5661184

insignificance that's kept them in the fight

That's pretty much a canon statement, so yeah. Compared to Black Crusades and Ork Waaaghs, this teensy-tiny bit of Tau space that has been locked behind a warp storm for most of a millennium matters so little, the Imperium literally can't be arsed to just flood them in bodies and murderize the hell out of them already. They're pretty much utterly insignificant on the galactic scale, but the fact that everything else is so much more lethal and mean-spirited than them keeps saving their blue asses.

5661202
The concern is that the Tau are not waiting on the Imperium of Man to get its act together, how long before they are a real threat and before the Greater Good proves its the lesser evil to all beings in and out the Imperium looking for a better way?

5661210
Thousands of years. When they say the Imperium contains millions of worlds, they aren't kidding. The Tau have what, a hundred? By the time they start looking like a threat, they won't have anything near the kind of power to actually be a threat. It's one of the great comedies of the setting that those dinky nobodies are thinking themselves actual competitors to an empire that covers hundreds of millions of suns in its scale. People usually really misunderstand what "galactic empire" actually means.

5661216 All it takes is GW pulling another Black Crusade or something similar to weaken the Imperium and excuse another magical Tau tech time skip.

5661223
Yeah, well, writer Deus Ex Machina always takes precedence over actual logic, but I mean in terms of what actually makes sense with the setting as established. They'd need to conquer hundreds of thousands of worlds to have a reasonable chance of even at all competing with the Imperium in manpower. Like, at a rate of "one of their troopers is worth ten of the Imperium's." That's just not feasible. They're basically a laughingstock on the global stage and they don't even realize it.

Man, the Nazi Germany parallels you mentioned really are strong there.

5661227 That's probably what GW is going for but we will never know till they move the story forward!

5661279
Kronus, technically speaking.

Yeah, I kinda always played Necron. It's hilarious. You just plain don't fucking die.

5661279 Its not fair or legal and its also an imp problem first!

5661307
Not when I'm playing they bloody well don't. Bloody Magpies can go screw themselves.

5661409

Bloody Magpies

...You mean Galactic Partridges

On the first day of planetfall
The Emprah sent to me,
The Partridges to steal gain glory.

—Codex Partridges

All Glory Belongs to the Partridges! Haters Shall Hate!

5661435
Yeah, but the real victors were when I managed to sneak that final group of Pariahs into the last base and made tast of the final objective, leaving Kronus to being the sterilized corpse-world that it really ought to have been.

5660750 40K is dumb.

5661438 The Necron stronghold is fucking uncrackable. I love the Space Marine one though, seize the cannon in the centre and then get LOS on the HQ. Dead Space Marines before the five minute mark.