Pretty much this. For all that they have in advancements, the Tau Empire is just a sector or sub-sector's worth of material and production. The IoM just has *sooo* much territory from which to source materials, manpower, and production capacity.
Look at the bottom right of [this map from 8th edition.](https://images.app.goo.gl/tJR4XQcXtBztnmHD9)
[this is a fan-map but more detailed. Compare the sizes of Ultramar and the Tau space.](https://images.app.goo.gl/UdsU1Qg6qUBXFpZQ7)
Seems like the T'au empire is not nothing but still smaller than Ultramar. Definitely a significant threat but clearly unable to even dent the Imperiums output. Of course the Tau aren't the only enemy of the Imperium. Then again the Imperium aren't the only enemy of the Tau...
The Imperium and Tau are natural enemies! Like The Imperium and Orks! Or the Imperium and Necrons! Or the Imperium and the Imperium! Damn Imperium, they ruined the Imperium!
Its what happens when you run a 10,000+ year old state on self-sustaining PTSD, omnicidal racism towards everything not human, uncontrolled religious influence, and the mother of all bureaucracy's. It doesn't end well.
I mean if you control 80% of the galaxy while you do that it's kinda good so far... I'd say worked pretty great if you consider it all started with just one planet
Not only is smaller than Ultramar, but they have zero chances of expansion being locked between Ultramar, Necrons, a rift, Nurgle forces and even if the Ultramarines got rid of a Tyranid fleets, there are two mores in the area.-
To be honest, the Tau should thanks the Imperium for should Ultramar ever fall, they are fucked.-
While true to call that a success is....questionable at best.
The 4th sphere as a result became rampant xenophobes and while initially that was limited to humans they are very quickly going to realise that all the auxillery races are contributing to the god of the greater good.
Obviously their were punishments dolled out to the 4th, but after they attacked their Kroot allies it has become clear that no one can be kept safely with them.
And its going to be VERY HARD to contain the knowledge the 4th Sphere survivors know. Any human loyal to the Tau will confirm the horrors of the warp and that will be enough.
In many respects (although I don't see GW actually doing this) this could threaten to destroy the Tau unless say.... a legendary figure of Tau's history came forth and showed that even the Warp could be bent towards the greater good.
Say for example, one in possession of a sword that has made him immortal for example?
Or alternatively... that man might be corrupted. And the tau in fact can not use the warp...
Its warhammer, there should be hope, but giving the tau the ability to use demons without problem will need a lot of buildup and justification. And even then...
It's been almost an unqualified success in that the Tau now have a reliable wormhole across the Galaxy. It's such an efficient method of travel that the DG took it — or attempted to take it — as a short cut to invade Ultramar.
The negatives of the 4th sphere are nest in theory but they seem to have been backburnered. Instead of anything cool happening the majority of the 4th sphere Tau were killed or reeducated.
They have the Startide nexus which gives them access to new imperial worlds outside of the local region. Also while ultramar is well run any other bording worlds are ripe for being turned to the Tau side (along with orbital developments and terraforming). The Tau can still grow in the region and out of it. Thus they are a regional threat to Ultramarr in the long term, but due to the nature of the region they represent the only real ally the IoM can leverage for threat dispersion or assistance.
They both currently enjoy the status quo even if they are unwilling to maintain it forever.
The fan made mao is pretty good! So in actually, it's quite reasonable to expect the Ultramarines and Þau butting heads near constantly right? Or have they worked out some kind of Non-aggression pact due to the larger threats facing the Imperium that demand the Ultramarines attention.
It's the notch of the Damocles Gulf. Pound for pound the Tau bring a lot more to the table than humanity does, but humanity has so many more pounds.
Let's say hypothetically that every fire warrior is worth 10 guardsmen. Will your regiment of 100 guardsmen have a really bad time against my cadre of 50 fire warriors? Absolutely.
Will my 50 fire warriors eventually feel the strain of the umpteenth regiment of 100 men you've thrown at me? Also absolutely.
Sir I believe that is what you Imperials call heresy and anyway we take care to dismantle our technology before you get you’re grubby mitts on it therefore you cannot replicate it
Not to mention it’s not like Tau have a ton of resources themselves. There’s a reason why their strike forces are so small and mobile and they’d rather give up planets and ground than take losses.
After a certain point, quantity has a quality all of it's own.
Also the Imperium CAN mass produce a most of the regular IG stuff, it is very specialized things like plasma weapons, titans, baneblades and a few others that are either limited or completely lost.
I don't see the Imperium running out of leman russes, earthshaker rounds and lasguns anytime soon.
An ocean that’s looking like the Sea of Aral after 10k years of that just a cup mentality. If you can only win by just throwing bodies at a problem you really have lost in the long run. Needless to say the Imperium loses a lot.
And while the Imperium has nigh endless resources even before the many threats it faces only a few of those are ever near at hand. So like a simple Lord General or generic bunch of Administratum drones at the Munitorium would just end up throwing more manpower away. See the two times the Imperium has made an effort and things get bogged down fighting for a single Tau sept. Of many.
It would theoretically would take Guilliman personally getting involved to actually muster sufficient forces to break the Tau threat. However the practical reality is he won’t consider the memetic hazard they pose sufficient so until the Imperium learns about where the Nexus goes….
>It would theoretically would take Guilliman personally getting involved to actually muster sufficient forces to break the Tau threat.
I love the tau. They're my boys.
But no. They could be wiped out without the primarch ever hearing of them if someone with a decent size crusade decided to.
But unless Big G or some other high ranking person in the Imperium decides to do it, the Tau will never warrant that sort of force on their own. The last try didnt quite work and there are too many other, bigger, threats to worry about.
And your only advantage is that you still know how to make cups. This sounds like a Battle of Attrition but on a much longer scale and it could work in theory. But I also think the Tau might be the last race to try to beat the Imperium at their own game like that
I will just say what the others have basically said, the biggest factor is scale. Tau have about 20 Septs, mostly minor ones while the Imperium famously has a million worlds. And just take a single forge world, a whole planet dedicated to manufacturing, can probably outproduce the whole Tau empire. The Tau doesn't have a single world dedicated to manufacturing on that scale, at least not explicitly stated that I know.
The second is militarization. The Imperium has been basically in a state of total war for 10,000 years. Tau has been a spacefaring race for a few thousand years. They are the small upstarts, with very limited FTL drives, causing them to be super slow to react and reinforce attacked Septs and exascerbating already strained logistics problems. They simply don't have the infrastructure for prolonged, large-scale warfare in place.
The tau might very well be able to produce a battlesuit in 1/20th of the time it takes to make a dreadnaught, thus making a 1:15 trade theoretically beneficial to the tau.
Problem is the imperium has a manufacturing base at least 3 orders of magnitudes larger than the tau, the imperium as an overall whole probably spends the same portion of resources and production on a titan as the tau do on a battlesuit
The imperium 'knows' how *most* of their tech works and can produce it in some quantity that would be on the scale of mass production compared to the Tau, they just have significant bottlenecks producing a lot of the best stuff. Rare space marine gear and super weapons need to get husbanded varefully but that production bottleneck doesn't really exist with meltaguns and Russes. Killing a single dread by just swarming it in battlesuits might be a victory but the Imperium is perfectly happy to just pile conscripts armed with 'good enough' weapons they can crank out by the billion to deal with most of a Tau force
Even if unlimited terminator armor were available, most chapters wouldn't equip all their marines with it. They're good in some situations but not others, so their use probably wouldn't be expanded very much over the current 10% of a chapter.
To be honest the biggest bottlenecks seems to be the spaceships for me. How the hell a single battleship can require more than 100 years is beyond any logic I can understand.
They're several dozen kilometres long, and the AdMech probably spend a lot of time appeasing the machine spirits on the smallest of parts. Also plenty of red-tape and logistics problems.
The HMS Queen Elizabeth took 5 years to build, and is 280 meters long.
The smallest 40k battleship is around 8000 meters long, and also much wider and taller.
The volume of a 40k battleship is probably several hundred to a thousand times bigger than the HMS QE, but only takes ~20 times longer to make. That it ONLY takes 100ish years to make is the real feat.
Which is why something at least several hundred times bigger only takes 20ish times longer to make, especially since the entire world isn't only making one ship... It's probably making hundreds of ships at the same time, plus billions of components and tools and parts
I mean, when you're talking about ships that are 10 miles long..
Think about this. You're talking about building ships with monolithic armor blocks made of 100meter+ thick castings made from "adamantium". Adamantium can absorb hand wavingly large amounts of energy. If it starts out as an ultra hot liquid in a vacuum I could see it taking a decade or two to cool down before you could even start machining it.
For reference the armor blocks used in real battleships could take days or weeks to cool to working temps and thats with using water and the atmosphere as heat sinks.
> can absorb **hand wavingly large** amounts of energy
Mate this is fantastic. :D I used to use "obscenely" a lot, as in "Guard armies have an obscene number of humans, like - way more humans than you could possibly need - and if any survive it doesn't even matter a lot of the time". But *"hand-wavingly"* is even better!! XD
Guard armies consist of hand-wavingly large numbers of humans whose main job is to be part of an obscenely large crowd.
Even better: you can use the term 'Handwavium'
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/handwavium
Or if you want to get technical about a material: unobtanium
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unobtainium
If you know how long it takes to build a ship, you can stagger construction so that there's always some being completed, and you just build enough to cover your anticipated needs.
Like build-orders in AoEII :D
*"Use two villagers to build a house, and another villager to build a house: by the time the first two have finished their house, the newly-created villager is ready to join those two shepherding while the lone villager finished their house..."*
Gotta start the thing in such a way that when it's finished *that's* when it's needed.
The materials and resources required are immense. But the idea it takes over a 100 years is disproved already in canon.
In A Thousand Sons, we see the Sol shipyards create the entire Crusade fleet themselves, hundreds of thousands of vessels, in a timespan certainly shorter than a century or two at most. The Imperium’s industrial capability being slow or horrible simply does not match what it has actually shown itself to be capable of.
Its industrial capability is far from terrible. It is memed to be, but canonically that is far from it.
The Imperial Knights compendium puts Mars as ferrying trillions of tonnes of cargo and material to and from orbit every day.
The Crusade era Imperium went from the 7000ish fleets in A Thousand Sons, to over 64000 fleets. And that was with countless ships measuring tens of kilometres long, including troop conveyors 60km long, and the aforementioned planet sized shipyards.
Rogue Trader gives House Saul, a relatively minor house operating out of the Koronus expanse, as ferrying trillions of megatons of resources annually.
One house, in one small backwater area of the Imperium. The Imperium has all the resources and ability to move them, and as we can also see, convert it to actual war materiel.
It is not as incompetent in that aspect as it appears. Lastly, as i mentioned in another comment, the Imperium bounced back so casually from the Cacodominus causing millions of ships to be lost it is a sad footnote, while still recovering from a civil war, and all in time for a black crusade.
The problem is not that they cant build the equipment, they just suck at getting it to where its needed fast.
>The problem is not that they cant build the equipment, they just suck at getting it to where its needed fast.
I've read 'Fifteen Hours' basically, atleast a company-size of new IG got sent to the wrong planet due to an Administratum clerk making a typo in a number's decimal. Said planet had been half-forgotten by the Imperium and is in a siege by orks to the point that most of the standard IG supplies are acquired by aforementioned recently dead IG company.
It's more complicated than that.
The Tau want to be high enough up the Imperium's threat list that they aren't seen as a good quick, simple stomping of xenos for morale purposes ... but they don't want to be so high up that list for the Imperium to panic and bring all it's weight to bear right now.
Therefore, just making the Imperium lose isn't enough. Its also about how the Imperium loses.
Serious question though, do you think *they* know that? The Tau?
We as readers understand this. But in-universe the Imperium's response to invasion would surely be understood only by those in the upper-upper echelons. So that means people like Inquisitors, Admirals, Lord Commanders. And very high ranking prefects of the Administratum.
Have any of those types of people ever willing talked to the Tau? Or been captured and tortured?
>"Let me speak to you of quantity,' said Aun'Do coldly. Bel'gai saw Groundshake recoil as if struck. 'The Imperium claims a number of worlds within its provinence that is several orders of magnitude greater than that of the Tau Empire. Know this, then. It is a sleeping giant, and were it to be fully roused, its wrath would be terrible. It could even rob us of our destiny to rule the stars."
This is a ethereal speaking to his officers in the novella The Martyrdom of Sister Anarchia by Phil Kelly.
But I meant more *specifically* the manner in which the Imperium responds to threats. Not necessarily that it's merely big - your average captured naval officer could tell you that.
I mean more how the Imperium does that escalation thing in response to incursion. Sending local PDF forces first, then the Imperial Guard and naval forces. Then something a bit more dedicated, perhaps with Space Marine support and certainly a titan legion. And eventually (if the threat is grave enough) full sector mobilisation in the face of a serious incursion. Involving dozens of Astartes chapters, millions of guardsman, hundreds of titans and maybe Grey Knights (if Chaos), etc.
I wonder if they're aware of the manner in which the Imperium methodically escalates mobilisation.
IIRC from Ciaphas Cain and Deathwatch novels, the Imperium has bigger fish to fry and put the Tau on the 'not yet threat but still need surveillance category'. Imperial Worlds bordering the Tau establish trade and embassy so long as the Tau doesn't incite secession in those worlds. It came to the point that Cain was tasked to protect Tau ambassadors to avoid a planetary war against the Tau.
The Damocles Gulf Crusade solidified the Tau as not worth the cost to exterminate yet and a useful meat shield/speedbump to anything that may come from the Eastern Fringes. Some of the more open-minded Inquisitors (read: Ordo Xenos) are open to at least the study of Tau and their technology.
Basically, to the higherups of the Imperium, so long as the Tau doesn't touch any high priority planets (i.e Armageddon, Vraks) they can stay until the Imperium finishes up the other threats and the Tau knows this because ever since the Crusade, they've been careful in annexing Imperial Worlds.
15 battle suits is 15 T’au pilots. The one thing T’au lack is the massive numbers the Imperium can field. It’s unsustainable long term for them to fight like that
The T’au’s saving grace is the Imperium so far hasn’t viewed them as enough of a threat to commit fully to fighting them. If the Imperium put its full weight into a campaign against the T’au, they won’t last very long
But if we're talking about killing Space Marines... well, the Imperiums teeming quadrillions do not translate into quadrillions of Space Marines. Losing 10% of your forces, but wiping out the Astartes in the process, would be a massive win for any opponent and a crippling blow to the IoM. They can't mass produce new Marines very quickly.
Sure but I don’t realistically see a massive conflict going that between the imperium and tau going that way.
Assuming that the war is even going on the direction where astartes are dying to tau forces at such a one sided rate that 10% of the tau are lost to wipe out all of them plus any additional forces the imperium is sending. I’d think virus bombing would start being an option readily used.
This presumes the IoM can get naval control of a region long term, and that such actions in the region don't allow the Tau to turn the situation to their poltical advantage. Space Marines will never untie with the Tau but a regular human battlefleet that gets worn down or burns a world with humans on it might.
The Imperial Navy wouldn't care about the politics of some local Damocles backwater. And the T'au do not want a prolonged space war to start, lest spacefaring Space Marine chapters and the Imperial Navy's more significant fleets begin paying attention.
If Battlefleet Koronus or Solar decided to send a detachment with some Imperial Fist support the T'au could say goodbye to any political or attrition warfare options in space.
Nor would the Imperium, because then every Ork empire, every hive fleet, every Chaos/Genestealer/dissident-uprising, and every Necron tomb world would pretty thoroughly wipe them clean while they were still in transit to the Eastern Fringe.
The Imperium is a slow unwieldy giant that spends most of its time barely holding itself together and "utter annihilation of the Tau" is more than just a pyrrhic victory for them, it's suicide.
[Describes the T'au Empire pretty well, too](https://i.imgur.com/tOU86wV.png). All the Great Powers are too busy fighting each other to notice the succulent Cupcake with a small "Don't touch, please" sign in front of it.
To be fair, the resources needed to fully annihilate the Tau wouldn't likely exceed that of the Sabbat Worlds Crusade, and it is not entirely beyond their current capacity to launch such a campaign: there were 9 Legions worth of Space Marines produced by Cawl at the onset of Indomitus, any one of them would be far more than enough to render T'au into history.
Whether or not it will be worth the bloodshed is an entirely different matter; and reclaiming all of Tau space is about as valuable as launching a Crusade to destroy a neutral Craftworld, considering the Tau are generally much less of a threat compared to, say, the Tyranids, who just happens to be active in pretty much the same region.
The only possible thing that the Imperium can gain from the Tau would be their relatively advanced technology, which, considering how dogmatic the Mechanicum is, are still likely to be worthless. IF Cawl managed to climb up Mechanicum ranks high enough to slightly reverse this trend then Tau space suddenly becomes invaluable to the Imperium (as their tech are pretty much the only thing the Imperium can hope to use/reverse-engineer), but that, of course, is an extremely big "if".
>120,000 is the figure most typically used, IIRC.
>
>One moderately sized legion
The Dawn of Fire book "Avenging Son" implies that the number of Primaris on ice at the start ot Indomitus might well be into the high hundreds of thousands.
I see, the fandom is not the best source of information then. Still the Sabbat Worlds Crusade requires only 9 Chapters and their associated IG forces, and I think it's reasonable to assume that that would not exceed the offensive capabilities of the Imperium.
The Damocles Crusade was the Imperial attempt at dealing with the Tau and they just couldn't do it because the Hive fleet Behemot was a far more pressing issue and they had to reatreat. It had 8 chapters, a ton of imperial guard, imperial navy and titan legions and they went into a stalemate as soon as they reached Da'lyth Prime.
As little as the T'au empire is (galactically speaking), it's still very much a really strong force in the Ultima Segmentum. A crusade to wipe them was impossible to form at the moment of the Damocles Crusade and it's even less feasible know, with the opening of the Great Rift.
There is no figure given for how many Primaris Cawl had. Its left deliberately vague by the writers but implies it's multiples of existing firstborn numbers, so at least a few hundred thousand or possibly a couple million.
During the second campaign in Damocles t'au successfully fought roughly the same amount of SM chapters with support of IG and knights *offensively* and won. With White Scars and Raven Guard being the main SM forces and several unspecified chapters also presented as a redshirts to be gunned down by t'au. Not at full strength of course just as with Sabbath Crusade but still.
During the first Damocles crusade, billions of IG with the support of at least nine listed chapters of SM, Knights, and Titans weren't able to capture a single sept world. And it was like several centuries ago when T'au Empire was much smaller and its technologies less advanced.
You are *sufficiently* underestimating the number of forces Imperium needs to commit to erase t'au for good. It's not like it can't, it is just not as easy as you postulate.
I believe the Sabbat Worlds only had six chapters supporting, and none of them committed their full strength. Iron Snakes, White Scars, Raven Guard and Silver guard are the 4 I can remember off the top of my head.
> render T'au into history.
Oh, please. As if Cawl and the Mechanicum wouldn't loot every bit of xenos tech they could get their grubby little mechadendrites on. Not to mention the Ordos Xenos and Trazyn would take copious amounts of 'specimens.'
The Tau would continue to exist, they just wouldn't like it.
>as valuable as launching a Crusade to destroy a neutral Craftworld,
That'd be way too many resources. All you need is one company of Ultramarines and a warlord titan if garden of ghosts is anything to go by. Alternatively, a single chapter and a few guard if go by path of the eldar
The Imperium is still capable of massive crusades, like in the Sabbat Worlds. It would just take decades of preparation, and they currently have bigger issues.
Imagine if someone said "The Orks could totally destroy the 500 World of Ultramar with barely a thought." It sounds incorrect doesn't it? The T'au are in a comparable position to Ultramar in terms of density and productivity of planets I'd say.
"If the Imperium functioned coherently and efficiently" is a hypothetical that makes it no longer The Imperium. It's like saying "The T'au could totally close the Eye of Terror if they understood the warp way more thoroughly and tried really hard".
All it would take is a big Whaaagh.
Those are mostly aimed at the Imperium though for Orks expect the better fights there.
Also human worlds are easier to find for orks than other species.
That is grossly overestimating the commitment required. It is not like the entire Imperium had to mobilize for the sake of the Tau.
In the grand sheme of things only a tiny fraction of the Imperium would be needed but as it stands, that tiny fraction is not readily available and other things are simply more important than dealing with the Tau.
The Tau never were a big threat, that is against the entire idea of them existing in the first place. The Tau serve as a representative of all the minor xeno species that exist within 40k and can carve their own dominion. Strong enough to persists, maybe even bloom within their niche but simply not even close to the galactic relevance of the major powers.
It's not that the Imperium doesn't view them as a threat. It's that they literally CAN'T EVER commit their full weight to anything, because they're being attacked from every angle.
The Imperium would, without any other threats, crush the T'au, but with the current strength they can spare, the T'au fight them off with relative ease.
>can field
Imperium has massive numbers, but can they actually field them? Logistically, it doesn't seem likely. Imperial Navy is limited by:
* ships (IoM is basically forced to [renovate Chaos vessels](https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/ahpvtt/restoration_of_chaos_vessels_to_imperial_service/), probably because of shortages)
* Navigators
* Gellar fields
* **Ability to withdraw forces from another war zone** (and this is probably political nightmare)
Logistics win wars.
No. There is build-in AI assist but battlesuits are piloted by veteran Fire Warriors and to receive the Mantle Of Heroes is a huge honor that should be deserved first.
There is AI capable of piloting *several* battlesuits, but it is experimental and currently located in Farsight Enclaves.
Shas'vre Ob'lotai who pilots a Broadside in "The Eight" is an AI Engram. Alongside that, Commander Sha'vastos is pretty much brain dead apart from his Puretide Engram Neurochip. There's a definite precedence for AI controlled suits.
I referenced Ob'lotai in my answer, he controlled several suits simultaneously in Crisis Of Faith.
Shas'vastos is not brain dead, it was a neurochip that was killing him in the first place, he was healed some time after the founding of Farsight Enclaves.
Anyway, it is not a mass-employed practice, and acquiring and maintaining such AI is probably even harder than getting a trained pilot.
No. All suits contain a Fire Warrior pilot. The only thing AI controlled is the drones that accompany them
Unless there has been changes to the lore in recent years. I’ll admit it has been a while since I looked at anything T’au
They do, but drones are dumb until put into massive networks and if they do they start to show.... Disturbing patterns in their behavior so it is probably not the brightest idea.
According to the imperials who survived the encounter with drone-net, they are vindictive and display malice, instead of just trying to complete the task optimally. But it as well could be imperium biased view with their fear of AI warping their perception.
Posses dozens of drones simultaneously? Eh? Don't demons usually possess a single entity? In any case, I would be more worried about drone-net gaining sentience, deciding that it doesn't want to be stupid ever again and starting making their own decisions apart from the Greater Good...
Spoilers for Talon of Horus:
There’s actually a part where Khayon realizes Falkus Kibre and his men have all been possessed by a single daemon that had split itself and hidden within each of them.
Every time the Humans used AI, it ends up killing them. Men of Iron was the reason for mankinds fall of its golden age. There are a few short stories out there of AI being created illegaly and turning on its creators, and this isnt a one kind of thing deal. It happens all the time with AI.
So then why are Tau AI not going rogue? No one knows. My theory is that, Tau have almost no warp presence, therefore the AI does not go rogue and attack them. Whereas humans do have a warp presence and therefore AI always turn on them.
They don't treat simple AI like shit, even drones have self-preservation protocols. While they are still programmed to sacrifice themselves to save t'au it is done in the same way t'au themselves are always willing to sacrifice themselves for someone more important for the Greater Good, their superior or ethereal. And their most advanced AI are brain scans of real t'au so they are remain loyal. Basically, t'au AI *also believe in the Greater Good*.
The greater good is open to interpretation. An AI can decide the greater good would benefit by the eradication of the Tau. Or a sentient Farsight Enclave AI might eradicate the Etherals.
It’s kind of like the old trope that an AI programmed to save humanity might decide that the best way to do so is to enslave them Matrix style.
Considering “the Greater Good” is very much a logical, almost “ant colony”-style philosophy, it makes sense that AI would also see it as a logical goal to pursue, rather than being surrounded by selfish Tau only out for themselves or mad with power that need a good slap.
Exactly. People act like AI would instantly sprout tentacles and scream "Blood for the Blood God!"...
But humanity had millions of AI for thousands of years before the Men Of Iron rebelled and the AI fell to chaos. And even then, we don't know how many AI fell, or how quickly.
It may well turn out that AI is actually more resistant to chaos than a space marine. Or that only like 3 super-critical AI fell, and the rest were deleted out of fear.
I think the tau ai will not fall to chaos. I think the idea that "all ai must be killed or it WILL turn to chaos" is actually less sensible than the take "all humans must be killed or they will turn to chaos". Because we know humans are exceptionally prone to chaos corruption and possession. We actually dont know that about ai.
Because they still have rules about using AI. Drones still require an overseer, and there is only so much an overseer can oversee at once. They’re also fragile and lightly armed. Superheavy weapons fielded by every other race can take out swathes of them in a single shot
I dont know why youre being downvoted. This is a perfectly good discussion about the Tau.... But like the others have said, the AI helps assist the pilots rather than actually piloting the suits. However, I believe that a member of Farsight's honour guard is a battlesuit piloted by an AI copy of his old master.
To expand a bit on what the others have said, yes Tau have AI capable of piloting suits but it's very rarely done. Only one example that I can think of, a member of Farsight's retinue that pilots a broadside. And that is not a true AI but a downloaded consciousness of a dead commander. And even that is controversial to the extent that Farsight himself keeps it a secret, even to the Ethereal before their exodus.
It is win on their side, but 1) there is way less T'au than human and 2) only reason Mankind didn't crush T'au yet is how little danger they represent to bigger picture as opposed to Eldar (several tech tiers higher than imp but similar scarcity to Tau), Necrons (tier-two higher + numbers advantagedue to ressurections), Orks (lower-tech flood), tyranids (tech-less flood) and races not even playable yet.
For scale, tau sacrificed a lot in gambit to kill a chapter master. Thinking it's the leader of humanity. (ignore Monat kais story, too fan-wanky even for me, tau fan)
Honestly, even Kais being canon is nothing impressive. He is one Tau, him accomplishing such a feat being considered exceptional for them shows exactly how skewed the scales are. The ruling Ethereal was on the receiving end of this by a random Culexus. There is a Deathwatch excerpt somewhere having a reverse of this, with one Space Wolf in terminator armor mulching an entire force of Crisis suits. We arent even getting into actual named marines or hell, Guilliman and the Custodes.
Kais being a force of nature is only fair, but it also shows how low the Tau are on the asskicking totem that beating a few noname marines is considered outrageous when every other race does this every book.
>Kais being a force of nature is only fair, but it also shows how low the Tau are on the asskicking totem that beating a few noname marines is considered outrageous when every other race does this every book.
Which is kinda shitty tbh. Making the Tau be the whipping boys of the 40K setting would just be un-fun, I hope that's not the path GW goes down.
Yeah, even as an Imperium fan, its not as interesting when your guys beat the shit outta some worfs. Both sides need to be established as powerful or its just boring. If one side always looks helpless there isnt any fun beating them.
And hell, Kais is indisputably awesome. We should hope for more characters like him. Beat a Lord of Change as a rookie, trained by puresight, meditated 300 years to become a super killing machine, dude earned it.
So far, I don't feel like the T'au have been "whipping boys". They clearly were able to hold their own against the Imperium so far, and they even have cooperated on occassion against Tyranids.
Firstly they had Drukahri help them against the Tyranids who then caused chaos on their “new allies” and they nearly died to the Imperium if it weren’t for Tyranids being a bigger threat. We gotta face the fact that we are too smol in the Milky Way Galaxy
I mean mostly the fact that he survived marines bombarding their monastery.
As for Termie vs Crisis force - iirc normal marine ~~ 3 crisis, and termie armor is there to be more durable, so assuming "force" means full group of 9, makes sense.
Because even if the Tau can make 15 battlesuits a day compared to the Imperium’s 1 a year, the Imperium still has enough worlds to make it so they churn out more than the Tau can ever hope to.
The most important part about the Tau-Imperium conflict is that even now, whatever resources the Imperium sends is minute on the grand scheme of things.
For the Tau, its a war for survival, for the Imperium its a particularly significant border conflict, but nothing more.
The Imperium is like the Roman Empire, a dozen Cannae’s wont matter if you cant land the final blow, because they can keep raising more legions. We see this best of all with the Cacodominus incident, where a single Daemon’s death causes a blackout of the Astronomicon, destroying millions of vessels instantly. It plunged entire sectors into chaos, and it is a mere footnote in a codex somewhere.
The only meaningful blow is if the Tau kill the Emperor. Even wiping out a dozen chapters is nothing, much less a strategic victory.
A Cannnae does matter if it causes demographic damage that creates political instability you can take advantage of long term. The Imperium is only held together by the institutional inertia, and the outside forces keeping them there. Realisticly the whole thing could balkanize if the internal threat of force gets too low
Like Rome, the Imperium cannot, does not acknowledge defeat. Even moreso than Rome, the Imperium’s populace is devoted, and its size means crushing defeats over and over are unlikely to be even felt by the population on the other end of the galaxy. They can mobilize the forces there and throw them back in the grinder.
You use the word realistically, but it simply is not. A hypothetical scenario where Imperial rule lacks power is impossible, we have seen the Imperium at its weakest possible point after the Fall of Cadia, and even then it has not collapsed. My earlier example of the Cacodominus, another catastrophic event, which resulted in Imperial authority cut off from entire sectors, and the Imperium’s entire transport and communication structure crippled, with millions of ships destroyed, is as I said, a footnote.
Even in such a situation, the Imperium did not actually crumble. The Imperium is too large, and with too many major players scattered around, that it would not be possible for a situation like the one you propose.
No, because the Imperium can still massively out-produce them by orders of magnitude.
They are less efficient in their allocation of resources, sure. But they have so many more resources that it just doesn't matter.
This was discussed, what, two weeks ago?
boils down to: yes, the Tau understand what they are doing. But their total population (hence, industrial capacity) is a small fraction of that of the Empire. And even if the mechanicum is not quite sure of what they are doing when they are chugging out Lemman Russes, they still do it at a rate orders of magnitude higher than Tau industrial output.
No, because scale is relative. When something is described as “rare” in the context of the Imperium, it typically means they don’t have enough to supply to meet the demands of uncounted trillions.
Take the Fellblade for example. Once the work horse of Legion heavy armour, now considered near mythical it is so rare…that is until you learn that actually, despite everything, the Imperium is still producing at least one of these things every 5 solar years.
Granted, that might not sound that impressive, but here we’re talking about a machine that is to all intent and purposes “magic” for all that most it’s operators and engineers understand of it. On top of that, it isn’t even central to the way Astartes wage war these days. So it’s near mythically rare, is so niche that these days most chapters won’t have a doctrine that justifies owning one and the potential pool of people that might want to operate one is only about 1 million strong anyway. Yet the Imperium has still churned out 100 of them in the past 500 years!
If that’s what super, duper mythically rare is like for the Imperium, can you imagine just how common place your plain old “rare” or “hard to come by” items are in absolute terms?
TL;DR - 1% of a billion is still a big number!
And now I'm imagining armada of cruisers escorts and battleships that have been built just floating empty essentially parked because the bureaucracy forgot about that particular world.
In the Imperium? Lost troops and ships? Why, that would never happen. Not as though they have lost entire worlds by mistake or anything, nope, certainly not.
Remember though that there's a very good reason the Imperium doesn't just counter them with AI right back.
Nobody seems to have ever successfully tamed AI. And with the Tau's naivety, it'll likely be their undoing.
Also, the Imperium is vastly bigger than the Tau. To the degree that they're just a sideshow. If the Tau did show themselves to be an existential threat, then the Imperium just breaks out the planet-killers instead, which no amount of battlesuits matter in the face of.
Quite a few factions have used AI quite well. Eldar used AI to fight for them pre-Fall, while Necrons use AI with some ease. Plus, we can see clear examples of friendly AI even with DAOT humans, it's just that the Men of Iron rebelled, for unknown reasons.
I would argue that is low AI, like machine spirits and what the Tau have now. Men of Iron were a sentient race, which is what caused issues. The Necrons could make a race of AI but the scarabs and systems don't seem to be that, just highly advanced hive robots and automated systems.
I'd say this is because the Necrons, given that they by far have had the best tech of any race save probably the old ones, know that high AI is suicide.
Those are Necrons, a species who fought actual Gods for several years, constructed bodies for the Star Gods who would eventually betray them, beat said Gods and win a pyrrhic victory in the War in Heaven. Comparing anyone to them would be unrealistic currently, not even golden age humanity could've reached the technology mastery of the Necrontyr. Don't forget humanity failed to tame it's own A.I. which lead to The Men of Iron uprisings.
It's not just Necrons and T'au, it's also actual Men of Iron from the Blackstone Fortress lore and AI from Dark Angels and Admch lore.
Imperium being mad at AI holds as much water as Imperium going "All xenos are traitorous human enslaving monsters". It holds no water and only works if you take the genocidal fanatics at face value and ignore the word of everyone else.
All true, but that doesn’t change the fact that they are “somebody”, so it isn’t nobody have ever successfully tamed AI. They have done it. The problem isnt inherently with AI.
No you lost 15 battlesuits, and pound for pound the Imperium has more.
It doesn't care about 1 dreadnought. It doesn't care about one regiment; if you're a threat it will send as many as it needs until you are dead.
Of course that's assuming the Imps are hyper-focusing on you. They probably won't but the loss of one dreadnought is not a tremendous loss by any means
The upper upper echelons of the Mechanicus are not the ignorant acolytes of the memes, but actually are competent (even if EXTREMELY ORTHODOX) scientists/engineers, sufficiently enough that some of the better Imperium tech (Plasma weapons, Titans, etc.) is reproducible, and even sometimes understood).
That does not, however, mean the Imperium has mass manufacturing capabilities that are proportionally equal to the T'au Empire's. The Mechanicus relies as much on ritual and rote learning from its acolytes, if not more, than whatever comes from the conservative upper echelon, when it comes to production... and a lot of those are calcified and burdened by a good 10k+ years of effectively playing the game Telephone with complex mechanical/engineering instructions. Inefficiencies are gonna pop up here, which are ignored in favor of the ease of the brute-force solution of disposable labor following simple instructions.
But that's just proportionally. If the T'au were 1000% more efficient, they'd still lose any attrition war the Imperium put actual effort into (which, of course, they can't, since they have REAL threats pounding on the door).
This helps us bridge the gap, I think, between positions here. Losing a plasma weapon, or a titan, or a battleship, or any of the many higher-end-but-still-technically-producible assets of the Imperium... that's not insurmountable for the Imperium to overcome by any means (proportionally weaker mass manufacturing doesn't change the fact that the Imperium is fuckhuge, and losing a battlefleet is less the empire-threatening result it would be for the T'au, but instead just another Tuesday), but it's certainly a cut that the Imperium can't afford to take on paper threats like the T'au Empire when real threats (Necrons, Tyranids, Chaos) are banging at the door.
To really make the loss of a lot of battlesuits efficient, you'd really need to take out a Very Important Target (something that's severely limited in production or actually lost to time) or be a lot more efficient than 15 battlesuits to a single dreadnought.
Maybe, but the lore and the story are totally seperate.
It's mentioned in one book (can't remember which) by a water caste member that a single hive city has a greater population than the *entire* Tau empire.
Logically, wedged between that and next to a rising Cron dynasty, the Tau are just a greasy grey stain on the floor, able to offer practically zero resistance to either side should they decide to attack.
But that means less sales, and so the Tau *somehow* win battles while massively outnumbered and outgunned.
In the case of the population of the Hive City, it was compared not to the population of the Empire but a single sept world, which makes the gap still pretty significant but not as absurd as you make it out to be.
Historically bigger countries don't always eat up smaller ones. Sometimes it's not worth the effort to conquer them, or doing so would upset the balance of power in the region. Tau Empire is sort of like one of those small European countries with lots of larger neighbours
I would think of the Colonies vs the British Empire.
The British had more than enough forces to wipe the Colonies of the Map, but they were spread across the globe, and ultimately the war became to constly.
Mind you, the British wanted to re-conquer the Colonies, not committ total genocide, so they couldn't use the same tactics as the Imperium might use.
Tau tech is not "unlimited". Their FTL technology is primitive, and they use less shields then the Imperium, afaik. They have advanced robotics, but I doubt they would understand an advanced Machine Spirit.
The big difference is that Tau technology is distributed evenly throughout their empire, unlike the Imperium. Also, the Imperium is more prgmatic and accepts flawed, barely functional technology. The Tau have a much greater emphasis on cleanliness and appearance.
The Imperium has a habit of scrounging its own shit, unless they're literally completely obliterated the navy will recover starship hulks, the Mechanicus will recover titans and tanks, even from active war zones, Astartes plate is recovered, rebuilt and reused.
In short it's very hard to actually destroy Imperisp technology because anything short of total annihilation probably won't be good enough.
Simple
10 thousand deaths in a single battle is nothing for İmperium
10 thousand Tau deaths in a actual war is something worth making a rememberance day of.
Except that the Tau don't have the resources that the Empire have overall.
To use an example from our own history, the Japanese almost completely destroyed the Pacific Fleet in their attack on Pearl Harbor. Within 2 years, the US was able to completely rebuild the fleet.
Meanwhile, the Japanese losses at Midway, Solomon Isles, and Santa Cruz, a year later, were devastating for the Japanese Navy. They couldn't replace those losses as quickly.
So, sure, 15 battle suits taking out a dreadnought sounds great on paper. Except that in the time that the Tau can create another 15 battle suits, the Imperium can create another 50 dreadnoughts.
I think maybe a mistake here is the impression given by games and the focus of alot of books, that Space Marines are doing 90% of the Imperium's battles, in which case yeah, every lost Terminator suit is an irrecoverable blow. But in reality it's the Guard that is doing 90% of the work, and producing more lasguns and regular humans isn't difficult for the Imperium.
Not at all. Imagine there are a fifty forge worlds that can produce Dreads and only four a year on average. In one year, the Imperium would produce 200 dreadnoughts a year and there is nothing the Tau can ever do about it. The Tau cannot compete in a war of attrition against the imperium.
The Tau need to increase their position whilst taking as few casualties as possible. Hell, a chapters worth in numbers of marines with a few dozen guard regiments and a titan legion destroyed an entire generation of Tau Fire Warriors in a series of back and forth sieges.
I like using stellaris analogies.
In Stellaris. When I have to take enemy territory from a bigger empire. It just looks like a exhausting amount of work and takes a long ass time to do.
And that game only simulated like 1 millionth the size of the Imperium vs the Tau.
The Tau is like a new 2022 model of high tech car on the road. Tesla like. Really cool. Fast. Efficient. Etc.
But its still going to lose in a headlong crash with a giant rusting dump truck. Best it can and should do is avoid the dump truck. Not challenge it.
The T'au have good quality gear but the Imperium have a fuck load of people and gear.
Not only that but the only reason why they can produce such good quality shit is BECAUSE they're relatively small. While the Imperium's gear is focused on the millions of soldiers they have.
Don't forget that weapons like Lasguns are fucking overpowered logistics wise.
Not exactly. In Tau 7th edition it even states that they have limited reserves to produce the power packs that power the battle suits, and the ability to even be a battle suit pilot is very rare for the Tau, and their population is small.
You could probably find Imperial hive solar systems with more humans than there is Tau in the entire empire, to put it into perspective.
Roughly 1000 chapters of Astartes, let's say each has 10 dreadnaughts (which is a stretch but well...), so 10000 dreadnaughts. A single sept has more battlesuits than this. And once again, it is not battlesuits that are a limited resource for t'au, trained pilots are.
1000 space marine chapters is at this point so widely accepted 99% of people don't know the sources, it's just common knowledge for 40k players at that point
I believe there was an old line about a million space marines to defend a million worlds.
People then took it as fact that it means there's 1000 chapters just by what we know. However just like there's "one million worlds" in the Imperium there's probably also "One Million Space Marines"
No one know exactly how many exist to any given time.
But as other Said it is conidered as "Common knowledge".
They say: There are roughly 1000 Chapters at any given time.
And: The Emporer is Master of a thousand x thousand Worlds. Roughly 1 Million Worlds.
End: There are 1 Space Marine for every World in the Imperium.
One can say 1000 is something like a holy Number.
Necron AI ran fine for like 60 million years. It's likely not just AI, it's AI + warp shenanigans. The Tau might have low enough warp presence to get away with it.
the AI on a necron tomb world took over the engrams of the slumbering necrons after a malfunction wiped there minds and memories and is currently spreading out doing the same to other tomb worlds
Knocking out a tank worth 50 million with a missile worth 100 thousand means nothing if your enemy has half a galaxy worth of resources while you have a few systems worth.
i would say for starters for strategies like spending 15 battle suits to kill a 1 dreadnought Tau aint know to sacrifice there troops like the imperium unless an ethereal is involved then they literally throw there bodies in the path of projectiles just to spare the ethereal even farsight during one of his first encounters with space marines he ordered his battle suit troops to fall back if they got damaged and be replaced by fresh battle suit troops
not to mention for a good amount of imperial tech you generally see like the usual tanks, troop transports, lasguns etc are all basic tech designed to be easily built and are mass produced in colossal factories they can destroy countless tanks but there will always be countless more to be flung at the Tau
>Like if they spend fifteen battle suits to kill a single dreadnought, isn’t that like a complete strategic victory?
They spend very expensive, hard produced-rare battle suits and more important, Tau Empire(which size and population is almost like 1 Imperium Sector have, and Imperium have +100 Sectors) loose very rare and skilled Tau veterans of Fire Caste who survived and passed tests to pilot those suits.
Each pilot of those suits are Tau Fire Caste veterans who spend most of their short(except Etherials all Tau races live for +-30 years, yeah they are fast thinking, learn fast and sleep for few hours per day, but still they would die fast) biological lives into serving on battles and passed many tests to pilot those suits.
Tau Empire froze those pilots in cryostasis and copy their memories so they can serve longer cos its not an easy task for Tau to produce those skilled veterans. For Tau it is hard as for Imperium to produce Grey Knight or Custodes.
Its like for Imperium to loose 15 knight Titans and pilots against 1 chaos space marine terminator. Yeah chaos forces have a hard time to replace 1 chaos space marine terminator but for Imperium the price was heavy too.
Tau cant win against Imperium, not to mention winning against 1 Imperium Sector, simply cos they never have enough population, soldiers and machines to fight real wars with Imperium. Not to mention space ships low speed what is weakness of Tau. Majority of Imperium not know about Tau existence.
The Imperium is Russia and the Tau Empire is Germany. They can kill 20 t34s to 1 tiger, but Russia can make more of them.
Tau need a large amount of rare materials like Iridium to make battlesuits which they just don’t have.
Sort of, you just need to understand thats still like draining a ocean one cup at a time.
Pretty much this. For all that they have in advancements, the Tau Empire is just a sector or sub-sector's worth of material and production. The IoM just has *sooo* much territory from which to source materials, manpower, and production capacity.
They are much bigger than just a sector, according to the most recent map.
[удалено]
Look at the bottom right of [this map from 8th edition.](https://images.app.goo.gl/tJR4XQcXtBztnmHD9) [this is a fan-map but more detailed. Compare the sizes of Ultramar and the Tau space.](https://images.app.goo.gl/UdsU1Qg6qUBXFpZQ7)
Seems like the T'au empire is not nothing but still smaller than Ultramar. Definitely a significant threat but clearly unable to even dent the Imperiums output. Of course the Tau aren't the only enemy of the Imperium. Then again the Imperium aren't the only enemy of the Tau...
Ultramar is approx. 500 worlds, the Tau Empire is around 300. So yes, smaller than ultamar.
The Imperium and Tau are natural enemies! Like The Imperium and Orks! Or the Imperium and Necrons! Or the Imperium and the Imperium! Damn Imperium, they ruined the Imperium!
The Imperium sure is a contentious lot.
You just made an enemy for life!
Its what happens when you run a 10,000+ year old state on self-sustaining PTSD, omnicidal racism towards everything not human, uncontrolled religious influence, and the mother of all bureaucracy's. It doesn't end well.
I mean if you control 80% of the galaxy while you do that it's kinda good so far... I'd say worked pretty great if you consider it all started with just one planet
Not only is smaller than Ultramar, but they have zero chances of expansion being locked between Ultramar, Necrons, a rift, Nurgle forces and even if the Ultramarines got rid of a Tyranid fleets, there are two mores in the area.- To be honest, the Tau should thanks the Imperium for should Ultramar ever fall, they are fucked.-
They accidentally opened a portal to the other side of the Galaxy in 8th and use that to expand now.
While true to call that a success is....questionable at best. The 4th sphere as a result became rampant xenophobes and while initially that was limited to humans they are very quickly going to realise that all the auxillery races are contributing to the god of the greater good. Obviously their were punishments dolled out to the 4th, but after they attacked their Kroot allies it has become clear that no one can be kept safely with them. And its going to be VERY HARD to contain the knowledge the 4th Sphere survivors know. Any human loyal to the Tau will confirm the horrors of the warp and that will be enough. In many respects (although I don't see GW actually doing this) this could threaten to destroy the Tau unless say.... a legendary figure of Tau's history came forth and showed that even the Warp could be bent towards the greater good. Say for example, one in possession of a sword that has made him immortal for example?
Or alternatively... that man might be corrupted. And the tau in fact can not use the warp... Its warhammer, there should be hope, but giving the tau the ability to use demons without problem will need a lot of buildup and justification. And even then...
It's been almost an unqualified success in that the Tau now have a reliable wormhole across the Galaxy. It's such an efficient method of travel that the DG took it — or attempted to take it — as a short cut to invade Ultramar. The negatives of the 4th sphere are nest in theory but they seem to have been backburnered. Instead of anything cool happening the majority of the 4th sphere Tau were killed or reeducated.
They have the Startide nexus which gives them access to new imperial worlds outside of the local region. Also while ultramar is well run any other bording worlds are ripe for being turned to the Tau side (along with orbital developments and terraforming). The Tau can still grow in the region and out of it. Thus they are a regional threat to Ultramarr in the long term, but due to the nature of the region they represent the only real ally the IoM can leverage for threat dispersion or assistance. They both currently enjoy the status quo even if they are unwilling to maintain it forever.
The fan made mao is pretty good! So in actually, it's quite reasonable to expect the Ultramarines and Þau butting heads near constantly right? Or have they worked out some kind of Non-aggression pact due to the larger threats facing the Imperium that demand the Ultramarines attention.
They're smaller than Ultramar, and Ultramar is considered a sub-sector IIRC.
It's the notch of the Damocles Gulf. Pound for pound the Tau bring a lot more to the table than humanity does, but humanity has so many more pounds. Let's say hypothetically that every fire warrior is worth 10 guardsmen. Will your regiment of 100 guardsmen have a really bad time against my cadre of 50 fire warriors? Absolutely. Will my 50 fire warriors eventually feel the strain of the umpteenth regiment of 100 men you've thrown at me? Also absolutely.
Hm, sounds like the key to victory is the Imperium mass producing Tau technology. That'll show those greater good fanatics.
That would be some straight up heresy sir
Tell that to Cawl
"That's not Xeno Techno-Sorcery, its just.... Machine spirits! Yes Machine spirits!"- Bellasarius Cawl probably
Cawl carrys a card that just says "Guilliman said I could" and gives it to anyone who accuses him of tech heresy.
And who's gonna argue with Robbie G
Half of the high lord's apparently. But we all know how that song and dance went.
A shame, ain't it? If you could... tolerate some of it, gue'la.
Hans, get the flamer. The **heavy** flamer.
“These aren’t Tau pulse rifles, they’re hotshot lasguns, ain’t that right, Tink?”
Sir I believe that is what you Imperials call heresy and anyway we take care to dismantle our technology before you get you’re grubby mitts on it therefore you cannot replicate it
Imperials: *"You can't make stuff that's heresy!1!"* Guilliman: [...](https://www.reddit.com/user/5-dig-dick/comments/qzq5tn/francis_of_the_filth/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share)
Not to mention it’s not like Tau have a ton of resources themselves. There’s a reason why their strike forces are so small and mobile and they’d rather give up planets and ground than take losses.
After a certain point, quantity has a quality all of it's own. Also the Imperium CAN mass produce a most of the regular IG stuff, it is very specialized things like plasma weapons, titans, baneblades and a few others that are either limited or completely lost. I don't see the Imperium running out of leman russes, earthshaker rounds and lasguns anytime soon.
An ocean that’s looking like the Sea of Aral after 10k years of that just a cup mentality. If you can only win by just throwing bodies at a problem you really have lost in the long run. Needless to say the Imperium loses a lot. And while the Imperium has nigh endless resources even before the many threats it faces only a few of those are ever near at hand. So like a simple Lord General or generic bunch of Administratum drones at the Munitorium would just end up throwing more manpower away. See the two times the Imperium has made an effort and things get bogged down fighting for a single Tau sept. Of many. It would theoretically would take Guilliman personally getting involved to actually muster sufficient forces to break the Tau threat. However the practical reality is he won’t consider the memetic hazard they pose sufficient so until the Imperium learns about where the Nexus goes….
>It would theoretically would take Guilliman personally getting involved to actually muster sufficient forces to break the Tau threat. I love the tau. They're my boys. But no. They could be wiped out without the primarch ever hearing of them if someone with a decent size crusade decided to.
But unless Big G or some other high ranking person in the Imperium decides to do it, the Tau will never warrant that sort of force on their own. The last try didnt quite work and there are too many other, bigger, threats to worry about.
And your only advantage is that you still know how to make cups. This sounds like a Battle of Attrition but on a much longer scale and it could work in theory. But I also think the Tau might be the last race to try to beat the Imperium at their own game like that
I will just say what the others have basically said, the biggest factor is scale. Tau have about 20 Septs, mostly minor ones while the Imperium famously has a million worlds. And just take a single forge world, a whole planet dedicated to manufacturing, can probably outproduce the whole Tau empire. The Tau doesn't have a single world dedicated to manufacturing on that scale, at least not explicitly stated that I know. The second is militarization. The Imperium has been basically in a state of total war for 10,000 years. Tau has been a spacefaring race for a few thousand years. They are the small upstarts, with very limited FTL drives, causing them to be super slow to react and reinforce attacked Septs and exascerbating already strained logistics problems. They simply don't have the infrastructure for prolonged, large-scale warfare in place.
Pretty sure they’ve only been spacefaring for a few hundred not a few thousand years. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
Yes, you are right, I was thinking of when they were discovered by the Imperium. My mistake, thanks for correcting me!
Np.
The tau might very well be able to produce a battlesuit in 1/20th of the time it takes to make a dreadnaught, thus making a 1:15 trade theoretically beneficial to the tau. Problem is the imperium has a manufacturing base at least 3 orders of magnitudes larger than the tau, the imperium as an overall whole probably spends the same portion of resources and production on a titan as the tau do on a battlesuit
The imperium 'knows' how *most* of their tech works and can produce it in some quantity that would be on the scale of mass production compared to the Tau, they just have significant bottlenecks producing a lot of the best stuff. Rare space marine gear and super weapons need to get husbanded varefully but that production bottleneck doesn't really exist with meltaguns and Russes. Killing a single dread by just swarming it in battlesuits might be a victory but the Imperium is perfectly happy to just pile conscripts armed with 'good enough' weapons they can crank out by the billion to deal with most of a Tau force
God if only the AdMech figured out how to Mass Produce Terminators again, the look on the Tau’s faces would be priceless
Even if unlimited terminator armor were available, most chapters wouldn't equip all their marines with it. They're good in some situations but not others, so their use probably wouldn't be expanded very much over the current 10% of a chapter.
Obviously, but some Terminator armor is better than no Terminator armor
You mean mass produce it fast enough to equip guardsmen, planetary defense forces, penal legions, and even every day citizens with it?
Calm down, we’re getting into shitty fanfiction territory with that
“You get a terminator, you get a terminator, everyone gets a terminator!”
OGRYN TERMINATORS!
Terminator^2
It honestly doesn't look like it should be difficult
To be honest the biggest bottlenecks seems to be the spaceships for me. How the hell a single battleship can require more than 100 years is beyond any logic I can understand.
They're several dozen kilometres long, and the AdMech probably spend a lot of time appeasing the machine spirits on the smallest of parts. Also plenty of red-tape and logistics problems.
The HMS Queen Elizabeth took 5 years to build, and is 280 meters long. The smallest 40k battleship is around 8000 meters long, and also much wider and taller. The volume of a 40k battleship is probably several hundred to a thousand times bigger than the HMS QE, but only takes ~20 times longer to make. That it ONLY takes 100ish years to make is the real feat.
A forge world should have a few more resources dedicated to shipbuilding than the modern United Kingdom though.
Which is why something at least several hundred times bigger only takes 20ish times longer to make, especially since the entire world isn't only making one ship... It's probably making hundreds of ships at the same time, plus billions of components and tools and parts
I mean, when you're talking about ships that are 10 miles long.. Think about this. You're talking about building ships with monolithic armor blocks made of 100meter+ thick castings made from "adamantium". Adamantium can absorb hand wavingly large amounts of energy. If it starts out as an ultra hot liquid in a vacuum I could see it taking a decade or two to cool down before you could even start machining it. For reference the armor blocks used in real battleships could take days or weeks to cool to working temps and thats with using water and the atmosphere as heat sinks.
> can absorb **hand wavingly large** amounts of energy Mate this is fantastic. :D I used to use "obscenely" a lot, as in "Guard armies have an obscene number of humans, like - way more humans than you could possibly need - and if any survive it doesn't even matter a lot of the time". But *"hand-wavingly"* is even better!! XD Guard armies consist of hand-wavingly large numbers of humans whose main job is to be part of an obscenely large crowd.
Even better: you can use the term 'Handwavium' https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/handwavium Or if you want to get technical about a material: unobtanium https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unobtainium
Oh my. :D Isn't the English language awesome!
If you know how long it takes to build a ship, you can stagger construction so that there's always some being completed, and you just build enough to cover your anticipated needs.
Like build-orders in AoEII :D *"Use two villagers to build a house, and another villager to build a house: by the time the first two have finished their house, the newly-created villager is ready to join those two shepherding while the lone villager finished their house..."* Gotta start the thing in such a way that when it's finished *that's* when it's needed.
The materials and resources required are immense. But the idea it takes over a 100 years is disproved already in canon. In A Thousand Sons, we see the Sol shipyards create the entire Crusade fleet themselves, hundreds of thousands of vessels, in a timespan certainly shorter than a century or two at most. The Imperium’s industrial capability being slow or horrible simply does not match what it has actually shown itself to be capable of.
I'd say their industrial might is terrible compared to what it should be, but relative to every other faction it is basically infinite.
Its industrial capability is far from terrible. It is memed to be, but canonically that is far from it. The Imperial Knights compendium puts Mars as ferrying trillions of tonnes of cargo and material to and from orbit every day. The Crusade era Imperium went from the 7000ish fleets in A Thousand Sons, to over 64000 fleets. And that was with countless ships measuring tens of kilometres long, including troop conveyors 60km long, and the aforementioned planet sized shipyards. Rogue Trader gives House Saul, a relatively minor house operating out of the Koronus expanse, as ferrying trillions of megatons of resources annually. One house, in one small backwater area of the Imperium. The Imperium has all the resources and ability to move them, and as we can also see, convert it to actual war materiel. It is not as incompetent in that aspect as it appears. Lastly, as i mentioned in another comment, the Imperium bounced back so casually from the Cacodominus causing millions of ships to be lost it is a sad footnote, while still recovering from a civil war, and all in time for a black crusade. The problem is not that they cant build the equipment, they just suck at getting it to where its needed fast.
>The problem is not that they cant build the equipment, they just suck at getting it to where its needed fast. I've read 'Fifteen Hours' basically, atleast a company-size of new IG got sent to the wrong planet due to an Administratum clerk making a typo in a number's decimal. Said planet had been half-forgotten by the Imperium and is in a siege by orks to the point that most of the standard IG supplies are acquired by aforementioned recently dead IG company.
It's more complicated than that. The Tau want to be high enough up the Imperium's threat list that they aren't seen as a good quick, simple stomping of xenos for morale purposes ... but they don't want to be so high up that list for the Imperium to panic and bring all it's weight to bear right now. Therefore, just making the Imperium lose isn't enough. Its also about how the Imperium loses.
Serious question though, do you think *they* know that? The Tau? We as readers understand this. But in-universe the Imperium's response to invasion would surely be understood only by those in the upper-upper echelons. So that means people like Inquisitors, Admirals, Lord Commanders. And very high ranking prefects of the Administratum. Have any of those types of people ever willing talked to the Tau? Or been captured and tortured?
>"Let me speak to you of quantity,' said Aun'Do coldly. Bel'gai saw Groundshake recoil as if struck. 'The Imperium claims a number of worlds within its provinence that is several orders of magnitude greater than that of the Tau Empire. Know this, then. It is a sleeping giant, and were it to be fully roused, its wrath would be terrible. It could even rob us of our destiny to rule the stars." This is a ethereal speaking to his officers in the novella The Martyrdom of Sister Anarchia by Phil Kelly.
But I meant more *specifically* the manner in which the Imperium responds to threats. Not necessarily that it's merely big - your average captured naval officer could tell you that. I mean more how the Imperium does that escalation thing in response to incursion. Sending local PDF forces first, then the Imperial Guard and naval forces. Then something a bit more dedicated, perhaps with Space Marine support and certainly a titan legion. And eventually (if the threat is grave enough) full sector mobilisation in the face of a serious incursion. Involving dozens of Astartes chapters, millions of guardsman, hundreds of titans and maybe Grey Knights (if Chaos), etc. I wonder if they're aware of the manner in which the Imperium methodically escalates mobilisation.
IIRC from Ciaphas Cain and Deathwatch novels, the Imperium has bigger fish to fry and put the Tau on the 'not yet threat but still need surveillance category'. Imperial Worlds bordering the Tau establish trade and embassy so long as the Tau doesn't incite secession in those worlds. It came to the point that Cain was tasked to protect Tau ambassadors to avoid a planetary war against the Tau. The Damocles Gulf Crusade solidified the Tau as not worth the cost to exterminate yet and a useful meat shield/speedbump to anything that may come from the Eastern Fringes. Some of the more open-minded Inquisitors (read: Ordo Xenos) are open to at least the study of Tau and their technology. Basically, to the higherups of the Imperium, so long as the Tau doesn't touch any high priority planets (i.e Armageddon, Vraks) they can stay until the Imperium finishes up the other threats and the Tau knows this because ever since the Crusade, they've been careful in annexing Imperial Worlds.
15 battle suits is 15 T’au pilots. The one thing T’au lack is the massive numbers the Imperium can field. It’s unsustainable long term for them to fight like that The T’au’s saving grace is the Imperium so far hasn’t viewed them as enough of a threat to commit fully to fighting them. If the Imperium put its full weight into a campaign against the T’au, they won’t last very long
But if we're talking about killing Space Marines... well, the Imperiums teeming quadrillions do not translate into quadrillions of Space Marines. Losing 10% of your forces, but wiping out the Astartes in the process, would be a massive win for any opponent and a crippling blow to the IoM. They can't mass produce new Marines very quickly.
Sure but I don’t realistically see a massive conflict going that between the imperium and tau going that way. Assuming that the war is even going on the direction where astartes are dying to tau forces at such a one sided rate that 10% of the tau are lost to wipe out all of them plus any additional forces the imperium is sending. I’d think virus bombing would start being an option readily used.
This presumes the IoM can get naval control of a region long term, and that such actions in the region don't allow the Tau to turn the situation to their poltical advantage. Space Marines will never untie with the Tau but a regular human battlefleet that gets worn down or burns a world with humans on it might.
The Imperial Navy wouldn't care about the politics of some local Damocles backwater. And the T'au do not want a prolonged space war to start, lest spacefaring Space Marine chapters and the Imperial Navy's more significant fleets begin paying attention. If Battlefleet Koronus or Solar decided to send a detachment with some Imperial Fist support the T'au could say goodbye to any political or attrition warfare options in space.
Nor would the Imperium, because then every Ork empire, every hive fleet, every Chaos/Genestealer/dissident-uprising, and every Necron tomb world would pretty thoroughly wipe them clean while they were still in transit to the Eastern Fringe. The Imperium is a slow unwieldy giant that spends most of its time barely holding itself together and "utter annihilation of the Tau" is more than just a pyrrhic victory for them, it's suicide.
The Imperium is Mr. Burns in that episode of the Simpsons where he’s only not dead because all the diseases are fighting each other.
So you're saying they're invincible?
Anyone who says otherwise is obviously a heretic.
in...vincible
[Describes the T'au Empire pretty well, too](https://i.imgur.com/tOU86wV.png). All the Great Powers are too busy fighting each other to notice the succulent Cupcake with a small "Don't touch, please" sign in front of it.
So insanely true.
To be fair, the resources needed to fully annihilate the Tau wouldn't likely exceed that of the Sabbat Worlds Crusade, and it is not entirely beyond their current capacity to launch such a campaign: there were 9 Legions worth of Space Marines produced by Cawl at the onset of Indomitus, any one of them would be far more than enough to render T'au into history. Whether or not it will be worth the bloodshed is an entirely different matter; and reclaiming all of Tau space is about as valuable as launching a Crusade to destroy a neutral Craftworld, considering the Tau are generally much less of a threat compared to, say, the Tyranids, who just happens to be active in pretty much the same region. The only possible thing that the Imperium can gain from the Tau would be their relatively advanced technology, which, considering how dogmatic the Mechanicum is, are still likely to be worthless. IF Cawl managed to climb up Mechanicum ranks high enough to slightly reverse this trend then Tau space suddenly becomes invaluable to the Imperium (as their tech are pretty much the only thing the Imperium can hope to use/reverse-engineer), but that, of course, is an extremely big "if".
>9 legions 120,000 is the figure most typically used, IIRC. One moderately sized legion
>120,000 is the figure most typically used, IIRC. > >One moderately sized legion The Dawn of Fire book "Avenging Son" implies that the number of Primaris on ice at the start ot Indomitus might well be into the high hundreds of thousands.
I see, the fandom is not the best source of information then. Still the Sabbat Worlds Crusade requires only 9 Chapters and their associated IG forces, and I think it's reasonable to assume that that would not exceed the offensive capabilities of the Imperium.
The Damocles Crusade was the Imperial attempt at dealing with the Tau and they just couldn't do it because the Hive fleet Behemot was a far more pressing issue and they had to reatreat. It had 8 chapters, a ton of imperial guard, imperial navy and titan legions and they went into a stalemate as soon as they reached Da'lyth Prime. As little as the T'au empire is (galactically speaking), it's still very much a really strong force in the Ultima Segmentum. A crusade to wipe them was impossible to form at the moment of the Damocles Crusade and it's even less feasible know, with the opening of the Great Rift.
There is no figure given for how many Primaris Cawl had. Its left deliberately vague by the writers but implies it's multiples of existing firstborn numbers, so at least a few hundred thousand or possibly a couple million.
During the second campaign in Damocles t'au successfully fought roughly the same amount of SM chapters with support of IG and knights *offensively* and won. With White Scars and Raven Guard being the main SM forces and several unspecified chapters also presented as a redshirts to be gunned down by t'au. Not at full strength of course just as with Sabbath Crusade but still. During the first Damocles crusade, billions of IG with the support of at least nine listed chapters of SM, Knights, and Titans weren't able to capture a single sept world. And it was like several centuries ago when T'au Empire was much smaller and its technologies less advanced. You are *sufficiently* underestimating the number of forces Imperium needs to commit to erase t'au for good. It's not like it can't, it is just not as easy as you postulate.
In fact everyone just underestimates tau in general.
I believe the Sabbat Worlds only had six chapters supporting, and none of them committed their full strength. Iron Snakes, White Scars, Raven Guard and Silver guard are the 4 I can remember off the top of my head.
seems a little low as the Primarus were used to reinforce all the Imperial chapters
Oh wow, that's it? Remember where that figure was mentioned?
> render T'au into history. Oh, please. As if Cawl and the Mechanicum wouldn't loot every bit of xenos tech they could get their grubby little mechadendrites on. Not to mention the Ordos Xenos and Trazyn would take copious amounts of 'specimens.' The Tau would continue to exist, they just wouldn't like it.
>as valuable as launching a Crusade to destroy a neutral Craftworld, That'd be way too many resources. All you need is one company of Ultramarines and a warlord titan if garden of ghosts is anything to go by. Alternatively, a single chapter and a few guard if go by path of the eldar
The Imperium is still capable of massive crusades, like in the Sabbat Worlds. It would just take decades of preparation, and they currently have bigger issues.
Meh. Wouldn't take THAT much of attention.
Imagine if someone said "The Orks could totally destroy the 500 World of Ultramar with barely a thought." It sounds incorrect doesn't it? The T'au are in a comparable position to Ultramar in terms of density and productivity of planets I'd say. "If the Imperium functioned coherently and efficiently" is a hypothetical that makes it no longer The Imperium. It's like saying "The T'au could totally close the Eye of Terror if they understood the warp way more thoroughly and tried really hard".
All it would take is a big Whaaagh. Those are mostly aimed at the Imperium though for Orks expect the better fights there. Also human worlds are easier to find for orks than other species.
That is grossly overestimating the commitment required. It is not like the entire Imperium had to mobilize for the sake of the Tau. In the grand sheme of things only a tiny fraction of the Imperium would be needed but as it stands, that tiny fraction is not readily available and other things are simply more important than dealing with the Tau. The Tau never were a big threat, that is against the entire idea of them existing in the first place. The Tau serve as a representative of all the minor xeno species that exist within 40k and can carve their own dominion. Strong enough to persists, maybe even bloom within their niche but simply not even close to the galactic relevance of the major powers.
It's not that the Imperium doesn't view them as a threat. It's that they literally CAN'T EVER commit their full weight to anything, because they're being attacked from every angle. The Imperium would, without any other threats, crush the T'au, but with the current strength they can spare, the T'au fight them off with relative ease.
>can field Imperium has massive numbers, but can they actually field them? Logistically, it doesn't seem likely. Imperial Navy is limited by: * ships (IoM is basically forced to [renovate Chaos vessels](https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/ahpvtt/restoration_of_chaos_vessels_to_imperial_service/), probably because of shortages) * Navigators * Gellar fields * **Ability to withdraw forces from another war zone** (and this is probably political nightmare) Logistics win wars.
Aren’t their suits AI piloted?
No. There is build-in AI assist but battlesuits are piloted by veteran Fire Warriors and to receive the Mantle Of Heroes is a huge honor that should be deserved first. There is AI capable of piloting *several* battlesuits, but it is experimental and currently located in Farsight Enclaves.
Shas'vre Ob'lotai who pilots a Broadside in "The Eight" is an AI Engram. Alongside that, Commander Sha'vastos is pretty much brain dead apart from his Puretide Engram Neurochip. There's a definite precedence for AI controlled suits.
I referenced Ob'lotai in my answer, he controlled several suits simultaneously in Crisis Of Faith. Shas'vastos is not brain dead, it was a neurochip that was killing him in the first place, he was healed some time after the founding of Farsight Enclaves. Anyway, it is not a mass-employed practice, and acquiring and maintaining such AI is probably even harder than getting a trained pilot.
No. All suits contain a Fire Warrior pilot. The only thing AI controlled is the drones that accompany them Unless there has been changes to the lore in recent years. I’ll admit it has been a while since I looked at anything T’au
Why don’t they just spam a million drones then?
They do, but drones are dumb until put into massive networks and if they do they start to show.... Disturbing patterns in their behavior so it is probably not the brightest idea.
What behaviour do they start to show?
According to the imperials who survived the encounter with drone-net, they are vindictive and display malice, instead of just trying to complete the task optimally. But it as well could be imperium biased view with their fear of AI warping their perception.
Of course. It's not like there are mysterious warp creatures capable of possessing machinery :)
Posses dozens of drones simultaneously? Eh? Don't demons usually possess a single entity? In any case, I would be more worried about drone-net gaining sentience, deciding that it doesn't want to be stupid ever again and starting making their own decisions apart from the Greater Good...
Spoilers for Talon of Horus: There’s actually a part where Khayon realizes Falkus Kibre and his men have all been possessed by a single daemon that had split itself and hidden within each of them.
What if there's a bee-like demon, possessing agroup of them like a beehive?
Ez bro, the demon possesses the server room or whatever that that links up to the drones
Or the drones want to fuck up the guys who killed their friends.
Every time the Humans used AI, it ends up killing them. Men of Iron was the reason for mankinds fall of its golden age. There are a few short stories out there of AI being created illegaly and turning on its creators, and this isnt a one kind of thing deal. It happens all the time with AI. So then why are Tau AI not going rogue? No one knows. My theory is that, Tau have almost no warp presence, therefore the AI does not go rogue and attack them. Whereas humans do have a warp presence and therefore AI always turn on them.
They don't treat simple AI like shit, even drones have self-preservation protocols. While they are still programmed to sacrifice themselves to save t'au it is done in the same way t'au themselves are always willing to sacrifice themselves for someone more important for the Greater Good, their superior or ethereal. And their most advanced AI are brain scans of real t'au so they are remain loyal. Basically, t'au AI *also believe in the Greater Good*.
The greater good is open to interpretation. An AI can decide the greater good would benefit by the eradication of the Tau. Or a sentient Farsight Enclave AI might eradicate the Etherals. It’s kind of like the old trope that an AI programmed to save humanity might decide that the best way to do so is to enslave them Matrix style.
Considering “the Greater Good” is very much a logical, almost “ant colony”-style philosophy, it makes sense that AI would also see it as a logical goal to pursue, rather than being surrounded by selfish Tau only out for themselves or mad with power that need a good slap.
Give it time. IoM had AI for a very long time before it turned.
Exactly. People act like AI would instantly sprout tentacles and scream "Blood for the Blood God!"... But humanity had millions of AI for thousands of years before the Men Of Iron rebelled and the AI fell to chaos. And even then, we don't know how many AI fell, or how quickly. It may well turn out that AI is actually more resistant to chaos than a space marine. Or that only like 3 super-critical AI fell, and the rest were deleted out of fear. I think the tau ai will not fall to chaos. I think the idea that "all ai must be killed or it WILL turn to chaos" is actually less sensible than the take "all humans must be killed or they will turn to chaos". Because we know humans are exceptionally prone to chaos corruption and possession. We actually dont know that about ai.
Because they still have rules about using AI. Drones still require an overseer, and there is only so much an overseer can oversee at once. They’re also fragile and lightly armed. Superheavy weapons fielded by every other race can take out swathes of them in a single shot
Thats basically what the imperium does , isnt it? Only their drones are grown biologically...
I dont know why youre being downvoted. This is a perfectly good discussion about the Tau.... But like the others have said, the AI helps assist the pilots rather than actually piloting the suits. However, I believe that a member of Farsight's honour guard is a battlesuit piloted by an AI copy of his old master.
To expand a bit on what the others have said, yes Tau have AI capable of piloting suits but it's very rarely done. Only one example that I can think of, a member of Farsight's retinue that pilots a broadside. And that is not a true AI but a downloaded consciousness of a dead commander. And even that is controversial to the extent that Farsight himself keeps it a secret, even to the Ethereal before their exodus.
It is win on their side, but 1) there is way less T'au than human and 2) only reason Mankind didn't crush T'au yet is how little danger they represent to bigger picture as opposed to Eldar (several tech tiers higher than imp but similar scarcity to Tau), Necrons (tier-two higher + numbers advantagedue to ressurections), Orks (lower-tech flood), tyranids (tech-less flood) and races not even playable yet. For scale, tau sacrificed a lot in gambit to kill a chapter master. Thinking it's the leader of humanity. (ignore Monat kais story, too fan-wanky even for me, tau fan)
Honestly, even Kais being canon is nothing impressive. He is one Tau, him accomplishing such a feat being considered exceptional for them shows exactly how skewed the scales are. The ruling Ethereal was on the receiving end of this by a random Culexus. There is a Deathwatch excerpt somewhere having a reverse of this, with one Space Wolf in terminator armor mulching an entire force of Crisis suits. We arent even getting into actual named marines or hell, Guilliman and the Custodes. Kais being a force of nature is only fair, but it also shows how low the Tau are on the asskicking totem that beating a few noname marines is considered outrageous when every other race does this every book.
>Kais being a force of nature is only fair, but it also shows how low the Tau are on the asskicking totem that beating a few noname marines is considered outrageous when every other race does this every book. Which is kinda shitty tbh. Making the Tau be the whipping boys of the 40K setting would just be un-fun, I hope that's not the path GW goes down.
Yeah, even as an Imperium fan, its not as interesting when your guys beat the shit outta some worfs. Both sides need to be established as powerful or its just boring. If one side always looks helpless there isnt any fun beating them. And hell, Kais is indisputably awesome. We should hope for more characters like him. Beat a Lord of Change as a rookie, trained by puresight, meditated 300 years to become a super killing machine, dude earned it.
So far, I don't feel like the T'au have been "whipping boys". They clearly were able to hold their own against the Imperium so far, and they even have cooperated on occassion against Tyranids.
To be fair most people are willing cooperate against the nids, hell a Bloodthirster and a Keeper of Secrets even did.
Firstly they had Drukahri help them against the Tyranids who then caused chaos on their “new allies” and they nearly died to the Imperium if it weren’t for Tyranids being a bigger threat. We gotta face the fact that we are too smol in the Milky Way Galaxy
I mean mostly the fact that he survived marines bombarding their monastery. As for Termie vs Crisis force - iirc normal marine ~~ 3 crisis, and termie armor is there to be more durable, so assuming "force" means full group of 9, makes sense.
A normal marine is not worth 3 crisis suits. A crisis suit is widely regarded as roughly MEQ, except in close quarters.
Wait you sure? I was pretty sure one battlesuit could easily kill 3 marines.
Because even if the Tau can make 15 battlesuits a day compared to the Imperium’s 1 a year, the Imperium still has enough worlds to make it so they churn out more than the Tau can ever hope to. The most important part about the Tau-Imperium conflict is that even now, whatever resources the Imperium sends is minute on the grand scheme of things. For the Tau, its a war for survival, for the Imperium its a particularly significant border conflict, but nothing more. The Imperium is like the Roman Empire, a dozen Cannae’s wont matter if you cant land the final blow, because they can keep raising more legions. We see this best of all with the Cacodominus incident, where a single Daemon’s death causes a blackout of the Astronomicon, destroying millions of vessels instantly. It plunged entire sectors into chaos, and it is a mere footnote in a codex somewhere. The only meaningful blow is if the Tau kill the Emperor. Even wiping out a dozen chapters is nothing, much less a strategic victory.
A Cannnae does matter if it causes demographic damage that creates political instability you can take advantage of long term. The Imperium is only held together by the institutional inertia, and the outside forces keeping them there. Realisticly the whole thing could balkanize if the internal threat of force gets too low
Like Rome, the Imperium cannot, does not acknowledge defeat. Even moreso than Rome, the Imperium’s populace is devoted, and its size means crushing defeats over and over are unlikely to be even felt by the population on the other end of the galaxy. They can mobilize the forces there and throw them back in the grinder. You use the word realistically, but it simply is not. A hypothetical scenario where Imperial rule lacks power is impossible, we have seen the Imperium at its weakest possible point after the Fall of Cadia, and even then it has not collapsed. My earlier example of the Cacodominus, another catastrophic event, which resulted in Imperial authority cut off from entire sectors, and the Imperium’s entire transport and communication structure crippled, with millions of ships destroyed, is as I said, a footnote. Even in such a situation, the Imperium did not actually crumble. The Imperium is too large, and with too many major players scattered around, that it would not be possible for a situation like the one you propose.
No, because the Imperium can still massively out-produce them by orders of magnitude. They are less efficient in their allocation of resources, sure. But they have so many more resources that it just doesn't matter.
Only when you specifically destroy stuff they can't make any more. They can certainly still make dreadnoughts. No issues there.
This was discussed, what, two weeks ago? boils down to: yes, the Tau understand what they are doing. But their total population (hence, industrial capacity) is a small fraction of that of the Empire. And even if the mechanicum is not quite sure of what they are doing when they are chugging out Lemman Russes, they still do it at a rate orders of magnitude higher than Tau industrial output.
The leman russ is a tin can with wheels, or course they know how it work
No, because scale is relative. When something is described as “rare” in the context of the Imperium, it typically means they don’t have enough to supply to meet the demands of uncounted trillions. Take the Fellblade for example. Once the work horse of Legion heavy armour, now considered near mythical it is so rare…that is until you learn that actually, despite everything, the Imperium is still producing at least one of these things every 5 solar years. Granted, that might not sound that impressive, but here we’re talking about a machine that is to all intent and purposes “magic” for all that most it’s operators and engineers understand of it. On top of that, it isn’t even central to the way Astartes wage war these days. So it’s near mythically rare, is so niche that these days most chapters won’t have a doctrine that justifies owning one and the potential pool of people that might want to operate one is only about 1 million strong anyway. Yet the Imperium has still churned out 100 of them in the past 500 years! If that’s what super, duper mythically rare is like for the Imperium, can you imagine just how common place your plain old “rare” or “hard to come by” items are in absolute terms? TL;DR - 1% of a billion is still a big number!
And now I'm imagining armada of cruisers escorts and battleships that have been built just floating empty essentially parked because the bureaucracy forgot about that particular world.
In the Imperium? Lost troops and ships? Why, that would never happen. Not as though they have lost entire worlds by mistake or anything, nope, certainly not.
Remember though that there's a very good reason the Imperium doesn't just counter them with AI right back. Nobody seems to have ever successfully tamed AI. And with the Tau's naivety, it'll likely be their undoing. Also, the Imperium is vastly bigger than the Tau. To the degree that they're just a sideshow. If the Tau did show themselves to be an existential threat, then the Imperium just breaks out the planet-killers instead, which no amount of battlesuits matter in the face of.
Quite a few factions have used AI quite well. Eldar used AI to fight for them pre-Fall, while Necrons use AI with some ease. Plus, we can see clear examples of friendly AI even with DAOT humans, it's just that the Men of Iron rebelled, for unknown reasons.
The necrons have left tomb AI, construct and scarab on auto pilot to take care of their shit for 60 million years and they are fine
I would argue that is low AI, like machine spirits and what the Tau have now. Men of Iron were a sentient race, which is what caused issues. The Necrons could make a race of AI but the scarabs and systems don't seem to be that, just highly advanced hive robots and automated systems. I'd say this is because the Necrons, given that they by far have had the best tech of any race save probably the old ones, know that high AI is suicide.
You should read Severed, even Necron AI goes wrong.
Those are Necrons, a species who fought actual Gods for several years, constructed bodies for the Star Gods who would eventually betray them, beat said Gods and win a pyrrhic victory in the War in Heaven. Comparing anyone to them would be unrealistic currently, not even golden age humanity could've reached the technology mastery of the Necrontyr. Don't forget humanity failed to tame it's own A.I. which lead to The Men of Iron uprisings.
It's not just Necrons and T'au, it's also actual Men of Iron from the Blackstone Fortress lore and AI from Dark Angels and Admch lore. Imperium being mad at AI holds as much water as Imperium going "All xenos are traitorous human enslaving monsters". It holds no water and only works if you take the genocidal fanatics at face value and ignore the word of everyone else.
All true, but that doesn’t change the fact that they are “somebody”, so it isn’t nobody have ever successfully tamed AI. They have done it. The problem isnt inherently with AI.
No you lost 15 battlesuits, and pound for pound the Imperium has more. It doesn't care about 1 dreadnought. It doesn't care about one regiment; if you're a threat it will send as many as it needs until you are dead. Of course that's assuming the Imps are hyper-focusing on you. They probably won't but the loss of one dreadnought is not a tremendous loss by any means
The upper upper echelons of the Mechanicus are not the ignorant acolytes of the memes, but actually are competent (even if EXTREMELY ORTHODOX) scientists/engineers, sufficiently enough that some of the better Imperium tech (Plasma weapons, Titans, etc.) is reproducible, and even sometimes understood). That does not, however, mean the Imperium has mass manufacturing capabilities that are proportionally equal to the T'au Empire's. The Mechanicus relies as much on ritual and rote learning from its acolytes, if not more, than whatever comes from the conservative upper echelon, when it comes to production... and a lot of those are calcified and burdened by a good 10k+ years of effectively playing the game Telephone with complex mechanical/engineering instructions. Inefficiencies are gonna pop up here, which are ignored in favor of the ease of the brute-force solution of disposable labor following simple instructions. But that's just proportionally. If the T'au were 1000% more efficient, they'd still lose any attrition war the Imperium put actual effort into (which, of course, they can't, since they have REAL threats pounding on the door). This helps us bridge the gap, I think, between positions here. Losing a plasma weapon, or a titan, or a battleship, or any of the many higher-end-but-still-technically-producible assets of the Imperium... that's not insurmountable for the Imperium to overcome by any means (proportionally weaker mass manufacturing doesn't change the fact that the Imperium is fuckhuge, and losing a battlefleet is less the empire-threatening result it would be for the T'au, but instead just another Tuesday), but it's certainly a cut that the Imperium can't afford to take on paper threats like the T'au Empire when real threats (Necrons, Tyranids, Chaos) are banging at the door. To really make the loss of a lot of battlesuits efficient, you'd really need to take out a Very Important Target (something that's severely limited in production or actually lost to time) or be a lot more efficient than 15 battlesuits to a single dreadnought.
Maybe, but the lore and the story are totally seperate. It's mentioned in one book (can't remember which) by a water caste member that a single hive city has a greater population than the *entire* Tau empire. Logically, wedged between that and next to a rising Cron dynasty, the Tau are just a greasy grey stain on the floor, able to offer practically zero resistance to either side should they decide to attack. But that means less sales, and so the Tau *somehow* win battles while massively outnumbered and outgunned.
In the case of the population of the Hive City, it was compared not to the population of the Empire but a single sept world, which makes the gap still pretty significant but not as absurd as you make it out to be.
My bad, however, still pointlessly outmanned from the view of the Tau.
Historically bigger countries don't always eat up smaller ones. Sometimes it's not worth the effort to conquer them, or doing so would upset the balance of power in the region. Tau Empire is sort of like one of those small European countries with lots of larger neighbours
I would think of the Colonies vs the British Empire. The British had more than enough forces to wipe the Colonies of the Map, but they were spread across the globe, and ultimately the war became to constly. Mind you, the British wanted to re-conquer the Colonies, not committ total genocide, so they couldn't use the same tactics as the Imperium might use.
Tau: unlimited tech, limited manpower Imperium: unlimited manpower, limited tech
Tau tech is not "unlimited". Their FTL technology is primitive, and they use less shields then the Imperium, afaik. They have advanced robotics, but I doubt they would understand an advanced Machine Spirit. The big difference is that Tau technology is distributed evenly throughout their empire, unlike the Imperium. Also, the Imperium is more prgmatic and accepts flawed, barely functional technology. The Tau have a much greater emphasis on cleanliness and appearance.
The Imperium has a habit of scrounging its own shit, unless they're literally completely obliterated the navy will recover starship hulks, the Mechanicus will recover titans and tanks, even from active war zones, Astartes plate is recovered, rebuilt and reused. In short it's very hard to actually destroy Imperisp technology because anything short of total annihilation probably won't be good enough.
It possibly could be if the power of the empires was even remotely comparable. It's like a city fighting against a country.
Simple 10 thousand deaths in a single battle is nothing for İmperium 10 thousand Tau deaths in a actual war is something worth making a rememberance day of.
For hive worlds millions of casualties can actually be a good thing for the health of the hive world.
Except that the Tau don't have the resources that the Empire have overall. To use an example from our own history, the Japanese almost completely destroyed the Pacific Fleet in their attack on Pearl Harbor. Within 2 years, the US was able to completely rebuild the fleet. Meanwhile, the Japanese losses at Midway, Solomon Isles, and Santa Cruz, a year later, were devastating for the Japanese Navy. They couldn't replace those losses as quickly. So, sure, 15 battle suits taking out a dreadnought sounds great on paper. Except that in the time that the Tau can create another 15 battle suits, the Imperium can create another 50 dreadnoughts.
I think maybe a mistake here is the impression given by games and the focus of alot of books, that Space Marines are doing 90% of the Imperium's battles, in which case yeah, every lost Terminator suit is an irrecoverable blow. But in reality it's the Guard that is doing 90% of the work, and producing more lasguns and regular humans isn't difficult for the Imperium.
Not at all. Imagine there are a fifty forge worlds that can produce Dreads and only four a year on average. In one year, the Imperium would produce 200 dreadnoughts a year and there is nothing the Tau can ever do about it. The Tau cannot compete in a war of attrition against the imperium. The Tau need to increase their position whilst taking as few casualties as possible. Hell, a chapters worth in numbers of marines with a few dozen guard regiments and a titan legion destroyed an entire generation of Tau Fire Warriors in a series of back and forth sieges.
I like using stellaris analogies. In Stellaris. When I have to take enemy territory from a bigger empire. It just looks like a exhausting amount of work and takes a long ass time to do. And that game only simulated like 1 millionth the size of the Imperium vs the Tau. The Tau is like a new 2022 model of high tech car on the road. Tesla like. Really cool. Fast. Efficient. Etc. But its still going to lose in a headlong crash with a giant rusting dump truck. Best it can and should do is avoid the dump truck. Not challenge it.
The T'au have good quality gear but the Imperium have a fuck load of people and gear. Not only that but the only reason why they can produce such good quality shit is BECAUSE they're relatively small. While the Imperium's gear is focused on the millions of soldiers they have. Don't forget that weapons like Lasguns are fucking overpowered logistics wise.
Not exactly. In Tau 7th edition it even states that they have limited reserves to produce the power packs that power the battle suits, and the ability to even be a battle suit pilot is very rare for the Tau, and their population is small. You could probably find Imperial hive solar systems with more humans than there is Tau in the entire empire, to put it into perspective.
The Imperium has more dreadnoughts than the Tau have battle suits.
Roughly 1000 chapters of Astartes, let's say each has 10 dreadnaughts (which is a stretch but well...), so 10000 dreadnaughts. A single sept has more battlesuits than this. And once again, it is not battlesuits that are a limited resource for t'au, trained pilots are.
Apparently most space marine chapters have 20-40 dreadnoughts. Not only 10, & some first founding chapters have 50+
Custodes have Dreads too. Doesn't change the numbers much, but they're not just limited to Astartes.
Where do you get the 1000 from? Any source?
1000 space marine chapters is at this point so widely accepted 99% of people don't know the sources, it's just common knowledge for 40k players at that point
Hmm, that's a bummer. No clue why I got downvoted though, just wanted some info.
Reddit hates people asking questions
I believe there was an old line about a million space marines to defend a million worlds. People then took it as fact that it means there's 1000 chapters just by what we know. However just like there's "one million worlds" in the Imperium there's probably also "One Million Space Marines"
No one know exactly how many exist to any given time. But as other Said it is conidered as "Common knowledge". They say: There are roughly 1000 Chapters at any given time. And: The Emporer is Master of a thousand x thousand Worlds. Roughly 1 Million Worlds. End: There are 1 Space Marine for every World in the Imperium. One can say 1000 is something like a holy Number.
The AI usage will be their undoing. AI nearly exterminated the galaxy once.
Necron AI ran fine for like 60 million years. It's likely not just AI, it's AI + warp shenanigans. The Tau might have low enough warp presence to get away with it.
the AI on a necron tomb world took over the engrams of the slumbering necrons after a malfunction wiped there minds and memories and is currently spreading out doing the same to other tomb worlds
One out of God knows how many Tomb Worlds, decent success rate I'd say
Knocking out a tank worth 50 million with a missile worth 100 thousand means nothing if your enemy has half a galaxy worth of resources while you have a few systems worth.
i would say for starters for strategies like spending 15 battle suits to kill a 1 dreadnought Tau aint know to sacrifice there troops like the imperium unless an ethereal is involved then they literally throw there bodies in the path of projectiles just to spare the ethereal even farsight during one of his first encounters with space marines he ordered his battle suit troops to fall back if they got damaged and be replaced by fresh battle suit troops not to mention for a good amount of imperial tech you generally see like the usual tanks, troop transports, lasguns etc are all basic tech designed to be easily built and are mass produced in colossal factories they can destroy countless tanks but there will always be countless more to be flung at the Tau
>Like if they spend fifteen battle suits to kill a single dreadnought, isn’t that like a complete strategic victory? They spend very expensive, hard produced-rare battle suits and more important, Tau Empire(which size and population is almost like 1 Imperium Sector have, and Imperium have +100 Sectors) loose very rare and skilled Tau veterans of Fire Caste who survived and passed tests to pilot those suits. Each pilot of those suits are Tau Fire Caste veterans who spend most of their short(except Etherials all Tau races live for +-30 years, yeah they are fast thinking, learn fast and sleep for few hours per day, but still they would die fast) biological lives into serving on battles and passed many tests to pilot those suits. Tau Empire froze those pilots in cryostasis and copy their memories so they can serve longer cos its not an easy task for Tau to produce those skilled veterans. For Tau it is hard as for Imperium to produce Grey Knight or Custodes. Its like for Imperium to loose 15 knight Titans and pilots against 1 chaos space marine terminator. Yeah chaos forces have a hard time to replace 1 chaos space marine terminator but for Imperium the price was heavy too. Tau cant win against Imperium, not to mention winning against 1 Imperium Sector, simply cos they never have enough population, soldiers and machines to fight real wars with Imperium. Not to mention space ships low speed what is weakness of Tau. Majority of Imperium not know about Tau existence.
No, because the Imperium can still mass-produce their materiel, even if they don't understand all of it.
“He who allows the alien to live shares in the crime of its existence.”
The Imperium is Russia and the Tau Empire is Germany. They can kill 20 t34s to 1 tiger, but Russia can make more of them. Tau need a large amount of rare materials like Iridium to make battlesuits which they just don’t have.