I can see where you are getting to with this Ginger, but I can also a lot of problems with how EA is built up to making the two fit.

'Tau a true popcorn army' - ok, so we would then have to modify units to, in essence, force the Tau to use co-ordinated fire. The only way that I can, on first look, is to have dedicated formations (or expensive upgrades) that have the coordinated fire special rule and possibly be the Marker Light carriers as well. These would then have to lose any ranged attack (so only CC & FF (small arms)) to prevent the placement of Popcorn Blast Markers.

Can we really face going through the whole list and changing unit stats to make this work?

If we didn’t do this, then I would just pick the best of the new smaller formations and popcorn away.

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Random idea - what to do if we wanted to make a popcorn, combined force army viable in E:A.

Allow picking out a large number of activations (I dunno, 20 or 30, it doesn't matter now). But to make them work together make the initiative really sucky (like 5+ or so as a random example) and get +1 for additional units. Say if you want to do a combined fire with 3 units you get +2 to your shared activation.

In order to discourage activating one cheap unit each time to leave your activation advantage for end of the turn when you can crush enemy with a few really mean coord fires/assaults, you could also add a mandatory retain after failed activations. But this could get even more tricky.

Well IMHO, the list is almost at that point now, but Tim is right that the powergamers amoung us would leap at the opportunity and blast away, so it would have to be prohibited in some way. Would this work?

[Spitballing on] Healthwarning!! This is very theoretical!
Change co-ordinated fire to be "co-ordinated action" as follows:-TAU Co-ordinated action
The Tau are a highly technical and disciplined race that consequently have the best communications in the empire. They use this to overcome their disadvantage in numbers by closely co-ordinating their movement on the battlefield.

Formations containing Infantry must either be activated with another formation or take a "defensive" action of Marshall, OW or March (we can refine this list later). Other ground formations may be activated in pairs, while air and space fomations must be activated singly.

When a pair of formations activate together to attack the enemy they may either shoot or assault a single enemy formation, but otherwise the pair of formations may take different actions. Any enemy OW fire may be split across the two formations as desired within the rules on range and LoS. Both formations are moved separately to their final locations resolving any OW fire separately on each formation. Once in position, the two formations are then considered a single formation for the purposes of shooting or assaults which then follow the normal rules. The Formations are considered to be separate once the co-ordinated action is ended.

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