I'm almost ready to start using my own Tau army in playtests, but I'm having trouble justifying using Drones.
I'll stick a couple of units in there anyway because of that whole "playtesting" thing, mind you.

Something closer to the "true gun" stats is probably the first place I'd look to go, rather than expendable, as they have 10 carbines to a unit compared to a Fire Warrior unit's 2.5 carbines. Basically because I remember how overpowered expendable on drones used to be and it'd be a big testing change this late in development.

_________________
Currently doing a plastic scenery kickstarter

All that does though is give a boost to crisis formations and they don't need it.

Wot, expendable?

_________________
Currently doing a plastic scenery kickstarter

I never played drone formations as non bm taking - what was broken was the very high speed, cheap cost and good weaponry. You could spam them like no tomorrow (with Orca's as well i think at the time).

Our eperience was that taking enough expendable Drones essentially gave Crisis formations a squinty-eye'd form of ATSKNF.
IIRC they even counted for half kills in engagements at the time, too.

_________________
Currently doing a plastic scenery kickstarter

I have played some games using the 4 drones for 75pts upgrade, they work OK. As an upgrade to Crisis they are very much worth it. I have also found them OK for Stealth who are not commiting suicide by teleporting and instead are doing something useful like air assaulting/shooting.

I am afraid I am very much of the opinion that disposable is not appropriate at all in any context within the Tau list, now of course thats a personal opinion and my take on the background but It is the position I will be taking with the list - especially as adding another special rule to the Tau list with the potential effect and intreractions of disposable would require significant playtesting.

Yeah, I'm just looking at the 25pt-50pt upgrades and wondering why you'd bother.

I'll try 'em, though.


I'm broadly of the same view these days.

_________________
Currently doing a plastic scenery kickstarter

I will go on the record as saying that "expendable" isn't against the background we have on Drones. The only large scale deployment of drones we know about was on Pavonis from Courage and Honor where thousands of drones were dropped into a city to hold up the PDF there. As I recall the drones were doing disruption raids till the last little disk.

A war of attrition that the Tau recognized they couldn't win from the beginning, but they needed the PDF locked in place.

But from a statistical perspective I can see the reasoning.