I beat the Dawn of War games, is it canon if you kill the Ethereal the Tau immediately give up and flees?

So they impotently try to melee?

More the likely the shock from the sudden lost of mind control.

Yes.

See, the thing that makes Tau normally capable is intelligent individuals being handed deadly guns. They take advantage of range, and utilize strategy.

They achieved this in a hundred years, give or take. They're still feral, and Ethereals are heavily implied to be the only reason the race is sane.
Without it, they essentially revert.
And that's when they whip into the most primitive combat-basic lashing out.

And in 40k, with their strength.....yeah they're fucked.

Isn't space just one big hole? A big nothing? Or did he just look at a black hole?

When were Tau so Tyranid-y?

A thousand years before the 41st millennium. Explorators and encountered them and said "Hey magos look at this blue monkey shits."
Then warpstorms happened, and after it lifted the Tau became advanced all of a sudden.

Probably a warp-hole.

If I'm remembering right he either got a vision of the Eye of Terror at some point due to psyker proximity or it was Necron fuckery.

I don't think much of anything from the DoW games is canon.

During their Napoleonic era, which they achieved remarkably quickly, they almost wiped themselves out of existence. Without the Greater Good philosophy, the Tau become savage and unrelenting while still being just as clever.

When an Ethereal dies, they do shit like launching banzai charges, red horde, against well-positioned machine gun nests without caring about their own lives. The results are often horrific.

youtube.com/watch?v=tNROmJIaDYc

>The results are often fantastic

Depends. The fluff bit that this lore is attached to was from the surviving space marines of the battle. They found that the Tau fought twice as hard when their Ethereal was threatened, but after their Ethereal died? They went bugfuck crazy in vengeance.

The Marines got out, but just by the skin of their teeth and with heavier losses than they expected because they were not expecting the Tau to just straight up stop caring about their own survival. If they had stayed and fought, the marines would not have survived. Tau willing to crash a perfectly fine Devilfish into you and then immediately hit self destruct is no joke, even for a Space Marine.

I remember that's from a Deathwatch blurb. Them going up against a batshit insane Guard regiment would look fun.

Yeah, that's about right. It's still a good thing to do though, because in the long term it demoralizes them, and by making them go on a revenge streak you take away their tactical and strategic advantage on the field.

Tau don't look like they are much weaker than humans. Carrying that giant rifle all day? Com on. What they lack is more training for melee combat. Then again, most monsters are much stronger than humans...

Khorne would be proud.

>Dies by a swarm of savage cute xenos.

Their stats reflect this. WS2 and S3 is the norm.

Well, only has it half right. They're not feral, not any more so than humans anyway. The Ethereals command absolute loyalty through strange pheremone/magic fuckery (it's left vague) but this power just means that the average Tau will listen to orders absolutely. It's what allowed Tau to unite as five sub-species and expand as much as they did. We as humanity need capitalism to drive us, but the Tau just did as they were told.

There are a few good resources on what happens when Ethereals aren't around. In the short-term, yeah, some Tau go beserk, others flee, some continue as they were. I imagine it's as if one of the twelve disciples decided to fight alongside you and then you saw him snuff it. Different people would have different reactions.

In the long term, well, that depends. In the book Fire Caste, the Tau there just keep doing what they're doing and wait for reinforcements. Command goes to the most senior non-Ethereal (a Water Caste) but iirc, he goes mad. The Tau don't turn into savages, but it's not all roses.

Then you have Farsight. He seems to have cut out a bit of a paradise without the Ethereals. By all accounts, everything seems to be going perfectly. The Tau there work normally under the usual chains of command. I suppose it makes sense. Just like human with Space Marines, most Tau will go throughout life without ever laying eyes on a single Ethereal (outside of propaganda). If that would continue or not into M42 is up to GW.

Basically, they lose it.
They may run away, but most likely they just snap and attack.
They don't go full out berserk, and subsequently charge into CQC.
They pretty much just stand up, shoot rapidly at the enemy, whilst advancing.
Basically they just become fast moving waves of soldiers that push forward really quickly, shooting repeatedly at the enemy until they all die.

>tears in the rain monologue ripoff
not even subtle

>40k
>Being subtle about anything.

>vagina fishheads
>cute
As delusional as the bara fetishists

Wasn't it better to keep it the old way? Now they look more mary suesh.

It's not a ripoff, it's an homage

>The Marines got out, but just by the skin of their teeth
I think this is the story you're thinking of. The marines weren't particularly in danger, though they did run out of ammunition and ended up not completing their mission despite getting over 300 confirmed kills each.

Not him, but the Etheral wasn't actually killed from what I am reading.

As if that's ever stopped the 40k writers. More Mary Sue is their fucking credo, no matter which faction they're writing for.

>Marines
>not Airforce or Specops

Shit nig, you fucked up.

When Dark Crusade came out, the Tau were in their 4th edition codex, wherein if you killed an Ethereal, all of their units had to take a leadership test. If they passed they all got Preferred Enemy (which only worked in melee back then, so this was a mostly useless buff), and if they failed, they ran off the board. When they got updated, this was changed to the opponent simply gains an extra victory point for killing an Ethereal.

So to answer your question, this probably wouldn't make sense for modern Tau, but at the time it did.

What's with the stupidity of saying the Tau "revert" without the Ethereals?

The whole point of the Farsight Enclavew supp is to show that the Tau no longer need the Ethereals and perhaps never did.

Farsight's group lost not one but three Ethereals and yet managed to fight the daemons and the Orks as a unit. Later they founded a breakaway realm where the castes lived in harmony and they believe in the Greater Good or their version of it.

>The whole point of the Farsight Enclavew supp is to show that the Tau no longer need the Ethereals and perhaps never did.
Except as this user pointed they kinda needed it:

This was good story design, but terrible game design.

You could explain it as psychic whiplash from suddenly losing the ethereal and not a dependence on them entirely

The Farsight Enclave is 6th ED, you dork, and regardless he is wrong.

Tau can function even without Ethereals. They did it before as primitive medieval society and they are doing it now as the Enclaves.

Oddly enough: The Ethereals stole those rules from the SOB.

Helena the Virtuous, the high leader of the SOB in 2e had basically the same rules. If she was on the board, you got super morale. If she was injured you had super morale + hatred. If she died you needed to make a break test but everything that passed got frenzy for the rest of the game.

homage implies a modicum of respect towards the original work.

the original speech was meant to show the character's humanity as he died.

this is just a ripoff.

>Now they look more mary suesh.
???

I would argue that the Ethereals were needed during the Mont'au. All of the Tau codices clearly state that their race was on the verge of self-extinction before they showed up and these codices are not written from a Tau POV, so I don't think this is just Ethereal propaganda. That being said, I'm not sure that the Ethereals are needed anymore, which is the point of the Farsight Enclaves. We're not told what the Ethereals were like back in the old days, but now they seem to be morally corrupt. In Mont'ka, Aun'va is described as being a manipulative, power-hungry dictator, and in the 7e codex, the Ghostkeel was kept off the front lines for a while after it was completed just to maximize propaganda impact. That being said, Aun'shi seems like an honorable guy, so it's possible this moral bankruptcy only exists among the higher echelons of the Ethereal caste.

I think one of the main issues facing the Tau right now is whether or not the Ethereals are needed in the 41st millennium. The Farsight Enclaves have demonstrated the survival without them is possible, but this doesn't automatically make it the better option. Despite all their problems, the Ethereals are effective rulers and have don a lot of good for the Tau, both as a race and an empire.

Yeah, it turned me off to Ethereals so much at the time that I rarely bring them today even though they're actually good now.

I actually hadn't noticed that.

Batty was a combat model, he spent most of his four years of life killing people because he was told to, and then decided he wanted to do something else. He'd kill to have it, but that was the means, not the end.

Farsight, who kills people because he is told to, has had a similar awakening. He doesn't have a four year lifespan to try and extend, but he has an idea of how the Tau should live, he's disillusioned with how he's been used.

Obviously Blade Runner is the superior artistic work but the homage on the Farsight image - because homage it is - is appropriate.

>I would argue that the Ethereals were needed during the Mont'au. All of the Tau codices clearly state that their race was on the verge of self-extinction

So was humanity at several junctions in in their history. They bounced back.

The problem wit the Ethereals is the needless cruelties that they inflict on the Tau for the Greater Good which are not reasonable at all.

My god you people are dumb. Farsight is talking there about witnessing the Eye of Terror consuming the galaxy (See Gathering Storm. It can true!) through the rift of Arthas Molech.

After witnessing this horror he realised that these truths must never go back to the Empire.

This has nothing to do with with some HACK movie about emo robots.

>More the likely the shock from the sudden lost of mind control.
That's the giant spider you're thinking of, not the Pope.

you're trying too hard, man

Trying what? Telling you what's the Farsight Enclave book? That quote was said after he saw the Eye of Terror in the Rift. It's not about PTSD or being forced to kill people. It's about the existence of Chaos being revealed to him and how it changed him.

You guys are dumb and that movie was a piece of trash.

Oh wow, I am so totally impressed by your maverick cinematic tastes user, please tell us more about what universally well received movies that people love that you feel are shit with very little coherent justification, please user, please

Go away, /tv/.

>Blue monkey shits
Not quite true. When the first explorators found them, the Tau had just about mastered fire and the use of constructed tools.

It's still a FEROCIOUSLY fast rate of expansion to go from the paleolithic to what was essentially the late middle ages in just 5-6,000 years, but it's not as if they their mental evoluion or the divergence into the castes happened in that time frame.

I ain't even touching on the rest of the Tau lore, even though I love them, as no two people can fucking agree on anything in goddamn 40k and the Tau have had their whole concept changed so much between their introduction and now that it's a cluster-fuck best just left to individuals or small groups to agree upon.

Some would just carry on being protestants.

Yeah, if someone with the magic power to make humanity stop fighting showed up in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis we would probably credit them with saving the world and not believe that we could have made it through on our own.

Calling Blade Runner hack while discussing 40k may be the stupidest fucking thing I have heard in my entire life. It does not matter how hack the movie is. Or how much we enjoy the 40k universe. 40k is the most hack thing ever created in the history of man. The entire point is that it is hack. It is hack cranked to 11 with more skulls thrown in. Grimmdark is hack incarnate.

40K being HACK doesn't make the movie any less HACK. Your post is pointless.

Your LIFE is pontless

>Aun'O Bhi
>Wan o bi
>Obiwan

I love it when GW sneaks in shit like this.

>Used to.
Nope. Their first codex already had them berserker firing and retreating once all ammo was spent.

Also no. They will fight on machine like and gun down as many enemies as they can. That goes on until either they are dead or the enemy is or they run out of ammo, in that case they fall back.

>sexual dimorphism.
That's obviously not a Tau.

I thought the Navy was the one that was 90% faggots

Why would you deliberately bite down onto a sharp metal object?

Where is my DOW3 given to me by the plunderers?

It's pronounced Gay-vy.

>shit workshop blatantly ripping off blade runner
I fucking hate hacks

The tau themselves still have innate characteristics and psychology, but the Ethereals constantly overlay their mind-control pheremones + religion + oppressive government on top of it. It would be like as a human, if you and everyone you knew were trained since birth to obey the High-Priest who smells really good. You get inducted into an all-out war for which there is no shred of dissent in your entire civilization. Then your glorious leader gets wasted, it might cause you to lose your nerve.