So is the consensus that these drone-swarming, rail-gun toting blueberries would completely sweep the galaxy in all directions if not for lore contrivances?
>>64728038>if not for lore contrivances?Them having a fraction of a percent of the imperium's numbers and vastly inferior FTL drives is not a lore contrivance.
>>64728048>numbersRemind me again how many Spaniards it took to topple the Aztec empire?
>>64728038>Not susceptible to chaos>Actually understands tech>Actually advances techRealistically speaking, they would overpower most other factions eventually.
>>64728057trvke
>>64728053That was a much wider tech gap. The imperium is close enough to the tau in most regards, and ahead in some(warp sciences).
>>64728057when they develop disintegrators (30k tech) call me
>>64728038I'm not familiar with the lore (and this is incredibly off topic) but is there some specific reason GW would have such a mary sue alternative faction in this grimdark setting? Surely there's some kind of dark side to this young upstart civilization? Like some kind of incredibly subtle "lesser races are property" scheme in their beliefs? Like they sterilize humans to prevent population increase or some kind of thing?
>>64728084>Like they sterilize humans to prevent population increase or some kind of thing?That sounds incredibly reasonable to do.Meanwhile the imperium would rather have them multiply until they starve in destitution, then see many of them fall to chaos for that very reason.
>>64728038Warhammer is garbage and doesn't belong here.
>>64728038All i know is that i want to fuck their women
>>64728098That's war crime for a reason
>>64728109The Tau wouldn't do it to exterminate the humans, just to keep them happy and obedient and chaos-free in the long term. Totally different thing.(I don't know if it happens in the lore or how the Tau escape the malthusian trap.)
>>64728053>>64728064It took around 3000 Conquistadors (see pic), plus a massive epidemic, plus 200,000+ soldiers from around a dozen local city-states/kingdoms. The Mexica of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan were also already half dead/dying from said epidemic by the time the offensive side re-entered their valley, and the vast majority of their subject states stayed neutral out of the conflict, so they too only had a force of around a few hundred thousand soldiers at the time to work with.It wasn't actually that lopsided a conflict>Tech gapAlso wasn't as big as you might think. The Mesoamericans may have predominately used wood/stone tools and weapons (though they did smelt Bronze and used it for some tools and probably some weapons, though the latter is a bit contentious), but they were still complex civilizations with organized armies and proper bespoke weapons: Rather then just simple clubs and spears, they had things analogous to glaives, halberds, swords, axes, picks, etc (see >>64701629 and >>64702362). Their cities were also on nearly par with those from Classical Antiquity and Medieval Europe, had very developed waterworks, and cutting edge botanical and medical sciences.Not that the gap wasn't there, it obviously was and was notable, especially due to them entirely lacking cavalry and siege weapons (they might have had Siege towers but that's about it) and having very primitive naval technology, but it wasn't unga bunga tribesmen vs Late Medieval armies, it was essentially Ancient Iron Age/Classical armies, if they had to make do with stone but otherwise had most of their other technological and social advancements, vs a Late Medieval, somewhat poorly equipped Mercenaries (and a epidemic plus a bunch of the same Classical-but-with-stone-weapons armies as allies)
>>647281087 foot tall big tiddy space elves for me, thanks.
>>64728133If you can conquer interstellar travel then food production should be a breeze
>>64728084>there some specific reason GW would have such a mary sue alternative faction in this grimdark setting?Contrast. When everything is grimderp, there's nothing to really serve as a yardstick for how much better things could be. If anything, I think GW should go full hog into making Tau totally enlightened/altruistic in the Star Trek sense just to show how absolutely terrifying and daunting the setting would be for such a faction.
>>64728150So? If the population grows, it will reach carrying capacity eventually. The imperium has entire planets devoted to agriculture alone and their common citizenry is barely above starvation, because there's just so many of them. And if you allow people to procreate at will, they WILL eventually have above replacement fertility rates, that's just due to natural selection for having many children.
>>64728170expansionist empires are a literal plague
>>64728057Are you forgetting the Necrons are waking up and have the most absurd tech by a mile? They have artillery that can lob whole moons at light speed, webway nukes, planet deleting weapons and so on. Remember the Imperium almost got wiped by a single big Ork that was, at best, 50% of a true Krork and the Necrons were fighting those things by the billions, plus the Eldar at their prime, plus the Old Ones. Then after all that they turned on the C'tan, and made car batteries of all of them. The same beings the Emperor almost got killed to barely seal ONLY ONE. If it wasn't for author favouritism they would be the ones to wipe out everyone, but GW loves to wank Chaos and the Smurfs for the 200th time.
>>64728276They're just sticking to the formula that appeals to the largest audience. "The noble defenders of humanity against the vast hordes of evil" is the most marketable story they have. It's only after getting into the lore do people realize how fucked it all actually is
>>64728098They sterilize humans to drive them to extinction anon
>>64728302Literally imperium propaganda. Which is funny because that's still better than how the imperium treats xenos.
>>64728304>that's still better than how the imperium treats xenos.Hell, that's better than how the Imperium treats humans
>>64728084The tau appeared to try and grab the weeb audience. And yes, the tau are still very evil in any other setting, but are portrayed as the reasonable option for asking "join or die" instead of just starting an orbital bombardment and telling you "die scum" a week after. They do canonically do mass sterilize a lot of the "converts" they receive into the empire and their client races are explicitly viewed as lesser. This isn't getting into the whole ethereal a separate race and are physkers actually mind controlling all the tau either
>>64728311All retcon asspulls because of complaints that they were too good so of course they have to have some other shit going on even though the moral dilemma they pose as is was already intriguing on its own to non-brainlets.>What if these dudes who are basically alright decided they wanted to be the arbiters of societal development and wouldn't take no for an answer? You'll probably live a long, healthy, productive and even happy life but it will be perpetually under the mandate of another species' civilization.
>>64728057>not susceptible to chaosthey still are and there are several cases of Tau being possed by demons or falling under the influence of a chaos god, the reason its far rarer even when factoring in their small size in the galaxy is they have a minimal (this does nto mean non existent) prescences in the warp compared to something like humans which makes going after them not worth it most of the time for daemons
>>64728053It took hundreds of thousands of local enemies to do it.
>>64728084>Surely there's some kind of dark side to this young upstart civilization? They're a ruthless authoritarian regime with an eugenics-based caste society that is running a 1984-style surveillance state and treats any non-Tau as expendable second-class citizens at best.>Like they sterilize humans to prevent population increase or some kind of thing?They've done that.
>>64728357Some were enemies, most were just local subject or allied states that opportunistically switched sides as shit continue to went sideways and they had increasingly less to lose and more to gain by helping topple the existing top dog and hopefully retain or gain power from doing so, rather then to stay loyal and risk being in a precarious position even if they win due to how weakened Tenochtitlan was getting and how destabilized the political situation had become The politics of it are very interesting, it's a shame that most people fall for the "Aztec subjects allied with Cortes due to resenting Tenochtitlan for being oppressive", which is a vast oversimplification to the point of being quite misleading, as if anything the side switching was enabled by Tenochtitlan's rule being loose and hands offSee pastebin.com/h18M28BR and arch.b4k.dev/v/thread/640670498/#640679139 and desuarchive.org/his/thread/16781148/#16781964 and desuarchive.org/k/thread/64434397/#64469714 + the other posts I link to within that /k/ post and the two posts of mine directly preceding that one
>>64728337>All retcon asspulls All of it was there right form the start, they only got less subtle about it.
>>64728357So like Tau auxiliaries.
>>64728362To be fair converting humanity to this kind of subservient existence is not hard to do. Just offering basic human needs and some level of dignity is way more effective than being a literal slave to an empire that sustains itself by turning you into a consumable product
>>64728372>Just offering basic human needs and some level of dignity is way more effective than being a literal slave to an empire that sustains itself by turning you into a consumable productThe standard of living in 40k is all over the place, even for the average citizen. Some worlds are slavery on a forge world or human cattle on a hive world and the high population of the latter definitely drags down the average across the galaxy to about 50-60, but there's plenty of backwaters that are nominally in the Imperium but so unimportant they get a visit every century to collect the tithe and check the religion thing is still being adhered to. Even the latter is often just rolling in the local religion as "yeah actually your prophet is an imperial saint now change a few signs and keep it up"And if you're insanely rich, the imperium's standard of living is insanely high. A baseline human who can afford rejuvenat therapy has a life expectancy of 500 years and imperial prosthetics are extremely advanced so if you're into it you can go basically forever. You're not dying of a heart failure or spinal injury, you're getting a new one or three put in. And the overt prosthetics are a status symbol, they can be subtle if that's what someone wants.
>>64728362This is Imperium propaganda. In Tau books humans are treated just fine, so are most aliens, even in Caiphas Cain humans are shown to be treated well by the Tau.The Tau are far more "good" than any country on earth today, if you live in Tau society, you basically live in a borderline Star Trek utopia.>>64728084Tau exist as contrast and the irony of them is the fact that they are a tiny civilization of just a few systems that are most likely going to be BTFO'ed by the main advance of the Tyranids anyway. It's basically "Good exists but will get snuffed out" storyline.
>>64728038They have less drones than the majority of factions in 40k have infantry. They aren't swarming shit.
>>64728038The real magic of drones is actually placing ambush munitions like mines on roads, autonomous HD surveliance cameras and ground placed loitering munitions launchers and large calibera single shot mortars, sniper spotters etcThe era of the asssult rifle is as over as the era of the flintlock musket. 20KM drones that go at 140 KM an hour at 500M, fibre optic HD CMOS and flir cameras and cheap light programmable devices ended it. The effective engagement range of an assult rifle is 300M with crappy go fatsre stripes 800. Intermediate calibres are fucking worthless and even snipers are now marginally useful. Its either drones or heavy weapons firesupport. Everything else is obsolete.
>>64728644Oh look, the infantry is obsolete why even have soldiers anymore tards ate back, again.
>Silent King literally woke up>THIS TIME THE T'AU WILL->Killed by a death croissantYep
>>64728412Part of the problem is that different authors depict it so differently too. Some make it out to be endless grimdark misery unless you're ultra rich, while others (like the Cain books) portray the majority of worlds as relatively decent and the people there have a decent amount of personal agency and even some social mobility, at least until some external force fucked things up. It's a similar story with military forces too, some depict the guard as unwilling conscripts only useful as human wave cannon fodder under dysfunctional leadership, others portray them as NATO-level high quality professional soldiers making effective use of combined arms and so on.Notably, in some of the less grimdark versions, Tau influence comes more from border worlds feeling underprotected by the Empire and from people just being hipsters who are into the idea of a new culture, shiny tech, etc. Also, something I always think about is that, to an outside observer, our world could seem pretty grimdark too. Much of modern humanity lives in pretty shitty conditions too, and we've even got the dismal hive/forge world thing going on in places like Bangladesh or those Chinese factories where workers live in cages and they have to put up nets to stop all the suicide attempts, places like Russia where everything outside the few main cities is crumbling into squalor while they send waves of their population to die in a retarded war, and even in the first world we have plenty of ghettos, impoverished rural areas, and so on. Earth taken as a whole isn't really much better than a lot of portrayals of the Imperium, even some of the relatively dark ones.
>ACKCYUWULLY ALL TAU SUBJECTS ARE UNDER PHEROMONE ENSLAVEMENT>ACKKKKCYUWALLEY THE TAU ARE BEING MIND-CONTROLLED BY BRAIN PARASITES>ACCCKKKKKCYUWULLEEEE TAU ARE UNWITTINGLY CREATING A NEW CHAOS GODOK? Sounds like Imperium propaganda to me. And yet all of humankind lives like fucking South Aziatic poop-worshippers from the 2nd millennium. BTW, I believe that Jesus Christ is my savior, which my Tau allies permit me to worship, and when Christ returns, that golden imposter on his gay little highchair is going to get a massive ass-kicking. I hate the anti-christ! I HATE THE ANTICHRIST! T'AU'VA!
>>64729326This. Perspective, Bias, and Tone are intentionally all over the place in 40k, originally because each faction was full of shit in their own special way.Plus, the general brand is literally 'grimdark' - the setting unambiguously presents itself as a bad, harsh reality with people just trying to eke out crumbs of hope.One of the nice horror bits of recent Tau fluff is how more and more they encounter the reality that the barbarism they see from other factions *sometimes is for a good reason*. Grappling with the dissonance between that and their ideology is genuinely good shit.
>>64729382Based
>>64728057>Actually advances techThey keep having AI rebellions so there's signs that the Tau won't be able to advance tech for much longer.
>>64728038>would completely sweep the galaxy in all directions if not for lore contrivances?Replace blue berries with necrons and it be a yes
>>64728038yes, thats explicitly how GW wrote them for the past 20 years.BUTsame goes for most factions desunecrons should be the only non warp faction in the galaxy "le not all woken up yet" excuse doesnt last forever.the order for full galaxy wide activation should have been issued at least a thousand in world years ago.at some point they are going to cuck the necrons and say "oh actually 99.99999% of the necrons in the galaxy have already been destroyed while they were sleeping teehee" and even then they would still be OP but i have a feeling GW has already relegated them to being a joke faction "silly trazyn, he's so cheeky XD"
>>64728084The Tau are just the sort've evil that people advocate for and support IRL, but competent.Also, there's also way more ways for shit to be grimdark than "lol they HATE EVERYONE isnt that COOL and DARK?" from the people who want everyone to be just as bad as the IoM.Fantasy wins, as always.>>64728038The lore contrivance is the Tau are actively expanding and are simply limited in the fact that that can't be done at infinite speed.>>64728064They frequently aren't but the Taus geatest superiority is that they're much less retarded.>>64728412The average's citizens life is almost universally shit on the vast majority of planet. At best it's 'merely' bad. Those backwaters aren't exactly living in paradise, and also aren't typical either.>50-60Never forget the 30 year life expetency of ultramar.There are some worlds that are genuinely okay to live on, but they're far outnumbered by the ones that aren't. The way the Imperium is outright encourages worlds to be this way.Anyways, Fantasy is way better.
>>64728079they have nid hive fleet destroying nano machines.
>>64728038Take your retarded tabletop dolls back to /tg/
>>64729449>tabletop
>>6472944940k is mainstream now
>>64729453I don't know what you fags do to play this shit but however you play it take it elsewhere. The whole IP peaked with emperor TTS and has been abysmal dogshit at every other point
>>64729471This is the same guy that complains in every fucking thread.Gas yourself kike
>>64729471>playthis thread is about the lore you retard> emperor TTSwas never good.
>>64729437>Fantasy is way better.Preach it brother.
>>64729468We're living in the derpest timeline.
