#james workshop

Got some new brushes for ProCreate and did a quick little pin-up sketch of Yvraine and and a pink boa.

The Tau, despite having been around for longer than the iPod mini, Webkinz, and the scramjet engine, have a strangely truncated model line. This is partially attributable to unique deficiencies in the army’s intended method of play, but nonetheless do exist. I want to fill those gaps and make Tau cool as fuck. Here’s some ideas

Plenty of armies in 40K have a simple ‘one army, three sub-armies’ make up. For example, the Drukari have the wonderfully alliterative and easy to remember Cabals, Covens, and Cults, each taking an aspect of dark eldar philosophy and filling a role in the larger army. Cabals are your boats and baddies playstyle, Covens having twisted abominations, and Cults do something that I would know about if I was a Drukari player

Necron have Dynasties, Flayers, and Destroyer Cults, with flayers filling fast attack roles and destroyers being self evident

Tau have 1 and a halfish sub-armies. You’ve got the Tau, who do shooting, Kroot, who do fast attack and some melee, and a Vespid, who have one unit. Clearly, something went wrong here. Why do we have two fast attack sub-armies despite having fine fast attack in our main army? Why do we have Kroot as bad at shooting and at melee? Why don’t Vespid exist?

I want to fix this. To do so I’m going to propose a frankly radical solution GW would never do, but I want to see anyways. Give us five sub-armies

We’ve already got Tau, Kroot, and Vespid. I’m not changing any already existing model lines, cause that’ll never happen. Instead, I’m going to round off incomplete lines and introduce a few new ones

Tau. Tau are fine as is. I’d love to see melee battlesuits, but this isn’t the place for more sword mech propaganda. Tau having gaps in their line is the whole point of having auxiliaries, so it’s fine

If I might make a personal request, I would love to see burst cannon equipped infantry. Not all of them, maybe like one in 10 strike warriors could replace their pulse rifle with a burst cannon, or have a wargear option to replace the sms on the support turret with a burst cannon. Trade indirect fire for direct anti infantry. That would be especially useful in boarding action, and not having the turret is a hit to fire warrior’s strength there

Kroot. Kroot are the second healthiest Tau Empire model line by virtue of being the one that actually exists. I think it’s good as is. I have two suggestions here, mostly for my own desire to see Kroot fuck. Give us big Kroot and enormous Kroot.

I want a Kroot melee elite unit. Elite both in unit designation and like Elites from Halo. Gimmie big beefy boys in a 3-6 unit that absolutely slaughter in melee. These will be our melee heavy hitters, our line holders, our brick shithouse with arm swords made of bone and chitin. Like a Kroot ate a space marine and got jacked. Size of a terminator big. These guys should have baller models and fill a much needed gap in the Tau as immovable objects you can park on objectives and laugh as your opponent tries to melee you off.

The other Kroot unit I would want is a dinosaur. Look, James, if you aren’t going to give us exodites at least let our Kroot be dinosaurs. I’m thinking a Knight equivalent, melee focus with big tau guns mounted on it, like that one tau’nar kitbash with the t-rex body and the tau’nar arms. Give use dinos.

And lastly for Kroot, we don’t need it but I think it would be funny lookin as hell, so I’ll mention it. Kroot flyers. They’re already lizard birds, I want to see a Kroot plane equivalent. Like a pterodactyl with a Kroot face and a Shaper on its back holding a pair of reins. Give it transport capacity so it can drop off Kroot or Krootox, or like if it overflies and enemy it can make a claw attack and if it hits it picks up a model or two and eats them to recover wounds. Just be wild with it. It’ll never see competitive play outside of Kroot only lists, but it’ll be a cool looking shelf piece and will give more for the three exodite diehards to kitbash so they don’t go insane waiting for official confirmation that they exist.

Vespid. Of the existing lines, Vespid definitely need the most work. They’re supposed to fill a fast attack role in an army that already has two fast attack infantry units. Here’s some ideas to start us off on a decently well rounded sub-army.

Vespid tank equivalent. I think we should keep with the wasp ascetic, and make a vespid tank. Big ol honeycomb on hover engines, stinger looking gun on top, that sort of thing. We’ve already got IFV and light tank roles filled by the devilfish and hammerhead respectively, so this will be our medium to heavy tank. Our Rougle Dorn equivalent. Slow, heavy hitting, tons of staying power, but weak to melee, so you can counter by rushing it. It’s not going to be taking points by itself, and you’ll want to screen with vespid to keep it safe. Anti infantry guns, big gun on top, with an alt build as a transport for Vespid. Give it some kind of energy shield to take hits and you’re golden.

Vespid shaper equivalent. Make it some kind of vespid queen or princess or something, an hq choice you would only ever use with vespid. Buffs vespid, maybe some pusdo-psychic abilities if you’re feeling generous.

Vespid melee equivalent to the current model line. Can even be one of those ‘one box, but you can build it two ways!’ things, like how the fire warrior box builds a strike team or a breacher team. Cheap trade pieces you throw at your enemies infantry to soften them up. I’m thinking some kind of stinger spear, hits once then you get shot and die for that bee experience. Maybe for every wound you do to the enemy unit, they’re moral test is worsened by one, cause the poison makes em want to run away and die. Moral tests aren’t really around in 10th, so maybe something like reducing oc on units they wound, so they’re really good at weakening enemies holding points but have like OC 0 so they’re never gonna hold it by themselves, they need other vespid to push up behind them and hold

And now, we’re truly in uncharted waters. No existing GW model lines to guide us. These last two sub-armies are going to be less standardized, and I think somewhat smaller

Gue’vesa. Was there ever any question? It’s like the most famous auxiliary, with no official table rep. Give us literally anything. IG units with an upgrade sprue, upgrade sprues for fire warriors with human legs and heads, rules for proxing in IG units wholesale, I’ll take anything. Hell, even just confirmation you can have humans in regular fire caste units, anything.

If we’re going to have a dedicated gue’vesa sub-army however, it can’t just be IG but in Tau colors. It needs its own flavor. I’d actually prefer human auxiliaries get absorbed into other castes rather than making a new one just because humans don’t have a designated shtick. But that’s just my preference. And I’m doing it anyways, so you can’t stop me.

And lastly, my final suggestion for a sub-army. This one isn’t actually it’s own ‘you could run this as it’s own army and do reasonably well in low points games’, it’s mostly just a place to stick everything else Tau need. Give use more weird one off units that fill gaps. We don’t need a full sub-army for phychic, that’d be insane. But we do need some phychic phase rep. Give us like one model that’s a psychic jellyfish in a fish tank carried by a drone that gives you deny the witch and smite. It doesn’t need to be the best pycher in the game, in fact I don’t think it should be all that good. But just something to get around the fact that we have nothing phychic going on.

A jokero weapons smith that’s buffs shooting in an aura or attaches to a unit or something. Adds ap and damage, bypasses invulnerable, just like something to make one big gun crazy good

Sentient mycanoid blob that spawns an equivalent to tyranid bio-mine balloons so you can make objectives deadly to retake