Misconceptions and Weapon Choices for Tau

I keep seeing a lot of... well let's just say bad advice for potential Tauists out there. The largest of them seem to be in the form of weapon choices, and all seem to stem from a few major misconceptions. Let me key them up here:

1. Tau should never be "in assault range" for an opponent. We die quickly
2. 5th Edition is heavily focused on both Troops and Mech. That means Transports
3. You're going to be fighting a lot of MEQs. Marines are just the most popular army out there, deal with it.

So then - if I'm facing a lot of mechanized marines, but need to stay at least... oh let's say 13" (assuming they roll a 1 on their run roll) from my enemies at all times what are my options? Well we need to evaluate them on four different prongs of points of criteria. The more we acheieve, the better the weapon

• Range
• MEQ Killing
• Rhino Killing
• Land Raider Killing

So I'll be revisiting my earlier attempts at evaluating each weapon, plus discussion potential synergies along the way. This will be a fun ride.

All my mathhammer is caculated on a spreadsheet that allows me to take a given combat situation (BS, Weapon stats, # shots, #target models in unit, save of target, and toughness of target) to calculate the number of shots landed, # wounds dealt, and number of unsaved wounds. For vehicles it will calculate the percentage change of glancing and penetrating hits.

Little Lumps of Gray Plastic: What I've Learned about Painting

OK - I apparently have a mental block against the correct spelling of the word gray (I tend to spell it grey). Forgive the spelling mistakes if I don't catch them as I go.

I stopped by Louisville Game Shop the other day on the off chance I could impulse buy (I LOVE impulse shopping - so much more fun some days) for my army and happened upon a friendly (non-tourney) game of 40k. On one side I found a beautifully painted Tyranid army fighting little lumps of gray space marines. Where the two armies melded together in assault looked like someone hand vomited gray across the board and littered with green and purple.

And this got me thinking about painting my own army, which I am sadly far behind on.

First there are these two articles: Paint to Play and Paint by Mistake which talk about at least getting a non-lump-of-gray-plastic army on the field. I'm trying to move to this philosophy of painting for the vast majority of my armies.

The bit about basing the army got me thinking then of a way to mark my units more visibly than unit markings: painting their bases . The top of the base will be green, but then most of the units that gets a base (mostly fire warriors, pathfinders, XV-8s, and kroot) will have a ring around their base with a color signifying their unit and/or stripes on that ring.

Following that I will begin designating certain models as "extra-care projects." These will all be carefully hand painted then assembled and are models that I especially care about. Mostly they will be unique models, etherials of any sort, or Forgeworld models but occasionally I may just simply want to paint a standard unit of fire warriors really well.

However I will never have any models that has at least not been moderately painted. I think in the end it'll look better than just lumps of solid color plastic - especially unpainted gray.