Let's do the math...
| Firewarriors (10) | $50 | |
| Crisis Suits (3) | $75 | |
| Ethereal (1) | $20 | |
| Total | $145 | |
| Start Collecting! Tau Empire | $85 | |
| Savings | $60 |
Ok. I've seen the blogs where the magpies and neck-beards are all complaining about unpopular models and price creep, and whatever. And while my contempt for these moon-faced assassins of joy is well known, they may have a case about the Orks or Vampires. But nothing in this box is unpopular or over-priced so far as current prices are concerned. In this box, you are basically getting the Fire Warriors and half of the ethereal for free.
What's not to like about that? At least you don't have several extra piranhas or Kroot laying around (though I do love my dust-covered Kroot... sigh). And you can always kitbash the Ethereal into something else if like me, you buy extra kits. And multiple Ethereals are actually useful in the new Cadre structure.
Every Tau army, and I mean EVERY Tau army needs Fire Warriors and Crisis Battlesuits. I have way more Tau than I can ever field, and even I will be picking up a few of these. My reason for doing so is that I want a few squads of breachers and I want to re-do some of my command options.
I have one of the fine cast Enforcer battlesuit commanders and two regular Crisis suit commanders. Each has two crisis suit bodyguards. With the exception of the Enforcer suit, I plan to recycle all of these battlesuits back down into the Elite ranks to beef up the squads there (now that crisis teams can take more than three battlesuits per squad). My two XV-8 commanders will each be replaced by an XV-85 and an XV-86 command suit.
The new crisis suits will replace my bodyguards. They all have the new articulated torsos which will better match my commanders, old and new. All of the battlesuits assigned to the Elite FOC slots will be the older models. Some (the demoted commanders) have four hard points, but they are all magnetic, so it will not really matter much.
As for the Ethereal? It's Aun'do, and I already have one from the Burning Dawn Campaign. I will probably keep another one for a conversion down the road, and it's off to eBay with the others.
The only downside is that now I have to find time to re-do our website's "Getting Started" series to account for the new kits available, and remove references to the kits that have been discontinued. I will wait to be sure the Tau Battleforce has actually gone away before I do all of that, though.
I play Tau!