Guns don't kill people, Markerlights do.

Tau. I know i'm a little late to the party on this one but I'm really obsessed with the little blue space commies.

I've been playing Tau for years, I even managed to get myself known as 'Tau guy' at my local club... down to the fact that nobody had ever seen another Tau player before. I quite like carving myself a niche in the local meta so I welcomed the chance to try and spank people with what was seen as a pretty underpowered codex. This led to weeks of feverish optimising and playtesting until I was using a list I was happy enough to use week after week after week after week and at tournaments. I found that I was so 'happy' with the list that I couldn't stop using it. I tried to re-write a list from scratch which ended up being exactly the same list, point for point.The old dex didn't leave much room for variety, I'd squeezed out every drip from an already skinny and two dimensional army book. For the sake of my own sanity and with a heavy heart I shelved the Tau and went back to being a Space Wolf douchebag.





With news of the new dex  I got rather overexcited. In scenes akin to some kind of drug relapse I got my old minis out and began using again, once more shooting pure Kauyon through my veins. Reading through the new dex like a scholar pouring over an ancient tome I began to formulate and plot and plan. Internet orders were made, delivery dates were counted down and opponents were challenged. Once more the Tau would go to war, but this time it would be different!

...Then none of my packages arrived. I waited almost 2 months, emailing the retailer repeatedly to no avail. I had to play the people I had been threatening with the wrath of riptides with the same bloody list that had driven me away from the Tau in the first place. RAGE QUIT.

Anyway. The actual point of this post is to announce that over the next few months I want to evaluate and asses the Tau dex. I have my new stuff, I have a head full of new ideas and tactics and a keyboard. Not the musical variety of keyboard, the kind of keyboard that plugs into an interweb machine and allows me to spout bile anonymously on the internet. Although I can play the keyboard...




Here's my list of the pros and cons of the new dex in MASSIVELY BROAD strokes:


Pros

• Shooting. This book is brimming with the best guns in the game, laugh at your imperial opponents with their second rate armaments!
• Mobility. Tau can move around well, skimmers and jetpacks are great for being able to get around the table without being funnelled by terrain.
• Flexibility. A Tau army does a great job of being customisable enough to deal with most battlefield situations.

Cons

• Close combat vulnerability. Tau still can't do close combat. Even a bog standard close combat unit from another dex will wreak havoc through your lines if left unchecked.
• Stormtrooper syndrome. Without markerlight support most Tau units have trouble reliably hitting a barn door at 6 paces. 
• Expensive troops. The cost of allowing firewarriors to cruise around the board in the luxury and safety of their own Devilfish soon gets pricey.

On the surface of it it seems that our overlords in Nottingham haven't shifted much focus on what Tau are good or bad at - they still rock massive gats (or guns to you and me), they still suck in hand to hand and their units still need some form of synergy to work effectively. My goal is to deconstruct the dex, get the best out of the pros and limit the cons, all in brain-fart web form.

ENJOY!