Indeed its a mechanic that many people like, although I personally do not like it at all. At this stage in development it is not a change that will be happening though and would require a re-write of the army list and special rules.

Sorry if that sounds a bit harsh, the internet is not a good medium for communicating and can make fairly blunt statements feel more unfriendly than they are meant. I would hope that if you like such a mechanic and want to try it amongst yourselves in games then you feel free to do so.

No offence taken, don't worry. Though just to clarify, when you say "would require a re-write of the army list and special rules" do you mean that you feel this change would have a significant impact across the list and would require a total re-write, or just that now is not the time to add in any extra rules (since they need more than 24 hours or so for debate before being incorporated into the next update)?

I certainly agree if it's the latter, but how often and what happens with firefights is definitely something I'll be looking out for (and hopefully remembering to record) in games.

A core "design choice" in Tau development has been to *artificially* lessen their firefight/assault capability and compensate by giving them "better" actual shooting abilities; I don't see this approach being dropped as people are heavily entrenched in maintaining it.

Not all agree with it, and variants/alternatives have been proposed, but it is *highly* unlikely that this approach will be changed. The concern is that giving Tau their "appropriate" Firefight values will just make them an Eldar/Imperial Guard variant and no allow them to be a unique army. Take that concern as you will.

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I understand that, hence why I quite liked the idea proposed above which seemed to fix a potential issue without giving the Tau a sufficiently strong firefight capability that it becomes part of the overall strategy.

The point I was making is that I'd be paying particular attention to Firefights when playtesting, more to see if I think there really is an issue around Firefights that needs fixing. Just like you don't want to make 'no brainer' units or tactics for the army, you don't want to force the same on the enemy (i.e run as fast as you can at the Tau and engage without worrying too much about suppression since you'll probably win anyway without taking a lot of damage in return). I'm not saying that's the case, just that will probably be the thing I'll be paying special attention to.

Oh god, can we not get into this again? This topic has come up so many times, and every time the answer from whoever is AC at the time has been clear; no FF4+, no special engagement rules.

Given that we're very close to completion now, can we please just move on?

That's one way to look at it. The alternative is that this is an issue that keeps coming up and for one reason or another has not been completely resolved...

I've not commented much (largely because if I'm not currently playing I'm happy to lurk), but that reason has been brought up for years and alienated a lot of people. It's hard to understand the resistance that an idea like 'this thing keeps coming up, I'm going to pay extra attention to how often it happens and the impact it has' during playtesting generates. I'm not advocating making my own list, or playtesting my own rules, just saying I'm going to pick some armies that feel right and pay particular attention to what happens in one particular situation rather than focusing on whether the AX-10 really earned those extra 25 points.

I'm not saying "let's boost Tau FF values" in any way, shape or form. I'm just saying that since this list is approaching the final tweaking stage, if we're generally happy with the way the units are playing when we're in control and the remaining issue is that large garrison units can't win in a firefight that should really be in their favour that this is something we might want to look at. The arguments against it (by which I mean philosophically against it, not arguing that it isn't a necessary change) don't particularly hold water, either being based off a misconception (FF4 Tau will play like Eldar or Guard, not taking into account the changes to initiative preventing this or the fact its limited to only a few formations) or an interpretation of the background at odds with the fact that 99% of the background is aimed a game where Tau fight in Firefights and are pretty good (or at least as pretty good as everyone else). One third of the community apparently thinks that Firewarriors should be 4+ FF, the remaining two thirds are split between thinking things are fine at 5+ or that FF4+ on its own is too much (the latter dominating), this kind of implies that most people would probably be happy with FF4+ Firewarriors with some additional constraint and since these are supposed to be the core of the army I feel that perhaps this is worthy of some focus (though NOT exclusive focus).

In short - the list is almost done, the changes are very minor (some even almost just spelling corrections, the rest being internally balancing). Perhaps rather than focusing on whether these point changes have done the right thing ask people to focus on what happened when it came to Firefights. Did the enemy not make it to you intact? Did they even try? Did you have to retreat from a fight you should have won? Did you get slaughtered by suprisingly average roles? Oh yeah, did you notice the other changes? If we've got two more iterations before finalisation we've got time to say "this is a problem, this seems the way to fix it - see what happens or we'll revert to the previous version with this as a known weakness" or we can go "turns out that this fixed it, all other problems are minor"

TL:DR If there is to be one last revision before the list is finalised, lets put the issue to bed once and for all.