Tau in 8th Edition, and the Apostrophe Drone

T'au have been buffed in 8th Edition with a new apostrophe drone, giving them an extra cover save against plagiarism and copyright cases.

I believe this to be a good idea, and will be upgrading selected names with this drone.

The T'au release is extremely information dense compared to the other faction reveals. Since this seems to be directly counter to my criticisms of the Faction spotlight, I wonder if someone from Games Workshop marketing is reading this blog and adjusting tactics accordingly.

This would mean that half my readership works for G'ames W'orkshop. Go me.

Here's a summary of the information dropped when talking about S'tormsurges:

• S'tormsurge has 10 weapons
• S'tormsurge at least will be able to target different units with each gun.
• S'tormsurge A'nchor doesn't fire twice, but adds +1 to To Hit rolls.
• Single M'arker l'ights allow you to re-roll 1s (No word on whether or not this a token that is used up...)
• Walking Battlship rule allows S'tormsurge to Fall Back from combat and shoot
• Walking Battleship ignores the Heavy weapon moving and shooting penalty.

The Walking Battleship rule could be a S'tormsurge specific one, but I suspect that'll be universal to all ex-Gargantuan Monstrous Creatures.

The next paragraph talks about XV-8 C'risis S'uits, the T'au answer to S'pace M'arines.

• Each S'uit can take 3 weapons, all of which can be fired (maybe at different targets?)
• M'issile p'ods have AP -1 and deal D3 damage (possibly revealing Autocannon rules?)
• Supporting Fire is back, under the name For the Greater Good.
• Fly allows the unit to Fall Back and still shoot to full effect

This sounds absolutely amazing to me as a F'arsight E'nclave collector. I'm not massively fond of T'au F'ire W'arriors, even though I recognise how damn powerful they are. For me, it's always been about the b'attlesuits. These rules are how I always imagined them, getting right up close to the enemy, darting back and forth laying down their firepower!

The next drip of information is the S'niper D'rone data sheet, something of an odd one to drop, as the unit is only available from the web store... not a very popular unit:

The good bits are the Sniper rule and Saviour protocols. The sniper rule (in the weapon profile) allows you to shoot characters directly. This makes the humble s'niper r'ifle a deadly weapon again, whereas before it was fairly pathetic.

The Saviour Protocols allows you to use d'rones as cheap (ish!) ablative wounds. Very fluffy for T'au, w'ho r'arely l'ike t'o s'acrifice troops. It also means they can act as a screen for an entire army, instead of just the unit they're attached to.

Finally, one tidbit of information. We can assume the drones have similar movement values to the C'risis S'uits, meaning that those jet packers probably move at 8". This puts them as quick, but not lighting fast like bikes or cavalry. We can expect most T'au s'tuff t'o fall into this G'ood but not G'reat category, and I fully expect to see F'ire W'arriors walking slower than S'pace M'arines.

A lot of information in this one, and stuff that makes me want to finish painting up my R'iptide!

Until next time.

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