To be honest, the Tau "gunline" has never been a viable army build. You could occasionally get away with it in 4th edition because mech armies were so much rarer than they are now -- and infantry was also significantly more survivable than in 5th edition -- but semi-mech Tau even back then was still a significantly stronger build. Semi-mech has more guns, more high-strength shots, is more mobile, and has superior protection. Foot Tau -- your "gunline" -- never had enough of any of those qualities to stand up to even halfway decent competition from your opponent.

So it's not like anything has actually changed. It's just that the game edition change from 4th to 5th has emphasized what was always already readily apparent.

Anyway, semi-mech Tau is now the only decent army list build for Tau. Sad, as we're now more or less a cookie-cutter army. Until we get the 5e treatment, that's what we're stuck with. Be glad we're not Daemonhunters or Necrons, for example, who pretty much suck. At least our cookie cutter remains very very strong.

 

I guess I should stop fighting agianst the current and just let it drag me off and kill me then!! XD

 

Yeah. It's tough, but the best thing you can do is just giv in to 5th ed, and all the changes it's brought.
Just a warning, though, 5th ed kinda screws Tau over.

 

its hard to make it work. the point of a tau gunline is to keep your opponent fromyour lines, but with all the new ways to prevent that such as drop pod assault or outflankers and infiltraters, its just too hard. against alot of armies it will work, but a lot of armies will have something deep striking or outflanking and so on and so on.

but as 6 said it could be worse...we could be necrons or deamonhnters or even dark eldar, we are less than half the age of the dark eldar and we have had 1 more book release than they have.

 

My view is that GW want 40K to be more CC than shooting. Thats the way the army codex's are going.
Even a shooting IG, is no more a gunline but made to be in veh moving around quickly. With many looking at storming up to enemy and rapid firing them.
They have also given evey codex ways to get at your enemy in an untraditional way so this is very bad for us. With a new codex i think we will be looking at going more the IG way. Maybe Pirana's will work like Vendetta's (no troop carrying tho) and maybe we will get firing points from your devilfishes.

They do seem to want units to be moving and getting into eachother face

 

So... I have some extra money and a buddy was saying I should try out 40k. I've played a game with his spare army and I have read a few codex's for a few armies, and I was thinking Tau would be fun to start with; but would you folks say that they are too broken now, or not so much broken as static in tactics and unit composition?

Thanks for fielding my newb question!

 

They are winnable but very mush fixed to 1 build with little changes unlike other codexs

 

Curious topic in which to post your question, MrT!

Tau remain a very strong, very competitive army. But keeping them at that level requires you to stick with a rather limited army build (see my tactica for the general outlines of it) and also requires a decent amount of skill to pull off. It's an army that works on the razor's edge, mistakes will be punished with your quick loss. But it's got plenty of potency, and lots of fun to play. If you don't mind a relatively steep learning curve, you could be the proud owner of a very opponent-frustrating army that is getting more and more rare on the tabletop.

 

I have always loved Tau for one overriding reason, they are a skill army. Even in 4th Tau was never that easy to get right and in 5th it is even harder but that is what attracted me to them. With other armies you have the ability to vary army builds so they exploit all three phases of the game, with Tau you basically have only two to work with (movement and shooting). If you do not deploy and then play tactically pretty much perfectly you will lose or at best draw. With Tau you also need to know your opponent armies very well, their movement and deployment capabilities, their special rules ( we have no psychic defences for instance and poor LDS in many units), weapons ranges etc.

With armies like Marines you can make quite severe mistakes and still perform well, simply because even their base units can take sever punishment. A unit of Tactical Marines can take a lot more punishment than a Fire Warrior, until recently I took two ten man squads of FW's and used them quite well as mobile fire support but I always knew that I had to be careful with them. Now I use minimum squads because I needed to find the points for more Plasma and that is the thing with FW's they are OK but not good enough to lose Kroot or Markerlights for (I would have had to lose some of either of these if I had not minimised the FW squads).

Fire Warriors need Devilfish or really good cover to be viable, preferably they should be in Devilfish, they certainly do not work when lined up in static lines waiting for rapid fire weaponry, assault squads and templates of doom to drop on their TGH3 heads. No gunline is not viable, the only line of troops you should have are Kroot.