eXplorminate had only just published my recent reXamination of Warhammer 40k: Gladius – Relics of War when the long-awaited T’au DLC propelled itself into my lap. With my power armoured gauntlets still caked in filthy xeno blood from my last sixty-something hour tour of duty on Gladius Prime, I lept back in with high hopes of more carnage, this time “For the Greater Good” of the T’au!
The T’au are rather strange and unfamiliar to me, aside from a brief flirtation in Dawn of War: Dark Crusade, most likely because they were introduced shortly after I stopped playing Warhammer 40k tabletop (moving onto Dungeons & Dragons, shortly followed by teenage drinking, chasing girls and college…) and so I never really got into them as a faction first time around. Games Workshop are notorious for “borrowing” popular themes, franchises and motifs from popular culture and assimilating them Borg-style into their own dark and twisted creations, offered up as a sacrifice on the altar of the “dark sci-fi/fantasy” genre to please their massive fanbase hungry for all things horrific!
Games Workshop introduced the Tau into the Warhammer 40,000 tabletop game in the early to mid-90s, clearly having watched the UK’s new found fascination with all things Japanese: early anime exports, subtitled or dubbed in the US and exported over with nary a care for video age restriction ratings and broadcast very late at night on Channel 4 started to slowly gain some mainstream attention and kids loved the mix of technological fetishism, raw violence and incredible storytelling.
One can see the Gundam series in the designs of the T’au’s Crisis Battlesuits (surely a nod to the popular OAV “Bubblegum Crisis” of the same era, and a favourite of mine as a teenager!) and these excellent designs are wonderfully recreated here in-game. The 3D models are solid, as always, with faithful rendering of your favourite units blasting their way through the already cratered terrain of Gladius Prime. I cannot comment too strongly on the unit choice with regards to their tabletop counterparts but my younger brother, who had a T’au army back when he was a wee nipper, assures me most of the essential fan favourites are included.
Unit Roster
Fire Warriors are the T’au’s line infantryman whose individual units gain fire support advantages for being placed next to one another and have access to an incredible range of AI drone based special abilities, grenades and other such gadgetry. They epitomise this faction’s design aesthetic: a rather physically weak race that use highly advanced technology for a strong ranged game supplemented with deployable limited lifespan drone units which provide them support bonuses, shielding buffs and extra firepower. The unit formation attack bonuses are also a running theme through the T’au roster, and much like the Tyranids, require careful placement of your formations to fully utilise in effective manner. Fire Warriors remain useful throughout most of the game, as their abilities scale upwards as you climb the tech ladder.
Pathfinders are the T’au’s dedicated scout unit, and add some extra support abilities in the form of a difference set of Drones, providing increased range for your other units, area denial and reconnaissance. XV8 Crisis Battlesuits are an early game armoured infantryman with a ranged attack and a close range flamer: it is this latter weapon that can become particularly important for the T’au as they’re a predominantly ranged-attack focused faction, meaning they become vulnerable to enemy ranged units hiding in close terrain such as forests. The flamer counters this nicely, at the expense of having to get up close and personal, something your average T’au would balk at the thought of. There are several types of Stealth Battlesuit, one of them a high tier unit with a jetpack that throws out advanced holographic countermeasures to drastically reduce the accuracy of a targeted unit. Some of these battlesuits are designated as Monsterous Infantry and subject to some of the same bonuses and penalties that class bestows.
The T’au also field a variety of well armoured hover-tank vehicles, ranging from the ubiquitous Devilfish troop transport, fast Piranha squadrons for hit and run attacks, and two large gunships: the Hammerhead boasts a huge and powerful railgun for sinking the most heavily armoured of targets, and the Sky Ray’s guided missile system can shoot without line of sight, making them effective in targeting well hidden units that are trying to repair battle damage. Very satisfying! They’re not always as quick as you’d expect for a flying unit, with the exception of the Piranha, so whilst it’s perfectly viable to use your tanks to flank, T’au armour is somewhat less suited to manoeuvre and more to long-ranged fire support.
The T’au heroes also lean heavily towards supporting the rank and file with buffs and targeting enemies with debuffs. The sombre, drone wielding Ethereal is the high level commander of the T’au forces, applying an area of effect damage reduction bonus, one that boosts attack power and another AOE healing spell. All extremely useful, ensuring his place amongst any serious T’au strike-force and usually paired up with a second to really stack up those bonuses. His final ability, unlocked at a higher level, Zephyr’s Grace, gives your surrounding units an extra action point, and is as invaluable as it sounds in allowing the player to pull of hit and run tactics, and other tactical plays usually barred by action point limitations. I found I used the T’au Ethereal almost constantly in my games and respect him as an essential commander unit.
I initially found the Cadre Fireblade rather less impressive. He’s yet another fire support hero armed with drones and an initially underwhelming Precise Shot attack that gets somewhat better with increased levelling. However, he might well be another essential addition to the T’au hero roster because of his later unlocked ability “Unity” which grants a huge +6.0 bonus to loyalty in every city you own. This can be one way to counter the serious loyalty penalties you suffer the larger your empire grows.
The Commander is a manga-esque Battlesuit-clad (yes, you guessed it) drone using support hero specifically focusing on enhancing the ranged performance of his subordinate compadres: you’re starting to get the picture here I’m sure. The T’au aren’t exactly a one-trick pony but they are focused in a very specific way as should be apparent from their ability selections. The Commander is the only leader here that can stand on his own toe to toe with some of the other factions hero units, but just barely, not really being equipped to take on a raging Ork Warboss or the terrifying might of a Chaos Lord mano-a-mano.
All in all, and again much like the monstrous Tyranids, the T’au are not an easy faction for a beginner to play. Individually their units are very weak, especially in the early game where they’ll find themselves easily picked off by the ever-dangerous native beasties wandering Gladius Prime, but the here the T’au have an extra card to play: two of the most numerous of these native races, the Kroothounds and Vespid Stingwings (both long-time favourites of the T’au roster if my memory correctly serves me) may be recruited into your force as auxiliaries at the cost of some Influence. This helps: the Kroothound Infiltrate ability bypasses overwatch completely, and if there is one faction that really relies on overwatch, it’s the T’au, meaning they could otherwise be a rather nasty counter to the Fire Warriors. This ability to spend Influence to quickly bolster your forces with weaker, but fast and adaptable troops is one of the T’au’s strongest benefits.
Faction Abilities
In 40k lore, each faction is monstrous in their own way: Chaos and the Dark Eldar are undeniable demonic horrors corrupted by the forces of the Dark Gods, the Tyrannids an almost unstoppable, unspeakable bioweapon capable of swallowing planets whole, and so we can go on. Even the “good guys”, the Imperium of Man are a faction of fascist ultra-religious nutjobs who would nuke one of their own densely populated planets clean to remove a few saucy Slaanesh worshipping sex workers. In time honoured fashion then, the T’au are no exception to this rule.
Under the guise of bringing together the different races of the galaxy under one banner of “justice” and for one “greater good”, they gradually assimilate their targets through the act of diplomacy, liberal distribution of gifts and then using propaganda, espionage and sabotage to quietly subvert and convert their people until they’re ripe for an easy military strike. Once inducted into the T’au Empire, every shred of individuality and personal freedom is stripped away until they’re just another well-oiled cog of the T’au war machine. Whilst their look is certainly based on modern Japanese culture, they’re also somewhat reminiscent of ancient era-Imperialist China, with a healthy dose of utopian “Space Communist” sprinkled in for good measure, and it is from this last flavour their abilities are drawn.
This information warfare, hearts & minds attitude is modelled in-game with a series of abilities called “Enlightenment and Unity” the player can spend Influence to unleash. I’ve already mentioned Convert Auxilliary above. For the Greater Good drops an opponent’s moral right down and veterans of Gladius will know how powerful this ability will be against a very strong enemy unit that you might struggle to take on face to face. Subvert City imposes a -3.0 penalty to loyalty to a rival city, a situationally useful ability that I honestly didn’t get a lot of use out of: you can’t see an enemies loyalty level, and whilst that penalty is significant, it’ll be more significant if their loyalty is already low, and so I found it difficult to judge when to use it. There are also several technologies that each unlock the ability to purchase one of the in-game resources: energy, ore and food, and of obvious utility when you’re desperate for a specific building or unit. There are more of these abilities to unlock in the tech tree as you progress.
Perhaps the most striking feature of the T’au play-style is “Utopia”, which grants a loyalty bonus for the first building of it’s type you build in any one city, and a penalty if you duplicate buildings. Loyalty penalties are serious and so you are heavily penalised for focusing your cities towards a specific job. I found this quite a challenge at first: the other races (and in fact, many 4X games I play) often require you to heavily specialise in order to efficiently leverage the resources at your disposal in each city.
Here you are expected to “build everything, everywhere”, something that flies in the face of modern 4X city management game design and yet somehow working to make the T’au much more interesting to play as a result. Where the Tyranids required lots of smaller cities, the T’au need lots of medium-sized ones with one of every building to maximize the loyalty bonus, and perhaps more importantly, to minimize the crippling penalties that low loyalties inflict on your industrial output.
For the Greater Good!
The T’au have a flavour of their own, but they play a little like the Astra Militarum and share some of their weaknesses. Where the Guard have poor quality infantry screening for incredibly powerful tanks and artillery, the T’au use a mix of heavily armoured hovertanks and anime style battlesuits which work to support the Fire Warrior formations. As always there are techs to upgrade the effectiveness of your basic infantrymen’s weapons, but the most effective technologies for them are the aforementioned Drones, which can shine marker-lights onto strong enemies to increase accuracy, shield your men in a force-field or act as fire-support by launching a death-totting Gun Drone. When carefully placed, these support units can often save your men from death, as the AI often seems to favour attacking them over your more valuable and permanent models, and I quickly learned to exploit this to protect weaker or damaged units when threatened.
Drones are not exclusive to the Fire Warriors: several of the vehicles (such as the fast attack flyer TX4 Piranha) can use them too. Facing off against the T’au can be quite daunting, as the AI will often spawn a seemingly endless wave of the things. Popping up from out of the fog-of-war behind his front line they raise a menacing profile, and I found myself wondering where they were all springing up from! Even a relatively small T’au force can suddenly double in size for a few turns or three, and some of the abilities of these Drones are not to be sniffed at. The invulnerability buff provided by one of them, stacked with the Ethereal’s Sense of Stone ability, can turn an exposed unit in an untouchable bulwark to place between yourself and your foe, allowing it to stand in the face of withering ordinance and most often forcing the AI to target something less well protected.
It is this careful stacking of abilities and positioning of your units that makes the combat in Gladius interesting, and the T’au adhere to that philosophy well. They are a tricky faction to handle initially but a rewarding one, once you’ve gotten to grips with the basics, and the tools you have at your disposal allow for a range of plays beyond the simple “out-range and outgun” strategy favoured by their close counterpart, the Astra Militarum.
Conclusion
This is a solid DLC with an interesting if somewhat challenging faction containing plenty of content and I think fans of the base game could do a lot worse than to buy it. I was never overly fussed about the T’au themselves in Warhammer: 40K but their representation here is fantastic and a whole lot of fun to use and I’m warming to them after long last. They play somewhat like the Astra Militarum and the Space Marines combined, but are significantly different to either of those individually with their own distinct feel that separates them from any of the other factions.
Tactical combat fans who delight in experimentation with combinations of stacking buffs and debuffs might well enjoy the large range of tools at the T’au’s disposal. The challenge of overcoming their unusual early game deficiencies and their weakness in close combat, balanced with an adaptable force endowed with a colourful strategic palette may be tantalising to fans of the genre who’re eager for more options in this increasingly excellent game.
You Might Like This DLC If:
- You’re excited to play with the T’au’s plethora of advanced technological toys: rail-gun toting hover-tanks, death spewing manga-style Battlesuits and strong support heroes are all at your fingertips here.
- Tactical positioning of units and careful special ability buffing to leverage the specific tactical advantage you need for the enemy face is more fun than piling into melee with your gore-splattered chainsword!
You Might NOT Like This DLC If:
- You’re not enamoured with the T’au themselves. There are a lot of you out there, I know!
- You’re expecting drastic changes to the base game experience.
Benjamin played Warhammer 40k: Gladius – Relics of War Tau DLC for 25 hours on a custom-built PC: Intel i9700k, GTX 1080 TI, 32GB RAM, 2560x1440P monitor @ 165Hz