’

>‘You can count on it,’ he assured me,

-Cain Novel (The Greater Good)

The Tau are not the bad guys here.

>what is necessary to survive
>'FUCK TECHNOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT JUST STAY THE SAME FOREVER"

yuuup

That is simply what the lore says user.
The tau are just mary sues, they're written poorly.

The mechanicum are a good example of that actually. The imperium has to ally with those crazies otherwise all of their shit would be breaking down.

>xenosfags complain about the Imperium refusing to give diplomacy a chance

Are you guys fucking retarded or do you just know zero human fluff about 40K?

Don't strawman

>He, at least, was still alive. But there were only so many times he could survive battle, and each time he fought he seemed to leave parts of himself behind. The last time had been the worst. It had been on Mu’gulath Bay, in the ruins of a hive, with thousands of gue’la refugees streaming from the burning city. The Imperials had fired indiscriminately, killing many of their own kind. He had been trying to protect them with his Stormsurge when he’d been hit. It was the enemy you never saw that were the most dangerous, he’d always said, and he’d ignored his own wisdom. Ch’an had spent so long in the rehabilitation ward, he had thought he would be refused permission to return to the battlefront. He had begged for active service, and in the end his commander had come to his bed.

We see here a Tau Stormsurge commander protecting Imperial civilians from their own side. This Tau hero protected the humans from those who were suppose to protect them.

Can you give me an example of an Imperial doing the same for xenos? Putting themselves in danger out of empathy for a fellow sentient life?

This goes to show that the Tau cherish all life regardless of its source. Avoiding its loss whenever it's possible and economical

>The tau really break this narrative though.
Considering their methods and ideology? not really.

They're less overt about it, but ultimately pretty horrible. In later fluff especially. TIDF here just takes their fluff literally to harvest replies from people who don't recognize his posting style.

Nobody is complaining. Just pointing out how things would have been if the Imperium wasn't so xeno hating.

If the Imperium wasn't so xeno hating it'd be DEAD you fucking idiot, because xenos driving humanity to extinction was what prompted the Great Crusade to begin with.

>Imperium decides to be less xeno-hating and accepts the Tau into an alliance
>Necron invasion force shows up
>Imperium: C'mon allies, these guys are bad news, let's get 'em!
>Tau: Foolish gue'la, we must initiate diplomacy first
>Imperium: Diplomacy? These guys don't fuck around you know, they don't care about diplomacy, they're just out to kill us
>Tau: What an unenlightened attitude. We will not commit our forces to this misguided genocide of another species

And let's not get started on the Tau allowing a Genestealer Cult to start up on one of their Sept worlds....

Less horrible than the Imperium if only for the fact that the Tau don't hate alien life and feel empathy towards it. Eldar are also capable of empathy towards alien races. More than once an Eldar went out of his way to save a human's life to his/her own determinant.

Heck, even the Necrons should some consideration and respect to alien lifeforms that they deemed worthy and honourable.

So what's the excuse of humanity? The Necrons and Eldar suffered more than human at the hand of xenos across their million of years lifespans.

This is all just evidence that the tau are conceptually shit.
The tau are simply the good guys, with nearly the best tech, the best tactics, the most unified people, constantly innovating, treat their subjects like fucking kings compared to every other faction.
Their only drawback is their smallness, and that doesn't effect them at all because of plot armour.

That's due lack of knowledge. If the Imperium came along and explained things to the Tau and showed them examples of what they are facing, then things will be alright.

How many times did the Eldar have to teach humanity about the dangers of the galaxy, usually by beating it into them like a dumb dog-animal.? Too many times.

Admech humans just keep awakening tomb worlds and messing with Chaos artefacts, then the Eldar have to clean the mess. The Eldar are basically taking care of one big toddler.

They are not good guys on the higher levels. Their civs are just not being educated into being hateful bastards. That's all. (Only the Enclave is legit good guys).

To hammer the nail in.

The Necron triach praetorians wore symbols of the Blood Angels and trophies from the marines to honour the Blood Angels courage and valour.

The Silent King wore a deathmask of Sanguinius partially to honour the man-god he was. Also he has no hatred towards mankind and in fact wishes that they would survive and become vassals of his reborn empire.

Did the Emperor ever honour a xenos? No never. And the Silent King has more reason to hate alien life than the Emperor.

Humanity is unique in its extreme hatred of other lifeforms.

>The Necron triach praetorians wore symbols of the Blood Angels and trophies from the marines to honour the Blood Angels courage and valour.
that sounds so gay I'm surprised its blood angels and not ultramarines

Think about how far Tau tech has come in the last few years. (decades? centuries?)

When they first saw imperial titans they thought they were some sort of joke but after fighting them they realized they could ADAPT and they started building giant anime weeaboo suits to counter imperial stuff

now they have riptides, stormsurges and that supremacy armor all in a very short time span. I even remember hearing somewhere they want to eventually give all fire warriors rail rifles (eventually as in never because of the crunch)

point is, they advance fast as fuck and while they might be small, by the time they get big enough for the imperium to get concerned, Tau units might be leagues ahead of imperial weapons, the good ones being "irreplaceable relics" compared to the Tau gear which can be churned out en mass

...not that GW would let that happen, cant have space marines get sniped by random tau scrubs

>and they have little defense against an Exterminatus as far as I know
Uh, can anyone counter/survive Exterminatus?

Some extreme xenos tech can. Necron Orrery can supernova a sun and take out the fleet (and planet) before the torpedos hit, DE can escape to the Webway, etc.

Yes, they are.
Even the Eldar, in their tiny numbers, could exterminate the tau to every last fishface, if they wanted to.

I always mentally ad a couple zeroes behind most numbers any 40k stuff has in it.
So 15 million troops, becomes around 15 billion or so.

That's because biologically, we are still hunter gatherers to whom a herd of 500 food critters was "big fucking number".