A few days back a reader on this site, Logan (who is rumored to be a play tester), brought up the fact that he had not seen any Kroot in the Tau Play tests he had been apart of. He concluded that in the upcoming Tau codex we would not be seeing any Kroot. This conversation is not with him, but with someone I must keep anonymous.
Once again, just to be clear, this conversation piece was not with Logan, and is from a completely different unrelated source (not a play tester).
Please understand, If any parts of this seem missing or feel like things were removed or moved around, its because they were. This is the part of the conversation that I was given permission to share here on the site.
Conversation Behind the Scenes: (The not me part, and must remain anonymous source)
There is a strong desire to add new and interesting ways to use allies, beyond just mixing and matching existing armies.
In a recent iteration of the Tau playtest material Kroot were removed as one developer felt that tables looked "clutterd" and tau armies looked "rag-tag" when using Allies, at the same time as Kroot and Vespid.
This was seconded by it being suggested that Space Marines for instance, may have a willingness to work with Tau, but might react poorly to the barbaric Xenos that are Kroot.
This expanded into the idea of making mini-dexes that are not designed to stand on their own. Army lists with 1-2 HQ options, 1 troop option, and only 1 of each other slot, or even some slots completely ignored.
These lists would be released in White Dwarf along with all the models necessary if they currently didn't exist. These "splats" would be easy to physically design and produce, so the idea has taken some root.
While it would be possible to play an entire army using one of these lists, it would not be balanced and would be missing lots of tools and have huge gaps. Normally this is a design issue, but could be easily overlooked in this instance.
The first idea for a list such as this is Kroot, who could therefore have a different allegiance level with Tau and Space Marines and still end up on the same table in games of 2k+.
This would add to the cinematic worth where Tau are not commanding Kroot, but instead a Shaper would have his own warband since as Allies it would require an HQ.
This would also start bringing into question interesting relationships between the levels of allegiance in terms of where these chunks of the army could be on the battlefield. Tau being battle brothers with both, but Space Marines being Desperate with Kroot.
Potentially this could allow all sorts of sub-races, or existing ideas which cannot be fully fleshed out into entire armies to find their way into this edition. Who knows, if something takes hold it could later be expanded upon in the same way.
This is SO early though, so it's all very much so subject to change.
In a recent iteration of the Tau playtest material Kroot were removed as one developer felt that tables looked "clutterd" and tau armies looked "rag-tag" when using Allies, at the same time as Kroot and Vespid.
This was seconded by it being suggested that Space Marines for instance, may have a willingness to work with Tau, but might react poorly to the barbaric Xenos that are Kroot.
This expanded into the idea of making mini-dexes that are not designed to stand on their own. Army lists with 1-2 HQ options, 1 troop option, and only 1 of each other slot, or even some slots completely ignored.
These lists would be released in White Dwarf along with all the models necessary if they currently didn't exist. These "splats" would be easy to physically design and produce, so the idea has taken some root.
While it would be possible to play an entire army using one of these lists, it would not be balanced and would be missing lots of tools and have huge gaps. Normally this is a design issue, but could be easily overlooked in this instance.
The first idea for a list such as this is Kroot, who could therefore have a different allegiance level with Tau and Space Marines and still end up on the same table in games of 2k+.
This would add to the cinematic worth where Tau are not commanding Kroot, but instead a Shaper would have his own warband since as Allies it would require an HQ.
This would also start bringing into question interesting relationships between the levels of allegiance in terms of where these chunks of the army could be on the battlefield. Tau being battle brothers with both, but Space Marines being Desperate with Kroot.
Potentially this could allow all sorts of sub-races, or existing ideas which cannot be fully fleshed out into entire armies to find their way into this edition. Who knows, if something takes hold it could later be expanded upon in the same way.
This is SO early though, so it's all very much so subject to change.
On Thu, Jul 26, 2012 at 3:13 PM, Natfka
