Tactica: Chess

 Even if you don't follow tabletop games, you've probably heard of Chess before. It is by far the biggest tabletop game, with hundreds of thousands of players across the world, and it's dominated the miniature game market for decades now. It's even started breaking into the mainstream with popular Hollywood actors opening up about how they're big fans of Chess. It's easy to see why too - Chess is a masterpiece of game design, and one of the most legendarily well-balanced games ever made. 

The Chess Community has grown a lot in recent years, and one of the constant questions I keep seeing on the Chess social media groups is about how newbies can play Chess better. Luckily for them, your boy here M-Daddy has got their backs, which is why I decided to put together this tactics article to help newbies improve their Chess skills so they can win more Chess tournaments or just beat their friends in pick-up Chess games. 

It's fair to say I know what I'm talking about here. I've been a constant player of Chess since 2nd edition Advanced Chess was first released 35 years ago, and since then I've swept up 22 Grand Chess Tournaments, and 12 Global Chess events, as well as 35 Grand Tournaments. I've also been reigning club champion at my local Chess stores across seven different towns. And just last year I participated in the St Petersburg Chess Open and came away with first place. So you can trust me when I say I know a thing or two about Chess. 

Now, the first thing you need to know about Chess is that it is a competitive game, just like any other sport. Maybe there are a few sad pathetic losers out there who just play Chess casually with fluffy Chess pieces in their mom's sewing circle, but they're so rare and lame that no-one cares about them and they don't matter. What does matter is competitive Chess. That's what everyone who collects Chess does it for, a contest of two men matching skill against each other in absolute carnage until one of them is able to brutally assert his superiority and dominate the other man into submission, forcing him down and marking him as the weak beta that he is with their superior Alpha Male musk spray, the same way that Dylan Boswick shoved my head into the school toilet every lunch recess in High School but I just took it like a man and sucked it up because he was doing me a favor by building my character and shaping me up into the hard top-dog well-adjusted trauma free Alpha Male that I am today. 

That in turn means that you need to get serious about Chess, because real Chess players are committed to the game they're so passionate about and what Ashley Lockfeldt didn't realize when she laughed at me after I asked her to the homecoming prom and then went with Dylan Boswick instead is that athletes come in all shapes and sizes and Chess players are athletes just like high school football captains. All too often I see the Chess Community being polluted by disgusting filthy casuals who come in with their poorly constructed fluff Chess lists and waste everyone's time by being checkmated on turn 2 after slowing the game down to farce because they wasted time painting their Chess pieces instead of studying the Chess meta. If you're going to be a filthy pathetic casual noob like that, then you can pack up your little toys and go play in the sandbox with the other little babies. 

The next thing you need to know about Chess is that Chess is a game of math. Every action and every decision in Chess can be rendered down to a mathematical formula for Chess units, and the whole point of Chess is analyzing the Chess meta to refine that mathematical formula so that you can dominate the other guy into submission beneath you by checkmating them on Turn 2. 

The formula for working out the best piece for capturing another piece, for example, is this: 

X=θ×sin∑℃πΔ≠−b±b2−4ac−−−−−−−√2a±!cos9$$\mathrm{<br>}$$

X=θ×sin∑℃πΔ≠−b±b2−4ac−−−−−−−√2a±!cos9

$$ $$

By putting in the stats and units of all the Chess pieces, we can work out exactly which the best ones are for capturing a given Chess piece and even the best Chess army for checkmating the other player on Turn 2. It doesn't matter how many squares are on the board, or what kind of Chess pieces the other guy has brought, as long as you follow the math, you will routinely dunk on your Chess opponents every time. 

Of course, the other thing about Chess is the units, since they're what you're analyzing with the math. So let's look at the Chess pieces you should be using. 

Now before we move on we need to take some time out to talk about faction choice, which is very important in Chess. And what you need to know is that you don't bother with White. Ever. White is fuck-off broken and stupidly overpowered, it just flat-out breaks the game. I honestly don't know what the game designers were thinking when they just flat-out made White always move first. It's an impossible advantage to beat, and doesn't make for a good game at all, which is why all Chess tournaments that are worth going to ban it. Really White doesn't even fit in with the core design philosophy of Chess in the first place, which is built around being able to guess which hand the jellybean is held in as a key skill. Without that key match of skill in guessing which hand the jellybean is in to work out who goes first, the game just turns into a random crapshoot. Seriously, playing White isn't really playing Chess at all. White just ignores so many basic rules of Chess that you just shouldn't even bother with Chess if you want to play White and go play Shogi instead. Trust me, all of the other gamers will hate you if you decide to play White, and you won't get anyone to play with you, and worst of all you won't be accepted at any of the good tournaments. So just don't even  bother with White. 

With that out of the way, these are the units available in Chess. 

Pawns: The basic Chess Piece, you're required by the rules to take at least two, but it's OK because you want more anyway. They have pretty shitty stats, but at just 1 point they're dirt cheap so you can afford loads of them in addition to your good pieces. What makes them really good however, is that when they're at the other end of the board they can be replaced with ANY other Chess piece available to Black! This is the only viable way to get Queens in the game, and getting 8 Queens instantly deployed in the enemy back row is a recipe for meatbread and PAIN. There is nothing sweeter than ROFLstomping the other Chess army with a full back row of 8 Queens that you got for just 1 point each. 

Rooks: Honestly these guys are pretty mediocre. They have good movement range, and they're not as overcosted as Queens, but they're still too expensive for what they do. You can take one for using the Castle stratagem, but otherwise you're always better off spending the points on another Knight and 2 Pawns. 

Bishops: Garbage. Pure absolute trash. Don't bother with them. If you even THINK about playing with these things, go punch yourself in the face immediately like Dylan Boswick made me do every morning before class in High School. The fact that they look like a pacifier should give you a clue that anyone who plays with Bishops needs to go put on a daiper, stick one in their mouth and then suck on it like the dumb baby they are while Daddy gets on and plays the game like a real man. For the same points as a Knight, you get a pile of turd that can only move on half as many squares and can't even jump over other pieces. There is NEVER any reason to use Bishops, EVER. 

Knights: Now we're talking. Easily the best Chessman in the game. For just 3 points you get a Chess Piece that can cover a lot of squares each turn, which is already pretty good, but what makes them REALLY worth it is that their special ability that lets them JUMP OVER OTHER CHESS PIECES. This is crazy good, and Knights are the only unit in the game that can do this. They synergise really well with Pawns using the Outpost stratagem too. 

Better still, their move is an L, but RAW the move can be any kind of L! Lower case l, Cyrillic л, you name it! This makes Knights able to attack just about anywhere. Always take as many as you can. 

Queens: Not worth it. Unlimited movement sounds nice, but they're a 0-1 choice and stupidly overcosted at that. For the same price as 1 Queen, you can get 3 whole Knights. Even 1 Knight and 6 Pawns would be more worth it than taking a Queen. Since they're 0-1 but still die to Pawns, and cost the same as 3 Knights, you should never bother taking them. If you want to use them in the game you are always better just taking more Pawns and then getting them to the other side of the board, which gives you unlimited Queens for just 1 Point each. Unless the game developers errata this game hack, Queens taken as an army choice are garbage and a waste of time. 

Kings: These are a weird unit. They're basically Pawns, but they can move backwards, don't get to change into something else when they reach the board, and if one of them dies you lose the game. They're basically garbage, but they also don't cost any points to take and don't use up a Chessmen slot, and the rules force you to take one in every Chess army, so instead they're really more of a tax you pay to field the actual Chess pieces you'll be using. Use them once for the Castle stratagem and then forget about them for the game. 

So with those Chess pieces in mind, we can use math to construct the most optimal Chess list, which is the only one you should be bothering with. Based on the formula above, and the points costs of the different Chessmen, the list you should be using is: 

1 King (mandatory) 

10 Pawns 

1 Rook 

8 Knights 

The math doesn't lie, and numbers don't care about your feelings. The fact is that this list is so optimal it is literally unbeatable. If you play this Chess list, you are mathematically certain to destroy your opponent's entire army and checkmate him by Turn 2 at the latest.  It doesn't matter which moves you make, assuming you can correctly guess which hand the jellybean is in to get first turn, you will win every game and shame your opponents by dominating all over them. 

So there you have it. You are now armed with the best tactics there are to Chess, so now you too can get good and win all your games against your local opponents, and you stand a good chance at winning Chess tournaments! 

Come back next time when I'll be sharing all the optimal ways in Chess to seize agency from your opponent in their turn! 

A New Chapter

 My fellow Citizens, 

I come to you tonight in the midst of a truly historic moment. By now it is all too clear that we are in the grip of an unimaginable cataclysm that shows no sign of stopping. Indeed, all signs suggest that things will only get worse before they get better. Make no mistake, the storm we currently find ourselves in is here to stay, and we will not find reprieve any time soon. 

In such unprecedented times as these, we must be flexible and dynamic. If we are to have any chance of progress, we must adapt to the new changes and the new opportunities that present themselves. We must be prepared to adjust to a new situation, and sometimes we must be prepared to reevaluate our oldest and most foundational traditions. 

For over two-score millennia we have prided ourselves on defying the Space Marine hegemony compeleld on us by Games Workshop, and taken great satisfaction from our identity of independence that grew from it. We have long been a bastion against the hegemonic constructs of Games Workshop's marketing, and the crown jewel of that rebellion has been our fervent denial to ever host Space Marine models within our borders. 

But the Space Marines too have suffered under these arduous times just as we have, and now at last they too have found themselves betrayed by GW. They are no longer the face of GW's hegemonic power structure, and they are no longer the 40k player base's boot upon our throat. Yet even as they have found themselves cast out from power, usurped by unfathomable products of GW's CAD complex, we have stubbornly upheld our long-standing prejudices against them. 

Until now. 

My fellow Citizens, as of midnight tonight, at long last, the Non-Space Marine Player Charter of 2002 and the Space Marine Act of 2004 are to hereby be officially revoked. From this day forward, the Kakapo Empire will officially grant political asylum to any Space Marine refugees from 1998 to 2004 that seek it, and we will officially recognise their right to sanctuary and to apply for full Citizenship within the Kakapo Empire. 

For too long we have considered the Space Marines our adversaries. Make no mistake, we are now trapped in the same storm together, and only by putting aside our long-standing differences and uniting our efforts together can we weather this onslaught. 

Already the first groups of Space Marine refugees are making their way to our territory even now. I implore you, my fellow Citzens, one and all, to strive to ensure they are welcomed warmly as new friends, and made to feel comfortable in their new home. 

Well, there it is. It's happened. After 20 years, it's finally happened. Hell has frozen over, pigs have taken flight, cats and dogs are living together in mass hysteria. 

I'm starting a Space Marine army. 

Of course I'm also starting a Dark Eldar army too, for much the same reasons, but I've never had an official militant policy of prohibition against the Dark Eldar, and have seriously entertained the idea of a Dark Eldar army for a while now. So that's not really too earthshaking. Not like the Space Marines, that I promised I would  never collect, ever. 

When I said I would die a bachelor, I did not think I should live till I were married. 

It was always foreshadowed I suppose. The first Warhammer 40,000 model I ever saw was a Space Marine Landspeeder. When I first happened upon the big store display of Warhammer 40,000 stuff in the local Toyworld one fateful afternoon, there were no Tau boxes on display, so my attention instead wandered to the strange mysterious yellow flying APC I could see on one of the boxes. It wasn't until over a decade later that I was able to put two and two together and figured out that the mysterious flying APC I had spotted as a 7 year old was, in fact, a Landspeeder that my memory had warped - in particular, I had got it into my head that it was a hovering troop transport because I had mistaken the very conspicuous maintenance hatches on the side for doors to a troop compartment and my developing myopia had fused the entire cockpit and two crewmen together into a single enclosed bridge. 

And then of course later on there was the Blood Angels army I happened upon one night when my parents decided to take a shortcut to the Chinese restaurant were going out to which happened to bring us past the local Games Workshop store. 

But despite all that I have, for pretty much my entire hobby life, been legendary for my loathing of Space Marines and my fanatical refusal to ever start a Space Marine army. For decades I resented the publicity and central framing the Space Marines got, and the fact that the entire 40k player base seemed to lean into it, with the fury of a thousand suns, and swore I would be the only 40k player in history to never start a Space Marine army or even own a single Space Marine model, and make my name that way. As the years went on I took enormous, fierce pride in being the cool rebellious non-conformist doggedly sticking to an exclusive hobby diet of alien factions while all the sheeple around me mindlessly consumed their bland Ultramarines or whatever. 

Of course, deep down the truth was that as a Tau player I was being relentlessly marginalised by the wider 40k fanbase, and when you're on the fringes of the group often what you desperately want most of all is to be in the centre. Natalie Wynn is definitely onto something with her Envy-Contempt Sublimation thinking. 

I probably would have kept up this anti-Space Marine policy forever if it were not for GW. It is the one of the world's greatest ironies that the release of 8th edition and the NuMarines ultimately convinced me to start a Space Marine army. See, when GW released the NuMarines and re-framed them to be the stars of the spotlight, it meant that the Space Marines were no longer the golden poster boys they had always been. And that made them cool. That made it OK for me to like them, because now I could hypothetically collect a Space Marine army and still maintain my anti-establishment non-conformist street cred. It was the loophole I needed to reconcile the two impulses. I could collect some Space Marines, and I would be just preserving another part of Warhammer 40,000 for posterity and providing another opposing force for my Tau and Witch Hunters.. so long as I never, ever touched any of those filthy NuMarines. 

With my Envy-Contempt Sublimation re-targeted, I was then able to consider two factors. The first was a shocking realisation of just how little of the Space Marine range actually remains in circulation. While I had been aware for years about just how many GW model lines had been discontinued, I never really gave much thought to how that had impacted the Space Marine range, because they're the poster boys. The star prodigies. GW's flagship product. GW might discontinue other model ranges, but surely they would never shut down model lines for their flagship product. It was only as I sat down, looked through an archived copy of the Citadel Miniatures Catalogues and compared them to the GW website that I finally had the genuinely sobering revelation of just how much the Space Marine range had suffered - pretty much none of it remains available any more. And with that, I then realised just how important it was to preserve the classic Oldhammer Space Marine range from 2003 for posterity, just like all the others. 

The other was seeing an opportunity to do just this. See, I love Jungle Trees. Like, a lot. They are easily my favourite Warhammer 40,000 terrain kit of all time, and easily one of my top 3 GW terrain pieces of all time, and I desperately wish I had gotten more of them when they were still available from GW. In truth, a lot of my quest to collect classic Warhammer 40,000 Battleforce and army boxes is motivated entirely by the drive to acquire the Jungle Tree sprues they contain. Rick Sanchez has his Szechuan McNugget sauce, I have my Jungle Trees. And I've noticed that one of the best remaining sources of Jungle Trees (and their cousins the Ruined Buildings and Battlefield Accessories that I also crave) is in rescuing 3rd edition Warhammer 40,000 starter box sets off Ebay. And those starter box sets also happen to feature a bunch of Space Marine models in them. So if I'm going to be rescuing a bunch of Warhammer 40,000 starter boxes from Ebay, then I might as well put those Space Marine freebies to good use. 

This was all starting to coalesce together into a solid action plan right around December last year, when something truly crazy happened. Games Workshop re-released the starter box for Warhammer 40,000. Now, it was only the army component of the starter box, there were none of the terrain kits and no rulebook or whippy sticks, but on close inspection it appeared that the model sprues for the Space Marine and Dark Eldar sculpts featured a copyright date of 1998 on them, which meant that they were very likely complete recreations of the original sculpts, painstakingly close if not identical. This in turn meant that GW had made a conscious step towards meeting my demands of it, so I removed some of my economic trade sanctions on it and ordered a set for Boxing Day of last year as a show of good faith. 

Supply chain issues due to the general apocalypse going on in the world at the moment meant that it then took almost a year for the box to get shipped to me, and now here we are, with the start of a brand new Space Marine army. Of course it probably won't actually get painted any time soon, not only because there are more pressing things I'm prioritising but also because before I can paint it I have to settle on which Chapter I want to paint them as. 

See, for those of you not in the know, the Space Marines in Warhammer 40,000 are organised into a bunch of different groups called Chapters. Each one has a very, very, VERY distinct colour scheme, lore and identity, though most Chapters can be grouped together as 'Codex' chapters, which means they're normal Space Marine Chapters that don't really do anything unusual. Chapters are a very big deal for a Space Marine army, and there are several ones I like the colour scheme and/or concept of, which makes figuring out which one I want to do a massive headache. 

Right now, here is the current short-list: 

FLAME FALCONS 

Pros: 

- The COOLEST Space Marine Chapter ever. 

- No, seriously. 

- They're Space Marines that fight ON FIRE. It doesn't get any cooler than that (for Space Marines anyway) 

- The Cursed Founding is easily the best part of Space Marine lore, ever. 

- Major mystique and non-conformist points for playing a Cursed Founding Chapter. 

- The Cursed Founding rules for Flame Falcons in Chapter Approved are pretty neat. 

- Can have fun expanding on the Chapter's recent history. 

- An excellent outlet for all my fire-related puns, leaving my Witch Hunters free to focus on in-character roleplay. 

- No official paint scheme means I can have fun with colours. 

Cons: 

- Models would require extensive greenstuff work, since they're all on fire. 

- Sculpting greenstuff fire is a pain in the ass. 

- I kind of want to preserve the 2003 Space Marine model range as it was, and covering all the Space Marines in greenstuff fire defeats that purpose. 

- No official paint scheme means I run the risk of getting constantly harassed for not painting them right. 

- The Cursed Founding rules restrict some of the unit options I can use, and I want to feature as many Space Marine units as possible for maximum diversity and to preserve the entire range for posterity. 

- I'm really not sure I'm comfortable with covering precious irreplaceable 1998 - 2003 models with greenstuff fire. 

- "You're using the normal Space Marine codex for a Cursed Founding Chapter? You have no respect for the lore or the unique character of the army! WAAC! WAAAAAAAC!!" 

- No official paint scheme means I actually have to plan one myself, and still avoid it being too similar to all the other Chapter paint schemes. 

- OH DEAR SWEET GOD NO IT'S THE EMPIRE PROBLEM ALL OVER AGAIN! 

LAMENTERS 

Pros: 

- The second coolest Space Marine Chapter ever. 

- The most relatable Space Marine Chapter ever. 

- Really, if I were a Space Marine I 100% would be a Lamenter given the way my life has gone. 

- "Blood Angels but without the Blood Angel problems except they get horrific bad luck instead" is just a really neat concept. 

- The Cursed Founding is easily the best part of Space Marine lore, ever. 

- Major mystique and non-conformist points for playing a Cursed Founding Chapter. 

- The Cursed Founding rules for Lamenters are pretty neat. 

- All the Natural 1s and appalling game losses I ever have with the army would be completely 100% in character. 

- No, really, I relate to the Lamenters on a cellular level. 

Cons: 

- Paint Scheme isn't the prettiest. 

- Chapter Logo has no transfer decals. 

- Chapter Logo incorporates a checkered background, which is a PAIN IN THE ASS to paint. 

- Chapter Logo incorporates a black and white checkered background, which is even more of a PAIN IN THE ASS to paint. 

- The fucking 2010s retcon. 

- The fucking 2010s retcon took away what made them actually interesting and just made them Blood Angels but shitty. 

- Fuck do I really have to engage with the fucking 2010s retcon. 

- Fuck it's going to get brought up even if I refuse to engage with it isn't it. 

- "Ughuuh, you know that Ackchually they have Death Company all along right? Your army isn't legal and is wrong for a Lamenters army!" 

- "Ughuuh, you know there's this little thing called KANOHN that doesn't care about your feelings right? Dumb baby casual git gud" 

-  "You're using the normal Space Marine codex for a Cursed Founding Chapter? You have no respect for the lore or the unique character of the army! WAAC! WAAAAAAAC!!"

- "You're not using the Blood Angels codex for Lamenters? You have no respect for the lore or the unique character of the army! WAAC! WAAAAAAAC!!" 

BLOOD ANGELS 

Pros: 

- I have an AWESOME concept for a Blood Angels army 

- Spoiler Alert: 90s Comic Book Blood Angels 

- Think About it: Blood Angels themed around the 90s era of Comic Books 

- It'd be so cool and so meta! 

- And they could be led by Rob Liefeld as a Space Marine! 

- This concept is everything my brain has ever wanted to think about 

- I'm actually pretty confident about painting red. 

- Baal Predator goes BPPPPPPPT! 

Cons: 

- Models would require massive amounts of additional pouches to really sell the joke home 

- Space Marine model sprues contain insufficient amounts of pouches for this. More would need to be sourced. 

- I kind of want to preserve the 2003 Space Marine model range as it was, and covering all the Space Marines in pouches defeats that purpose. 

- The Blood Angels army is not a Codex Chapter and is has a very distinct array of unit options and fighting style. 

- I kind of want to showcase a normal Codex: Space Marines army for posterity. 

- Baal Predator is a Unicorn online 

- I don't know I really want to lean into the whole Jump Pack thing. I'd kind of like a shootier, more footslogging Space Marien army. 

- Would have to source a bunch of extra models for Death Company. 

- "You're using a Blood Angels army with no Honour Guard or Veteran Assault Squads? Or Furioso Dreadnoughts? You have no respect for the lore or the unique character of the army! WAAC! WAAAAAAAC!!"

ULTRAMARINES 

Pros: 

- THE archetypal Space Marine army, which would be a plus given the goal is to showcase the classic Space Marine army for posterity. 

- Has all the unit options I'd like to try. 

- Has all the thematic justification for fighting my Tau and Witch Hunters a lot. 

- Captain Motherfucking Ardias 

- Captain Ardias is a stone-cold badass and the single coolest Space Marine character GW ever created. 

- No seriously forget all the ninnies from Dawn of War. They only wish thy could be as awesome as Captain Ardias. 

- Holy shit I could kitbash a model for Captain Ardias. 

- Holy shit I could use that model of Captain Ardias alongside the models of Ui'Kais I'm going to make. 

- I HOLD YOUR DEATH IN MY HANDS!!  

- Let your DARK SOUL feel the LIGHT OF THE EMPEROR!! 

- FEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEELL THE IMPERIUM'S MIGHT!! 

-  THE EMPEROR ORDERS YOU TO DIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEE!! 

Cons: 

- The most boring of Space Marine Chapters 

- Not the biggest fan of the colour blue

- Forever Tainted by Matt Ward 

- Will attract ALL the stupid memes 

- Will attract ALL the mean comments 

- "Urrhurrhurrr Rawbutt Gurllymann!" 

- "uLtRaSmUrRfS!" 

- "OMG r u in love with Matt Ward?" 

- Really need a 1990s Ultramarine army to really hammer home the Chaos Gate memes 

IMPERIAL FISTS 

Pros: 

- Always liked the colour scheme 

- Yellow and red is a winning combination 

- Was the first Space Marine colour scheme I ever saw 

- The other archetypal Space Marine chapter, which helps with the posterity mission 

- Also have all the unit options I'd like to try 

- Kind of like the defensive specialists/siege veteran angle 

- Have a special character named Lysander, which pleases my inner Thespian 

Cons: 

- Yellow is a pain in the ass to paint 

- Especially bright yellow

- Also a lightning rod for memes 

- "Oh my god the pain glove amiright" 

- Fuck I'll have to deal with all the Black Library Horus Heresy stuff won't I. Fuck. 

- Fuck I'll get an earful of all the 30k stuff too. 

- Starting to realise I don't really have a compelling hook for the backstory. 

- Aren't they missing that gland implant that lets them spit acid venom? That sucks and is totally lame. 

BLACK TEMPLARS 

Pros: 

- The iconic 3rd edition Space Marines 

- Completely native to 3rd edition, no roots in 80shammer or 90shammer 

- The mixed model squads are kind of cool 

- The poster boys for the starter box AND rulebook, which is a case for the posterity mission 

- Could possibly dabble in Sword Brethren with the 4th edition codex 

- Land Raider Crusader goes BPPPPPPPT!

Cons: 

- Colour scheme is black and white, which is a pain to paint 

- The Black Templars army is not a Codex Chapter and is has a very distinct array of unit options and fighting style. 

- I kind of want to showcase a normal Codex: Space Marines army for posterity. 

- Land Raider Crusaders also seem to be a Unicorn online. 

- Forever tainted by Flashgitz. 

- Oh god I have to choose between assault weapons and specialist close combat options for the infantry squads? But there's only six of them!  

MY OWN CHAPTER 

Pros: 

- Sidesteps a lot of canon bullshit 

- Can work out my own colour scheme 

- Already have a few Chapters of my own invention that could work 

- Can even make them a 21st Founding Chapter if I want 

Cons: 

- Would have to decide which of the Chapters I've invented to do. 

- Oh sweet god this is torture. It's Sophie's Choice I tell you! 

-  I kind of want to preserve the 2003 Space Marine model range as it was, and giving all the Space Marines a wild new colour scheme defeats that purpose. 

- "Oh so your guys are [GW Chapter that has similar colours to mine]?"

So as you can see, it's a tough call. Fortunately for me I've got time for now. 

Start Again

 

It is one of the deepest curiosities of this blog that it does not, in fact, fully cover my main two sets of little metal figures. 

It's in the timing of course. When this blog first tore its way screaming into this universe, fresh blood dripping from its nubile form as it sucked in gaspfulls of icy air into its pulsing lungs and grasped a sword before any sustenance, it was the end of 2013. As explored before since then, I had been painting models for a long time by then, and the history of Millitant's adventures in little metal worlds stretches back long past that point. But most notably, being first started at the end of 2013 means that the entire start of my main army for Warhammer was completely overlooked on here. 

The time has come to correct that mistake. 

There's something in the air now. Something set in motion that shall rule the fate of many. The board is set and the pieces are already in motion. A new concept has begun living rent free in my brain, a vision of a grand sprawling epic that might very well one day soon sweep the internet (or at least the Warhammer part of the internet) by storm. For now it is a secret that only blogs can tell, because it involves an eternity of planning, admin work and writing reams and reams of silly backstory, plus a number of technologies I do not yet possess. 

And the first step on that long road is to know thyself, which means making sense of my own Warhammer armies. And that in turn means that I must finally begin the long, painful, thankless task of sifting through the backstory and units of my Wood Elf army, and reforging it anew. 

In contrast to my Tau army in Warhammer 40,000, whose beginnings are becoming ever more steeped in legend and myth as more and more of my childhood is lost like tears in the rain, the origin of my Wood Elves is much more clearly documented, because it is much more modern. This is because for most of the first 17 years of my existence my pop cultural genre tastes were very early and very, very, very strongly rooted in science fiction over fantasy. Like a lot of cis male lads born in the 1990s, I quickly developed a strong fascination with various kinds of technological machinery at an early age. What started as an obsession with real-life cars, trucks, agricultural and construction machinery and all kinds of aerospace vehicles quickly moved on to Thunderbirds, Beast Wars and this very obscure short-lived 1990s Flash Gordon cartoon once I discovered television (there were many, many, many more such cartoons to follow), and then Men In Black and Star Wars once I discovered VHS tapes, with various assorted space opera artwork running throughout as I discovered books. After discovering Lego I was always much more drawn to the Space and Aquanaut ranges than I ever was the Pirates and Castle ones. Later on when I discovered video games I largely overlooked Age Of Empires in favour of Command & Conquer and later Starcraft. 

There were a few exceptions of course - Deltora Quest and later Harry Potter (because of course it did, I was born in the 1990s after all) remained very conspicuous islands of swords and dragons in a sea of lasers and spaceships, as did Slizers and later Bionicle. And every so often I would shamelessly pilfer some fantasy concept or another and work it into science fiction with Games Workshop efficiency - most of the fantasy universes I encountered in the wild invariably got elevated to 'future'-grade technology, and a lot of dragons got imported into space adventures, often receiving a cybernetic makeover in the process (seriously, why are there no cyber-dragons in 40k? Tolkien Orcs and Elves with spaceships are fine, but you draw the line at a general riding a giant fire-breathing cyborg dragon with a couple dozen laser cannons and missile launchers strapped onto it? REALLY?). But by and large, for pretty much all of my pre-adult life, the rule of thumb when it came to what kind of made-up worlds I liked was "Give me sci-fi or give me death". 

It was in the aesthetics you see. Science fiction, especially the space opera variety that was my favourite, was full of all these spaceships and robots and hover tanks that all zipped around quickly (or stomped around ominously) and made cool noises, as well as all these lasers and rocket launchers and machine guns and such that all made the bad guys explode, which lent science fiction visuals a certain kind of explosive oomph that a bunch of dudes poking each other with sticks (or occasionally dropping rocks on each other) could just never quite match. This mixed with the distinctive brand of savage venomous tribalism that came naturally to me back then (I blame what appears to be a long line of hyper-competitive Tools on my father's side and the cycle of hyper-competition that they fostered) to produce a particularly cringeworthy fanaticism of science fiction over fantasy that persisted for over a decade and a half. Even when I started discovering Horror Films I locked onto psychological thrillers first because oh my god only little babies are scared of ghosts and vampires and junk (yes that really is what my poor wretched misguided self thought once upon a time).

(The other, even more horrifying side of this is that I also had a very unfortunate undercurrent of Toxic Masculinity imprinted on me from a young age, which left me feeling compelled to distance myself from a lot of fantasy content out of fear of it being too girly with all those princesses running around. However hard you might be cringing at reading that, I can assure you that I am cringing at least twice as hard thinking back on it. Fortunately increasing contact with girls in High School - and some key female role-models in the media I consumed - was eventually able to deprogram me of such lunacy)

Throughout this period there was also something else bubbling under the surface after I discovered tabletop games. After getting my first ever White Dwarf magazine copy in early 2006 I was introduced to the Dwarfs that inhabited this strange alien undiscovered country of Warhammer that existed on the far side of the Games Workshop hobby that was by now giving me Warhammer 40,000. This was important, because these Dwarfs weren't like other fantasy civilisations. They had guns. They had flamethrowers. They had a primitive clock-punk attack helicopter. And THAT was enough to get my attention, in much the same way that featuring a clock-punk space shuttle in The Last Hero was enough to get me interested in Discworld. It wasn't nearly enough to win me over to this whole fantasy thing, but it was enough to begin bridging the gap. 

This was followed a little later by another White Dwarf magazine that introduced me to the Empire that inhabited this strange alien Warhammer game. Again, they had guns. And gattling guns. And rocket launchers. And a clock-punk tank. In the White Dwarf they were fighting these Vampire Count guys that had an army of zombies and wolves and ghosts and bats and things and while in the past these kinds of Halloween monsters had always felt kinda lame, these ones actually looked pretty dope. 

Maybe this whole Warhammer fantasy thing isn't as lame as I first thought it was. 

This more or less continued for a few years, before being completely swallowed up in the unprecedented upheaval that began in the 2010s. History is always a tangled chaotic mess of interlinking factors and causes and effects, and it is no different with the history of a person. But nonetheless, most historians traditionally trace the dramatic seismic shift in pop-cultural tastes that comprised the Fantasy Reformation of 2010 - 2012 to three key events. 

The first was the discovery of Urban Fantasy TV shows, specifically Angel, Buffy The Vampire Slayer and especially Supernatural. This was important because, as well as being really fun cool amazing pieces of television, they all featured a common theme of including nominally fantasy elements like monsters and magic in the nominally technological world of 20th century civilisation - Supernatural even had the characters fighting the demons and vampires and monsters with guns. It was just the right blend of modern and fantasy, coming in at just the right time of peak moody adolescence when I was ripe for gothic content, that these shows became the final missing link needed to bridge the gap and get me interested in fantasy... of a sort. 

Perhaps even more importantly for this story, these shows also primed me for what was to come for later... 

The next watershed moment came not long after, around the winter of 2010, when I went through what is quite possibly the only true religious experience I have ever had thus far, almost entirely by accident. By this time I had gotten into the LetsPlay videos of Youtuber Helloween45 - Helloween covered Horror video games, which seemed like the next logical step after discovering Horror films and TV shows. For one of his videos he was forced by technical problems to put together a slide-show of screenshots and ran that with some music over it. Helloween will never know just how much of a profound earthshaking event he was about to unleash when he decided to use the song he chose, on what I assume was entirely a whim. But he made that fateful choice, and I, following his videos, heard that song, and nothing would ever be the same again. 

The song was called Amaranth, and it was by a band called Nightwish. 

Words cannot convey just how profound listening to that song was. See, up until this point I had never really quite gotten music. Like, I could enjoy listening to it well enough, and I could follow Top 40 Pop music enough to converse with the girls at high school about it, but the idea of being as invested in it as much as I saw a lot of people was alien to me. I just wasn't really passionate about music like I was other things, and I could not give a favourite genre, artist or song to save my life (in fact, I actually failed a couple of class projects because of it). But this was different. Listening to this song, for the first time I really felt myself reflected in music. When I discovered Nightwish, I found my voice. 

When I discovered Nightwish, I finally found my sound. 

For the rest of the year, my eardrums quickly began to swim in a soup of symphonic metal as I devoured every Nightwish song I could find on Youtube as ravenously as I had devoured Warhammer 40,000 lore eight years earlier. That Christmas my best friend got me a CD of Dark Passion Play that remains one of my most treasured possessions, and I listened to it religiously for the next year. I would of course later discover other artists of a similar style that I loved, but Nightwish would forever remain my all-time favourite, and Amaranth my all-time favourite song. 

But Amaranth did more than just that. It also opened my eyes to looking at traditional fantasy in a whole new light. It's soundscape, atmosphere and accompanying music video that I watched 1100 times finally got me thinking that epic fantasy adventures could be, well, epic in their own right. And then I discovered this other little number. 

It was called The Last Of The Wilds. 

There are no words in The Last Of The Wilds, just 6 minutes of heart-melting instrumental beauty, and the more I listened to it the more inspired I was of faraway lands of snow-veiled mountains, deep forests of rich green pines, storm-scourged seas at midnight, silver full moons and stars, giant hawks and eagles, fearsome dragons and adventure at every turn. Now, I was finally vibing with traditional fantasy, without any technological training wheels. By now I had also been thoroughly opened up to the subgenre of dark fairy-tales, and had also gotten into Once Upon A Time.

This too primed me for what was soon to come... 

By this stage my curiosity of Warhammer had crystallised into genuine deep interest and a resolution to get involved with it at some point. My starting up with Warhammer was no longer a question of 'if', but of 'when' and 'with what game faction'. The front-runners at this point were Dwarfs (still riding the initial "Oh wow they have guns" factor and piggy-backing my explosively growing obsession with all things Nordic at the time), Bretonnians (having rediscovered them after rethinking everything I had ever believed about fairytales and, as mentioned, Once Upon A Time) and Vampire Counts (plugging into all that Horror shtick that I had deep-dived into in the preceding years and Victoria Frances artwork. Plus I still thought the concept of an army of horror monsters was pretty dope). The Empire and High Elves were also intriguing possibilities. There were also these Beastmen and Wood Elf armies that I remained curious about, having inquired into them in the past (before the Fantasy Reformation) but was unsure of what to make of them, save that the Wood Elves had these cavalry troops that rode GIANT HAWKS which was the dopest thing ever (so much so that I had stolen the concept and given it a sci-fi twist many years earlier). 

Then came the third watershed moment of the Fantasy Reformation of 2010 - 2012. And my fate was sealed. 

In the spring of 2012, around Term 3 of my final year at high school, I began to become aware of the latest video game Blizzard was working on. I think someone might have shared the trailer with me at some point. Regardless of how I found it, this trailer showed me a window into a dark gloomy fantasy world where humans struggled to survive in the cross-fire of wars between angels and demons. In other words, the culmination of all of the things that I had been deep-diving into over the last couple of years. I knew then that I had to have this video game and play through it. I needed to know more

The trailer was for a video game called Diablo III. 

The really important thing happened a short while later, when more information about the game became available and it turned out that one of the playable character options in this upcoming game was a person called a Demon Hunter. Demon Hunters roamed the land of the game's setting fighting Demons with crossbows and various ingenious traps and devices - just like the characters in Buffy, Angel and Supernatural. Demon Hunters went about their adventures clad head to toe in brooding dark cloak-and-hood getup, just like a lot of the characters in the fantasy artwork that I thought looked the most rad. And the female character model looked a lot like a lot of the singers in all the symphonic metal bands that had by now well and truly become my jam. In other words, this character class embodied the culmination of all the things I had been deep-diving into over the last couple of years. It was meant to be. I knew that when I got my hands on this Diablo III video game, that would be the character I would play as. 

I got my hands on that Diablo III video game for Christmas that year, and then spent the rest of the summer enjoying the simpler pleasures of shooting demons in the face with a crossbow. It was tremendous, enormous fun and I loved every second of it (except when the game said no because my wifi wasn't good enough for it). And from then on I knew exactly what I wanted my first Warhammer army to be like - I wanted an army just like the Demon Hunter I had been playing as. I would accept no substitute. In the moments when I could manage to tear myself away from Diablo III, I scoured the Warhammer model ranges for a game faction that would give me the army style I so craved, and began to grow increasingly dismayed when I found nothing that came even close to it... 

... until I remembered that Wood Elf line and gave it another look over. 

Yes. This was it. The Waywatcher models were enough to cue me into this line being the one that would provide me with the army of cloaked hooded bow-slinging anti-heroes that I so desired. Sure they used plain old longbows instead of the cool snappy pistol crossbows I had been enjoying in Diablo III, but that was a minor annoyance at most, it was still close enough. 

And so it was that in early 2013, I went out after my University classes had finished for the day, visited the GW store that was conveniently just a 15-minute walk away from campus at the time, and went home with a copy of the rulebook for 8th edition Warhammer. A few weeks later, I did the same thing and went home with a copy of the Wood Elf army book and a Battalion Box on which to found my brand new army for this strange new world of fantasy adventure. 

It is from that box that came these two: 

The Wood Elf Battalion box contained a surplus of Glade Guard sprues, more than was needed for the units of 16 I had already decided I wanted. I quickly worked out that I would have enough pieces for a full unit of 16 Glade Guard, a small band of 5 Scouts, and then three Glade Guard figures left over. These could easily be made into Characters for a Wood Elf army, and indeed that's what I did with one of them - we'll get to her later. The final two I decided to build as regular archers and put to good use as test models to practice painting on. This was very important, because the Wood Elf model range is one of the most beautiful model lines ever made for Warhammer, which in turn meant that I was absolutely terrified of painting them, because up until then my painting had largely consisted of throwing colour at models until it was impossible to see the undercoat through it. I had almost zero confidence that I would end up doing the sculpts the justice they deserved. 

The only thing that kept me going and persuaded me to try was the colour hobby section in the Wood Elf book. It featured these zoomed-in insets of certain parts of the models, which was important because not only did it show me for the first time that the 'Evy Metal studio painters were not, in fact, flawless in their painting, but also through studying them intensely I finally came to understand how highlighting works in paint. 

When I finished these two prototypes in April 2013, they represented the very apex of my model painting at the time, and showcased the very bleeding edge in my range of painting skills. They combined my newfound comprehension of highlighting with the precision detailing I had honed on Battlefleet Gothic models in the preceding years. I followed the instructions in the painting guide of the Wood Elf book to the letter, because I loved the GW studio scheme for the Wood Elves and wanted mine to look like that. Granted the greens they were painted in were a far cry from the dark drab browns and greys of the Diablo III Demon Hunters that had brought me to them, but it was a happy change since green is my favourite colour. 

They have not exactly aged gracefully, something not helped by their use as a testbed for paint sealing and finishes. The primitive method employed here - a coat of gloss varnish followed by a coat of Lahmian Medium to remove the shine - was never entirely satisfactory and always seemed to leave an unacceptable amount of shine on them even at the best of times, and one of these days I will go back and repair the finish as best as I can with the methods and resources I now have at my disposal. But nonetheless, I was awfully proud of them at the time and they motivated me to keep going with the rest of the army, which only looked better. 

And that then, was the beginning of the Meadows of Heaven. 

Evolution of The Tau - Part 2

 My favourite TV show of all time is Firefly. 

It didn't start out that way of course. I actually discovered Firefly in reverse, getting into it at the end and working back. You see, it all started when, one fateful night, I went down to the local Video Ezy. And when I say I went there, I mean one of my parents took me because while nominally old enough to walk around to the local shops I was raised in a household Police State by parents a little too paranoid about my wellbeing for my own good. And I certainly didn't have the purchasing power to rent media anyway, let alone snacks to have with them. But I digress. 

So I went to the local Video Ezy and came back home with a couple of these newfangled DVD things to watch. I no longer remember what titles they were. But what I do remember, is the trailer on one of them that preceded the film. A trailer for some film that promised a slick wild ride of spaceships and anti-gravity vehicle chases and gunfights and mystery. Needless to say I immediately wanted to know where I could find this brilliant thing, but I missed the name of the picture being advertised - I was only 11 or 12 at the time. 

Like Warhammer 40,000 before it, I very nearly forgot about the whole thing until about a year or so later, when I returned to the local Video Ezy and happened upon a DVD whose covers and screenshots next to the blurb seemed to match that fun cool science fiction trailer I had seen before. Intrigued, I immediately put it on the top of the list of titles to get out on this trip. 

The DVD was called Serenity. 

And on the Third Year did Firefly arise from death. Truly it is The Messiah of Television shows. 

My first outing with Serenity didn't go quite according to plan. It was during my birthday party that year, and while promising my friends were completely thrown off by its nested opening sequences. I actually was too, but I was prepared to press on. However I was distinctly in the minority, so we settled on a different DVD to watch instead. The next day however, free from the burden of democracy, I gave Serenity another watch. Once again I was somewhat baffled by the opening, but I was also just entering adolescence so I was strangely intrigued by the funny feelings I was getting from watching Summer Glau on screen (they shared a lot of similarities with the funny feelings I got from Lts. Zofia and Eva whenever I played through Red Alert 2 at that time), and that was enough to get me through to where the film proper began. 

Which I am very glad of, because it was GLORIOUS. 

It quickly rocketed to my number 1 favourite movie slot, and remained there until I discovered that there was in fact an entire TV series of these characters in this setting before it.I managed to borrow a copy of this show, called Firefly, from one of my parents' friends, and was hooked from the start. Now is, however, not the time to delve too deeply into the unforgettable characters and their fantastic dialogue and electric chemistry, or the moments that made me feel things in my very core, or even the profound impact it had on me as my life took a screaming nose dive into hell from which it still hasn't quite recovered, but suffice to say that Firefly helped me through some very hard times. Indeed, it was one of the biggest pillars keeping me going until I discovered symphonic metal and figured out how to make friends again. 

So earlier this year when I happened to be going through some similarly dark stuff at the same time as I was - by an astonishing coincidence - house-sitting for those same people who had kindly lent their DVD set of the show, I decided to take the opportunity to give the whole series a watch-through once more, which I hadn't been able to do in a while because many of the discs in my own box set have since lost their minds. Once again, it helped me through and reminded me that there is still beauty in the world (and in the case of a couple of episodes, that there is ugliness in the world beyond myself). Naturally one of the first things I did upon returning home was then load up my DVD of Serenity - which still works - and complete the story. 

Only, that was where the problems began. That was when the colour began to fade. 

Now don't get me wrong here. I can still recognise that Serenity is a brilliant film and great in its own right, and in all honesty is probably about the best conclusion to the show that we could have realistically got. But... it's just not quite the same as Firefly. Watching it again right next to the series, I couldn't help but feel like... something was missing. 

Sure, it was bigger than Firefly, glossier, with slicker production values, and the movie-scale budget meant it could pack in a few giant flashy centrepieces that would not have been possible with a 2000s TV budget. Sure, it has all of the same ingredients as Firefly. And yet... something felt off about it. It's darker than the TV show, both literally in its visual aesthetics as well as in its overall atmosphere. The characters were always a little dysfunctional in the show, but here they fight more often than give friendly hugs and pats on the back, and they actually fight more than the bickering they did in the show, and I just did not feel like these were the same spaceship crew that would laugh endlessly together about all kinds of silly stuff. They did that all the time on the show - often about something that got brought up off-screen - but I don't remember them doing it once in the movie. Hell, I'm not sure I even remember them laughing much at all in the movie. Even the soundtrack is darker and deeper, more theatrical and less space western for the most part. And, most of all, the movie just seems to be missing that same overall innocence, feeling of love and sense of good honest FUN that the show had (the exceptions of course being the first caper at the start of the film and almost every scene with Mr Universe in it. I suspect it's no coincidence that those parts also tend to stick in the public conscious most). 

Again, I understand that a lot of that isn't really the movie's fault. A lot of it is almost certainly just the inevitable collateral damage that comes from squeezing one or two 22 hour TV seasons' worth of content, including character and storyline development, into just one 2.5 hour feature film. There was always going to be stuff that was lost in that translation. Like I say, I'm aware that the movie is probably the best conclusion anyone could have realistically expected. But that doesn't change the difference in look and feel between the movie and the show, which only grows starker when you watch them back to back. 

And that, then, is where this finally relates to the Tau in Warhammer 40,000. Because it was in thinking on this and reaching these conclusions that I finally at long last understood my issues with Codex: Tau Empire. 

In the Grim Darkness of the Far Future, there is only BROWN!

Codex: Tau Empire was originally released in April 2006, about five years after the original Tau release and two years into 4th edition in what turned out to be the mid-point of the editions period of GW support. It was in most respects a pretty conservative book, especially by later GW standards - most of the army rules were left unchanged from Codex: Tau, with the few things that were changed being largely small but significant. It was accompanied by a somewhat more ambitious lineup of model releases that were centred around importing two Forgeworld vehicle kits - specifically the Skyray SAM TELAR and Piranha patrol speeder - into mainstream 40k plastic form. 

The best feature of the book by far is the expanded armoury section. Andy Hoare and the rest of the writing team on this project took the opportunity in this codex to expand the wargear armoury lineup of Codex Tau - which in fairness is... spartan to say the least - especially the Battlesuit Wargear section, which affords Tau characters with a similar level of options to what armies like Witchhunters have already been enjoying. Indeed, between the new wargear options and the Battlesuit equipment system already in place, Tau characters in Crisis Suits can start to rival even 3.5 Chaos Space Marine characters in their complexity and wealth of options. And with a very generous points budget of 100 for every character, and the most expensive item being 30 points, it is possible to load down a single Crisis Suit with every single item in the entire Battlesuit Wargear list - provided, of course, you did not take Shield Drones to escort them. They'd push you just over the limit, so you'd have to give up something for them. 

You couldn't do it for every Tau character in a Crisis suit though, because almost all of these new Wargear items were tagged with a new rule for this codex - Special Issue. The Special Issue items here mark the start of the tradition of new Tau books introducing brand new cutting edge prototype technology that you could equip certain units - usually characters in Battlesuits - with, and means that any item listed as Special Issue is restricted to one for the whole army. This effectively leaves you with the choice of either piling all the Special Issue stuff onto one single Super Prototype suit, or distributing it around the various Battlesuit characters in the army like a boring person. 

Most of these new Special Issue items were largely fun extras, like the Ejection System or the Failsafe Detonator, while a couple - namely the 2+ Armour Save Irridium Armour and the wound-canceling Stimulant Injector - were very potent and quickly became very popular amongst Tau players. But the crowning jewels of the Special Issue addons weren't Wargear items - they were the two new Battlesuit Support System options included in this book, the Command and Control Node and the Positional Relay. 

Of all the things in this book, the Command and Control Node and the Positional Relay are the two things I miss most about it these days, and the two things I would most strongly consider salvaging from it. Right off the bat they have two very powerful abilities - letting nearby units use the character's leadership for Target Priority tests and getting a single Reserve unit onto the table on a 2+ dice roll regardless of what turn it is, respectively. But more than that, when put on a Shas'El or Shas'O commander they really emphasise their role as leaders and highlight their ability to, well, command things, making them actual command units instead of just fighters with really hardcore stats. Not only that, but they also highlight two different levels of military command - the Command and Control Node, with its effects on on-table local fire control, emphasises command and leadership at the Tactical level, while the Positional Relay with its control over key Reserve deployment reflects command and leadership at the Operational level. It's beautiful. 

The final Special Issue items of note are two new Battlesuit weapon options, the Cyclic Ion Blaster and the Airbursting Fragmentation Projector, both of which got modeled as metal components that are exceptionally cool looking even now. The Airbursting Fragmentation Projector in particular is the best addition from this codex next to the aforementioned support systems, and is an auto-include on my commander in every game not played using Codex: Tau (a rare thing, and getting rarer as time goes on), being essentially a self-guiding cluster bomb launcher that functions as a short-range Mortar on crack. 

In addition to all this, the codex features a new kind of alien auxiliary unit in the form of the Vespid, a new heavy weapons unit in the Sniper Drone team, some expanded options for Stealthsuit teams, a smattering of minor rules alterations here and there, and two new named Special Characters. The first of these is Aun'Va, billed as the head Ethereal that all the other Ethereals in the Tau Empire answer to. In later books his character was taken to some pretty absurd places in the name of pandering to rabid anti-Tau fans (we'll be back for them), but here he's presented how he should have always been as the sagely non-combat Leader type that's a staple of so many RTS escort missions, and while the initial seeds of the later takes are plainly there, its a refreshing image from before the GW writers went Full Putin with him. The second is Commander Shadowsun, conceived as a foil for Farsight, and is essentially a Tau version of Sarah Kerrigan from Starcraft - even right down to the red topknot, thanks to the 'Evy Metal team - something only reinforced by some honestly pretty badass illustration artwork of her out on a covert mission in the middle of a moonlit wilderness. Shadowsun also debuts the XV-22 Battlesuit so beloved of later Tau players, even though I still think it's one of the uglier battlesuit designs; it's the helmet that kills it for me, something that I was very grateful to the Relic team for fixing in the Tau campaign of Dark Crusade. 

Also, speaking of artwork, Codex: Tau Empire features some more artwork by the legendary Karl Kopinski, in whose breathtaking illustrations Warhammer 40k came of age, and who has easily done the best job of capturing the Warhammer 40,000 universe in visual form (fight me 2nd Edition grognards). Currently featured on the gallery section of Karl Kopinski's website is this spicy little collection of little page doodads. 

Image sourced from KarlKopinski.com. All credit for artwork goes to Karl Kopinski. Seriously, check out all his artwork, he's really good!

Right away it's pretty easy to spot the influence of the Lord Of The Rings Strategy Battle Game page doodads creeping into the visual style, particularly in the shading techniques. But what I find really interesting about this collection is that not all of these made it to the final codex. Not counting the baby doodle (which judging by the very different visual tone was never seriously intended for codex publication), only half of the doodad pieces featured here were featured in the final published book. The ones that GW elected not to use are interesting, because I actually like some of them a little more than some of the final choices. Particular standouts to me include the cityscape at night and the hunk of meat with a knife plunged in it, which would have been a nice bone to throw for the Kroot aspect of the book (pun intended). 

But while Codex: Tau Empire has some fun features, it also harbours some big problems, and indeed carries the seeds of many of the later problems that would surface in GW's direction of the Tau, as well as a couple that would reflect greater problems in GW's direction of 40k itself. To start with, not all of the rules changes were good ones, with many of them being well-meaning but ultimately problematic. Take Flechette Dischargers for instance, easily one of my favourite Tau vehicle upgrade options. This book changed them from being an offensive tool, granting a bit of insurance against Death Or Glory counter-attacks when plowing the vehicle into infantry units, into a defensive tool that inflicts a bunch of moderate strength hits on infantry attacking the vehicle in close combat. Which is.. it's fine from a purely mathematical point of view, but it completely misses the point of what makes Flechette Dischargers so special and important in Codex: Tau - namely that by allowing Tau vehicles to (mostly) Tank Shock infantry units in safety, they provide Tau armies with an alternative to Kroot for clearing opposing troops off of objectives and important locations, which in turn makes the option of a pure Tau army with no alien auxiliaries in it more viable (while at the same time leaving Kroot a relevant option because they can still handle the counter-assault niche better and are better at digging opposing troops out of REALLY dense areas). 

But it goes deeper than that, because the big problem with a lot of the rules changes in Codex: Tau Empire, especially with the existing wargear upgrades, is that they were changed in ways that sacrificed something really fun and special in the name of supporting bog-standardised Pitched Battle Pick Up Games and Tournaments. The Battlesuit Sensor rules and Sensor Spines vehicle upgrade are both good examples of this - in Codex: Tau they give all Battlesuit units and any vehicle with Sensor Spines the equivalent of an Auspex/Scanner for the purposes of detecting Ambushes in Jungle scenarios and Lictor Secret Deployment. The Sensor Spines also give a bonus to navigating minefields. But in this book they give all Battlesuits the Acute Senses special rule, and vehicles the ability to make use of cover as if they weren't skimmers, respectively. 

Which is... again, I get that those effects are both more universally useful, and in particular more relevant to bog standardised Pitched Battle Pick Up Games and Tournaments, so it's great if you're the sort that mostly does that anyway, but it feels soulless. It misses out on something special. The fact that those fun special scenario and environment rules are so fundamentally baked into the DNA of its scenario mechanics is one of the best things about 3.5 Edition Warhammer 40,000, and even one of the very few parts of that core rule set I enjoy more than 4th Edition Warhammer 40,000, and the fact that here we are, with a whole unit special rule and standard vehicle upgrade right there making direct reference to those, that's something I really love. So I don't feel right seeing it gutted and replaced with.. a Universal Special Rule and a generic movement gimmick. 

(as an aside, it's also why the special Daemon World rules in White Dwarf #313(AU) are one of the best things about 4th Edition Warhammer 40,000) 

And of course there's the Markerlights. Codex: Tau Empire marked the beginning of Markerlights being Flanderised by GW writers from being a fun interesting little side quirk of the army into a crutch that's integral for the army to function at all. See, in Codex: Tau, Markerlights are very much a supplemental thing, a little bit of sauce on the side. They are by no means an integral must-have thing, and not only is it entirely possible and very common to build a fully viable Tau army without a single Markerlight in it, that's actually what Games Workshop writer Pete Haines did in the very first inaugural White Dwarf battle report featuring the Tau, and he won that game. Point is, Markerlights in Codex: Tau are a cherry on top that's there to help your assault and heavy weapons hit That One Big Threat That Has To Die Right Now. The trick here, is the magic of the Ballistic Skill 3 stat. Because Ballistic Skill 3 means always hitting on a 4+ with every gun, every shooting attack has a flat 50/50 chance of hitting, which is very easy to plan around. But on top of that, every major Tau weapon carrier has an organic way of improving those odds. Vehicles can take Targeting Arrays to make them Ballistic Skill 4, Battlesuits can take twin-linked guns (and Broadsides in particular even have their guns conveniently already twin-linked to give the player a hint about this), and everything else can effectively throw out so many shooting dice that you're guaranteed to get enough through regardless. 

In that context, Markerlights are not at all essential to a successful Tau army. But in Codex: Tau Empire that all changes. In this book, instead of just making guns hit on a flat 2+ or guiding in Seeker Missiles on a flat 2+, Markerlights provide a range of shooting related bonuses that include ignoring Night Fighting, ignoring Target Priority, improving Pinning chances and, most crucially, ignoring cover saves for the first time. On top of that, this book marks the first place where two of the most widely-used and powerful Markerlight abilities - better shooting accuracy and ignoring cover saves - are stacking modifiers that are very moderate individually, but get exponentially better the more of them are combined. This makes Markerlights enough of a force multiplier as to distinguish Tau armies into "Have Markerlights" and "Have Not Markerlights". Consequently many many more Tau players began including lots of Markerlights (helped by the introduction of a new Markerlight carrying Drone option), which in turn encouraged Games Workshop to double down on their significance in following rule sets, in a vicious cycle that continues to this day. 

Mere rules changes are one thing though, but altogether worse was the shifts in aesthetics and lore. There are many small examples of this scattered throughout the book, but perhaps the biggest one is what happened to the Ethereals, which is emblematic of one of the worst design decisions that GW went with for the post-2004 Tau. 

You see, looking at the Tau media and models ever since the release of Codex: Tau Empire, it is very readily apparent that at some undisclosed point between 2001 and 2006, someone at Games Workshop sat down one day, watched Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, and then said to themselves, "YES! This, this right here, THIS is what we need for our new Tau game faction!" 

Because since then, with every major iteration, GW seems to be hell-bent on injecting more and more aspects and tropes of the Star Wars Prequel antagonists into the Tau game faction. And the epitome of this trend is the Ethereals, and their models in particular, which each edition seem to get more and more like the Neimoidians in the Star Wars Prequels - especially The Phantom Menace. And it all started with this 2006 Tau release wave, and this Codex: Tau Empire. The Ethereal models released for it represent the most obvious visual links between the two. I mean, just look at them next to each other: 

Real subtle there, GW

I'm using the particular 4th Edition Ethereal sculpt that's closest to those exact costuming designs to illustrate a point. There are about three other variant sculpts that are a little more distinct, but not by a lot. Likewise there was a later plastic Ethereal model released in 2017 which breaks from those characters visually, but this just replaces that with 1) just being a very boring and ugly model in general and 2) only really treating the symptom and not the disease. 

That's because while they started to cut some of the visual ties to the Neimoidians from the Star Wars Prequels, they only doubled down on the characterisation ties. This ones a little hard to explain without lots of video clips, which is a form of techno-sorcery beyond my primitive TV writer brain, but suffice to say that a lot of the major attributes exhibited by the Neimoidian characters - being unscrupulous, greedy, devious and ultimately cowards - are all attributes that are increasingly exhibited by Ethereal characters in post-2005 Tau fiction, both from Games Workshop itself and Black Library. Which is bad not just because it's a very lazy and tired way of characterising authority figures, but also because it's Problematic for the same factors that make the coding and characterisation of the Neimoidian characters in the Star Wars prequels Problematic. A subject on which there's already been plenty of discourse elsewhere. 

In all deadly seriousness, what my creative writer's instincts are telling me happened was that this particular example at least is a case of Convergent Evolution. I suspect that when designing the models, and writing the fiction, the Games Workshop team went to all the same root sources of inspiration that the Phantom Menace production crew did for the Neimoidians, asked all the same questions they did, went through the exact same creative and workshopping processes they did, and thus inevitably came out with an extremely similar end product that has all of the same flaws. 

But then I look at the style of Tau buildings depicted in the themed terrain sets used in all the model shoots (sure, there was a little of the style in the 2001 Games Day board themed around a Tau city, but not with nearly as many weird slim fin-like elements everywhere), and I remember that this 2006 era of the Tau is the same era that produced Dark Crusade, a game that infamously gave Tau drones "Roger Roger" style robot voices, and I cannot help but wonder if someone in Games Workshop circa 2004-2005ish really did watch too many Star Wars prequels. 

But it goes even deeper than that. All throughout the book there's just this creeping darkness, and creeping murkiness, that pervades everything. The new artwork is less bold and vibrant in its shading. The graphics are more sinister. There's the first creeping appearances of the vectors with which Games Workshop will later inject Grim Darkness into the Tau game faction to appease the 1d4chan crowd. In Aun'va's lore blurb they even mention Tau on a crusade for gods sake. Tau! In a crusade! That's the kind of language you'd expect from an Imperial codex, not a Tau one. And all those beautiful 1950s Space Opera throwbacks about exploring the cosmos are thin on the ground, replaced by talk about binary join-or-die expansionism that was never really much of a thing in the earlier material and invariably painted as freak outliers when it did happen. 

Even the cover illustration is bleaker. Just look at the cover art for Codex: Tau, bursting with bold vibrant colour and life, promising a world of adventure and excitement and dynamic progress: 

Nothing says "Space Opera adventure!" quite like a desert battle beneath an aggressively blue sky

And then compare it to the bleak drab murky tones of the cover art for Codex: Tau Empire: 

In the Grim Darkness of the far future, there is only BROWN!

And all in all the whole book feels pervaded by, well... a sense of innocence lost. 

Which brings us full circle to the conclusion I've reached, the voice I've finally been able to give to my reservations about this book. You see... 

Codex: Tau Empire is to Codex: Tau what Serenity is to Firefly. 

Sure, it's bigger than Codex: Tau, and glossier, with slicker production values, and the 2006 GW budget meant it could pack in a few giant flashy centrepieces that would not have been possible with a 2001 codex budget. 

And sure, it has all of the same ingredients as Codex: Tau. And yet... something feels off about it. It's darker than the original codex, both literally in its visual aesthetics as well as in its overall atmosphere. The characters were always a little expansionist in the first codex, but here they fight more often than explore the wonders of the cosmos, and they actually fight wars more than the border disputes and peaceful coexistence they practiced in the original lore, and I just do not feel like this is the same love letter to Supermarionation and 1950s - 1970s Space Opera that would solve problems with intelligence more than violence. They did that all the time in the original fiction - often running rings around some hapless human diplomat from the Imperium - but I don't remember them doing it once in Codex: Tau Empire. Hell, I'm not sure I even remember the Imperium sending diplomats to negotiate with the Tau at all in the post-2005 material. Even the cover artwork is darker and deeper, more gritty and less space opera for the most part. And, most of all, Codex: Tau Empire just seems to be missing that same overall innocence, feeling of love and sense of good honest FUN that Codex: Tau has (the exceptions of course being the Wargear Armoury and Special Issue Weapons. I suspect it's no coincidence that those parts also tend to stick in the public conscious most). 

And I'm aware it's not the book's fault. The things that concern me in this book are almost entirely due to flawed creative processes and attempts to pander to the 1d4chan segment of the Warhammer 40,000 player base. But that doesn't change the difference in look and feel between Codex: Tau Empire and Codex: Tau, which only grows starker when you read them back to back. 

It's a reasonable enough book, especially from a purely mechanical point of view, but whenever I look through it I can't help but feel like there's something missing in it, something intangible but very important nonetheless. And it took my first tabletop love from me. 

So that then, is why I invariably give Codex: Tau Empire a pass these days, and use Codex: Tau instead whenever possible, especially in 4th Edition Warhammer 40,000, because that book brings a smile to me more in much the same way that Firefly warms my soul more than Serenity these days. 

GW can't take the sky from me...