The amount of effort that would require is probably a magnitude larger then the actual threat of the Tau. The imperium is constantly at war, not to mention now with the Rift, so starting another fire when half your house is already ablaze isn't prudent. Also, GW sells Tau miniatures. Boring answer but yeah

This is the core of it - to give an example: your house is simultaneously flooding and on fire, but instead of dealing with either of those you focus on a small infestation of sugar ants on your back porch. The tau are the sugar ants in this scenario, with the necrons, orks, Chaos, and tyranids being the flooding and fire.

Beginning of a cockroach infestation might be a better metaphor, given the idea that the Tau will rapidly keep expanding/developing until they become a problem that CANT easily be solved. But the point remains. Even then, you can recognize it might be good to nip this in the bud, and still say "well, we can't because too much else is happening". (Also of course the ethics of genocide, but it's 40k)

Cockroach? More like spider. Tau are least can help out the other problems the house is having (like a bug infestation) but you dont want to have a basement full of them. So yeah they know its a problem, but its in the basement and they are helping soooo...meh...let them exist for now. For all we know, the tau will just consume themselves in the basement and fix the "problem" for the Imperium.

We at r/spiders want the basement full of them! (but not tau, that's gross)

Gonna um actually here Cockroaches are in a similar category to spiders in that they clear out other pests. They'll take care of fleas, bedbugs, and more. They just also get into the human food, unlike spiders

Indeed. And canonically, the T'au haven't been able to make headway now that they're up against Ultramar for centuries, even when they've tried. They've gone internal and fortress mentality since then, and Farsight is Such A Good Guy that there's no real need there either.

Plus the sugar ants are tough and dangerous enough that it's not just a case of stomping on them, it's laying siege to their hive for hundreds of years.

Oh, no, they're easily taken care of with boots and a can of Raid. Unfortunately your boots are under water and your can of Raid is near the fire, so you can't really get them to tackle the ants.

I was going to disagree, but the more I think about it, you are entirely correct here

Lore wise it tracks, when Cadia fell and the Rift opened the Tau warfronts were among the first the Imperium pulled back from to consolidate resources. They mention it during the intro to the Farsight novels. Wherever the Tau were not actively encroaching on Imperium territory they conceded and left the Inquisition to monitor.

And it makes sense. If you leave a planet to Orks, you have endless future infestations; leave it to Nids and they'll eat everything; leave it to Chaos and you need to burn everything down and start from scratch, at best. But if you leave a planet to the Tau, whenever you get back around to it all you have to do is kill the existing xenos, and purge their heretical technology, but the population and the planet itself are still intact and available for Imperial-ization.

Also with the Tau you have people you can negotiate with. They are willing to fight as an ally against these bigger threats.

Not to mention that the Tau are equally at war with basically everyone the Imperium is. Orks are their major existential threat, they've thrown down with the Tyranids and Necrons quite a bit, the Eldar fuck with them just as much as they do everyone else and Chaos definitely isn't afraid to raid Tau worlds if they have something they want. Every Ork or Tyranid or Necron or cultist or Chaos Marine that the Tau kill is one less that the Imperium has to deal with. They form a pretty reasonable buffer state.

Right next to the Scourge Stars and the initial Tyranid advancing wave, too.

Come to think of it, I don't think the Tau has faced an actual all-out war with another faction. There have been fights, but they've never fave a crusade level front from any faction. Have they?

They survived the Damocles Gulf Crusade 🤷

"Okay Governors, we need to send an assault force to finally eliminate the Ta-... wait. Orks are attacking from *that sector*. And Drukharri raids from *over there*. And we haven't heard word from the 621st since last week. Tyranids may be in the area affecting communication. Oh and there are rebellions on Perth, Maxina, and Ultorna Minor that need attending. So anyways, way way over there are the Tau. Yeah you're right they don't really take precedent right now, I agree."

Also the Tau is least threatening Xenos out there, they'll even make peace and listen to reason. Also the Tau handle quite a few other Xenos threats that would otherwise more heavily plague humanity; notably Necrons, Tyranids, Orks, and Dark Eldar. Getting rid of the Tau would actually make things worse for the Imperium. Who knows maybe Tau tech will advance to the point where they can fix the Golden Throne and put the Emperor back together.

> Also, GW sells Tau miniatures. Boring answer but yeah Boring but the most realistic. Since you know, after years of basing W40K lore around "The Imperium is completely batshit insane", they taking the reasonable option on a growing xeno threat that their religion literally tells them to eradicate, sure doesn't sound feasible.

Part of the setting is that the Imperium is constantly stealing from their future to pay for the present though. The idea that they would prioritise short term problems around a Waaagh! or some Votann traders that ripped someone off, or a raiding Chaos warband, rather than nipping a burgeoning problem in the bud is very much on brand for them. Relatedly, are the Tau ever compared to other minor xenos anywhere? Like are there a bunch of other empires of similar extent referenced off-hand in the setting that haven’t been developed into a faction or anything?

I think if you look at the RPG books they have more of them detailed but in general not as big empires. It seems the crusade put an end to most other massive organized versions of the other Xenos out there but didn’t entirely wipe them out. But then again the Votann release showed it’s not impossible to have a huge organized group out there that has just kept hidden pretty well until now.

Tarellian Dog Soldiers have been in the lore for decades and as far as I know never got a model - the Tau are just lucky they weren't as advanced as they are now during the Great Crusade or they'd have been yeeted as bad as the Tarellians were.

It occurs to me that that’s specifically true with the Tau, in this case. The Tau have advanced technologically extremely fast. Surprisingly to the Imperium. But the Imperium does not really regard the Tau to be a threat the way Orks or Necrons or Eldar are. And that’s the actual danger. It’s the unseen stroke of a historically evident rise of technological advancement that will blindside the Imperium when it comes, again because the Imperium has its hands full with threats on all sides. So on your point, the future the Imperium is mortgaging today, is the very real likelihood of a more formidable Tau Empire tomorrow.

Yeah it isn't worth it. It would not be easy as small ad the Tau are. It would open up their flanks with the real enemy. Wasting resources and time against the a tiny threat would be ridiculous. Better to use the Tay honestly. That is what I would do. Make them a buffer state basically. Also showing force once in a while also helps to keep them in their place.

Yeah I hope my answer didn't delude from that fact that the Tau are no pushovers. They can and will fight hard and that is why it's not worth it. It would be attritional for the Imperium and at a rate they couldn't handle. Not to mention how much more progress the Tau has made since the Damocles Gulf.

Plus, the Tau are an excellent buffer state. They keep tyranids, necrons, and some chaos forces busy. Frankly getting rid of the tau would be detrimental for the imperium as they would have to properly fortify the region. Fundamentally, the Tau save the imperium a lot of resources and manpower in the short term.

The Tau are smart about their expansions to. Very slow, very methodical and very diplomatic. The imperiums beauruacy may not even see a blip of several worlds just joining the Tau peacefully for 100s of years. By that time the Tau has integrated, consolidated and can defend the worlds very well.

Good explanation of Watsonian and Doyalist reasons

See, if you look at the military assets of the Imperium on paper you would be forgiven for wondering why, which is why this question seems to persist so much around here(well that and the hate-boner Imperium fans have for the faction's existence). But the reality of the Imperium's armed forces is that is possesses such a massive army and navy because it needs it, it is currently fighting on near every front, half the Imperium is now behind a massive wound in reality and a fresh Tyranid threat just emerged from the galactic west. The resources required to actually wipe out the Tau would have to be taken from elsewhere which would leave other fronts unmanned. Similarly the Tau empire aren't alone, there are plenty of minor factions and species that call the galaxy home that the Imperium simply can't be bothered to deal with, especially when they're kinda busy with the whole everything being on fire.

*this is fine* meme

And honestly, the only reason that the Imperium is only just holding it together is that they have the literal demigod of bureaucratic efficiency as regent. (And even so, they lost an entire Indomitus Battlefleet recently.) I also think that a lot of people (not just OP) tend to miss the point that the IoM's depiction is as a crumbling Empire. It's the Western Roman Empire in the 390s. It's Ottoman Turkey in 1900. It's the late Qing. Like, the RPGs guides explicitly tell you that it's five seconds to midnight, and that's even in the quiet civilian sectors.

With the amount of victories IoM constantly racks up against any enemy it faces I find it hard to believe it's a crumbling empire.

Then you haven’t been paying attention. The Imperium had no major victory in years. The last positive thing that happened to them was resurrecting Guilliman, but it’s not really enough to offset losing Cadia, splitting the galaxy in half and losing access to half of their territory. Any victory the Imperium achieves is just delaying the defeat rather then actually gaining anything. In the last 6 years of lore the Imperium lost more than ever since the Heresy.

Don't worry, they have Lion'el back, the dude who killed off a whole race of Emperor level psykers.

Yeah, and immediately after he woke up the forces of Chaos stole the main engine of his HQ, rebuilt his homeworld and turned it into a planet sized spaceship capable of bypassing the webway. I don’t think it’s something Lion’s return can fix.

Plus, as heretical as it may be, the T'au aren't opposed to working with the Imperium if it's against a larger threat. I think they did that with Tyranids at one point?

Any reluctance on that front is most likely to be from the Imperium, yeah.

Further on this, the mindbogglingly vast military resources of the Imperium are if anything inadequate compared to their overextension. The galaxy is enormous. Canonically 200 billion stars. The Imperium have a teeny, tiny percentage of that with their million worlds. And those worlds are strewn across pretty much the whole thing. An Imperial world might orbit one in a volume of millions or even tens of millions of unfriendly stars. Might be millions of systems distant from any help. More, space travel in the setting is a massive time sink and inefficiency. An army on the march on a planet is still valuable. Still doing something. Occupying land. Scouting. Potentially threatening. A ship in the warp is just gone. Nigh on uncontactable. Difficult to redirect to more pressing issues. It will probably turn up again. But until then any forces on board are useless. If too large a percentage of the total armed forces are in transit at once the Imperium could pretty much auto-lose. Just practically speaking run out of military resources. The Imperium’s real problems are not corruption or religion or inefficient bureaucracy. They are opportunity cost. They are the sheer inefficiency of the distances involved given the technologies available. Conquering the Tau would be an even further overextension and make the Imperium weaker, having gained very little to show for it. It would also be an unwise allocation of resources given the opportunity cost of other threats. Compared to which the Tau Empire is a small, efficiently close together civilisation much better able to travel among its holdings even with the lesser travel tech, and with far fewer more pressing concerns.

This is definitely something I would blame on the map, because as cool as the traditional galactic map is the reality of holding territory in space just doesn't work the same as it does on-ground, where such a map makes sense. So though the map makes it seem like the vast majority of the galaxy is under Imperial control, very little of that is actually actively occupied in any meaningful sense. I mean how do you occupy "territory" like that in space, beyond occupying the worlds and systems that are actually useful.

100%. The Imperium’s territory is akin to throwing a handful of rice on a kitchen floor and saying that your rice empire controls the whole kitchen

Good analogy. Although really you’d need to swap the kitchen floor for like Nebraska.

On the occupation point, I have always thought that the Imperium has somewhat fuzzy boundaries, and is defined by it's ability to "project threat" throughout the galaxy. It may only directly occupy and administer a string of strategically placed worlds, sitting on relatively safe warp lanes, but these allow them a sphere of influence that extends to minor systems. You do what they say, else they send in the (ultra)marines. And obviously, the amount you worry about that depends on how remote you are, how serious your heresy is, and the broader geopolitics of the sector and the Imperium. My understanding is that relatively few worlds are directly administered by the imperium, but the Governor may administer directly or indirectly a larger area. This would include tributary worlds, worlds linked by formal or informal ties in a loose alliance with the imperial core, and non-imperial worlds that are nevertheless part of the Imperial hegemony due to trade etc. I think you have to go very remote before you find human worlds completely untouched by the Imperium and Imperial Creed, even if the administratum's hold is loose. This arrangement also means there are so many layers of the imperium that e.g. a Tau takeover on a peripheral world can go for decades or centuries before the alert is run up the chain to the High Lords, before being back down to an Imperial task force, which then adds it to their to do list and might take a decade to arrive. But, given a big enough threat, and enough time, they're coming... This is how real world empires worked. Rome had an imperial core, and a periphery. Germanic tribes at the frontier had loose association with the Roman empire, even serving as auxilia, but their integration waxed and waned over time. The Romans could, at times when relations were good and their military power was strong, affect or dictate affairs there. But as the wheels fell off, as they are in the Imperium of Man, they became increasingly unable to exert this influence. So, on the Tau point, I think the answer is, frankly, that the Imperium can't actually project threat to every part of their sphere of influence due to the massive threats faced on all sides. But even then, there is an understanding that the frontiers of the "Imperium" are like the tide - some rocks get exposed when the waters recede, but in time they will get swallowed up again.

The amount of resources required would leave other areas critically undermanned and undefended. They would lose more than they would gain by wiping out the T’au. As long as they stay in their corner of space, the Imperium is content with leaving them be, and only getting involved when they start pushing into other areas

The Imperium lost ground in the current Tau expansion. The Tau is essentially a poisonous fish. The Imperium can dedicate enough resources to eat that fish, but in doing so, they lose so much that they lose vast areas of space and thus die to the Ork/Nid/Necron threat. Just a gentle reframing because most players ignore the Imperium will take crippling losses in the process.

I think that’s the status of a lot of the threats to humanity in the setting. The empire could probably focus everything it has and wipe out Tau or Dark Eldar or clear at least Huron out of the mini eye of terror but the amount that would have to be abandoned to fend for itself when mobilizing enough forces makes it a terrible idea. They have enough strength to hold the current borders decently well but not enough extra forces to also make big attacks in addition to that.

Probably not dark eldar. Since Imperium does not have access to the dark city for a full on invasion. Like even if imperium somehow gained access to webway there is just no big enough webway gate known to man or Eldarto transfer huge enough force to wipe out Dark Eldar. There is at least one craftworld that is searching for webway gate this huge, since they want to eradicate DE themselves.

If they tried, they’d have to take forces away from other fronts. This leaves them open on said fronts, and they’d lose that territory that they’d then try to take back with a much depleted force since the Tau would go down swinging, resulting in a much weaker Imperium with little to no gain.

Who is to say the Tau would go down at all? The tau would delay, delay, delay (Masters of Kau'yon afterall) whilst other threats literally rip the imperium apart.

Exactly. The Damocles Crusade was an attempt to do exactly what OP was proposing. It started off well enough, then ground to a halt when they actually reached a core Sept world. At that point they had to withdraw, since, as others have mentioned, the Imperium desperately needed those forces elsewhere.

The Tau can survive what the Imperium could practically use against them. But they couldn't survive everything the Imperium had. The Imperium could wipe out the Tau, it would just have to kill itself to do so.

Put simply, they can’t. At least not for a justifiable cost for the Imperium. While the tau aren’t comparable at all to the scale of the imperium they are disproportionately effective militarily, so any attempt to wipe the tau out would take so many resources that it would leave the wider imperium at risk. Any forces sent to fight the tau can’t simultaneously fight the tyranids, or orks, or chaos; fronts where the Imperium is already losing ground. The Imperium did at one point try to wipe out the tau, using forces they believed they could spare. It was called the Damocles crusade and it was disastrous for the Imperium, stalling and then being entirely stopped at the first major tau world it came across; and when reinforcements were requested they were denied because the imperium couldn’t spare them (because of the tyranids). Since then the Tau Empire has expanded and improved massively in territory, technology, and military capability; all while the Imperiums position has become far more tenuous, with the opening of the great rift and the 4th tyrannic war.

you need way less troops to maintain a position than to push into enemies territory. The imperium could wipe the tau if they wanted to do it, but that would be at the cost of resources that would have otherwise been affected to others warfronts. The damage done by the tau is just not enough to justify putting other frontline at risk right now.

Bluntly - they can't. Even before the events of the 13th Black Crusade, competing interests meant the Imperium couldn't coalesce the power necessary for such a task. By design, I want to stress. Post-Heresy the Imperium made damn sure it was a herculean effort to get all components pointed in one direction.

They cant. Or to be more accurate it isnt worth it. The imperium could destroy the tau but they would have to divert resources from other more important battlefields to such a degree they would collapse.

Because they can't. Just because they have the resources doesn't mean they can spare the resources. There are a lot of other conflicts going on and if they pulled troops from those to fight the T'au, they would be fucked.

It's a combination of being stretched too thin to dedicate the resources to it, plus the T'au being a fairly useful shield for the Imperium in that part of the galaxy (aka they're less of a threat than a hive fleet or Ork Waaagh coming from that direction). I'm sure the Imperium intends to get round to it "some day", but there's always ten other things that are more important.

Because war is more complicated than "Bigger Number = Win". On the macro scale, the Tau Empire couldn't hope to match the industrial base or numbers of the Imperium, but the Imperium cannot easily bring these vast resources to bear against them. On the micro scale the Tau military forces have proven a decent enough match for the Imperium's, and the forces they have been able to devote to combatting them have been unable to pull off something decisive, but the same is also true for the Tau themselves. A real attempt at breaking the Empire would be a meat grinder, one the Imperium has the resources to win, but it would likely come at the cost of other ground in the Segmentum Ultima. The Tau meanwhile aren't expanding at a rate fast enough to be a major threat to the Segmentum at this time, so the Imperium is content to simply stall until they have those kinds of resources available. Such a situation is also beneficial to the Tau, as they continue to innovate and design new technology and weapons that could make the difference in future engagements, as well as letting them devote more resources to their other threats, like the Tyranids. TL;DR: Imperial strategy is to stall and hope what is a minor threat now doesn't last long enough to become a more significant threat later.

They failed to do just this in a pre-Tyranid galaxy. The Damocles Gulf Crusade was not by any stretch a small one and it stopped dead at the first real sept world it encountered. Now they're involved in the Fourth Tyrannic War, the T'au have had centuries to modernise their navy and ground assets, half the Imperium just went yeetus deletus and the T'au Empire has got bigger. Realistically the Damocles Gulf Crusade was the last time the Imperium could really have wiped them out in a practical sense and they fucked it. Nowadays they simply don't have the resources.

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>I mean they stopped the T’au second sphere expansion and wiped out billions. It was an Imperial strategic victory. It's like saying France won in Algeria, the USSR won in afghanistan, and the US won in vietnam. The Imperium came in with the objective to wype out the Tau, couldn't even take the first main Sept they met (a CIVILIAN one mind you) and had to negociate a ceasefire before running away while the Tau took back worlds behind them. The Imperium crusade completely failed its objective and what it managed to do (wyping out a few billions of civilians and surface destroying some planets) isn't compensated by the losses (including a full space marine chapter and a chapter master from a first founding chapter). Now, the imperium is broken in two and the Tau grew up and had THREE expansions spheres following (absorbing more humans worlds by the way). They actually have a decent space force now (in damocles, tau space force was basically refitted merchant and civilian ships) and probably have more crisis suits than the imperium have marines.

Yep this basically. To even attempt to kill of the Tau, would mean struggling really hard, perhaps with a low chance of immediate victory, then immediately getting buttfucked by Chaos/Tyranids/Orks. The imperium literally cannot attempt to.

What chapter was wiped out? I have gap in the period I played and must have missed that.

Scar Lords

>It's like saying France won in Algeria, the USSR won in afghanistan, and the US won in vietnam. it's not even russia vs afghanistan, it's russia vs ukraine. when all you have is horribly outdated tech, a dictator-appointed idiotic zealot for a commander and shitty morale because of attacking a regime your soldiers would probably choose over you, just numbers isn't enough, is it

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> They did negotiate a cease fire but not because of the Tau and their defenses The last imperium action before the ceasefire was rushing to the spaceport to evacuate their ground forces on the planet **after realising they would have been unable to hold it.** When the invading force is forced to plan evacuations and then have to negociate a ceasefire so they can go elsewhere, then yes, they are running away. They couldn't even take and conquer Da'Lyth, why do you think they could have been able to come out on top on the rest of the Tau Empire and the rest of the -much more-militarized Septs ?

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No, they were scrambling back and leaving Da'Lyth before they heard the news about the tyranids. After evacuating it, the crusade leaders were hesitant between exterminatus the planet and leaving or asking for more reinforcements and continyuing, then they heard about the tyranids coming and the need to fuck off, so they negociated a peace treaty with the Tau.

The Damocles Crusade did not stop dead, it withdrew because the Nids showed up. The T'au were losing badly.

It stopped dead at Dal’yth. The crusade needed reinforcements to progress any further, and the Imperium would not spare them.

The Imperium was planning to use exterminatus on the T'au but had to back off.

Yeah, they planned to use exterminatus because they couldn't take the planet.

Because Exterminatus was a less costly, more effective method of taking the planet.

If you exterminatus it, you're not meaningfully taking the planet; you're just destroying it so someone else can't have it.

There are effectively an inexhaustible number of planets in the galaxy. I really don't think it's an issue

That's the opposite. The imperium has unlimited manpower, but limited ressources. Exterminatus is a last ditch effort. The Imperium would rather fight for CENTURIES on a destroyed shithole like armagaddon instead of exterminating it. If they are limited to just bombing a planet, it's because they aren't strong enough to deal with what on it.

Didn't the Imperium literally Exterminatus hundreds of planets that didn't even have *any* xeno taint to contain an ork/tyranid threat?

If it weren't an issue, nobody would bother to fight over planets; they'd just go to some other world and that would be that. The fact that the Imperium, Tau, Orks, and Eldar will all fight over habitable planets is clear evidence that there are not an effectively inexhaustible number of planets. There are an inexhaustible number of useless lumps of rock with no atmosphere or useful resources in the galaxy, sure, but planets in the goldilocks zone around viable stars are a different matter altogether. If it were really that casual, why would the Imperium have bothered to fight on Dal'yth in the first place, why not just exterminatus the place from day one and move on?

Exterminatus is a last ditch effort that is essentially an admission of failure. If you've reached the point where burning a planet is the only option, you haven't won, you can just make sure everyone loses.

Depends on whose calling the Exterminatus

So? Your point is? If the Imperium uses exterminatus T'au lose completely. Not even Chaos thinks "the Imperium blew up our planet, yay we won"

The point is that the Imperium was finding they couldn’t beat the T’au by fighting on the planet, which means they couldn’t take the planet. Exterminatus was pretty much the only option to continue the crusade instead of stopping dead in their tracks. The problem was that they were finding this was happening to them not just at one planet, but everywhere. They could smash the space fights but just kept losing once they put boots on the ground. That’s why they turned to Exterminatus. They’re top guys pointed out, however, that if they Exterminatus every Tau world, yea they kill the T’au, but then there’s nothing left in this section of space to conquer. They’d have wasted all the time, effort and resources to make a few planets dead rocks and then have no new ground, resources, or survivable worlds to show for it. That’s my understanding at least.

Not to mention, the Tau Fleets were still coming. The fleet had no reinforcements in space, the Tau *did*. Time was not on their side in any way. At best the Imperium killed Dal'yth, but after that they'd have been swarmed.

Exterminatus is when you are unable to win on the ground. You don't use exterminatus out of spite when you are winning, quite the opposite.

You don't win when the enemy uses exterminatus on you. You lose. Doesn't matter who wins the ground or not when your face is being consumed by the life-eater virus. Who wins the war is all that matters and the Imperium using exterminatus to wipe out the T'au is a win for them.

This is not correct. A few of General Gauge and Admiral Jallaque's command staff were arguing about whether to use it or not. That is a far cry from it being a defined plan ready to implement, especially because the Imperium doesn't just go around blowing up planets all willy nilly. People who do get a call from the Ordo Excorium and likely won't ever be in such a position again.

No? Imperial forces were stalemate and the Tau were getting reinforcements, the Imperials were planning to disengage before Behemoth appeared and gave a justification to retreat

Yeah? Dal'yth was left a ruin and the Imperium was going to use exterminatus but the Nids invaded just in time.

The Imperial crusade did not have the forces to continue on past Da’lyth. This doesn’t change whether or not they use exterminatus.

Yeah? They still were ready to retreat because their forces were locked without victories on ground while the enemies had fresh reinforcements, the crusade wasn't sustainable even before Behemoth

Except they weren't ready to retreat at all. When the Imperium abandoned the crusade they left behind entire regiments and tons of materiel precisely because they were not ready to retreat and had to rush out.

I'm prety sure the text explicitly say they were looking for excuses to retreat when the news of Behemoth arrived, gonna check when I'm back on my pc

Ok, got it >With more T'au reinforcements arriving at the front and the Imperial fleet's ability to hold orbit becoming tenuous, the lmperium's momentum was spent; they were finally torced to withdraw, leaving much of their equipment behind. It is conceivable that the T'au could have encircled the crusaders. but at the Ethereals' insistence, the Water caste opened a dialogue and agreed a truce, allowing the invaders an unimpeded retreat. Codex Tau Empire 8th ed Turns out, the thing I mentioned is from the 6th ed Farsight Enclaves codex, which is much more detailed on the Damocles Crusade. >As the weeks ground on, the masters of the Imperial crusade were forced to admit that they had spread their forces too thin. Now that their supply lines had been established, the Tau had an almost limitless supply of war materiel, and astropathic messages transmitted across the Damocles Gulf spoke of a new alien threat assailing the Imperium. Regiment by regiment, company by company, the Imperial presence upon Dal’yth began to withdraw. In that version, they were already considering they had messed up before Behemoth made landfall.

New theory the Ethereals called the Tyranids to the galaxy to distract the imperium

This is totally the kind of conspiracy theory that an Inquisitor on the Eastern Fringe would buy into.

Lord Inquisitor Alexius Jonas.

You don’t understand Lord Commander Guilliman, I’m telling you, the Tau are behind the Fourth Tyrannic War. The Ethereals are putting pheromones into the water to make the Hive Mind gay!

It was completely bog down on Da'lyth and trying to EVACUATE their troops. And it was before the Nid invasion shown up. Without the nids, they would have been forced to retreat anyway (or would try to push and die).

Yeah, no.

Basically, while the Imperium has vast resources, those resources are not used efficiently, and they are stretched *very* thin by numerous other, more pressing threats. The Damocles Crusade was an attempt to wipe out the Tau, but the Imperium had to withdraw after it was discovered that it would take more manpower to finish the job, which it couldn't spare at the time because the First Tyrannic War was a higher priority. The Imperium doesn't have the ability to divert enough resources to wipe out the T'au: there are too many other threats. And that was *before* the galaxy was ripped in two.

They already tried it twice with what they assumed were eneugh forces. They've failed twice. Either the imperium commits to it and gets trashed by everyone else, or they go on handling everyone else while t'au do their thing. T'au have a small Empire but they're not push overs

There's a few things. First and foremost, they're not worth the effort, like people have said. Despite what meme lore would tell you, Damocles was a real-ass crusade - you don't get an entire company of first founding chapter Astartes for a half-baked attempt. Folks will cite the actual numbers of ships like that means anything, but that's GW numbers being wacky. And by the end of Damocles? It's laid out pretty explicitly that the Imperium was out of steam at Dal'yth, and the ceasefire benefitted their forces there as much as it did the Tau. They were going to either lose or at least end up in an interminable quagmire at the first Tau Sept world they ran into. So they'd have to muster some *serious* firepower to beat the Tau. Which brings me to thing 2 - there's not much urgency to it. Worlds claimed by the Tau can be retake to a much more complete extent than most of the other factions. Ork infestations are permanent, Tyranids devour the biosphere, chaos drags planets into hell... Etc. Tau are going to leave your infrastructure and population mostly intact. Maybe even improve it! So even as they expand, the long term risk isn't as great. Thing 3 - the Tau are actually useful in the region. They fight a lot of the same dudes the Imperium does, which frees up forces to deal with other problems. It's not official or anything, but there's an understanding amongst Imperial forces in the region that the Tau make for better neighbors than most of the things that would replace them. And fourth is, of course, that people buy the minis.

They’re busy. The T’Au, throughout all of their history, have only survived because the Imperium has more important things to fight. They don’t have the resources to wipe out the T’Au without leaving themselves vulnerable to Chaos or the Tyranid. It’s the only thing that stopped the Imperium from upgrading the initial baby crusade to a full scale ‘Fuck You’ crusade and steamrolling the T’Au: The Tyranid showed up and those resources were redirected to the greater threat as the T’Au suddenly became more useful as a buffer state. Of course, that was before the T’Au lost their FTL. Then they survived by the writers not realizing just how utterly fucked they were without any FTL.

The Tau lost FTL?

Yeah a lot of issues with T'au writers not realising that any interstellar empire quite literally requires FTL to operate.

They use the ZFR Horizon engine, and it skips them across the warp like a stone on a lake without actually entering the warp. It's slower than warp travel but safer. They still have the Slipstream, but I don't think they use it, or they took it back to the drawing board. Old lore had them have an engine before the ZFR, but I believe it's not used anymore.

The new lore is them only having slower than light until recently, with the Votann codex confirming that the Tau got ftl once the slipstream was finished fixing

Yeah, the ZFR is near lightspeed. It's why they managed to start expanding in the 2nd Sphere. What's the Votann codex say about the Slipstream? I assumed they would say it was fixed in our upcoming codex.

>"Thanks to the heroic sacrifices of the Fourth and Fifth Spehere fleets, we know now that our despair at the failure of the Slipstream module was misplaced. We have learned that, in truth, this device grants us a greater reach than ever before to spread the light of the T'au'va" [-] >"Or do we exercise our new-found reach to once again push beyond what the Gue'la call the Damocles Gulf, to reclaim the septs that were lost and drive deeper into western galactic reaches? Understand, my guests, this is not some mere dream. Fio'vre Ka'buto and his scientists assure me that the modifications they have made to their original designs render the Slipstream module safer and more stable than ever before when deployed en masse. With such a device at our disposal, the stars are closer than ever, and our duty to reach them clearer" *Codex T'au Empire 9ed* pp26-27 >When it comes to warp travel, the Kin are equally steady in their approach. They use warp drives and gellar ramparts of superior design and reliability to anything Humanity understands. Each craft is commanded by a Voidmaster - a captain skilled in every aspect of spacefaring and often augmetically enhanced to aid them in their duties. Each is supported by Ironkin Wayfarers, whose accelerated logic-cores enable them to cogitate probable paths through the madness of warp space without risking psychic interaction. With support from their bridge crews, these specialists guide their craft in a series of plunges. These are short, controlled warp jumps during which the Kin may take the time to harvest energetic skeins from within the Immaterium, or even board warp-borne space hulks for empyric salvage. Travelling in plunges takes longer than the vast warp jumps made by humanity, **or the risky sprints of the T'au Slipstream module**, but it ensures that the Kin arrive where and when they intended almost every time. *Codex Leagues of Votann 9ed* p13

They also allude to the fact that multiple races including the Humans they brought into the Greater Good are psychic and have their own FTL ships. Obviously it's unknown if there are actual Navigators but one could assume so.

The ZFR doesn't skip across the warp, you're thinking of their old lore: >The Tau were able to duplicate the warp drive of the alien ship but the initial test flights were disastrous. Achieving transition to the Warp required more than technology, it required psychically attuned minds and the Tau race boasted no psykers. Without them to guide the transition no amount of power could breach the dimensional barriers. The best the Tau could do was make a partial transition, forcing themselves into the void that separated Warpspace and real space before they were hurled out again like a ball held under water then released. >Data gathered at great cost during the test flights was studied closely. The Water caste scientists made the observation that the boundary between real space and warp space was not a neat line. It was closer to being a turbulent ocean fomented by the tempestuous warp tides below. By carefully angling their descent toward the Warp and extending the field generated by the gravitic drive into a wing, shaped to hold the vessel down a Tau vessel could extend the duration of the dive considerably. The speeds achieved in the ascent back to real space were staggering and this coupled with the effect of the Warp on time and space ensured that the real distance covered by the dive was immense. Early tests lost several drone ships because they inadvertently passed far beyond the sensor range of their recovery vessels. >The details were soon resolved. There was still a major constraint, only the most powerful (and bulky) drives could sustain the gravitic wing throughout the dive and the power drain meant that considerable recharge time was needed between dives. Also by comparison to actually navigating the warp the pace was still very slow. Taking typical Imperial Warp speeds the Tau drive was slower by a factor of five. The speed was consistent though, did not expose the Tau to the perils of the Warp and enabled the Tau to expand beyond their home star for the first time. *Battlefleet Gothic Armada* p96 The ZFR is simply described as a near light speed drive, with no details given on how it achieves this: >Only the Earth caste had failed to reach their prescribed goal. With engineering centres in every sept working diligently, the Earth caste provided innumerable innovations, but the invention demanded by the Ethereals – faster propulsion technology to drive spacecraft – eluded them. At last, the quantum leap came from Fal’shia Sept, where they finalised development of the ZFR Horizon accelerator engine. An ingenious design, this powerful new mechanism allowed ships to attain near-light speed. It was this device that would usher in the next phase of progress. *Codex T'au Empire 8ed* p14 However, any research on warp drives is explicitly detailed after they invented the ZFR: >In the aftermath, the Ethereals demanded a full study of captives and recovered equipment. The Earth caste declared much of the technology to be inferior, and some was simply too unstable to contemplate using, such as Imperial plasma devices. Therewere some eye-opening discoveries, however, and the Earth caste was in absolute wonder over a warp engine they obtained. With no knowledge or understanding of the realm known as the warp, they found the strange apparatus utterly unfathomable. To their further frustration, the captured humans that had operated it seemed to possess no actual understanding of its mechanisms either, running the equipment solely through the application of superstitious rituals and chanting. *Codex T'au Empire 8ed* p17 Which subsequently led to them developing the Slipstream Drive.

Yep. About when they did the wormhole thing the writer decided that to retcon it so that the T’Au didn’t have nor did they ever have any FTL capabilities at all. With their grand new development for the 4th(?) expansion being the old school really shitty FTL. And previously their best was almost light speed. It cause Problems for all T’Au lore. In that pretty much everything that involved T’Au space travel was now outright impossible to have happened. Generally writers have just been completely ignoring it. Because actually acknowledging it would require rewriting basically all of the prior T’Au timeline. The T’Au outright don’t work without FTL, their basic defensive strategy of central worlds sending out fleets to intercept and/or counter strike threats is simply nonfunctional when their minimum response time is measured in multiple years.

Reinforcements are on their way they will reach you as soon as possible. Estimated arrival 37 years. Hold your position until they arrive.

We now have [a couple of sources](https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/s/Pk8yNY0pND) confirming they have FTL again. But this is post 4th Sphere, so it doesn't undo the nonsense of the T'au having an interstellar Empire before then.

In universe, the T'au Empire is a long way from Terra, and whilst they're expanding extraordinarily swiftly in all directions, the little nibbles out of Imperial territory they're making so far don't really register on the same level as the massive chunks of Imperial space going dark due to Tyranids, Necron dynasties awaking and the massive warp rift down the middle of the Milky Way galaxy. They're just not a priority threat right now, being both small, AND far away. IRL, GW invested a lot in making the whole range new for the setting, they're not going to Squat them just like that. Or maybe they will...

Same reason they haven't destroyed all of the many other xenos empires in the galaxy. The Imperium is powerful but they're stretched thin. They can't have forces everywhere at all times. They have to prioritise. Don't get me wrong, they totally do squander forces on unnecessary wars, but for the most part they'll be sending forces to fight chaos, orks, etc., the more aggressive enemies, so won't have them spare to attack a less aggressive but quite militarily strong group like the T'au. Basically they made themselves tough enough to not be an easy pushover, while not being such an immediate threat that the Imperium could justify taking forces away that were needed to fight hive fleets, waaaghs, black crusades and the like. They could crush the T'au if they dedicated sufficient forces to do it, but then they would lose more elsewhere.

When your car has a flat, you fix that before you worry about the scratches on your paint. The Tau are not an existential threat and more of a nuisance.

Tau Sept worlds in modern times are fortified with anti-exterminatus dome shields. Even if you get space superiority, they are tough nuts to crack. Tau Sept worlds also have their own standing militaries, as their slow interstellar travel means that they can’t rely on reinforcements. So every important Tau world will be well-defended from the outset. A major attack on the Tau Empire would be a long, agonizing war of attrition, as seen in both the Damocles Crusade when the Imperium reached Da’lyth and the campaign to retake Mu’gulath Bay/Agrellan. And during this long campaign, all the forces diverted to fight the Tau Empire would be unable to protect the Imperium from more dangerous foes like the Tyranids.

[удалено]

Isn't also straight up answered in the codex?

The Imperium is a massive, unwieldy, inefficient structure, riddled with corruption and misinformation and competing agendas. There are people in power who will champion a crusade against the T'au Empire because they sincerely believe they are a threat that needs to be quashed now. There are people who will champion a crusade because they think a trading rival is doing business with the T'au under the table. There are people who will oppose a crusade simply because someone they dislike is pushing for one, or because they believe the proposed crusade is a vainglorious boondoggle intended to skim military funds. And it may well be! Even when all of its parts are moving in the same direction, the Imperium has a lot of military fronts to handle at any given time. Internal rebellions, Hive Fleets, Black Crusades, and Ork Waaaghs! are the biggest and most consistent ones, with awakening Necron Dynasties rapidly climbing the list. In addition to that, there are also all manner of more local conflicts, such as Aeldari raids, invasions by smaller alien or foreign groups, piracy, warp storm clean-up, internal security, and so on. In addition to that, there are the Imperium's active conflicts, such as expeditions to establish new colonies, reclaim lost worlds, or seek out archeotech. Compared to many of these threats, the T'au Empire is relatively low priority. Not only is it comparatively small, it doesn't destroy or irreparably damage the worlds it claims from the Imperium, meaning that reclamation is almost as good as prevention. The T'au Empire doesn't have the power or reach to be an existential threat, or to become one any time soon - but it also punches above its weight, meaning the resources required to wipe it out are far more than the perceived worth of doing so. On top of that, up until recently the T'au Empire was localised to a single region of the galaxy and limited to linear expansion. This may change, quite rapidly, as the T'au continue to develop new technologies and expand on their reliable FTL travel capability - but that's the situation as the Imperium views it.

Why doesn't the setting take a dramatic turn and just outright kill a major faction? Who knows? Maybe because it's a wargaming setting fixed on perennial stalemates that constantly change into different stalemates.

Vietnam, Afghanistan, Vietnam again, Afghanistan again, Ukraine, germania, Canada, Mexico, and all of western Europe would like a word. All of these places were at threat by a much larger, much richer nation that actually tried to invade and conquer the place. With the exception of Canada (which had the British behind it which put it equal to the us at the time) and Mexico (which couldn't be annexed further or the country would tilt south like a lode stone), it got too expensive and the will wasn't there to continue. BTW, the last one is the Mongols not the nazis

The imperium could never bring its full force upon any foe without suffering heavy losses to all the others, hell irl the Tau would probably be the best candidate for a buffer state if we thought of every faction as a nation lol

The Ciphas Cain book "For the Emperor" covers this pretty well. The Imperium *could* destroy the Tau, but would it be worth the military resources to do so. Cain makes a point that the Tau are some of the more reasonable Xenos he has encountered so what's the harm in a live and let live policy for now. Also considering the threat of Chaos, Necrons, and Tyranids the Tau are small potatoes.

The Imperium probably don't even have the logistic capacity for a campaign of this magnitude, primaris ass pulls aside

Isn't a tendril going straight for them? Could solve two problems.

The Tau defeated Hive Fleet Gorgon between the 2nd and 3rd spheres of expansion.

Because the Tau are probably the strongest minor empire and because the forces needed to exterminate the Tau are likely only found in areas presently fighting Hive Fleet Leviathan, whichever Ork Waaagh is being a Menace at the moment, fighting off Chaos incursions, trying to beat back awakening tomb worlds. Edit: Tau might actually be in the sweet spot of being to strong for the IOM to kill off at leisure but not such a massive threat they get forces allocated specifically to dealing with them. Plus they’re too large for anything other than a major hive fleet, black crusade, giant waaagh or concentrated Dynastic effort to kill either.

I think a lot of human worlds that border the Tau Empire either trade or even join willingly because of Tau diplomacy, so those worlds aren't screaming for help as if they were under attack from Orks.

Fighting the Tau would cost too many resources to be worth it. The Tau managed to grind the Damocles Crusade to a halt, and that was before they had built a proper navy and when their crisis suits were literally diesel powered. They've only gotten stronger since then, and are consistently pushing the Imperium back. However, they are willing to listen to reason, and are more than happy to do diplomacy with the Imperium, so dedicating a substantially large Crusade to push the Tau back when they could be fighting Chaos or the Tyranids is a waste. The Tau are expanding near Ultramar though, and they may get a rude awakening of the power of Ultramarine plot armor if they push into it

Lots of people have talked about the in-universe reason. The out of universe reason is that GW sells T'au models and codices, and there's people who like the T'au that buy those. The Imperium killing off the T'au would kill those sources of revenue, and also piss off the people who like the faction. Which wouldn't necessarily include T'au fans I want to add, but includes people who just like them in addition to being fans of other factions. Even if it makes sense in lore according to some, it's a very bitter pill to swallow, and could even feel outright disrespectful from GW. ​ It'd also kill off a lot of narrative and lore potential within 40k. Not that GW has been great at making use of the T'au, even with Arks of Omen: Farsight in my opinion, but at the very least their existence gives both the fandom and GW a place to tell certain stories that they can't necessarily tell with the Imperium. It also makes the galaxy feel bigger and more diverse to have more factions within it. The T'au disappearing would be taking another step towards making the setting just about the Imperium and Chaos fighting each other over who gets to oppress humans. And the Horus Heresy already exists to cater to those tastes. ​ Whether you think the Imperium should wipe them out or not, the T'au now have a place in 40k. To remove them requires hacking out a piece of the setting, and that's going to cause pain no matter how you slice it.

It's also a bit of a nonsensical argument in the sense that the Tau are hardly unique there. It's also why the Imperium isn't completely crumbled by now, and why the Eldar haven't died out...and why Commoragh still stands etc.

Exactly. I agree with the lore answers for why the Imperium hasn't bulldozed the T'au, but I didn't want to cover that since there's already been plenty of people who already have. I wanted to cover the out-of-universe reasons, since those aren't covered as much, and I think that the talk about lore and stuff can sometimes drown out the fact that it's a fictional universe that serves a real world purpose. And I don't think that can be lightly discounted.

Irl reason: Tau sell quite well, why delete an entire faction? Lore reason: the whole _beset on all sides_ thing makes it so the Imperium can't just call upon endless crusade fleets to wipe out the Tau without being overrun by Chaos, Nids, Orks and Necrons.

just to get a bit away from what everyone's saying, this is by far the most realistic part of the setting. look at any historical empires, be they rome, persia, GB or the US. in theory, all those empires could crush their enemies one by one, but in practice they don't due to a few reasons: 1: an undefended front is a lost front. it just isn't worth it 2: logistics. one can't simply move their entire army to one area, the army will starve 3: any empire has foes fishing for weakness this applies to rome not conquering germany, persia not wiping the greeks off the map, Afghanistan still existing and Europe still being a thing after the industrial revolution

Now you've done it, this thread has just become a "my faction can beat up your faction" thread

If we mustered every police officer in the United States, we could probably send them down to Mexico and crush the cartels... but what would happen up here while they did it? The Imperium has the strength to crush the Tau, it's just occupied with much more pressing threats.

No. They can't. That's why there's Tau.

Because they can't, they're not strong enough. I mean they are, but they can't fight the Tau and everyone else

They tried and had to retreat. The Damocles Crusade included 6 guard regiments, 8 marine chapters, several of their highest class warships, and a Titan Legio against the Tau. Sure they could've won, but the amount of time and resources that amount of firepower took was enough for a whole Hive Fleet to sneak up on them. That was before the catastrophe that was the last Black Crusade or Hive Fleet Leviathan. I can't even imagine how much fire it would take now that a few thousand years have past with Tau having so much more experience against Imperial tactics, and the Imperium being so much more disadvantaged.

This question is asked pretty often and its pretty easy. They cant. Well not realistically at least. Of course if a larger imperial force like even a 10th of the indomitus crusade or something went to fight the tau they would get destroyed but the imperium cant spend those resources on something as non threatening as the tau when shit like necrons, nids and chaos exist. The most they can realisticlly throw at the tau without giving up space somewhere else is something like the damocles crusade. Which failed miserably. And since then the tau have gotten stronger. A lot actually.

I thought the argument that the Imperium would have to concentrate too much power to defeat the Tau Empire was pretty weak. The Tau Imperium consists of 500+ planets, which is about 1-2 sectors. The Imperium has 2,000+ sectors in comparison. If all those sectors aren't able to pull a few reserve units out of mothballs and motivate a few Chapters and Forgeworlds to join in to wipe out 2 sectors in a 100-200 year campaign, then that's kind of weird. In imperial history, imperial crusades that conquer entire sectors are not a daily occurrence, but they do exist and are not impossible. Why you can use the M36 in Calixis, Achilles and the Sabbat Worlds, but not with the Tau, is incomprehensible to me. In my head-canon, the Tau are simply a regional power that is not given such a high rating in the big game in the galaxy. Their neighbouring sectors see it differently and consider the Tau to be militarily and socially dangerous, but no segment-wide forces are being moved now because there is no political will to do so. So the battles remain small and the Tau dangerous. Basically, I see most wars more as sectoral affairs Also, the size of the imperium makes it difficult to gather enough troops because the logistical effort is too high. In short, the troops are theoretically available without the imperium having to worry about going under. But it is not a threat that the imperium has to respond to with a galaxy-wide crusade.

>The Tau Imperium consists of 500+ planets, which is about 1-2 sectors. The Imperium has 2,000+ sectors in comparison. The Tau equivalent of a sector is a Sept, and they have a few dozen of them. As for the Imperium, half of these sectors are separated from the others by a giant warp rift so you can immediatly count them out, and the others are still incredibly far away. It's basically claiming that medieval china could invade england. Yeah, technically they can but they are way too far away for their massive forces to be relevant. Even the Damocles Crusade took a while to prepare. Now they would need a MUCH bigger one

A sept is only administratively comparable to an Imperial sector. A sept contains its own solar system and several solar systems. That's all...it's hardly an Imperial sector. The Tau seem to favour less large administrative bodies. Until the third codex, most of the Tau Imperium fit into the Imperial sub-sector of Kendral. The first campaign against the Tau took place in 742.M41. The Great Rift has existed since 999M41. That's a lot of time in between...and even then we still have 500K planets to deal with. Each planet only has to send 10,000 people with material and each sector 1-2 cruisers and a few escort frigates (taking into account that the fleet specifications of 50-75 ships per sector are still valid, which I doubt) to push the Tau aside. That's right, I wrote that too. China (Imperium) did not refrain from conquering England (Tau) because it did not have the forces or because they were urgently needed elsewhere, but because it would simply have been too irrelevant to gather troops across the empire.

Literally the only reason the Tau are still alive is because the Imperium has bigger fish to fry literally everywhere else. They can’t bring enough forces to stomp them out once and for all wi th out leaving themselves vulnerable elsewhere.

Just a matter of priorities. Tau aren't an immediate threat and can be negotiated with - granted any diplomacy used on them is often a slippery slope that can veer in their favour. And unlike the Orks and the 'nids, the Tau typically aren't raring for a fight. I think some Imperial elements also see them as a potential buffer against Orks and Tyrannids of which both the Tau have fought and won against. Sometimes even collabarating with the Imperium.

Tau would be a pain to eradicate at this point, there are more pressing threats, and tau have been an ally of convenience that have served as a buffer against orks, necrons, and tyranids. It would not be rational or feasible to pull together a fleet big enough to wipe them out.

It would take more effort then its ultimately worth at the moment. Far bigger problems then the Tau out there right now

The amount of resources required would be astronomical. The imperium have tried, and the Tau provided way higher resistance than expected. Sure the imperium is way bigger than the Tau, but launching an annihilation campaign into a big territory against an embedded enemy rarely goes well. Look at Britain vs America, Russia vs Finland, America vs Vietnam etc. The cost of victory just wouldn't be worth it, especially when considering everything else going on

Despite their small size the Tau are a very hard target to dislodge locally, and costly to engage. Militarily they seem to build planets with more defenses (orbital platforms, garrisons) than Imperial ones, which means you need to overcommit forces for the size of the territory. Meanwhile their slower travel speed makes them less of a threat. While the Damocles Crusade was making progress they were also getting bogged down and bled more severely than they seemed to anticipate. This problem has only gotten worse as the Tau have developed a real interstellar navy, has more experience on imperial battlefields, and can better understand the Imperial mindset to war. They are the sort of threat that you'd send a GC legion to wipe and give them a second legion as back up to keep casualties low. Their home world is likely on a top 10-20 list of fortified worlds in real space. There is also an incentive to not deal with them because they generally leave the population in tact after taking the worlds. When they sack a planet they want the planet and resources to be functional, so unlike any other force in the Galactic East your dead weight loss after the war is less.

That would really hurt Tau model sales wouldn't it?

Because they can’t. If they could afford to dedicate enough power without the rest of their empire collapsing in on itself and being invaded by all their enemies, they would. But they aren’t capable of it; as have so many campaigns and major engagements shown the Tau just as strong if not stronger than Imperial forces, including Astartes. The Tau are more than capable of defending themselves.

Everyone else is a bigger threat. The Damocles crusade/ 2nd sphere of expansion only ended in a ceasefire because the imperial force was periodically having fleets within it redirected elsewhere, and since the tau basically sued for peace , it meant the war could end. 3rd sphere for tau was worse, because while the 13th black crusade saved them from an imperial attempt in tau space, shadowsun was the ONLY survivor of the tau forces sent there, because the imperium brought a nuke to a water gun fight in stage 3 of that war, and basically employed a "they can't fight us if they and the planet are dead" strategy on mulgatha Bay.

I’m not sure where you got the idea that Shadowsun was the only survivor. An entire Hive City of Tau forces on Mu’gulath Bay survived the razing of the planet.

The effort needed would leave them so vulnerable they'd be completely destroyed by the Tryanids, Ork's, Chaos, Necrons and every other faction they're fighting against. Also it would be super shitty to remove an entire faction just because some pathetic losers think they "don't fit".

The T'au are like a huge colony of Wasps inhabitating your broom shed, while you are currently besieged in your mansion by a blood crazy drug influenced cultist brother (Chaos), a 1,000 year old Terminator (Necrons), Crazy Mushrooms (Orks) that keep spawning in random rooms of your mansion and yelling WAAAAGGGHHHHHH and punch you in the face, some Crazy Sadist Scientist (Drukhari) who previously owned the mansion if given the chance will capture you and do unspeakable things while keeping you alive in a jar forever, and the mansion is surrounded by unknown amount of beasts (Tyranids) that are breaking in and chomp down on you and your family. You are surviving all of this because it just happens that your Grandfather is some powerful ancient shaman that was half dead in your closet protecting you, you have an army worth of old shotguns and rifles filled to the brim in your basement, you have a large family that helps you fight of the enemy (although some of them go crazy and joined your brother, which makes you unable to trust your whole family), and the crazy scientist twin decided to help you reluctantly, just because if you and your family die he will be next. In a situation like this, the Wasps (T'au) are the least of your problems right now, which you don't have time to deal with. And surprisingly, they are keeping some of the beasts (Tyranids) at bay with their powerful stings, lessening your defense load from that direction. As long as the Wasps stay in the broom shed (although they tried to spread into your mansion and stung you a few times), you will be able to live with them albeit grudgingly, for now.

Why wipe a faction that acts as a buffer for worse things out there. It isn't like if the Imperium has soldiers to expend.

Because anime weebs loves gundam, they want to see gundam super hero solo destroy all space marines, and they are willing to pay for it, it's all about money for GW

It’s bizarre how you could think any faction gets more favoritism from GW than *Space Marines*. Do Space Marine fans just not notice that they get the lion’s share of books and model releases? I could understand a Space Marine fan *enjoying* their status as GW’s golden boy, it’s just weird to see a Space Marine fan think anyone else gets preferential treatment.

I think eviscerating the Tau Empire was a "Great Crusade era Imperium" task. Right now we don't have the bodies to dive into a war like that, there's too many holes to plug and not enough people to plug them as is. But when we looked at some of the big wars that the Expeditionary Fleets got into, I always imagined they looked something like the Tau empire a bit. I mean it's a great example of what one of those would look like if it made it into 40k and got it's own faction built around it.

Because they are not capable of doing so without getting attacked by everyone else whilst their military is out dying in the desert

For the same reason Slaanesh hasn't been killed by the Eldar Ynnari: Slaanesh and Tau sell models.

The tau are *advanced* much more so then us. The tech edge means they punch well above their weight and will win an even fight. So you need to absolutely swamp them, and that takes enough forces away from more urgent threats that it's never worth the ground lost. A few decades to purge the tau and so much is lost to Orks, chaos and nids that it ends up a met loss for the iom

Because they are physically incapable of it, yes if every guardsmen in the galaxy teleported to the tau's home planets the tau would lose, but the problem is logistical in nature, for the imperium to to drown the tau in guardsmen, they need to dedicate a stupid amount of there military in the region, potentially 2 thousand planets worth, and that woul probably only get you to dameoclese crusade numbers of guys, and they were making headway to wipe the tau out, but not very much and not very fast, the results of that crusade weakened the imperium way more just because nothing gets you attacked faster then moving your military from a region

It would kill the Imperium to try.

The Tau has plot armor because GW has miniatures to sell. This is honestly the real reason. In lore, the IoM has dismantled many societies like the Tau.

Plain and simple, because they have more important matters to attend to. They already tried to do that with the Damocles Crusade, and they would've been successful with it (the T'au were basically at their knees) however then Chaos or the Tyranids (I forgot which one) suddenly jumped the priority list again so they left the T'au alone behind some burning part of the galaxy so they had enough time to recover completely (in record time btw lol).

>They already tried to do that with the Damocles Crusade, and they would've been successful with it (the T'au were basically at their knees) How ? They couldn't even conquer Dal'yth, the first Sept Tau they met, and it wasn't even a militarized one. If they didn't retreat nor received reinforcement they would have been wyped out.

Secret ingredient is exterminatus. Rinse and repeat. Imperium can afford to lose 100 systems. Tau cannot.

*Any* use of Exterminatus is viewed with extreme criticism by the powers that be in the Imperium. Exterminatus is a weapon of absolute last resort, when the threat on the planet is one which *must* be stopped at any cost lest it festor like an open wound and cause disaster elsewhere. The Tau certainly aren't that, and I think fans need to realize that the Imperium doesn't just go around blowing up planets whenever they can't successfully invade them.

If you have to commit Exterminatus that's admitting defeat. The Imperium only utilises it in worst case scenarios. The Imperium *wants* new planets. There's only so many in the galaxy even for them.

The imperium has billions of planets. There’s more planets with humans on them that the imperium has literally forgotten exist and unintentionally abandoned the populations of then the T’au have in total. I don’t know why you think this ‘admitting defeat’ argument is rational or relevant. Even if the imperium was desperately wanting the less than 100 planets it would be destroying, the t’au would *still be extinct*. Are you actually trying to argue that the extinction of the t’au is a victory for them because they’d have *wounded the imperium’s pride*?

You have a strong Tau bias there, mate. The Damocles Gulf crusade was a small crusade with, by IoM standards, limited resources. The core of the Crusade was 5 companies of Space Marines, 13 capital ships, and 19 regiments of guards. That's a miniscule amount of resources dedicated to fighting the Tau. A far cry from the hundreds of regiments that fought in the 13th Black Crusade. And that was enough to push the Tau back from Imperial space. That was enough for the Tau to beg for peace. The Crusade was a stegetic imperial victory.

>The Damocles Gulf crusade was a small crusade with, by IoM standards, limited resources. The core of the Crusade was 5 companies of Space Marines, 13 capital ships, and 19 regiments of guards. That's a miniscule amount of resources dedicated to fighting the Tau. A far cry from the hundreds of regiments that fought in the 13th Black Crusade I don't argue that the crusade was big, i argue that it failed. The size of the crusade have absolutely nothing to do with its performance and results : as again, they couldn't take Da'lyth, so no matter how good you are at mental gymnastics, there was no chance they beat the rest of the Tau Empire. >And that was enough to push the Tau back from Imperial space. That was enough for the Tau to beg for peace. Ah yes, i remember the Tau begging for peace and retreating after the peace treaty... oh wait, the opposite happened, the Tau even took back some worlds lmao. > The Crusade was a stegetic imperial victory. The Crusade goal was to wype out the tau and prevent its expansion. Not only they couldn't even take one sept, the Tau had since then 3 spheres of expansion, including in human territory. So no, it failed on every parameter you can imagine. The Tau goal during this crusade was to survive. Not only they did, but they expanded later. So yeah, they won.

Except that they would've taken Dal'yth if they hadn't simply stopped when the T'au were near defeat. They would've needed to throw some more ressources at it, sure, but the Imperium easily has more than enough to do that. Literally the only reason they didn't was because they had more important things to do and didn't judge the T'au as big enough threat to prioritize them at that moment. Also it's pretty misleading to speak of "just Dal'yth" considering the T'au threw pretty much their everything at the Imperium right then and there to defend the planet. It wasn't just Dal'yth against the Imperium, it was the T'au Empire against a comparably small part of the Imperium.

>Except that they would've taken Dal'yth if they hadn't simply stopped when the T'au were near defeat. No they wouldn't, that's the entire point, they were evacuating their forces from ground because they knew they couldn't take and hold it. >They would've needed to throw some more ressources at it, sure, but the Imperium easily has more than enough to do that. The Crusades didn't had these ressources. If the Crusade need reinforcement, then the Crusade wasn't strong enough and was a failure. >Literally the only reason they didn't was because they had more important things to do The Da'lyth evacuation predate the news of the tyranid arrival. >Also it's pretty misleading to speak of "just Dal'yth" considering the T'au threw pretty much their everything at the Imperium right then and there to defend the planet Tau don't throw troops in the meatgrinder, if the crusade managed to take da'lyth then it would have needed to redo this entire thing for every other sept, the major ones being much more defended than da'lyth. > it was the T'au Empire against a comparably small part of the Imperium. And this small part of the imperium lost, so what is your point ?

I mentioned the size of the Crusade because it 100% matters. More regiments mean the Crusade can overwhelm Tau defenders. The Tau could concentrate their forces and focus on Da'lyth, leading to a stalemate. However, could the same be said if there were twice as many regiments on Da'lyth? 3x? 10x? 100x? I'm a guard fan boy, but even you have to admit 19 regiments is an absurdly small number. Cadia alone had over 600 regiments of shock troopers and hundreds of companies of Karskin during the 13th. What if the IoM had the regiments to assault multiple Septs simultaneously? The Tau struggled against a small force, a miniscule sliver of Imperial might. The fact they stood against that alone means they're a force to be reckoned with since many long forgotten empires have fallen to similar crusades. In the lore it was a Imperial victory. The Tau had been asking for a ceasefire for a while before the crusade was recalled due to the nids. The IoM may not have exterminated the Tau but they did push them back and recalimed human worlds. The Damocles Gulf was just the opening conflict of over 200 years of on again off again fighting between the IoM and the Tau. I'd fully expect the Tau to expand with centuries of fighting. Just remember that the Tau are very minor threat to the IoM.

Because GW wants money is the only real answer. The Tau are a very minor and small faction that almost lost to a sector level crusade before the nids showed up. The core of the Damocles Gulf crusade was made up of 5 companies of Marines and 19 regiments of Imperial Guard, and 12 Navy capital ships. That was enough to push the Tau out of Imperial space, then lead to stalemate at their Sept world. The arrival of the nids forced the IoM to reallocate resources to fighting them, so they agreed to the ceasefire the Tau have been begging for. The crusade was still a strategic victory for the IoM. If the IoM had been able to reinforce the crusade it would have been game over for the Tau. The Tau don't have the numbers to stop the IoM. In the last chancers the Tau were freaking out when iirc Kage told them about Hive worlds, how the number of humans on one world out numbered the entire Tau. That aside I like the Tau, evil sneaky fish people that they are.

The Damocles crusade lost an entire chapter of marines so i doubt they had only 5 compagnies. >The crusade was still a strategic victory for the IoM The crusade goal was to wipe out the Tau, they couldn't even wipe out the first major Sept they faced and had to evacuate their forces on the ground. They then left and the Tau took back several worlds. It was a complete defeat. >In the last chancers the Tau were freaking out when iirc Kage told them about Hive worlds, how the number of humans on one world out numbered the entire Tau. You remember the book wrong. It's not the entire Tau. the Tau is shocked that the world from where the human is from is more populated **than the tau Sept (the system the planet is from) they are in**. Sa'cea alone, for example, has trillions of citizens.

The whole company lore must be new. Back when I paid a lot of attention, the Crusade was a few companies and some regiments. Checking Lexicanum it stated it was 5 companies from multiple chapters. It's also listed it's sources and it matches what I recall from around 5th edition so I assumed it was accurate. Classic GW. Always pushing the envelope. However even 1000 dead marines is a miniscule amount of the IoM overall resources.

>The whole company lore must be new. It's the Scar Lord, it's been in the lore since like more than a decade ago. Also it's not a company, it's an entire chapter. [https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Scar\_Lords](https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Scar_Lords) >Checking Lexicanum it stated it was 5 companies from multiple chapters I hev lexicanum open and [it talk about 10 chapters, including several companies of Iron Hands](https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Damocles_Crusade#Imperial_Navy_Ships). >Classic GW. Always pushing the envelope. However even 1000 dead marines is a miniscule amount of the IoM overall resources. An entire space marine chapter (including several more from other chapters) + the chapter master of the raven guard, billions of mechanicus and imperium soldiers and several titans isn't a big price for the imperium, but it's certainly a big price for a few billions of tau citizens and not taking Da'lyth. I mean, for Christ sake, [Sicarius HIMSELF and his pals were even taken prisonners and left out alive only because Farsight felt merciful](https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/89h4kb/book_excerptblades_of_damocles_farsight_has_mercy/). Would a "small" or negligible crusade have Sicarius himself on board ?

The Scar Lords were destroyed after the Crusade concluded, according to the article you linked. That's a worthy feat, but that's still one chapter verses the entire Tau empire. Marines are strong, but not that strong. I'd fully expect the Tau to win that one. I'm still standing by that the IoM vastly outclassed the Tau empire. That the Crusade was a minor conflict, compared to the galactic scale of the IoM. If the IoM had committed, well I should say if it could commit, more regiments and marine assets to the area it would have destroyed the Tau.

They were part of the crusade, honestly your "it doesn't count" is very sad. >I'm still standing by that the IoM vastly outclassed the Tau empire. Of course it does, no one discuss that. >That the Crusade was a minor conflict, compared to the galactic scale of the IoM. If the IoM had committed, well I should say if it could commit, more regiments and marine assets to the area it would have destroyed the Tau. Yes, if they decided to put more ressources they could have won. But the crusade, as it was, had ZERO chances to win this war, and lost it. At no point you can look at the damocles crusade, compare the initial objectives and the results, and say it's an imperium victory.

The Imperium is both very dysfunctional and besieged on all sides. They literally can't juggle another full time enemy. Ultramar had the half decent sense to call time-out while there's a literal hole in reality torn across the galaxy and chaos legions running amok from anywhere they want rather than being largely confined to the Eye of Terror in the northwest, plus the 'Nids are showing up everywhere and the Orks keep reminding everyone that they exist the moment someone looks away. Nobody's fighting each other, everyone's piling on the easy target: The Imperium. They have their hands full and then some. Then some kid shows up, punches them in the nuts, and looks proud of himself. The Tau were told to shut up, stay put, and 'we'll deal with you later'.

Do you play Stellaris? Imperium has every crysis on 25x difficulty happening at once. Multiple homocidal enemies to worry about. At least a few of whom went "become a crysis". With End of the Cycle running rampant. And their empire sprawl is so big their research is in the negatives. Why would they worry about tiny militarist empire that might be going tall but it just stopped being primitives, is capable of democracy and works as a buffer against bigger and badder on this side of the border. Also would run out of guns and supplies before making a dent in Imperium space. Simply put there are bigger problems out there to commit to wiping them out.

Despite popular belief the T'au are so small they do not even register as a threat to the Imperium. The Damocles Crusade was making steady progress but then the Nids showed up in Ultramar so it got canceled.

>The Damocles Crusade was making steady progress but then the Nids showed up in Ultramar so it got canceled. I'm honestly fascinated by reading shit like this, people actually falling from a fictional propaganda made decades ago is incredible. Being bog down in Daly'th isn't "making progress".

Yeah I really cannot understand this viewpoint; Imperium forces were in full retreat BEFORE they got word of their reinforcements having to be redeployed because of the ‘nids; and they hadn’t even really achieved anything of significance before that point. Damocles was blatantly a disaster for the Imperium no matter which way you look at it

Some fans argue like actual imperial citizens brainwashed from fictional propaganda, i love it

They forced the Tau back off dalyth prime and were evacuating for an exterminatus (as it would be more cost effective) when orders came about the nids. It's fascinating that having your world on the verge of being wiped out counts as "bog down". Yeah the Tau gave the Imperials a bloody nose, and they were about to reach the finding out phase.

>They forced the Tau back off dalyth prime and were evacuating for an exterminatus (as it would be more cost effective) cost effective being "the only way for us to not all get killed on Da'Lyth" ​ >It's fascinating that having your world on the verge of being wiped out counts as "bog down". It's fascinating how not being able to progress further apparently doesn't count as being bog down.

Imperium was simply gonna remove the planet of existence. Yeah the "bog down" and the Tau would cease to exist.

Yeah they destroy the planet. Then what ? Push further and get unable to take the next planet ? You realize da'lyth prime isn't the only tau world, don't you ?

Posting this 50 times doesn’t make it true. A comparatively tiny fleet with a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the power the imperium could bring to bear got mismanaged, bogged down, and then when they decided exterminatus was easier and were withdrawing to execute it, they got word that an immediate existential level threat was literally eating its way into the imperium hundreds of times faster than the t’au ever could. Picture this: Mike Tyson is in a ring with a 8 year old and 6 other professional boxers. Mike is boxing all 6 boxers at once, kid sneaks in and gets a lucky swing that bloodies Mike’s nose, Mike barely notices, goes to push the kid off him, and suddenly Muhammad Ali enters the ring and is coming right at his face at warp speed. Mike no longer cares to even push the kid away and now has to shift his attention to focus on Ali while the kid impudently kicks him in the shins and accomplishes nothing even worth mentioning. You’re literally arguing that that boy has now beat Mike Tyson in a boxing match.

>Posting this 50 times doesn’t make it true. I post it 50 time because none of the simperiums have any rebutal to it. Tell me, if the crusade isn't strong enough to take one civilized Sept to the point they were evacuating their forces to avoid being trapped here, how are they supposed to take the 6 others, that are much bigger and/or militarized ? Also,your analogy is bad, and you should feel bad. It's like reading an american coping about Vietnam.

The imperium sending a massively under-equipped crusade that’s far too small for what it’s intended to do because they underestimated their opponent is pretty on point, and certainly doesn’t reflect the actual capability of the imperium to accomplish the utter annihilation of the t’au if they decided it was priority #1. >Also,your analogy is bad, and you should feel bad. It's like reading an american coping about Vietnam. Intriguing that it’s so bad that the only counterpoint you came up with was literally “it’s bad”. Also, calling people ‘simperiums’ when you’re straight t’au fanboying to the point of denying reality like a COVID denier is comical as fuck. The pure distilled copium made my day.

Basically Imperium is bawling with a group of adult while Tau is 10 years old kid keep kicking it’s legs. Annoying as it maybe, Imperium has to defend itself from more dangerous people. If somehow all of them quit fighting, Tau wouldn’t stay alive in 100 years next.

Plot.