Join up for the Greater Good - Part 1: Why?

The new Tau Empire Codex has been released and this has prompted me to reboot my Tau army.

This post details the current state of my Tau collection and how I got to this point, both with my force and with why I want to reboot them.

First let me tell you the history of why and how I started my Tau army in the first place.
The time was mid-to-late 4th edition and I only had a Dark Angels force back then. The second Tau codex was recently released (we're talking March 2006) and rumours started to show up that the 3rd edition (mini) Codex Dark Angels was going to be redone within a year.

3rd edition Codex DA

I already had a sizable force of Dark Angels and didn't want to buy any more squads as I didn't know if they would be obsoleted by their next Codex and there were some awesome concept images floating around and I wanted to wait to buy those instead of regular old vanilla marines.

So I had about a year of time and hobby-budget to spend on something else, and I decided the Tau would be the lucky army, as they had a completely different look and feel to them. Decision made, I bought the Codex and I started the army with a battleforce worth of minis and a battlesuit commander, as this is mandatory.

Ye olde battleforce

Obtained forces:

• 1 XV8 Battlesuit commander
• 1 XV8 Crisis battlesuit
• 3 XV25 Stealth suits
• 12 Firewarriors
• 12 Kroot dudes
• 1 Devilfish
• Some gun drones and a marker light drone

Quite a good start, but for a shooty army, it lacked some serious firepower... which soon (around September 2006) followed in the form of a Hammerhead tank.

This gave me about 800 points of models and, using a proxy broadside or two, this allowed me to fight some battles with my fledgling sept. We have a rather slow gaming group, getting together about once every month, so I didn't get in a lot of battles before the new Dark Angel Codex was released (March 2007) and the Tau army was kind of abandoned. 

Sporadically they came out to play, but my loyalty in 40k remains with the First Legion, and they just got some nice additions with the Dark Angels Veterans box set released.

Skip ahead a couple of years: I graduate, meet my future wife, rent a place together for a year, buy our own home etc. etc. In the mean time, the DA Codex gets utterly obsoleted by the 5th ed. Space Marines Codex.

Even though the Tau rarely leave the comfort of the hobby-room closet, I find out some guy not too far from the route from home to work, decides to sell his Tau collection and I pick up 2 (crappily posed) Broadsides for half price. I play maybe 2 battles with them and then return to my true love, Dark Angels... well... played using the vanilla marine codex... it's strictly better.

Skip ahead another couple of years: I get married to my wife, some other stuff happens bla bla. 

Games Workshop releases 6th edition 40k and as the second released Codex, there are the Dark Angels again. For variety's sake, I had decided, shortly before the Codex release, to start collecting a Deathwing army. Just to show off my 2+ rolling skills and to piss off my usual opponent with them.

After a bit of a Terminator-buying frenzy, I now seem to have 4500-5000 points worth of Dark Angels... and I decided that it was enough for now. (more DA details in a future post)

My Legion of Rust is going to be the army I take slow and do right... so now I'm faced once more with the 'problem' of having some hobby time and budget to spend... and what does GW do? They release the 4th Codex in 7 months time. (CrAzY!)

It happens to be:

Rejoice for the Greater Good, the Tau have arrived!

We all do things for different reasons. Do you have an interesting story about how or why you started another army? Share it with us in the comments... we could start "Armybuilders Anonymous" ... is "AA" already taken?