Right let’s get this out in the open from the start. It’s cool to like the T’au. Okay? Forever the bottom barrel of every losers 40k jokes, The T’au have been getting dunked on by people in the fanbase with an aversion to soap. A common problem people seem to have is that they don’t fit the “established lore or grimdark setting” which is a wild take given the plucky blue babies of the galaxy have been in the game since way back in 3rd edition… which, makes them just as established in the tabletop… as the Black Templars. Yeah, take that you moody losers!
So, with that in mind we can continue, As I said, the T’au are cool. Naive as they may be with their Greater Good philosophy and lack of knowledge on warp shenanigans, running an army of mecha suits backed up by railgun toting soldiers and tanks will never not be cool. My first purchased model was a T’au Commander! I was so excited to get him built but was then hit by the bullying and jokes that come with it and I’m ashamed to admit it hurt me so badly that I traded him for a squad of Votann. However! Not long after that I decided my joy mattered more than what some losers on the internet might say, and I went out and bought the full Retaliation Cadre box, a kit containing a Commander, a Broadside, a Ghostkeel and a Riptide! Safe to say, I was immediately hooked. My first ever win on the table came with the T’au, and ive since then gone on to have a pretty healthy win rate with my Battlesuit heavy Retailtion Cadre list!
I’ve only been playing the game since 10th edition, so I can only use my experience there for any examples, but now with 11th on the horizon I feel like I have enough information to take a stab at how well our favourite ion toting xenos boys might do with all the new rules!
First off let’s talk about this new Hidden rule. Any infantry, Swarm or Beast models will be unable to target outside of 15” so long as they are within cover, and haven’t shot in the previous turn. When this was first announced a lot of the shooting army fans had a crisis (suit) thinking this would make them nigh unplayable. With sneaky little melee threats running up the table safely until they’re right on your doorstep and charge in to beat you to death… I was part of this fan group, worried it was about to be very hard to be a shooting phase enthusiast. Then I had a bit of a revelation, the Hidden Rule goes both ways, and both Stealth Battlesuits and Pathfinders, our 2 best spotting units, are infantry, and while the Hidden rule means no shooting if I want to keep that 15” buffer of safety, guiding targets just needs a unit to be eligible to shoot. Suddenly we have our best units for spotting and actioning able to hide in terrain and just keep on spotting all game in safety! In my experience once an enemy realises just how useful Stealthsuit guiding is, they become a key target and get hunted, making them able to hide away and keep doing what they love to do and making it harder for the enemy to stop them? That’s a big win for The Greater Good in my eyes!
Next up is charging in general. Like in Age of Sigmar, Charges will now be rolled first, then targets selected. This makes it less risky to go for a long bomb charge when you can just use a lower roll to move into something closer even if it isn’t your preferred target. Again, this is a big help to melee focused armies and worried those of us who bring guns to chain sword fights. Another key change is that engagement is now 2” rather than 1, so hiding 1.1” behind a wall is no longer keeping your models safe from harm! It’s a little harder to put a positive spin on these changes for our precious T’au, but I’m full of hope, so my belief is first of all that with the increased engagement, and the fact that you need to roll the charge to get base to base, not just within 2”, snake eyes rolls will now mean for sure, a failed charge! No more guaranteed charges! Melee players will need to be even more certain of their positioning to make sure everyone gets in. We still don’t know for sure if infantry will be able to pass through solid terrain like they can in 10th, so there is a chance too that putting a unit of Crisis suits 2” beyond a wall will make them safe from harm for at least a little while!
Now, since we’ve spoken about walls, lets talk about cover. Possibly the biggest change noted by players was Cover no longer giving the defender basically a +1 to save by removing 1 from the attacks AP, now it gives the defender -1 to hit. Not only does this make the thematic sense, it also makes those guns with 1 or 2 AP suddenly feel much more valuable. T’au as a faction love high AP shots, what we don’t love is being made worse to hit, when we already hit on 4s without guiding, being made worse hurts bad. A lot has been said about how bad this could be, but we also seem to be missing one of the key parts of our army, Markerlights. In lore the T’au often carry around laser designators called Markerlights to highlight priority targets for the bigger guns. On the table in 10th this translates to any units with the Markerlight keyword giving [Ignores Cover] as well as the standard +1 BS on all the guns. Now lets just take a moment to read that again…Ignores cover. So, if that remains… your unit hiding in terrain thinking its going to be harder to hit, is now losing its safety net and the T’au guns are still getting made better to hit in them! This might be me huffing hard on the copium but please GW, let the Markerlights stay and keep doing what they do…
My final point then, Characters! Anyone who’s kept up with the T’au in the last few months will now The Twin Lance landed and immediately became everyone’s favourite pair of close-range Gun Kata psychopaths. Getting sustained hits and ignores cover natively when shooting the closest target, being as fast as a crisis suit team, hitting on 2s with all those guns… and then being the single best melee unit in the army thanks to hitting you with…guns in the melee. This T’au Wick lads have changed the way people build lists and within weeks of launch were panic nurfed to cost more points and no longer be able to move at the end of every fight phase if they didn’t try fighting. The melee profile of guns has made a lot of people hopeful that it’s a sign of change to come for the whole army making use no long flee every fight on the table and instead, like the orks, try our best to get stuck in up close and personal! I’m on the fence with this one, while I would love to make use of every phase in a turn, I do think making T’au actually decent in a melee takes away a small part of their theme that makes them fun. So perhaps it should be limited? I’d like to see battlesuit units for example have the “guns in melee” profiles, but infantry models should stick with the guns and keeping things back! A change I’d love to see with characters is making the current ones better in general. Right now for example, Commander Farsight is arguably the most popular single T’au model and character in the lore. Even with his massive super daemon killer sword, his not much to write home about in a melee… so come on, lets make him live up to the hype! If I was in the rules wriritng room I think I’d suggest that Farsight should have rules much like the Primarchs, Cawl and more recently Commisar Yarrick and Wazdakka Gutsmek, an ability that lets you pick from 1 of 3 options. Something like 1. Any battlesuit unit within 9” gets plus 1 to wound on any target they shoot within 9” of them. 2. Any Battlesuit units within 9” if they aren’t engaged with the enemy can jump back into strategic reserves and 3. Pick any battlesuit unit within 9” and they can advance and shoot/charge. These ability options suit Farsights close range Mont’ka tendencies nicely, but also make him highly adaptable during a battle which is very much on brand for him based on the lore! And if we still have another ability just for him on the data sheet? Let him heal D3 wounds on a melee kill, The Dawnblade is keeping him young and healthy so why not write rules around that!
So there we have it, 11th edition will soon be here. The basics of the game seem to be the same but with the known changes, we might be seeing a totally different experience on the table, and while it does seem to favour those armies that want to be swinging a chain axe and running at you with murder in their eyes, its by no means the end for those factions who think combat is better through the scope of a railgun from 6 miles away… For the Greater Good.
