I'd put my Tau to one side for a little while because I found that not of my usual opponents wanted to play them that much. My DE get walked over, I'm not feeling the DA love and I don't like using my Orks because a) they aren't painted for the most part and b) games take too damn long! That means my go to army has been Space Wolves more often than not. I really want DE to work but they just feel so handicapped at the moment. You have to spam the same units to make them effective and I find that get's boring pretty quickly.
![](https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-V6u-oJ8VF3Q/VccuQ4IDsxI/AAAAAAAAL2o/c3dxiid7qXQ/s320/IMAG1989.jpg)
Commander and bodyguard with fusion/plasma
Ethereal
Missile pod Crisis team with marker drones
3 Devilfish with 10 Fire Warriors each
10 Kroot
10 Pathfinders
3 Piranhas
Sun Shark Bomber
2 Hammerheads
Bear in mind this a deliberately underpowered list. I've chose not to take Riptides, Skyrays, etc and I'm not using a buff commander or a PENchip for my missile team. It's a very similar list to the one I fielded against Matt's BA in our recent game and it was still a lot of fun without being OP. It feels like a very traditional Tau list. Obviously the Sun Shark didn't exist in the old but but everything else was there. In the old days I'd have used Broadsides but the rail variant isn't much fun and I despise the HYMP loadout so I don't even own them.
Anyway, there are drones missing from the vehicles in the picture but otherwise you can see that with the exception of the Piranhas everything is painted to a reasonable tabletop standard. I've got just under four weeks until our mini tournament though so I'd like to use that time to update some pretty old paintwork and make a real push towards having them "finished".
Here's what I think needs doing to accomplish this:
- Magnetise the Piranha weapons (they currently have fusion blasters glued in but I want to use burst cannons in this list)
- Paint the Piranhas (I already gave them a quick spray of basecoat)
- Base the Piranhas
- Paint all the drones (they're part painted at the minute but I'd like to finish them)
- Tidy joins/mouldlines (I've had these models awhile and I wasn't that fastidious back then)
- Sept markings
- Squad markings (it can get difficult to tell the fire warrior squads apart)
- Panel lines on the the vehicles
- Highlights on everything
- Transfers
- Improved basing
That looks like quite a lot but some of those things are quick jobs that I can knock off in an evening. I'm not naive enough to think I can get all of this done but it's in rough order of priority so I'd be happy if I could get most of it done. Of course this is only a small proportion of the Tau models I own.
There are a couple of problems though. Firstly that Mechanicus Standard Grey is not quite the same as Adeptus Battlegrey. It's very close but there's a noticeable difference (compare the painted Piranha to the basecoated ones). You can't really tell too much when the models are done (the two hammerheads are actually different colours) but touching up any mistakes in the highlighting or sept markings may be an issue on the older models. I've got some Adeptus Battlegrey left but not sure it'll be enough.
On another note, I really wish I'd bought an airbrush sooner as the paintwork on my old vehicles is far too thick and has some brush marks in it. I'll try to distract from this as much as possible!
Right I'd better get cracking! I'll post some updates on my progress. Bear in mind I wrote this post on Sunday so I'm already into this little lot. Hopefully by the weekend I'll have another update but I'm away so it will probably appear on Monday evening.