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The Tau really are a hair's breadth from annihilation when it comes to the Imperium, it's just not worth the effort this millennium. If the Damocles gulf crusade hadn't diverted to kill tyrannids or if they'd caught one of the grown up sized waaaghs, there wouldn't be any Tau left. They're just lucky enough to have doctrine that works well against the tyrannids, and badly against everything else -- the Imperial Navy creams them every time they fight, because there's nothing stopping them from just cruising past the firing line and shredding them with broadsides.
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Feb 7, 2017 10:11
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EponymousMrYar posted:The consistent problem the Eldar have with this is that they don't seem to get that everyone isn't Eldar and therefor does not behave like them, nor do they have the same set of bias's and assumptions. Also they keep underestimating them. Isn't this all perfectly in character for the Elder though? Makes me want to hear what plan, failure and outcome would be in character for, for each race/army list in the 40K universe.
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Feb 7, 2017 12:29
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wiegieman posted:The Tau really are a hair's breadth from annihilation when it comes to the Imperium, it's just not worth the effort this millennium. If the Damocles gulf crusade hadn't diverted to kill tyrannids or if they'd caught one of the grown up sized waaaghs, there wouldn't be any Tau left. They're just lucky enough to have doctrine that works well against the tyrannids, and badly against everything else -- the Imperial Navy creams them every time they fight, because there's nothing stopping them from just cruising past the firing line and shredding them with broadsides. Yes, yet they'll never actually go away and have absurd bullshit by the bucketload on the tabletop.
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Feb 7, 2017 13:37
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Cythereal posted:Yes, yet they'll never actually go away and have absurd bullshit by the bucketload on the tabletop. in 40k "don't get into melee" counts as absurd competence.
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Feb 7, 2017 14:42
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Mycroft Holmes posted:in 40k "don't get into melee" counts as absurd competence. Tell that to the space BDSM monsters, space Demons and space zombies.
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Feb 7, 2017 18:27
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Annointed posted:Tell that to the Orks
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Feb 7, 2017 22:03
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Comstar posted:Isn't this all perfectly in character for the Elder though? Makes me want to hear what plan, failure and outcome would be in character for, for each race/army list in the 40K universe. This got me thinking, so here's what I can pull up off the top of my head in relative order of 'overall success.' Orks Plan: Get into a fight. Failure: Perfectly willing and eager to fight themselves without direction. Outcome: Unable to achieve any significant victories except by happenstance/accident. Tyranids Plan: Consume all life in the universe. Failure: Space is huge and they only have one brain to spread out amongst themselves. Also are really really scary. Outcome: Eventually they lose control of parts of themselves which devolve into acting like stupid animals which are incredibly easy to kill. Usually because everyone tends to stop fighting each other to kill them first because they're scary enough to cause that. Imperial Guard Plan: Protect the Imperium from it's myriad foes through military doctrine and superior numbers. Failure: Space is huge and the Imperium's foes are many. Outcome: Forever putting out one fire after another and dying in droves while doing it. Space Marines Plan: Protect the Imperium from it's myriad foes through superhuman prowess and superior equipment. Failure: Superhumans are still human (read 'fallible') enough and their numbers are limited. Outcome: Forever putting out one fire after another while glacially heading towards oblivion as their finite amount of geneseed gets nicked/lost over the millenniums. Chaos Forces/Chaos Space Marines Plan: Further the plans of their patron Chaos God while attempting to corrupt and subvert the Imperium's forces at every turn. Failure: The Chaos Gods are incapable of not dicking each other over. Outcome: Forever getting backstabbed by themselves even when that backstab is in the shape of enemy/non chaos armies showing up just in time to stop whatever it is they're trying to do. Necrons Plan: Wipe out all life in the universe. Again because the first time didn't take. Failure: Life finds a way and they're sleepy groggy robots now which slows the whole process down a bit. Also they're really really scary too. Outcome: Unable to mass a significant enough force to further their efforts, especially when everyone tends to stop fighting each other to make them go away for a bit (like the Tyranids.) I don't know the Tau well enough (I can surmise their failure and the outcome but I don't know what their overall plan is) and I can't think of any other armies I would actually consider full fledged armies for purposes of doing this (Sister's of Battle are Space Marines lite and the Inquisition is the Imperial Guard With Chaos Failings.) Edit: also this is somewhat old info combined with wider fiction than just the army books. EponymousMrYar fucked around with this message at 00:43 on Feb 8, 2017 |
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Feb 8, 2017 00:39
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The Tau's big failing is they are a blip. as in a single larger hive world has more population than there are tau period, the entire tau empire could be lost on one of the larger more populated imperial hive worlds. (Terra alone has trillions living on it for example.)
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Feb 8, 2017 00:58
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Every other faction has tons of moving bodies compared to the Tau. Hell if the Black Templars felt like it and decided to fight the Tau with all their numbers the Tau would be wiped out in no time. That and the fact that Tau have no endgame supergod that'll make them nigh invincible.
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Feb 8, 2017 01:11
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My personal favorite stuff kinda-sorta-maybe hinted in the lore is that the Tyranid swarm is a gigantic galaxy eating swarm... that is fleeing for its life from an intergalactic Ork WAAAAGH e: ^^^ Tau have the advantage of being the only faction that has time working in their favor. They're overtaking the Imperium in some regards, and they have a sorta-maybe endgame in establishing contact with all surviving "neutral" xenos to form a pangalactic "gently caress the Imperium" alliance. my dad fucked around with this message at 01:14 on Feb 8, 2017 |
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Feb 8, 2017 01:12
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my dad posted:My personal favorite stuff kinda-sorta-maybe hinted in the lore is that the Tyranid swarm is a gigantic galaxy eating swarm... that is fleeing for its life from an intergalactic Ork WAAAAGH We iz takes da teef o' godz himself.
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Feb 8, 2017 01:24
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EponymousMrYar posted:This got me thinking, so here's what I can pull up off the top of my head in relative order of 'overall success.' The Orks wouldn't consider the above a failure or a bad state of affairs. They just like to wage war for its own sake. As far as they're concerned, this is their utopian dream endgame scenario. The fact that they constantly war among themselves and lose as many wars as they win is of no concern whatsoever. The galaxy of 40K, my friends, is Ork paradise.
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Feb 8, 2017 01:39
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Oh, huh, how did I miss this thread. Posting for an easy bookmark when I get home. 
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Feb 8, 2017 02:35
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Skippy Granola posted:We iz takes da teef o' godz himself. This is peak Ork. Nothing can top this, unless they use Tyranid teeth as a form of Enough Dakka.
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Feb 8, 2017 02:37
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my dad posted:e: ^^^ Tau have the advantage of being the only faction that has time working in their favor. They're overtaking the Imperium in some regards, and they have a sorta-maybe endgame in establishing contact with all surviving "neutral" xenos to form a pangalactic "gently caress the Imperium" alliance. No, they don't have this advantage at all. It's a significant thing in the fluff that the Tau can afford to outfit all their ships and ground forces with all the fancy kit that they do for a simple reason: their standing forces are tiny compared to every other faction. All those battlesuits and fancy toys are expensive, and the Tau are small enough that they can afford it and small enough that they can keep the supply up. Doesn't help that Tau ships are pitifully slow in the fluff - and again, they get away with it because of how absolutely tiny their empire is. The Imperial Guard doesn't use the lasgun as their standard weapon because it's the most powerful gun they could have chosen, they use it because it's the most powerful gun that's practical to equip trillions of men and women with. Space Marines got stuck with bolters at their creation because they were much cheaper and easier to manufacture in the numbers needed by the Marines than the volkite guns the Emperor originally intended for them. Something to think about for the Imperium: there are planets, plural, that are colossal factory worlds that do nothing but manufacture lasguns. There are other factory worlds that do nothing but manufacture lasgun power cells, or bolter shells, or chainswords, or any of the other weapons the Imperium uses. The men and women of the Departmento Munitorum, the Imperial agency responsible for keeping Imperial forces across the galaxy supplied with the weapons and equipment they need, probably count more people in their ranks than the Tau Empire has people, period.
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Feb 8, 2017 03:07
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Nope, their plasma tech is straight up more advanced than Imperial tech. Time works in Tau favor because the Tau are growing while the Imperium is shrinking. That's the whole bloody point. They're somewhat comparable to Asimov's Foundation - mercantile imperialist assholes who are somehow* surviving everything the galaxy throws at them despite the odds. Tau travel is about an order of magnitude slower than imperial travel, which is still stupid fast enough for the purposes of reaching out, bonus points for being reliable. It won't ever happen, of course, because the setting is not about the Tau really. *fuckin eldar my dad fucked around with this message at 03:18 on Feb 8, 2017 |
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Feb 8, 2017 03:16
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my dad posted:Nope, their plasma tech is straight up more advanced than Imperial tech. The Imperium has far, far more advanced plasma tech than the Tau - the catch being that the availability of Imperial technology is exceedingly uneven and your typical Tau plasma gun is better than the typical Imperial plasma gun. But every once in a while there's an Imperial plasma gun that's much better than the best Tau plasma gun. Time only seems to work in the Tau's favor because they're so tiny that many of the problems intrinsic to the Imperium don't apply to the Tau. The Tau don't have a need for goods and tools that warrants planetary-scale industry. The Tau have never worried about fighting a war at the end of a years-long supply chain. The Tau have never had to figure out how to equip, feed, train, and deploy military forces numbering in the trillions. The Tau have never confronted Warp Storms erupting in their supply lines or in habitable systems. The Tau have never faced the full might of a Hive Fleet like Behemoth, Kraken, or Leviathan. The Tau never had to face half their military turning traitor. Remember that humanity in the Dark Age of Technology was capable of teleporting star systems across the galaxy, creating stars, and employing time travel as practical battlefield technology. The Tau aren't even a blip on the radar compared to what the Imperium has on hand for extreme emergencies.
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Feb 8, 2017 03:25
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Counterpoint: Anime.
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Feb 8, 2017 03:28
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my dad posted:Counterpoint: Anime. Also, your beloved Tau were literally manufactured by the Eldar as easily manipulated minions.
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Feb 8, 2017 03:30
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Good old reliable Cythereal. Sorry thread, I'll stop now.
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Feb 8, 2017 03:32
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EggsAisle posted:The Orks wouldn't consider the above a failure or a bad state of affairs. They just like to wage war for its own sake. As far as they're concerned, this is their utopian dream endgame scenario. The fact that they constantly war among themselves and lose as many wars as they win is of no concern whatsoever. The galaxy of 40K, my friends, is Ork paradise. Which is why the Orks have the most success, because they don't care about achieving significant victories. It's more of a meta failure state however: they don't really get anything done. Then again that was 40k in a nutshell before the Eldar became Aeldari And since people are saying stuff about them, here: Tau Goal: ?? Expand, Explore, Exploit, Extermin- I mean spread the Greater Good. ?? Failure: The newest and second-smallest kids on the block who have the best toys but don't know what all the hoopla about this 'Warp' thing is and why everyone's so hung up about it. Outcome: The deadliest game of Risk ever as they somehow manage to have enough force to survive all but the most dedicated assaults on them and enough diplomatic savvy to keep those assaults from thinking they're worth destroying. That's actually kind of the nutshell of the Tau really: they're playing a different game than everyone else and they're starting several millennia late on that game. To put yet another game simile to them: they're the Civilization player that joined the game late and sat on a nice remote island researching and turtling while everyone else was expanding.
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Feb 8, 2017 03:57
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Eldar, because fuckin elves, also have (had?) two! End games. Craftworld Eldar: Goal: Collect the souls of the dead, use them to summon Ynnaed to go Kill Slaanesh. Failure: Get eaten by Slaanesh/die out. Status: Eldrad done hosed up and this is a (partial?) failure. Harlequinns: Goal: Reunite the Craftworld and Dark Eldar peoples Failure: Get eaten by Slaanesh/die out. Status: Victory? I think that part of the Aeldari changes include the Dark Eldar and Craftworld Eldar being on the same page now. As for Ork's failure state: An Ork Waaagh penetrated the Eye of Terror and invaded a demon world, and wasw wiped out. The entire Waaagh is resurrected each day to fight demons again. The Orks involved consider this a success. And as for Plasma tech - Imperial Plasma weapons are set to the absolute brink of what they can handle. Which is why they sometimes explode. Tau Plasma weapons are set on incredibly low power relative to Imperial versions.
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Feb 8, 2017 04:44
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EponymousMrYar posted:Necrons From what I remember, and granted this is back from 4th edition before they retconned the 'crons, they didn't fail to wipe out all life the first time. They succeeded in harvesting all/almost of it, then decided to go hibernate while the galaxy repopulated itself with a new stock of Sentient Life-Os. Now it has and they're waking up to a full continental breakfast. Again, dunno how much that's been changed/impacted by newcrons. But that's what it used to be.
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Feb 8, 2017 04:54
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The Empire of Man is (I think) fighting literally on tens of/hundreds of thousands of planets/sectors/whatnot at a time. That's not actively maintaining forces or logistics, that's combat zones while in full tilt production and conscription. They're spread out so far apart that just gradually attrition is (at least by my very broad understanding of the fluff) whittling them down over millenia of warfare as they slowly lose things and are ground down and have fewer mobile reserves and more units get plugged down into eternal trench warfare on a galactic scale and their bureaucracy is more entrenched than ever and has little room to adap out of intertia.
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Feb 8, 2017 07:04
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Veloxyll posted:Eldar, because fuckin elves, also have (had?) two! End games. Three: Dark Eldar Plan: Torture the souls out of people and eat them to steadily replenish what is being slowly nibbled away by Slaanesh. Failure: Get eaten by Slaanesh/die out. Status: Still around, probably teaching the craftworld idiots how to not get eaten now that all their soulstones are gone. VVV That's just where Asdrubael Vect keeps PoptartsNinja fucked around with this message at 07:33 on Feb 8, 2017 |
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Feb 8, 2017 07:21
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Deldar are currently crapping their pants over the giant sealed gate to the warp under Commoragh that they have to surround with kidnapped pariahs to keep closed. There's something banging on it.
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Feb 8, 2017 07:27
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Cythereal posted:Remember that humanity in the Dark Age of Technology was capable of teleporting star systems across the galaxy, creating stars, and employing time travel as practical battlefield technology. Wait, what? That sounds like that the Star Trek Federation was the Dark Age of Technology. Age is about right too I think.
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Feb 8, 2017 10:25
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Comstar posted:Wait, what? That sounds like that the Star Trek Federation was the Dark Age of Technology. Age is about right too I think. As I remember, in one of the Horus heresy books (I think it was Mechanicum) an Imperial ship fires at an Eldar vessel, misses, then rewinds time to shoot it again. EDIT: Did a little research, and boy was I off the mark. The book's Priests of Mars, and it's not a HH-era ship, but an Ark Mechanicus (basically, a ship filled with the AdMech's best toys). Said toys included stuff like a black hole cannon, and instead of reversing time for itself, simply shifted the Eldar ship into the past so that its shot had always hit it. It's also implied that all the Arks Mechanicus are not just STCs, but self-updating STCs. Basically, if the Imperium has a win condition it can achieve, it'd be in the hands of the techpriests. CommissarMega fucked around with this message at 11:28 on Feb 8, 2017 |
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Feb 8, 2017 11:23
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Where the heck is all this new lore? I thought Lexicanum might have some of it but it seems to have nada.
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Feb 8, 2017 11:28
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CommissarMega posted:As I remember, in one of the Horus heresy books (I think it was Mechanicum) an Imperial ship fires at an Eldar vessel, misses, then rewinds time to shoot it again. The Ark Mechanicus in Priests of Mars is a unique (for now) vessel that was unearthed and repaired/reconstructed. There's no real formal Ark Mechanicus class of ships. By default, an Ark is just a very powerful ship with a lot of cool AdMech toys. In PoM's case, it is a unique vessel dating back to at least before the Dark Age of Technology. The toys aboard are not just some of the best the AdMech have but also stuff that far exceeds AdMech stuff.
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Feb 8, 2017 12:00
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Argas posted:The Ark Mechanicus in Priests of Mars is a unique (for now) vessel that was unearthed and repaired/reconstructed. There's no real formal Ark Mechanicus class of ships. By default, an Ark is just a very powerful ship with a lot of cool AdMech toys. In PoM's case, it is a unique vessel dating back to at least before the Dark Age of Technology. The toys aboard are not just some of the best the AdMech have but also stuff that far exceeds AdMech stuff. This is why I love the mechanicus, half the time they're begging toasters to work by praying to them. Then, very rarely, they actually pull out some amazing tech and get it working.
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Feb 8, 2017 14:46
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CommissarMega posted:Basically, if the Imperium has a win condition it can achieve, it'd be in the hands of the techpriests. I mean, access to a full STC means you can just start building Titans and Battleships again, not to mention start providing the populace with lostek like vaccines and inexpensive genetically engineered food.
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Feb 8, 2017 18:45
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As for the Tau they recently had their priorities changed after the Kauyon and Mont'ka books. Thanks to the actions of those two books the Tau took a heavy beating and a loss of a very important person and now they are switching from expanding and invite people to WAR! Kill all none tau!. Also the Mechanicus set the area of space between the Imperium and the Tau Empire on Fire! Now I don't know how that works. Edit: JT Jag posted:A complete STC getting in the hands of either the Mechanicus or Dark Mechanicus would be all but a victory condition for the Imperium or Chaos respectively Unless it is an STC for toothpaste or something silly. Remember each STC corresponds to certain piece of equipment and half the time they don't even know that it makes until they try and turn it on.
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Feb 8, 2017 18:57
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koolkevz666 posted:Unless it is an STC for toothpaste or something silly. Remember each STC corresponds to certain piece of equipment and half the time they don't even know that it makes until they try and turn it on. It may have changed in the meantime, but IIRC the term is often used for two separate things: A proper "full" STC was a computer system that contained basically all the combined technological knowledge and plans for everything ever. You could basically go up there, tell it you want to build a bunch of tanks but only have wood and granite as your resources, and it'd spit out detailed schematics and step-by-step guides on how to do the whole thing from the bottom up. Kind of like a ridiculously advanced wikihow, except actually useful. Each colony would have at least one of those, allowing them to quickly build up with minimal previous know-how required. Now, all of those full STCs are assumed to be lost forever. What does however survive are hard copies of individual schematics and plans found within them, which are also called STCs for some reason. These may just be fairly simple things, such as blueprints for an advanced combat knife. There are a fair few of these scattered around, and not all of them are actually useful to the Imperium. Some have been found detailing powerful warmachines, but the AdMech has no idea how to even begin building them. Imagine finding the construction specs and blueprints for a modern computer, while you don't even have the infrastructure to produce simple transistors. Edit: Sometimes the STCs also incorporate automated factories. So you'd just dial in what you want, throw in a bunch of requested raw materials in one end, and receive a shiny new tank out the other. Presumably the original full STCs also had that functionality, making them even more valuable. Perestroika fucked around with this message at 19:16 on Feb 8, 2017 |
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Feb 8, 2017 19:10
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Perestroika posted:It may have changed in the meantime, but IIRC the term is often used for two separate things: A proper "full" STC was a computer system that contained basically all the combined technological knowledge and plans for everything ever. You could basically go up there, tell it you want to build a bunch of tanks but only have wood and granite as your resources, and it'd spit out detailed schematics and step-by-step guides on how to do the whole thing from the bottom up. Kind of like a ridiculously advanced wikihow, except actually useful. Each colony would have at least one of those, allowing them to quickly build up with minimal previous know-how required. Ah my bad and I apologise I only knew of the less advanced versions of the STCs, never knew they had full database versions.
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Feb 8, 2017 19:26
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koolkevz666 posted:Ah my bad and I apologise I only knew of the less advanced versions of the STCs, never knew they had full database versions. IIRC, the difference is between Standard Template Constructor and Standard Template Construct.
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Feb 8, 2017 19:33
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There are Mechanicus Magos who spend their entire lives hunting the universe to find just the blue prints. They send whole drat fleets to go after the constructors and data bases. They've yet to find one that isn't somewhat corrupted and broken. But it has lead to some rather spiffy *new* tech for the impirium. If I recall, one of the flamer tanks the space Marines use came about because they helped the mechanics find a constructor that only had one working design on it. Point being they're a really big deal. Because they circumvent one of the biggest weaknesses of the imperium. They don't know how half this poo poo works.
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Feb 8, 2017 19:38
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Yeah, original complete STCs were sent with colonists to be their guide to how to set up a colony. None of them have been recovered. Even the slightest of STC fragments are considered priceless by the imperium: there is a standing order that if any non-Mechanicus member finds an STC fragment of any providence, regardless of what is on it, they are given a fortune and their own planet.
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Feb 8, 2017 19:46
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EponymousMrYar posted:
Shoeless posted:From what I remember, and granted this is back from 4th edition before they retconned the 'crons, they didn't fail to wipe out all life the first time. They succeeded in harvesting all/almost of it, then decided to go hibernate while the galaxy repopulated itself with a new stock of Sentient Life-Os. Now it has and they're waking up to a full continental breakfast. Again, dunno how much that's been changed/impacted by newcrons. But that's what it used to be. Newcron lore pretty significantly torpedoes that. The new lore is that they were once mortal beings with very short lifespans who declared war on the Old Ones(tm) for the crime of 'being immortal'. 'Crons get their asses handed to them because the Old Ones used the webway to outmaneuver them constantly. Sometime later Szarekh the Silent King decides to make a pact with star vampires (as in, they literally suck the life out of stars) called C'Tan to get turned into robots. A second war between the Necrons/C'Tan and Old Ones erupts, but the enhanced firepower/toughness of the robo-crons makes the Old Ones create the proto-Eldar and proto-Orks as meatshields (whose prodigious use of psychic powers, in turn, roils the once-calm Warp into the Chaos-filled Hell we know now). This ends with the remaining Old Ones loving off to another galaxy (and possibly creating the Tyranids) but Szarekh realizing that he literally sold his people's souls to the C'Tan, so he comes up with a plan to destroy them after they feast on said souls, shattering most of them except Llandu'gor, who was killed, and possibly the Void Dragon, if it is a captured C'Tan. After this, the remaining Necron nobility realizes that even though they are immortal, they would still succumb to madness after a few eternities, so they decided to take a few-million-year nap until they were ready to rebuild their lost empire. This left the galaxy to the ascendant Eldar, who, of course, hosed everything up (literally). Szarekh then decided to exile himself and fled to intergalactic space, because penance and all that. Then he encountered the 'nids, noped all the way back the Milky Way, and started waking up dormant Tomb Worlds to fight the menace. Some of these Tomb Worlds, and their nobles, have gone a little...strange intervening millenia. Some of them think they're still mortal and fighting a civil war. Some have had their memories wiped and are nothing more than mindless robots. One lord is an undead robot pirate. Their endgame has also changed a lot. Some dynasties do want to extinguish all life and rule over an undying galaxy of robot skeletons. Others want to keep the fleshbags around as slaves. Others use the younger races as experiments in order to reform their own fleshy bodies. And some just want those damned kids off of their lawns.
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Feb 8, 2017 20:19
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One lord is an undead robot pirate. I'm sorry what? Please tell us more while I start planning next month's GW purchases and think of conversions to be done for this.
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Feb 8, 2017 20:32
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