Napoleon once said something important about the vulnerability that follows after any military victory. I don’t remember the quote. However, the meaning of it was simple. Territory won must be secured. What most tau players—and by extension, most people—tend to fail to understand about war is that there’s more to conquest than killing. It’s not enough to simply harass opponents with endless artillery fire and air strikes. If you can’t fortify the land you’re fighting on and can’t build a logistics system to secure it, then you might aswell have conquered an area covered in mines.
Part of why the tau struggle so much with the orks and the tyranids is because they fight even more obnoxiously than Americans. The tau are too reliant on range, stealth, and expensive-as-fuck equipment to win most of their battles, but struggle to commit to building fortifications that can ensure their expansion. The results of such nearsightedness include the Damocles crusade, literally any exchange with the Orks, getting their asses beat by generic basilisks, and more. It’s no surprise knowing that when tau forces try to take a fortified imperial world, all victories end up being more devastating than the phyrric victories the guardsmen deal with when up against heretics.
Tau players online are even more fucking obnoxious. Their entire beliefs and reliance on tech reek of ignorance of the importance of fortification and the logistical constraints of conventional war. It’s almost as bad as the rhetoric spewed by amerisharts that boast of their military’s technology while endlessly whining about getting their asses beat by insurgents.
Ffs the tau didn’t even get to have their own golden age before getting hit by the great rift.
Off topic note, I’m kind of glad for the fact that the tau do fight in such a unique fashion. It’s hard for me to describe how I feel about the tau. However, the tau in 40k give me the same feeling I had watching the reboots of evangelion compared to the original.
Stories like vraks are genuinely upsetting due to the reality that much of the horrifying shit that occurs in it is shockingly realistic and fully coherent. The idea of a land-based reclaimation of a rouge territory still resulting in a land ultimately ruined by the devastating effects of mechanized siege warfare is shockingly realistic (Ukraine for the past god knows how many years). All for what? A fucking statue? It’s not even like the characters or events were written to be deliberately grim. Compared to real human history, the actual devastation was shockingly less severe than what would’ve occurred if something similar happened on earth.
The tau aren’t like that. They’re like orks. They do away with the consistency, realism, and grimness of the world building to give a moment for the reader to feel genuine optimism for a society that could’ve and has existed. To me, the tau represent the difference in the screenwriting in evangelism 1993 and the reboots. The former franchise was much more realistic, painful, and more in depth in its ideas. The latter was much more fun, optimistic, and less ideologically intense.
I’ll stop here. The feelings I have for the tau’s role in the world of 40k is something you the reader will have to experience yourself by reading through the books.
>>37385There’s one thing that does strike odd about most major factions in the war hammer setting. Although I’m sure this wasn’t intentional, many factions indirectly adopt a lot of socialist development policies. Most factions force sub factions to centralize their production over towards the major group, collectivized labour is common throughout the imperium, people typically live in lord-owned or collectively-owned and operated communes, it’s not that unusual for humans to share vital resources including food and weapons, and more. Although rouge traders and pirates offer some semblance of a merchant-based economy existing, most factions are written as industrialized feudal or even collectivist socialist economies indirectly.
That shit really can make one wonder if feudalism would’ve evolved directly to collectivized capitalism in the presence of greater urbanization and heavy industry.
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