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Tau are the guys I love to hate, introducing them to us via an illusion of choice was 
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Aug 16, 2015 07:58
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Veloxyll posted:The Imperial Infantryman's Uplifting Primer is frequently checked and updated to make sure it has the latest and most accurate data on the Xenos filth who would dare to profane His most holy domains. 
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Aug 16, 2015 21:00
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Cythereal posted:The main point of the Tau narratively, in my opinion, is that they genuinely believe they're good guys and act like it. They think they live in a rational universe where reason, diplomacy, and the common good can prevail. GhostStalker posted:The Tau are naive as all hell, but that and their superior firepower makes me like them all the more. This is partly why the Tau are the faction I love to hate. I generally like to describe 40k as being a non-sequitur of violence and it's actually strong part of its appeal. Other franchises more rooted in reality often have to live with the unintended consequences of their elaborate action sequences - e.g. Nathan Drake is genocidal maniac who's killed thousands of human beings for baubles that he ends up losing half the time anyway even though he's definitely never presented as such. 40k just runs with those consequences, all of them, with the extra rule that the more elaborate and insane the action sequence the better. The setting is grimdark as all hell but mostly in so far as it enables it to be more fun - bigger battles with bigger heaps of bodies and ridiculous engines of war running amok. The Orks are obviously best suited for a setting like this but even the Eldar, the dying but advanced race, will throw down for a mid-shootout sword fight and send in screaming dudes in cloth armor even though their fancy advanced weapons could evaporate a target from a continent away. If the Eldar see a grotesquely impractical titan coming at them, they build their own even more impractical titan because they are totally down for an old-fashioned and fun skyscraper fight. The Tau didn't show up to have fun. They showed up to win. No melee, that poo poo's been dumb since WW2 and space age technologies have only made it dumber. Oh the enemy uses teleportation to close in? Eh, just give warriors jetpacks so they can shoot and scoot. Oh, the enemy can come at you with grotesquely monsterous titans? Eh, just shoot that dumb thing down using extended missile racks - high end missiles are are way cheaper to make than high end skyscraper robots. Oh, every other faction tries to achieve its goals through glorious conquest and glorious conquest alone? How about we make deals, treaties and compromises - “the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting” after all. Etc, etc, etc. I like the Tau because they're unique, distinctive and a welcome addition to the setting but they're also the faction I personally dislike because they crashed a party with no intention of having fun. I can see their appeal though.
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Aug 17, 2015 22:55
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Cythereal posted:The thing is, the Tau show up to win but they can't. They're rational actors in an insane universe, a very local power in galactic terms that thinks because they've kicked over every castle in their sandbox they have what it takes to rule the whole playground. There is a certain naivety I didn't get into but the Tau are definitely potent despite their size and immaturity. Their cause as it currently stands, is hopeless because of their galactic smallness and the ease at which they get taken advantage of but they're still the only fully-sentient faction whose ledger is in the green. The imperium likes to say we totally could have eliminated the tau, you guys, if it wasn't for those drat 'nids  but the idea holds less water when the tau later rekt the splinter tendril that was coming for them. Tau science can out-adapt the hive mind. The Tau seem to be responding to the insanity of the setting but not by becoming insane themselves. If the Tau continue advancing to their golden age of science, they're definitely in it to win it. The problem is surival, they gotta survive their society's coming of age and remain psyker-less embers in the warp.Night10194 posted:They decided to try to make the Guard's commandos into a separate army for some insane reason, then redesign their armor and give them the ugliest half tracks in existence. Not to mention give them edgy as hell backstories.
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Aug 17, 2015 23:37
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Blind Sally posted:I spent a chunk of last night scouring the internet for Warhammer 40k memes. There are a lot of them and they are pretty funny! You must've found a better site than I did.
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Aug 18, 2015 22:55
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Lord_Magmar posted:there is really old lore about half-Eldar that never got retconned and so is still technically canon. You're thinking of Illiyan Nastase, a rogue trader-era ultramarine chief librarian who was a confirmed half-elf. I would say this is a solid instance of retcon since rogue trader era stuff was really different (space marines were just buff space cops back then for example) and Nastase has since been replaced by Tigurius. I think there are still a few characters rumored to have a drop of xenos blood in their veins still around but there's nobody like Illiyan anymore.
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Aug 19, 2015 05:07
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Shame about the peaks.Pimpmust posted:I'd be alright with Force Commander Vanilla Ice being a recurring villain / rival of Thule, probably involved with Slaanesh though. The FC's hairesy isn't so bad in game or cutscene but his potrait definitely does him no favors. He's like one of those b-list former teen actors who still uses a headshot from the 90s as their imdb profile pic, frosted tips and all.
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Aug 19, 2015 19:28
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here's a post I put in the gbs/byob 40k thread a whiles back, if you like bizarre lore/artquote:ah yes hard counter fucked around with this message at 06:53 on Aug 20, 2015 |
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Aug 20, 2015 06:41
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Blind Sally posted:But what's the deal with the guys wearing batwings? Those are what cherubs used to look like.
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Aug 20, 2015 07:00
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They're like weirder servo-skulls, in that they're like floating assistants. They're more autonomous but also more mischevious, going by the flavor text from the trpgs. You keep them in aeries in high-ceiling rooms. baby supplied bombs, psychic familiar baby, maybe some kind of ceremony baby? e: For a further explanation, the imperium hates AI and innovation. Either there's an existing machine spirit that can do something (machine spirits are sometimes implied to just be admech sanctioned AIs) or they make a person do it - probably with cybernetic enhacement if the job is insane... see the archiver who has to remember the locations of 120 trillion files. Vat grown babies were never alive/aware and are simply grown so somebody can slap cybernetics on its head to make a smart servo without resorting to AI. hard counter fucked around with this message at 07:51 on Aug 20, 2015 |
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Aug 20, 2015 07:25
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habituallyred posted:To start with the Kroot are still going out and getting hired as mercenaries. iirc kroot are so mencenary that money functions like a drug to them, like if a kroot is getting paid enough for a job they're about as a high as your average slaanesh warrior and fight like they're on a whole cocktail of combat stimulatants
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Aug 21, 2015 16:49
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Night10194 posted:Really, the big reason Tau work is because they bring in some contrast and the setting sorely needs it. It helps get across everyone else's crazy deal and helps make, say, the chainsaw swords look equal parts dumb and metal when someone shows up who doesn't play that way and legitimately stands out as a different approach. I agree, the tau are a fine and distinctive addition. The slight downside is that before the dumbness was understated, a true rarity in 40k. Chainswords, for example, are cool but totally impractical and this is reflected in their tabletop statline, str: user ap: -, with no special rules except that it's a melee weapon. That statline is the equivalent of riflebutting and it's only real advantage is that it's one-handed wpn, leaving your other hand free to smite foes for an extra attack. Tau coming in and doing everything sensibly and succeeding for it makes the situation a little more overt.
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Aug 21, 2015 20:06
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EggsAisle posted:Also, how the did Imperium travel through the Warp before the Horus Heresy? A few answers: -Psyker/Navigator tagteams can do a trick where the pysker marks a location with psychic energies almost like a minigolden throne which the navigator can plot a course off of, using it as a point of reference instead. When the warp was calm this was a fairly easy thing to do, and may have been the chief MO for travel but now it's a last ditch course of action if the navigator absolutely can't find the astronomicon and it's been weeks/months. -There was a slew of archeotech for that sort of travel, there's infact some archeotect that can sub in 100% for a navigator as well. Some of that archeotech was abandoned for normal 40k reasons (people forgot how to build it), some are implied to have been abadoned for pragmatic reasons when slaanesh was birthed. Warp Antennas help you travel the warp but make your ship more noticable to daemons - that flaw would've been a non-issue before. This is probably going back to the DAoT though. -Short jumps don't need navigators, therefore wouldn't need the throne either. It's often assumed that the average pirate ship/fleet, etc doesn't have a navigator aboard because those guys are usually expensive, respectable people. Until they kidnap a navigator they're totally stuck doing short jumps, if they wanna live though. E: it's worth remembering the imperium only became the far flung empire that it is today during the great crusade (or at least that's the most recent huge human empire). Building the astronomicon is definitely move to support a large, cohesive empire. e2: have a relevant old pic 
hard counter fucked around with this message at 03:35 on Aug 23, 2015 |
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Aug 23, 2015 02:48
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Heaven Spacey posted:So I'm sure you'd catch a hell of a lot more than just an execution if the Commissar caught you wiping your rear end with it. It also includes empowering and holy prayers that protect and aid the Guardsman in his time of need, such as the Litany of Stealth (to be whispered under one's breath while infiltrating). I've said this before and I'll say it again. If you don't scream out the litany of stealth, loud and proud, when it's called for it's like you don't even worship the emperor. e: now with relevant pic 
hard counter fucked around with this message at 07:23 on Aug 24, 2015 |
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Aug 24, 2015 07:18
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I thought the DoW2 cast of marines was pretty alright, they were diverse and animated as a group but individually each person was mostly one-note.
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Aug 24, 2015 19:51
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I don't wanna post too much lore stuff in an otherwise fun thread, especially lore speculation butLord_Magmar posted:Except if Huron was war-master he'd fail just as much as Abaddon, because Chaos cannot be allowed to win. isn't quite correct. Inside the fluff section of each faction codex there are resounding victories and dismal failures - one of the few brightsides of the stormtroopers codex was that there's a good blend of each since the current trend has been that each faction has been written like a mary sue in its own codex. Anyway the issue Abbandon has was that an outstanding success of the Imperial Guard codex ("maybe if all of our enemies came at us one at a time, we could beat them all! but welp we're fighting everywhere all the time and we're boned") was instead rebranded as inching chaos victories for the chaos marine codex. That didn't sit well with fans. GW could have invented literally anything for the chaos' fluff, it's a big galaxy perhaps there are previously undiscussed major chaos gains elsewhere that Abbandon led that have nothing to do with the black crusades, but they didn't - they were only limited by the imaginations of the writers here. The tau for example, are definitely 'allowed' measured successes against the Imperium. If you really wanted to tie abaddon's horse completely to the black crusades maybe by distracting the imperium with a big pitched battle at cadia lesser incursions were allowed to succeed elsewhere that wouldn't have. Anyway the other issue that abaddon has is that he's sort of a corporate champion that GW pushes onto unwilling fans - the black crusades are cool why don't you think they're cool? Fans, it seems, prefer people like Huron et al as their own champion, to make a geeky analogy. The same could be said of the ultramarines as far as loyalists go.
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Aug 25, 2015 05:24
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e: oops
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Aug 26, 2015 03:45
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As the bloodcrusher rent the stubborn techpriest limb by augmented limb, the noble acolyte of mars buzzed one final chuckle. '80085,' he mused.
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Aug 26, 2015 08:04
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Image21 posted:Most of my mission success depended on getting a baneblade. Then all was gravy. It was getting there that was a problem. If the IG had a three sentence summary.
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Aug 27, 2015 06:42
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Dawn of War 2 in my experience was Alpha Strike: The Game in both MP and SP campaign. For that reason it has a certain appeal in simulating squad level tactics but normal RTS strategies like army build-up & concentration or building counter units to your enemy's stuff tends to get overshadowed by ability management and hit&run, at least when most people have a handle on the basics. Even if you know to do things like throw a grenade at an infantry squad for massive damage you can easily get caught up in this weird meta where your opponent knows that's what you want and has a contingency plan ready to go.
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Aug 28, 2015 08:16
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Pimpmust posted:Natural desert color scheme you say Pretty Marines scheme looking good. anilEhilated posted:DoW2 is really good for this. Just setting up Avitus in a building and watching endless waves of Orks try to run through the meat grinder is among my favorite RTS experiences. All that bloodshed is just so satisfying. One good reason to go with a ranged force commander is pretty much this except when he has the war cry buff on every round gibbs an enemy. The gun that doesn't reload fires a lot of rounds.
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Aug 28, 2015 22:31
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Really Pants posted:Who do you use for tanking if you have a ranged Force Commander? Melee Tarkus seems to take an awful lot of damage, even with max Stamina and Melee Tactician. Iretep has a good alternate handle on it but Tarkus, Thaddeus, Thule and Jonah on CR are all fine subsitutions for an FC tank. If you're playing on Primarch, you don't wanna send melee tarkus at melee units - in fact you don't wanna send any of your melee specced guys at melee units until they've got abilities that make them briefly invulnerable. Those kinds of fights are too even and you'll take damage. You always want to fight the enemy asymmetrically on that difficulty, meaning you try and tie up with enemy's ranged units with your melee and you try to pin down their melee with your suppression/ranged. Melee Tarkus should approach, definitely with tactical advance on, and drop grenades (blind, frag or both) to disrupt melee and then charge ahead to hack up ranged. Your ranged guys should prioritize the disrupted melee.
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Aug 29, 2015 01:26
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anilEhilated posted:Speaking of the Eldar, I just decided to try the space pansies for the first time in Retribution and holy poo poo they're actually fun. Even in a campaign consisting of one linear corridor, being a stealthy bastard is actually pretty cool. The Eldar are really fun to play as in any media - it's one of their main features imho. Nothing sweeter than when your army of specialists pulls off its master plan and slices through the enemy without resistance. Eimi posted:You know speaking of DoW1/2 or I guess rts/pseudo rts, playing stuff like EU4 has made desperately want a pause button so I can plan out tense situations and make my guys react how I want without the time pressure. I don't really want full turn based but I'd kill for that in a single player mode, especially if the AI was smart enough that you needed to pause. I dunno why but my reaction time in these games can be really slow and I have a hard time splitting my attention to multiple units/positions so something like that would make them more fun to play. (drat I'm bad at rts nowadays When I replayed DoW2 a whiles back I thought the exact same thing. CK2 and the Dragon Age series have made me lazy with their tactical pauses  
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Sep 1, 2015 19:09
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I can't speak for dow since I don't recall anymore but dow2 lacks a tactical pause. With tactical pauses you can cue up orders, swivel the camera around and generally still interact with things on screen, time is just frozen, so everything you did during the pause begin happening once you've unpaused. Regular pauses don't let you do any of that, save maybe panning the camera a bit, and might even put a huge PAUSED message in the middle of the screen to block your view.
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Sep 1, 2015 21:11
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Night10194 posted:This would have helped DoW2 a huge amount, too. Your needing to micro your squads a lot to really play it properly would've been much more fun with the ability to cue stuff up. Definitely. I've called dow2 alpha strike : the game in a previous post and being able to co-ordinate your dudes would've made that experience a lot more streamlined. I remember one time I scouted out an eldar grav tank and some infantry when I was playing it on primarch some time ago. I had a good bead on this game by that point so I knew what I had to do to win. My alpha strike whiffed hilariously due to slightly misaligned co-ordination between squads and the grav tank killed 3 of my dudes in like 5 seconds. I mashed retreat as fast as I could but only the FC survived, just. Blind Sally posted:DoW has a "tactical" pause. Not everything queues up nicely since the game is paused, but I can more or less move units around, use abilities, queue construction, and start building units. Right on.
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Sep 1, 2015 21:30
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Yeah sure, let's show the eldar what 11 barrels of diplomacy look like.
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Sep 1, 2015 23:57
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Really Pants posted:In the grim darkness of the far future, everyone in any position of authority is either a scheming sociopath or an inbred moron. Well sometimes there's something that actually need taking or defending, for the imperium it's usually one of those irreplaceable baubles/buildings from their golden age, same goes for chaos and the eldar. Orks would scoff at the notion of passing on a good fight and 'nids can't eat glass. Really it's just the tau that have slim justifications for not orbitally bombarding a planet. Of course you could say that the tau do bombard from long range, just not orbitally 
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Sep 2, 2015 04:44
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Veloxyll posted:Plus everyone wants the planet intact for their own reasons. so blowing sections of it up is not really a viable option. Yeah I think that my original point I just wasn't sure what reasons the tau, in particular, had for not just glassing a belligerent force from space but I did concede that tau combat doctrine is nearly orbital bombardment given its preference for long range. Maybe the Tau don't have spaceguns for exterminatus yet or smaller calibre guns for making big craters?
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Sep 2, 2015 06:05
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Onmi posted:Whereas his predecessor, Shas'o Kais, tends to give a surrender ultimatum before attacking, Or'es'Ka prefers to lead off by orbital striking a population center, then threatening that his forces will cheerfully pound their area until it resembles the results of a protracted cyclonic torpedo bombing if they fail to see the wisdom of the Greater Good. That's... like the one situation where, as the Tau, you don't wanna use orbital bombardment. Using your space cannons to lol at an enemy ground force that wants to fight is one thing but decimating population centres as their primer to the greater good is definitely another thing.
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Sep 2, 2015 08:13
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When I describe this setting as a non-sequitur of violence I usually don't include the Tau but it's nice to know that sometimes they get silly too 
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Sep 2, 2015 08:22
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Pierzak posted:I'll have to ask for citations on the "humanity created chaos gods" stuff, it smells too much of "humans are the most unique snowflakes, humanity gently caress yeah The Khorne one I know is from really old fluff, the gist is that humanity's medieval period (read: europe's medieval period) was so brutal on the one hand yet so honorable on the other that chaos had to adapt a new form to understand it or something. I can't send you to the exact edition for citiation but I'm guessing Rogue Trader or 2nd. Not only is there contradictory stuff now, like Khorne being involved somehow when the very first human brained another with a rock, but I don't think humanity is even responsible anymore. When Nurgle was fully born he was heralded by the black plague on earth, and probably plagues elsewhere, but not caused by it. I imagine the same goes for Khorne too - the whole galaxy must've heralded his birth by taking up jousting simultaneously or something.
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Sep 2, 2015 18:19
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" lovely fanfics. (No, Goto is not a valid source)
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Lord_Magmar posted:Some fluff suggests he was also Hitler, although I cannot for the life of me remember where, it may be one of those /tg/ jokes that I remember overly well. There's fluff stating that Doombreed was an ancient human warlord from before the imperium whose slaughter and genocide won the favor of Khorne. Doombreed could be any number of historical dudes, maybe even a future dude relative to us, but draw your own conclusions
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Sep 2, 2015 19:03
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my dad posted:I love the new thread title. emptyquoting this 
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Sep 2, 2015 20:40
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Pretty sure Slaanesh somehow called dibs on all Eldar souls so it doesn't matter but a radical craftworld aligning itself with Khorne to sow dissention between the gods is eldar as all hell.
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Sep 3, 2015 23:49
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biosterous posted:If Eldar are basically space elves (superiour arrogant dickheads who think they know better than everyone), what are Dark Eldar? Are they basically space drow, or do they go in a completely different direction? They're starting to carve out their own niche now - I'd consider them space vampires. Essentially they're understandably very afraid of dying and do weird, unsettling things to unnaturally prolong their lives, aesthetically some of them are pale space goths but some have moved onto body horror poo poo with grosteque body mods, surgically-attached drug tanks and whatever. Either way, younger Deldar can regenerate/rejuvinate by harvesting psychic agony from a victim but the process loses its edge over the eons so some of the older ones become withered but powerful and may join the ranks of the haemonculi as ancients, a thing similar in idea to a council of ancient nosferatu-esque vampires who have mastered the dark science of their species. Between all that they're still major hedonists as a society and they fly under the chaos radar by suppressing their innate psychic abilities - it's so atrophied there's not a shred of talent left. Night10194 is right in that underneath it all they're eldar that didn't learn a drat thing since they're still as vile and debauched as before - it's noon the day after the party ended but they still think they can keep it going.
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Sep 4, 2015 04:13
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my dad posted:They got in because the guy in charge of the "city" needed a convenient way to remove a rival and his entire power structure, and what's more convenient than a bunch of space marines obsessed with fire? One last thing I should point out is they added a tiny bit more character to Deldar and also mellowed them out a tiny bit. They're still decadent/hedonistic but their society has less emphasis on extreme bdsm and more emphasis on survival of the fittest, the event mentioned here was a Game of Thrones-esque powerplay to create a crisis and feed some rivals to the Salamanders while creating openings to backstab others. There are Deldar mecenary companies that enjoy a bit of co-operation and success in the galaxy and the deldar have an odd couple relationship with other eldar groups - regular eldar are their weird little sister that found God and joined a coven, off-putting yes but they'll still come to their aid since blood is thicker than water. Among other advances deldar dark science worked out how to boost their reproductive rates and their numbers are sustainable, if not glacially increasing. Another poster pointed out dark science can even cheat death in some cases. Lillith now collect oddities and runs a (mostly) wholesome museum of oddities in her spare time and her hair isn't an AP2 power weapon anymore but it still bizarrely ignores infantry armor. Of course all this has been built on an empire of immense torture made even worse when some dude at GW heard about poo poo like human centipede and got ideas but thems the breaks.
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Sep 4, 2015 06:20
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There's Eldar Corsairs as well, pretty much exactly eldar rogue traders, and they make up a part of a broader group of eldar known as outcasts. Outcasts are young eldar that are going through their teen rebellious phase and stopped following a path to go out into the stars and be their own man/discover themselves. Usually they wisen up and go back to Veloxyll posted:Dark Eldar went "NOPE. We're loving off to the Webway. And we'll pay Slaanesh off with the souls of others." Also Commagh, the sole Dark Eldar city, has 7 suns or so because the Dark Eldar know (or at least, knew) how to pull stars into the Webway. Deldar used to be eldar that took part in all sorts of devil's bargains and monkey paw wishes to save their own skins but that's outdated, at least as their main MO. Nonetheless tzeentch may be involved in deldar figuring out how to drain victims to cheat death a few more years though, since that pisses off slaanesh.
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Sep 4, 2015 08:58
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Crane Fist posted:Hey nerds! Someone explain what exactly the Angry Marines are in more detail than 'it's a stupid internet thing', thanks Sometimes people forget that at the core of it 40k is supposed to be fun, albeit one played with a straight face if you're not orks. In more recent years, relatively speaking, people started taking 40k much more seriously. I think the angry marines got traction because they're amusing in all the right ways.  pretty sure there's a version where they all rock out on guitars on the way down
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Sep 5, 2015 07:23
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Onmi posted:People trying to have fun. 4chan is kind of scummy sometimes tho, see the zoe quinn name drop in the article.
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Sep 5, 2015 07:53
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Poil posted:Not only are there Pretty Marines, Hah back when Space Marine was new I used the armor customizer to make chaos pretty marines as my chaos scheme. Black/purple/pink spikes looked really slick alltogether. I think Blind Sally sometimes uses a similar scheme called purple, yeah! Onmi posted:EDIT: This isn't to say Gods can't die, Slannesh murderfucked most of the Eldar Gods. Just there's no real way to do it unless the Emperor flat out became a God. I guess if any of the eldar faction's end-game schemes come to fruition those could put down chaos gods too.
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Sep 5, 2015 19:50
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