They do if you play them the way I do! I generally use a move order instead of an attack order, works better. My general rule of thumb is place your ships in the front 2/3ds of the enemy fleet, and hit the back with the torps, and if you use them like that, they will fire everything. I do want to make the formations a bit looser to make this less crowded. Plus, snaking your support ships is a matter of setting a series of waypoints in a zigzag leading to the enemy, it's not that hard or micro intensive. Escorts are the only really micro intensive part of the whole thing.

that be prezo's job man, the only thing that's my job is matching the models with the entities. I'm going to look at them next to the Imperial cruisers, because those are set, and we are going to use them as the basis for the scale on everything else. The chaos cruisers don't matter because they're getting replaced anyway. In short, the chaos ships are a bunch of very shiny and nice looking .entity files floating around that I want you to help make play well with the imps.

Oh, and tsk, dude, only the non-release version has the kol, and it's really not supposed to be there, so don't make screenies with standard ships.

I just skimmed the the stats of the online and the Taros book, and i couldn't find any difference between the ships, but i i didn't get much sleep last night as i'm about to head for germany, so i might have missed something.

That's what I hear from prezo too, that's a shame, the FW tau are really short on firepower and durability. Forces them into ordnance spam a bit much in my eyes, but whatever.

Thanks for going to the effort of checking though.

http://rapidshare.com/files/172608358/Dirk.txt.html

The current website holding the story is down at the moment, so that's always a bit suckular. Its a good story, about a Guardsmen named Dirk, who is the universe's luckiest person. If you read it you'll find out how lucky and such. FYI, its safe, so no woes. {You can only download it 10 times for some reason, I guess a new policy of theirs. If you can't download it, tell me and I'll try an alternative!}

The tau are pidgeonholed by the rules into a disproportionant reliance on attack craft and missiles. However you could make them reflect their 40k selves. A highly mobile force with an excellent variety of weapons that output an excellent fire/size performance. On the flip side their increased subspace mobility comes with a significant penalty to long range jumps meaning tau need to consistently refocus their frontline production facilities in order to maintain lines of logistics and requisition. This also kind of reflects the fluff in that the tau spheres of expansion, coupled with the lack of warp technology (and a general warp presence, be it of c'tan of old one intention) leave them a long way off from homeworld reinforcements.

Continuing in the 40k vein, they are fragile. Even with their xv suits, they tend to be obliterated by any form of respectable concentrated small arms fire. These factors tend to lend the tau to high mobility tactics, including jump shoot jump suits and devilfish assaults. In BFG terms it makes them a bit like the eldar but less fragile and with poor warp travel.

Give their rail guns longer range and added punch (they are insane in TT, St 10, AP 1) with an AM submunition shot for frigates or strikecraft. Make mantas THE definitive bomber, they are larger, faster and carry a more powerful payload than anything else going round. Plus the air caste have unnatural understanding of 3 dimensional combat and high tolerance to g forces.

They have a fairly limited range of ships and are definitely noted in 40k for a lack of static defences. Even forgeworld only introduced deep striking turrets. However they make extensive use of human auxillaries so perhaps they can utilise and few basic imperial ships and defensive structures.

Finally, big bonuses for the presence of an ethereal and even bigger penalties for his death. Phew, far too much said but i am more than happy to chat about any good criticism or ideas about anything ive mentioned!

EDIT

Just crossed my mind but is it possible for you to integrate some of the dawn of war sound files? there are some excellent lines littered amongst the 4 games. would it require permission from GW/thq/relic/assorted developers (cept ironlore who is now defunct)?

Got it, pretty funny. I liked that line about seeing fear and a krak grenade on the daemon's face, that was good.

I just realized something. Of course the Tau are pigeonholed, all the races are, and it doesn't make them any less interesting. I bet you could play them something like mech tau actually, keeping out of the enemy's range, and swooping in on part of their fleet, defeating it in detail and then moving on to the next one, but I'm not sure, I'll need to see how they play to know for sure.

Plus, if you want a fleet that can shoot well, that leaves you reason to build a lot of Heroes for those of us who like the SG fleet.

Well, they're not that fragile, but they're pretty expensive for troops without a 3+ save, so they don't have the numbers to soak up casualties all that well. The BFG rules make them fragile and that works, it just makes it very very hard for them to launch a credible attack. But whatever, a carrier fleet would be pretty interesting.

In what way are Mantas not the definitive bomber? There are two other forms of AC that can even hold a candle to mantas. Thunderhawks also get the 4+ save in TT, but they're assault boats so they don't do all that much damage, while the Eagles are very good at doing damage if they get to the target, but they don't have the sheer durability of the Mantas, and neither even comes close to the sheer blanket coverage you can get from the Manta.

I don't know if we could get the permission, but we're keeping that in mind, don't worry.

p=np
anything with in reason to help the mod along, and also gives me an excuse for digging through all the old books

There are two ways to make the manta into the definative bomber, that readily springs to mind.
1) Dammage, the harder it hits the harder it hurts
2) Survivability, making the manta able to survive a flak burst, would really increase the fear they generate. this could be explained with their shield arbsorbing the flak, the shield then overloads after x flak for y time. This flak resistance would force the enemy to move their ships into each others flak range for better defence, or make them field their own fighters. Figthers in the IN, chaos and eldar all seems to have speed of 30 cm in BFG as oposed to the 25 cm of the baracuda fighter, this speed difference would mean that the tau would need to focus their fighters on escorting the mantas, as chasing down the enemy fighters easily could mean that enemy fighters out manuver the baracudas and head for the "defencesless" mantas

EDIT: There's probably a coding problem here as with my other ideas

There's one other key thing about the manta that makes it awesome. It'll be a one bomber squad (the chaos one will too, but that has a bland effect) with an awesome set of firing effects. 2 heavy railguns and 6 ion cannons will make for quite the light show and that range will let them hit before they fly into flak range, so that'll let them shoot even if they get killed by the turret later and they'll be able to survive a squadron of fighters making a run on them. Don't think they'll do more damage, though, that'd be a bit excessive, but I think the others will work nicely.

I hate too sound like an idiot but what software are you using to model,texture,code  and get it in the sins mod.  Cause I'd like to help in any way I can.   Oh and also where I can find the software.

Knowledge is power guard it well.

I use notepad++ for the entities and meshs, it's a really good text file editor, you can clone windows to other views and lots of other fun stuff that really helps out, and I use gimp whenever I need to play with textures (you'll need a plugin to work with .dds files like most of the ones in sins), but considering that I'm already able to deal with any of that, if you want to help, notepad++ is all you really need. Honestly, I've pretty much got the text modding under control, and I can't help you with the models. Prezo and iNert are the guys who can help you with that, but I'm glad that we've inspired you to help.

EDIT: Oh, I didn't notice, 100th post already! woot!

Thank you xthetenth I'll see what i can do,  it may be a long time to do anything cause my computer is way out of date, and just barely get by playing sins 1.0.  But once I get my up to date gaming computer (1-2 months), I will help where I can in this GRAND and AWESOME mod.

The emperor protects

Good to hear, any help is welcome.

How are you going to implement the Tau escorts who doesn't have warp capabilities? like the warden and orca.

also i found a fan suplement for tau on http://warseer.com/, called "Project Distant Darkness". i don't know if you can use it for anything but as were said "knowledge is power" but only in the right hands.

Yeah kiernyc was talking to me about that. In all actuallity, all Tau ships don't have warp capabilities.

as i understand it it is some sort of revers engineered warp drive system they are using, but that they can't enter the warp completly.

"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." (tau pdf from GW's webside (it a bit flawed tough watercast scientists ))

EDIT: aren't they called etherdrives?