Taken together, it is now possible to make a Crisis Battlesuit bomb do some real work. It still probably isn’t the best thing Tau can be doing, but the power is there, mostly for the Enclaves.

Mobility. Ironically, while T’au have the units to be one of the game’s most mobile armies, most everything about their play style and rules encourages castling up, forcing the opponent to come to you while being torn apart by withering hails of gunfire. Rules like For the Greater Good encourage keeping units close together while rules like Kauyon prohibit moving at all in favor of a huge boost to your damage output. The end result is an army that can be very mobile and able to move to capture objectives, but isn’t. Farsight Enclave detachments can instead take two COMMANDERs per detachment. While the rule of three obviously means you can’t just take six of the same type, a mix of Enforcer, Coldstar and Crisis suited one lets you fill this up. Sept Tenets Master of the Killing Blow: Re-roll hits against characters. This is OK, but a little bit underwhelming because of how parasitic it is on other abilities – you’re quite often already re-rolling from a markerlight or the Sept trait. It’s also way less good than The Mirrorcodex, but has the upside of not competing with Prototype weapons. At its best on a Coldstar who’s going to go hunting, as it allows them to advance and still shoot at near full effectiveness. Can be worth adding with Promising Pupil when you have a suitably equipped model and the enemy has some characters you want to hunt. C+ Instead of taking a normal relic (including those added with Emergency DIspensation), Tau can instead choose to take a Prototype Weapon System. These are essentially “unit” relics with a much broader set of places they can be assigned than just characters. We’ll cover these in their own section later on. Warriors of the Greater Good

Weight limits

With the Ethereals firmly in charge, the T’au became truly united and their technological progress leapt forward, propelling them into the heavens. Protected by their army – known as the Fire Caste– settlers began to take over systems and assimilate other species under the banner of the Empire, in successive ‘spheres of expansion’. Seismic Fibrillator Node: Do not gaze to long at this less madness take you. OK, the FAQ made it a bit less mad but it’s still extremely weird. Once per battle, at the start of your opponent’s turn, you activate this and then for the duration of that turn you roll a d6 each time a model starts or ends a move (other than a consolidate or pile-in) within 6″ of the bearer, dealing a MW to the model’s unit on a 6. This is clearly intended as a charge deterrent, but it’s very clunky and quite easy to work around, and no longer has the comedy upside of occasionally allowing you to roll 5 or 6 times per enemy model. D+ Drones. Everyone hates drones, and with good reason. Drones allow T’au to tank hits for key units, essentially giving a dozen ablative wounds to their best units. The new FAQ update in September made drones even better, allowing them to even absorb special effects from shooting they intercept and ignore “bonus” wounds like those dealt by snipers. The first loadout tots up to just under 300pts for a full squad and shines in metagames full of horde armies like Orks, whom they will just evaporate. They’re also a nightmare for horde armies to charge, as the Gatling burst cannon extra hits still trigger on overwatch. If you feel you need even more firepower, one model can also take a drone controller and you can bring a bunch of gun drones along as well.

Wisdom of the Many – 1CP: Use in the movement phase. Select one Ethereal unit from your army. Until the end of the phase you can invoke one additional elemental power. Note that you can’t double up on powers. I mean, yup – you frequently want both Storm of Fire and Strength of Stone and now you don’t have to choose. Yay. That’s it. This isn’t complicated. AGiven that many T’au units have BS4+ and (though tanks have BS3+ at their highest profiles), your army will live and die by its ability to put markerlights on key targets to ensure that your best shooting will get through. Because markerlights themselves have to be fired using the Ballistic Skill of a model, you’ll typically want to bring several very accurate characters who can easily put 1-2 markerlights on a target (Firesight Marksmen fir this bill perfectly), then use the Uplinked Markerlights stratagem to get you the rest of the way there. Having at least 1 markerlight is a big increase, but 5 is the sweet spot, and you will want to do whatever it takes to get 5 markerlights on a target that you’re planning to focus fire down. For the Greater Good The battle tanks of the T’au Army, Hammerheads can opt for either a Railgun or an Ion Cannon as their primary armament. And while the Railgun looks extremely cool, it’s almost always going to be a worse option than the Ion Cannon, which can put out a greater volume of shots at nearly the same range and has much lower variance, with the ability to Overcharge for D6 S8 3-Damage shots. The main weakness of these is that they’re true VEHICLE models rather than being BATTLESUIT like a lot of the rest of T’au, so they’re vulnerable to things like haywire or the Imperial Fists’ Legacy of Dorn doctrine where things like Riptides aren’t. The Enclaves now get four traits to choose from. Sadly, they’re at best OK, with some useful choices but nothing with proper wow factor.

Sept Tenet – Calm Discipline: Re-roll one To Hit roll each time a unit with this Sept shoots, and units with this Sept get +1 Ld At her peak Shadowsun was potentially in competition for one of the very best units in the game, but she’s come down in power a bit (while still being good) thanks to an updated datasheet and a shift in the metagame away from Tau Sept. Tau have a huge array of good options for killing, and this is very much only one of them, but TGG has finally given long-time Crisis fans a way to actually use them, and especially in the Enclaves either of these two setups should do work in their assigned roles. XV95 Ghostkeel Battlesuit These get a boost with the advent of Hardened Warheads which boosts up their seeker missile alpha strike potential and Gifted Pilots, which also helps. XV109 Y’vahra Battlesuit (Forge World)

Exemplar of the Mont’ka: When your warlord advances, they can shoot as if they didn’t. Another Trait for mobile Warlords (and mobile armies generally). Might be more useful if there was a compelling reason to play mobile T’au but right now, the strategy is to let them come to you. Still, useful on a Coldstar Commander that needs to be able to close a 40″ gap and then shred something with fusion blasters. B