*destroys your game*

>silly Orks, picking their noses! Tau don't even have them

>The trouble with Tau is they tried to be too many things at once.
I don't know about that. The point of the Tau is that they're a quintessentially non-40K race that happen to exist in that universe. And to that end all those things serve their purpose. Their anime mecha design aesthetic makes them seem completely at odds with the rest of the setting (while simultaneously staying true to the 40k 80's fantasy/sci-fi theme), as does their optimistic outlook and non-feudal society and their more practically-themed "let's just shoot them from way over here instead of bringing a chainsaw to a gun fight" playstyle.

The Tau are perfectly designed for what they are supposed to be. The issue is the concept behind them in the first place was flawed. They're a great idea for a minor race from a lore perspective, but the issue is that 40k is a tabletop game and they have to be played up in importance to justify being playable and thus can't just be the fun minor "What if the Federation met the Imperium?" side story that they ought to be.

I don't think this is disagreeing with what I've wrote. You have to analyse 40K from the perspective of a tabletop game, for which models and miniatures are produces and expected to be sold. This means that strong, out of left field exceptions will never do well, compared to variants on existing designs like IE the 40,000 different flavours of Marine.

>3rd edition was the most grimdark of them all
>4th and 5th went by with little issue other than a brief stint of fish of fury
>Broke 6th, but needed the help of the eldar to do it. Also got darker lore right around now
>were very strong in 7th but nowhere near taudar levels
>Useless in 8th, and ignored in the lore so far

Yeah, I'm going to have to doubt that claim OP.

This, desu.
The point of the tau was to be the token 'reasonable people' to contrast all the insanity against. And, obviously, team reasonable are totally fucked, because 40k is an unreasonable setting.
Unfortunately, that got kind of forgotten and they turned into a MECHS FUCK YEAH faction, which diminished things.

>Their anime mecha design aesthetic makes them seem completely at odds with the rest of the setting WRRRROOOOOOOONG

Their STAR WARS PREQUELS design makes them at odds with 40k. As evidenced by the eldar, anime aesthetics are perfectly compatible with 40k

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By their own design, they naturally fall into the position of humans in most scifi settings: The young, bold species, ready to take to the galaxy. They are exactly what humanity was in the first days of the Dark Age of Technology.

Shit, why couldn't we get these tau?

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Imperials?

There's nothing deep about 40k. It's a stupid parody that takes itself way too seriously.

actually, them becoming MECHS FUCK YEAH is just them adapting to the rest of 40k

The more they encounter fucked-up shit, the more extreme and over-the-top they become

Farsight leads a team of super-badass dudes to protect his empire and it works better than following the ethereals

the Empire started creating giant mechs after encountering the full force of the Imperium and it worked for them

the 4th sphere septs became xenophobic extremists after seeing all their auxiliaries go insane and it worked for them

I predict that, once they figure out that they shouldn't constantly shave their heads, they will rival the Sautekh dynasty.

>it's a parody
>it takes itself seriously

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minus the navigator gene

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>actually, them becoming MECHS FUCK YEAH is just them adapting to the rest of 40k
Or rather, it's them being adapted to the rest of 40k, because their original shtick doesn't actually take them very far as a faction and they needed something to appeal to both 14-year-olds and the inner 14-year-olds in the hearts of the people that might play them.

what's this supposed to be a parody of?

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Squats?

Well, I can see it with the Orks being clearly hooligans.

Which is a lot better than having them be designed to appeal to 8 year old kids who just watched the Phantom Menace and liked it.

Which is literally what they were originally supposed to be.

Tau are a small fish in a lake full of sharks, and to give them protagonism GW is always turning them into Sues.

which is just the 80s trope of "street punks are the modern day equivalent of medieval barbarians" played straight

Early 40K was much more self-aware of how outrageous stupid it was.

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A mary sue is never in the wrong

the more powerful the tau become the more they become assholes

You are an edition late. Now they are a big empire.

I've seen the new map, they aren't at all. They even lost an entire sphere trying to get warp engines

Lion el Johnson is named after Lionel Johnson, a catholic closeted gay poet who wrote "Dark Angel" to express his secret desires.

Who else, duh.

They are about the size of a necron dynasty which is already huge. The Imperium just keeps getting more and more holes from necron, ork, chaos, and tau empires to the point that I doubt they have even the so-called million planets anymore.

That guy flying in the background looks like he is having the time of his life.

Or they just didn't have the resources to hire really good illustrators who could make serious-looking art, and had to do with what they had, which is to say very clumsy approximations of B movie posters and 2000AD comics.

It's not parodic it's just clumsy.

Now that they have bigger resources they can afford art that looks serious, they'd have to make a purposeful effort to include art that looks goofy

Do you want your codices to include art drawn by that one furry who does the Warhammer Community cartoons?

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Lyyn Elgonsen*

>Chainsaw swords, giant walking battle cathedrals, space elves, space dwarves, undead terminators, and giant green soccer hooligans.

Yeah. Super-serious work of scifi guys.

Most of that stuff is played straight.

It's not super-serious (as in, supposed to matter in the real world) but most of it is played straight.

It can either be spun into comedy or into horror, or both.

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Doesn't look huge to me.

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that's what people with poor vocabulary call Pastiche

Oh! Also freaking demons, and satanic cultist in space!

They've been fucked over by every other faction. Even by Dark Eldar and AdMech. AdMech! Retarded, superstitious, incompetent technofetishists.
Their emperor, the most important character of their everything, awful as he was, got killed by a bunch of reeeeing mary sue retards, not even by Farsight or Primarch.

Oh yeah cause that's totally parodic and not just something that's supposed to be cool.

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>an entire sphere
That's not something they "lost", that was a failed expansionist wave, they didn't lose any territory to it.
They're a big enough power to be seen on the galactic map, and they've intelligently colonised a very dense packet of space. Size can be deceptive in space, the vast majority of planets the imperium holds are mostly empty, with only a few mining stations dotting the planet, or highly spread out farms. While a hive world may have tens of billions on it, an agri or mining world may only have a few tens of millions. Meanwhile, if the tau are as high-tech as they're implied to be, they could be using advanced techniques such as mining out their planets and constructing dyson swarms to hold hundreds of billions to trillions in each sept system. I'm not saying they're on the same magnitude as the imperium, not by a long shot, but "space" covered in the galaxy is nothing but a disadvantage when it comes to a galactic empire, as if the tau exploit their dense cluster of stars more efficiently than the imperium does their average system, combined with their much shorter inter-system travel times and distances, it really isn't that surprising they've been able to hold off the bloated, inefficient, anti-progress Imperium.

I remember reading some short story somewhere (not 40K) where a galactic federation ala star trek is contacted by a nested world about the size of earth, which wishes to join them, but upon doing the maths, the union realised that this single planet, due to having been completely hollowed out and refitted for maximum storage efficiency, held a larger population inside than their entire union, comprising thousands of planets.

I find it funny how a setting as dumb as 40k gets how old and huge would a galactic empire truly be better than other scifi and it is still minuscule compared to the real thing. If that were at scale at 1080x1920, 4 pixels would have over a million worlds.

>muh dyson
they aren't, but that aside, why is it that the current generation of nerds has such a giant fetish for muh dyson sphere despite it being a rather dull concept compared to everything else they might have read about?

>they didn't lose any territory to it
They didn't get any either, and lost a shit ton of resources and manpower, which unlike the Imperium they can't just replenish easily.

It's grand and simple to comprehend compared to even simplest arcology blueprints.

40k is a comedy where everyone is the straight man.

That something that has never made sense when they have breeding factories, government-directed breeding programs, short lifespans, and armies of robots to do all menial work.

Gits Manga is so stupid. I can't believe Gits came from this manga.

The imperium doesn't bother to terraform anything though, and have gigantic gaps in their empire due to natural paths in the warp, making travelling from one system to another easier than to some other system, regardless of distance.
But yeah, scale is always pretty seriously off in sci-fi, as the true scale of the universe is nigh-on incomprehensible.

Dyson SWARM user, not sphere. The original concept for a dyson sphere was a swarm, but these days "dyson sphere" usually refers to a single giant object, which is slightly ridiculous. Dyson swarms we've already begun making, by putting satellites around the sun. All we need now are inhabited ones.

They actually did get some territory in the north of the galaxy. Whether that new bit can actually be considered part of the empire is debatable, but regardless, the giant wormhole it resulted in (the startide nexus) allowed them to kick off their fifth sphere

so yeah, that was a net positive overall. The only issue is that now, there's a faction of xenophobic tau, which poses all sorts of ideological problems for the empire, which is why they don't talk about it

what's wrong?
Not serious enough for you?

Or it's horror you can laugh at

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Is this the new lore from the codex?
Is there any more you can dump?
Who are these new xenophobic tau, and why are they cut off from the empire? Is the Startide nexus one way?

it's just what I heard from the youtube review of the codex

the xenophobic tau are the 4th sphere. They were teleported into the north of the galaxy, and exterminated all non-tau on their worlds, possibly after seeing them succumb to chaos possession.

They're in touch with the Empire proper, but all data about them is suppressed

they aren't chaos tau they're genocidal tau

It seems that they tried to go big with warp tech for their 4th sphere of expansion. It backfired, but the 4th sphere fleet survived and was scattered across the galaxy (a good excuse to face tau outside of the empire).

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Daily reminder auxiliaries are both the best and most underutilized feature of the Tau.

They really should get more of a focus with more species, they mix things up and let them fit better into the rest of the setting while also playing to the "Star Trek Federation but in 40k" kind of vibe.

Kroot are hindered by the Tau

Tau are barely propped up by the Kroot

the Kroot deserve their own codex

the Tau barely deserve to exist

This desu, the Kroot fit better with the aesthetic of 40K

>Tau at their core are Japanese gundam with a Samurai thing
Lol all these years and people still say this shit.

Because after "all these years" it's still the case? They have a healthy anime theme.

Why the fuck weren't they given sept rules in the codex?
Oh wait, it's because they're just old farsight enclaves again.
>No auxiliaries
>seperated from the empire
>information about them suppressed
>hate xenos

So what, are FE set to rejoin the empire now, and we'll get new lore for these guys?
Also love how GW is now just totally abandoning the ally angle.

>Their anime mecha design aesthetic
LOL, their shitty british wanabe "anime" aesthetic you mean, the fucking westenerns tried to sell this shit as the new hot cool robots here and they were shit and expensive, what is more funny is that here and more importanly the Japanese play power armors and IG more than every shit.

>The backstory of the setting even accounts for Tyranids (see Pharos
pharos came out in 2016
Tyranids have been in 40k since 1987.

Lol at all these years and people still call them "Communists" despite the fleeting resemble that is on the whole thinner than that of the Imperium, while meanwhile aping the clothing, weaponcraft, honour systems and story-telling format of fuedal Japan and samurai fiction.

>I'm autistic, don't use language with contextual meaning
No, man up like the rest of us

>Ethic of self-disposability
>Everything belongs to the state, for your own good of course
>Everyone is equal, except some are more equal than others
>State atheism and strict thought control through heavy indoctrination
Gee I wonder.

*Destroys your Codex*

Tau are the most popular xenos army, they're a success regardless of the butthurt they cause on Veeky Forums

*Leaves transhuman fluids in the heroine your empire forehead*

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But I love the Tau

Well... fair the communist thing was always retarded. But Tau's are anime as RWBY and who ever like them because "dude they are the W40k anime" is at the same lvl of people that love dubs and play Infinity.

In their first editions they were pretty good High Tech asians, when someone decided to add more bigger and uglier battle suits (not the Ghostkeel) and shit their original flavour while getting more overpowered full of ironical weebs powergamers they killed a lot of respect for the faction.

FW was doing kind of good work when they were making Battle Suit variations like those commander suits and XV8 variants.

Yep, you've done a bang-up job of describing the Imperium there, especially under ol-Emps himself.

Now describe where the ronin rifleman completely with horizontal shoulder pads and baggy thigh pants, seven samurai knockoffs, bushido priests and blatant merchantism and reaching out to other races fit in.

Never said anime. That was always a retarded take. The only thing anime about 40K is the Primarchs, especially Fulgrim. Big difference between East Asianism and Feudal Samurais stuff and Anime, even if they all fall under the purview of weaboo. Tau are not the "weaboo" faction and never have been, they're all the other stuff described in the thread.

>surrounding a ship with an anti-matter envelop protects you from daemons in the Warp.

Why didn't the Imperium think of this?

No one ever pretended everyone was equal in the Emperor's Imperium, and private property (and privacy) was a thing.

Because neckbeards hear "greater good" and assume communism even though fascism also stressed the greater over the individual. Hell even the symbol from which Fascism derived its name (the bundle of sticks known as the Fasci) was about the whole over the individual.

Imperium doesn't have anti-matter tech.

Their equivalent would be vortex technology which are warp-derived as it is

The T'au are EXPLICITLY, LITERALLY, UNARGUABLY inspired by manga. That's not up for debate, it's a documented fact.

And so are eldar, by the way.

the t'au society is largely based on Plato's Republic

hence the "Greater Good". That's platonician terminology

>Humans are destined to rule the stars!
>Oh but only certain Humans, like the Emperor (not a human) and his Primarchs (not humans)

Meanwhile, Tau empire has prolific open trade.

Honestly I'm not even sure relentless neckbeardry can explain this fuckup. There may have been some comment in a WD circa 2002 or whathaveyou that has since snowballed beyond all sense, but the term doesn't fit anything unique or distinctive about the Tau in the setting. Pretty much any movement more collective that pure individualism uses "the greater good" as a principle, it's just a neat catch phrase meant to emphasise the idealistic, smug nature of the Tau.

Really.

>t'au
Ah, you are motherfucker?

>> 3rd sphere is a rookie dot on the map in old galaxy map
>> In a few hundred years becomes as big as a necron dynasty
>> Also has forces expanding in other parts of galaxy

Their rate of expansion is immense. Another two successsful spheres of expansion could see their Empire grow to 4-6x it’s size on the current 8th ed map.

No one has ever pretended that everyone was equal in the Tau Empire either. They have fucking castes.

Private property is a bit shady in the Imperium. In theory the Emperor(and the Council of Terra) own all planets in the Imperium

The caption of that picture in the Rogue Trader rulebook was "Space Marines collecting taxes in the Eye of Terror." I'm not making that up.

>Big difference between East Asianism and Feudal Samurais stuff and Anime
You're right, this totally screams "feudal Japan" and not at all anime.

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It's original wh40k art my nigga, it used to draw heavy inspiration from British comics like Judge Dred, Nemesis the warlock and probably from American comics like cobalt 60 too

Okay, I admit, the tau aren't even remotely inspired by samurai.

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I know what it's from

The idiot who posted it did so as a way to "prove" that 40k is a parody.

So I ask: what is it a parody of?

What is meant to be funny about it? Where's the joke?

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why are the tau the gayest? is it because they're blue?

What part of "Gundam" do you smoothbrains not understand?

I'm being harsh to you because I could see that comment coming from a mile away.

Replace the tau with GW and the image will be correct.

>I could see that comment coming from a mile away.
...Then did you consider that maybe it made sense?