KV128 Warhammer Tau Empire Stormsurge

Product Information

Ion weapon: A weapon whose profile includes the word ‘ion’, or a Relic that replaces an ion weapon. Mont’ka is your option for going fast and breaking things, and offers you benefits to your mobility and damage output for the first three turns of the game. While Mont’ka is active, your units can make Normal Moves or Advance and still count as Remaining Stationary for the purposes of shooting, and when you shoot at the closest enemy unit within a set range (which decreases from 18” to 9” over the three turns) you improve your AP by 1 and get to re-roll wound rolls of 1. This is, obviously, extremely good stuff – Tau have lots of mid-ranged guns that look very spicy in this book, and using Mont’ka allows you to get these into touch fast, and substantially improves their output in the opening phases of the game. It’s particularly useful for heavily mechanised lists, as getting access to re-roll 1s is pretty unusual for non-CORE tanks, and Fire Warriors hopping out of Devilfish (something there’s strong support for – more on that later) are extremely nasty with this up. There’s basically nothing in this book that doesn’t appreciate the extra mobility too – whether it be Crisis Teams launching daring early strikes, or Broadsides sprinting ponderously into firing positions, being able to Advance and Shoot is just always great.

Burst weapon: A weapon whose profile includes the word ‘burst’, or a Relic that replaces a burst weapon.Ultimately all three basic Commander options have some appeal – the Enforcer maybe stands out because they can do something that very little else in the army manages, but all could fit into builds. All of them can also bring a few drones from the standard gun/marker/shield choice if you want.

Choices: This book is another one where everything looks awesome and you want to try it all out. Deciding what to cut from lists has been hard. This warlord is held in the highest favour by the alien auxiliaries serving alongside them.This WARLORD gains the following abilities: Perhaps unsurprisingly, Prototype Systems are now Tau’s paid upgrade option, letting you take additional wargear or super-powered versions of weapons on Commanders, Crisis Team/Bodyguard Sergeants and Ghostkeels (though there’s really only a few for the latter). Most are weapon upgrades (where like relics you have to buy the base weapon first) but there are a couple of bits of more esoteric fare here too. Same deal as ever with these – only one per unit, only one of each, none for Named Characters. Next, I have the Ghostkeel, his fan club of 10 gun drones, the Farsight marksman, and the Riptide all holding down my home front. Those units have a large enough footprint that I should be able to screen out my deployment zone very well. While the rest of my army pushes forward to challenge all of the center objectives. I also have brought Vespid to be a bit of an action-doing unit, which I would expect to see in the majority of Tau lists. A Riptide playing keep away behind a piece of obscuring terrain has been a strategy used by Tau players all 9th edition, and I don’t see that changing. The ion accelerator being increased to four damage only furthers the need to have something like this to pop open tanks or threaten some hammerheads (for example). Now that we have access to the 30-inch plasma guns, we can also hammer down on units that think they can stand out in the open and not be punished for it. Dal’yth are also The Sneaky Ones, but with a slightly different flavour based on their integration of highly advanced Auxiliary tech. Their trait provides INFANTRY units with Light Cover against anything except shooting in combat, and also allows Auxiliaries to benefit from Kau’yon or Mont’ka. Jumping ahead to their Warlord trait, this also allows Auxiliaries to benefit from Markerlights, and the combination of Markers and Mont’ka looks like it could be extremely potent applied to Vespid in particular.I played tyranids and did not have the heavy wepaons to deal with him. I think my usual space wolves also have a hard time presenting enough hevay wepaons to threaten it. It might be my lists that are the problem. If every model in an INFANTRY unit is on or in an Area Terrain feature with this trait, then it can either Hold Steady or it can Set to Defend (see below) when an enemy unit declares a charge against it. Sept Warlord Trait: A Warlord Trait associated with a specific sept. These are only available to WARLORDS that are part of a Sept Detachment (and only if they are from the associated sept). Sector A sits square in the middle, so can be paired with any of the others, and the other available pairs are sectors B &C or D & E. Even with that limitation there’s a formidable array of combinations here, plus the standard option to inherit abilities from one of the named Septs, here called Allied World, so are any of them any good?

A strong bond of loyalty has developed between the simple drone AIs and their pilot masters, such that they seek to protect the T’au at all costs.If you use the Saviour Protocols Stratagem when a saving throw is failed for a model in this unit, reduce the CP cost of that Stratagem by 1CP (to a minimum of 0CP). Note that the CP cost is only reduced by 1CP for that use of the Stratagem; any future usages of it cost the normal amount of CPs.

Political Centre

As well as those for the factions as outlined above, there’s six generic Warlord traits in here. The names will be familiar from 8th edition, but the effects are universally way better. A good example here is Precision of the Hunter– previously, your Warlord got re-rolls of 1s to wound against VEHICLE and MONSTER units, not exactly a huge upgrade all considered. Now, it gives your character full hit and wound re-rolls, in both melee and shooting – a huge upgrade in their effectiveness, especially since Tau characters can take real guns. Combining this with the Onager Gauntlet from the Relics section also gives you a powerful melee punch, something which isn’t always a feature of Tau armies but becomes genuinely attractive here. Twelve relics here, a mix of returning favourites and new kit. These are now “Relics” too, rather than Signature Systems, in line with the drive to standardisation (which is good). They’re also helped here by two things – the fact that Farsight is in this faction (surprise) and the stratagem. Farsight we’ll cover in Datasheets, but he’s definitely worth having in lists, and the stratagem is a super-powerful buff for Crisis Suits or Commanders arriving from either Manta Strike or a Homing Beacon – just flat full hit and wound re-rolls. It ain’t cheap (2 or 3CP depending on unit size) but it’s a direct upgrade of a vanilla Stratagem (which only provides hit re-rolls) and looks like it can be used in combination with cunningly crafted 3-model Crisis teams to throw out an atrocious amount of pain for a modest investment. Realistically, every Tau list you build is going to have at least one Commander, often two, and you can fill to taste from the rest of the options here – there’s plenty of decent stuff. Troops Last up, Tactical Drones. If you want lots of gun, marker or shield drones you can take these in a separate unit of 4-12 models, and it seems plausible you sometimes might. Four marker drones is your easiest and cheapest way to put down some easy-to-use Markerlights, while in Farsight Enclaves dropping in some big Gun Drone units feels like it might have some play in Mont’ka – twelve of them is a whole lot of shots at only 96pts. Without Saviour Protocols Shield Drones aren’t that useful in their own right now, but if you’re on either of these other plans adding a few Shield Drones can provide some substantial extra tankiness. Definitely feels like there will be some uses for this datasheet overall. Heavy Support