T'au Second International 8th Edition

Isnt there a theory the the ethereals are in service to the c'tan and are feeding the Tau all their achievements?

True mobility is key, and even though I hate them, the riptides, stormsurge, robot dick etc... are still valuable weapons mounted on two legs and a jetpack. Unless we're gonna go full out mary sue, and go "nu-uh! I have a shield for that! And technology for that!" shields dont last forever and their ankles are still bare (#feminism). Paired with some realism alotted to 40k, anything from a flashlight glance to a hammer blow could completely fuck a suit up. The stormsurge especially takes the cake for inefficient. A heavy supertank in the likes of a baneblade could have the mobility of a hammerhead and the stability of a hammerhead without becoming useless the moment a heel gets shot out.

I'm going full aspergers on this because everything these suits are purported to do, a gunship would make more sense. Why risk putting valuable resources on two legs???

Yeah, but at the same time, if you have the armor, anti-grav tech, and general technology to make a Riptide or a Stormsurge, you could make an even better Tank.

Being more durable doesnt magically make having a small profile a bad idea.

Especially with their thin little legs i like to think of the suits as much more of flying gun pods that land for cover and firing stability more than anything else. So their long and multi-jointed legs are just to let them land on top of whatever battlefield rubble is laying around.

Doesn't Tau neural interface tech cause SPAAAAACE MADNESSSS? The need for bipedal robots is more about burning your pilots out in years instead of weeks -- the more familiar the form, the more they jive well with existing engrammatic structures in the brain. That therefore becomes the primary concern, pushing all the benefits of a non-biped vehicle-type unit to the side.

The book, "Fire Warrior," gets into this a little bit in the beginning. The Shas'el notes one of his battlesuit pilots walking with a cane, because his suit lost that leg in one engagement. There's no physical damage, it was just the suit that was damaged, and not even any pain send through the interface. Still, the guy's got some psychosomatic glitch from it that means he's always going to limp.

He also remembers a few guys with similar cases in other, various limbs, or phantom pains, though I'm not sure he says it's always a 100% chance that this happens to you. He also briefly mentions one pilot who was shot in the sensor suite, the "head" of the battlesuit, and how that really fucked him up, though his thoughts never elaborate on what that entailed.

I'm not even sure they use neural interfaces for tanks. We see art of Longstike operating his hammerhead and he seems to just have a cozy seat with some holographic buttons and dials to use. Plus, he's been spending a bunch of time inside hammerheads to no ill effects.

If burning out your pilots due to such direct neural interfaces is an issue, then perhaps you should save battlesuits for the roles you really can't replace with vehicles, and then use a normal fucking vehicle for if you need a really big gun on a mobile, well-armored platrform?

But piloting a giant animu mechie is like, 80% of Tau Firewarrior recruiting. They give out crisis gundams at every recruiting center even!

Will Farsight finally fulfil his destiny and achieve godhood in this edition?

Protection 101:
Not being hit >> being able to survive the hit

Now that all the waacfaggots are gonna be jumping ship, i kinda wanna pick up all the unpainted crisis suits they're selling, along with some broadsides and stealth suits and build a thousand-point farsight list. I've already seen two riptide armies up for sale, hopefully a bunch of smaller suits follow

Fire caste don't need any fancy propaganda to recruit. They frankly have no choice.

I guess Fire Caste do other things like policing and sports besides being soldiers. Otherwise, what was their job during the centuries/millennia-long peace after the unification?

First for stealth suits are amazing now

Trying out the crazy shit the Earth Caste made?

Actually I think 2x flamer or 2x burst cannon might be the only viable way to use Crisis Suits now. There are lots of ways to get fusion blasters, plasma rifles, and missile pods but there are few ways to get flamers.

I would still bring a plasma rifle or fusion blaster as the third weapon but in Infantryhammer the crisis suits are best used as anti-infantry.

Can somebody do the math about ATS versus a 3rd flamer?

>Then they went full retard introducing the riptide, then consequently the stormsurge. To me the giant robots dont fir the lore of a conservative and intelligent race. Giant robots are for measuring dick size, not really for any tactical reason.

I don't care for the Riptide but the Stormsurge makes perfect sense

As the Tau empire expanded they realized their enemies and their tactics are barbarous and brutal. To match the brute force of the space marines they needed a mobile heavy weapons platform.

Riptide is literally just gundam fanwank

>I guess Fire Caste do other things like policing and sports besides being soldiers. Otherwise, what was their job during the centuries/millennia-long peace after the unification?
I't mentioned that they indeed were goiung bonkers with nothing to fight before the expension stared. Then they went way too trigger-happy at exterminating "dangerous local life forms" and even voted for hunting down other sentients when Tau first met them.

And speaking about police and law-enforcement work, it's water caste that handles that shit on tau planets.

optimized stealth cadre is a good expansion to those units

Ghostkeels seem to be really good now and Stealth Suits are great too

>As the Tau empire expanded they realized their enemies and their tactics are barbarous and brutal. To match the brute force of the space marines they needed a mobile heavy weapons platform.
Why not just make it a grav-tank? It's way more efficient platform for heavy weapons

Quick question related to how FtGG works if a unit within 6" is embarked on an open-topped transport. Can Pathfinders embarked in Tidewall Shieldlines still fire overwatch for adjacent units?

Probably because the Tau Fire Warriors are equipped like WWI riflemen and the Tau were never actually that efficient when it came to tactics. They were notably more realistic than most other factions, most of the time, but that was their theme, not some introspective piece of fluff on how retarded everyone in 40k is for being inefficient.

All fluff up until the surge was they just called in a manta to heavy railgun enemy titans and anything else some hammerheads couldn't handle, and actively looked down on Imperial Titans and Ork Gargants as inefficient use of resources when you could build a small starship for the cost, complete with better, bigger weaponry. Then suddenly BAM, riptide and stormsurge.

I've heard this perpetuated everywhere, but is there actually any piece of fluff that supports this or is it just headcanon that's spread about? As far as I remember the Tau were actually somewhat afraid of Titans due to how insanely powerful they were for their design, I think I recall it simply being that they were forced to retreat or got hammered every time Titans showed up.

If there's a source saying otherwise, I could accept it, but I've yet to see one.

other user, but it's somewhere in the 1st codex iirc. can't prove though, since not at home.

The stormsurge has a giant cluster rocket system, more missiles, destroyer missiles, and a fuckoff huge cannon meant to take down space ships.

Heavy weapons have huge recoil. The anchors on the Stormsurge are better than trying to create sufficient thrust through a hover system.

Whichever volume of Imperial Armour introduced the Manta and Tigershark had this in it.

I was under the impression that the Tigershark AX-10 was an attempt to make a Titan-killer because the Titans were actually stomping around anywhere they showed up, but I'll go take another look in case I'm misremembering.

The stormsurge makes perfect sense for situations where a Manta either can't make it to the surface or can't accurately fire because of terrain

The Riptide is just a big crisis suit and there's no justification for it

In xenology a scientist researched an alien that could control/guide his own species with a pheromones gland. It than went on theorising that the eldar(not sure) had bioengineered this gland into the tau.

but user I've read this years ago and don't remember it exactly. I got this book somewhere in my attic.

Anyone interested in 8th ed lists in this thread? Here's something I just put together mostly from bundles.

Idea is that the 2 larger FW squads (+4 gun drones) in transports run around and shoot stuff with the auras from Darkstrider, the Fireblade, and the PF''s pulse accelerators. Stealthsuits dick around and commander turbos 40" every turn. Might replace Coldstar Gundam with a normal commander w/ 2 fusion blasters for more AT.

I've wanted to play a Tau army like this for a while, mainly very mobile infantry with a bit of suit support. Plus I can get it up to 1.5k with SC crises and a ghostkeel.

Let's talk about Seeker Missiles

Are they worth taking?

Which units are good at carrying them?

R8 my formation

Sorry for the ghetto-ass quality, I don't have much space right now. The MSpaint scribbled units are ones I just ordered.

Forgot to say, this is a Brigade Detachment (9cp) and Fortification Network. I still have 10 points to play around with, do I shove a seeker missile on each hammerhead?

Is there any reason to run burst cannons on hammerheads?

10 pt per burst cannon versus 8 points per gun drone... Seems like gun drones always win.

They do. Burst cannons are an option for units that dont have drones competing for the same slot.

Gun Drones must fire at the closest unit, Burst Cannons don't.

Well to be honest, about 110% of all 40k designs are fatally flawed like that, from flying bricks to exhaust vents directly next to the access points, guns blocking doors, spindly legs on everything etc.

Well with the current suit point prices you need like 8 models for 1k army.

I can't see this mattering too often since burst Cannons are a pretty short range weapon

Drones have the added utility of being able to disembark to capture objectives and take wounds for infantry/battlesuits

It really annoys me when these "I'm not like the other girls" are sucking on antitaufags dicks trying to score some brownie points on how they riptides and shit and try to explain it with lore. Riptide came to be because nova reactor. Nova reactor was a game changer which allowed tau to do things that was impossible for them before it. Then Sho'aun went nuts and embezzled funds for his giant animu mecha projects.

>meant to take down space ships

The manta has 2 fuckoff railguns meant to take down spaceships, because it is a spaceship

>anchors

You could have any sort of grav tank land, anchor itself, and then function as a heavily armored bunker that could still move and wouldnt be vulnerable to someone shooting its ankles or ramming them with a rhino.

Except the Stormsurge is so large, it takes a specially modified Manta dropship to bring it to the planet in the first place. If a location needs Stormsurge support, you're still wasting a manta sending it there.

Furthermore, you're using that many a to carry only the Stormsurge instead of 4 hammerheads and an 8 man crisis team. Not the greatest logistical tradeoff.

Again, a Grav-tank makes more sense, because it could travel long distances more easily and not have to do armless sprints to try and keep up with the rest of the force only to come to a stop at the first canyon or river

>i dont know how combat works durrr

Tanks are great on open fields but good luck trying to navigate them through cityscapes

There are lots of situations in a war where a tank or ship are not practical, stop being a contrarian faglord and open your mind

Tanks work fine in cities, especially tanks that can hover and fly over any broken or rough ground.

If we're discussing Titan-killers anyway, then you don't really want to be fighting in close-quarters in a cityscape, you want to be blasting it from the longest possible range with heavy railguns.

And, if for some reason a giant Grav-tank won't fit on a road while a Stormsurge will, consider that you still gave up the option for 8 Crisis suits and 4 hammerheads, which would do even better in an urban environment because they can fly over stuff and won't get stuck trying to turn around and having their giant gun get stuck on a skyscraper.

>stop being a contrarian faglord and open your mind

No. Everything about the Stormsurge is dumb. Every single facet of its existence has needed retcons and garbage fluff to justify putting that walking pile of shit on the table.