[Warhammer 40,000] How ome Fish got Angry and made everyone else Angry along with them

In passing I've mentioned before how Warhammer 40,000 has a problem balancing "Cool idea" (see: Chaos jetfighter dragon) with "balanced gameplay" (see: The aforementioned jetfighter dragon being the only unit that was actually not garbage in the chaos codex). Well this is a story of perhaps the worst single fuck up, in that respect, in Warhammer 40k history. A fuck up so bad that many people actually went out of their way to avoid being associated with it.

This is the story of the Fish of Fury, a phrase whose mere utterance has fatguys and neckbeards everywhere foaming at the mouth with vein-popping rage.

Weeaboo Space Commies

This drama is a result of the rules not interacting in a way the game designers anticipated, further exacerbated by the playstyle of the army in question. Buckle in, Ima try and make this simple but it may get a bit confusing.

Rogue Trader was the first attempt at 40k. They basically took a bunch of cool british pop culture ideas (Judge Dredd, Dune, Football Hooligans, etc) and threw 'em all together into one universe.

By 2nd edition they had started diverging from their Fantasy counterparts, adding new races, and trying to refine the rules into something playable.

3rd is where the game really started to come together as more than just an excercise in tables and stupid awesome shit. 3rd is, in many ways, where it became the game we recognize today.

Which is not to say nothing changed in the 5 editions since, more that 3E was where shit got real as it were.

As part of this, Games Workshop, the company behind 40k, held a contest to see what new alien race would be added to the game. The race that was eventually chosen was the Tau

If you see people on reddit spamming "For the Greater Good" like they're the Neighborhood Watch Alliance of a quiet English village, they're referencing these guys.

The Tau are a race of Samurai Romans with slits for noses, hooves, blue skin, and 4 fingers on each hand. They're comparatively tiny in scope (this map of the whole galaxy of man which 40k takes place in shows you where their entire empire is over on the right by the two red arrows) and physicality (The Tau equivalent of Hafthor Bjornsson would probably be Connor McGregor sized) but are massively imperialist, rapidly expanding as much as they could until the Imperium of Man took notice.

In order to maintain this expansionism in a galaxy where everyone is stronger than them their gameplay style basically boils down to being LOUDER THAN GODS REVOLVER AND TWICE AS SHINY

They put the biggest guns they can manage on the fanciest mechs and hover tanks and blow you away before you can ever reach them.

How powerful are their guns?

Well their average infantry trooper carries a pulse rifle. A pulse rifle ignores the standard armor of most light-medium infantry in the game, both human and alien, completely. If a hit is anything more than a glance, you're gonna die.

Against Space Marines, 8 foot tall guys literally armored in adamantium according to the lore, Pulse Rifles have a 2/3rds chance of killing them.

Pulse Rifles hit harder and from further away, than the burst-fire RPG machine guns that Space Marines use.

And that's their basic infantry. Stuff like Broadside battlesuits can (lore wise) punch a hole through a tank and the two tanks behind that too. And don't even get me started on Riptides, the Warhammer equivalent of BT-7472

Tau also like practicing combined arms like a real military, which is where the shenanigans comes in.

Devious Fish

this is a Devilfish transport. It holds a full squad of 12 firewarriors, armed with the Pulse Rifles we talked about earlier. On the front you can see it has a gatling-style Pulse Rifle called a Burst Rifle (same stats, more shots) and mounted on little outriggers there you can see it has a pair of gun drones, each wielding Pulse Carbines (same stats, shorter range)

You'll notice too that it hovers. This makes it what's called a "skimmer", a catch all term for any 40k vehicle that doesn't uses physical contact with the ground to move, but doesn't move at the speeds of a real aircraft.

In 3rd edition, if a skimmer tried to run you over, or if you tried to beat a skimmer in melee combat, you could only hit it back on a 6. You essentially had a 1/6 chance of actually hitting it in melee. This will be important in a moment.

On top of this, Devilfishes have "disruption pods", a sort of active camoflage that makes them harder to hit the further you are away from them, combined with metallic reflective chaff to make auto targetting more difficult. In game terms this gave Devilfishes a "cover save", a chance, after damage was ready to be allocated, for the Tau player to say "Ha! It was actually to the right or left of where your guy shot, so he missed!"

Rainbow Six Siege players will be intimately familiar with how frustrating having this happen to you is.

Finally, the Devilfish has above average armor for a transport, ostensible to compensate for the fact that it's slightly bigger and thus is more likely to be seen and shot at. While most transports have Armor 12 on the front, with Armor 10 on all other faces, the Devilfish reverses that. It's Armor 10 is only on the back, all other faces are Armor 12.

What this means is essentially to damage its armor you need to roll a full 2 values higher than your normally would. Not hard for dedicated anti-tank weapons, but hard for those without such weapons (Orks, Tyranids, etc) or Squads without such weapons (most infantry)

So now that we're clear on the rules, we're ready to discuss

FISH OF FURY

Here's the game plan. Take two Devilfishes, which, as skimmers are pretty zippy. Load them up full of Firewarriors armed with Pulse Rifles. Pick your victim squad.

Zoom up to the victim, so that the devilfishes form a chevron shape, pile out your firewarriors. Do it right and it looks like this That's your movement phase.

Shooting Phase, unload 48 shots at close range (Pulse Rifles are one of many default weapons in the game which get double shots for close range). Against light infantry you're hitting half the time, 24 shots, and wounding most infantry in the game 5/6ths of the time, so 20 wounds average. Against anything with an armor save 5+ or 6+, which Pulse Rifles punch right through, basically the whole squad got wiped out. You might survive if you have a full 30 man squad of Ork Boyz, but even then they just lost 2/3rds of the squad.

Against something Tough like Space Marines (who only come in squads of 10 btw) you hit with 24 shots, wound with 16, and their incredibly thick armor stops 2/3rds of that so you successfully kill 5.33 repeating. Let's be generous and round down, you just wiped out half a squad of space marines.

Now the devilfishes shoot, 10 shots between the two of them (6 for 2 burst cannons and 4 for 4 gun drones). Hit with 5, reroll 2 misses (drones have a pair of Pulse Carbines each, in game terms they get to reroll misses instead of getting another shot) for 1 more hit. 6 hits, 4 wounds on space marines, 1.33 more kills.

The Space Marine squad is now below half strength.

Anytime a squad takes 25% losses from shooting it takes a Leadership test to see if it flees. If it's below Half strength it gets a penalty on this leadership test, and if it flees below half strength it won't stop running till it's off the board in 3rd edition.

Let's be generous and say the squad stays though. Boyz will stand and fight if there's a Nob nearby to knock 'em into line, and Space Marines Know No Fear after all!

So naturally the enemy squad is pissed and wants some payback. Well here's the problem.

In 3rd edition, you have to pass a leadership test to shoot at a unit other than the closest one. The Devilfishes count as the closest unit. So a unit, which is now well below half strength, tries to pass a leadership test to shoot at the firewarriors instead of the devilfishes.

If they fail, now they're stuck shooting the Devilfishes. Best case they need a 9 or higher on 2 D6s to do any real damage to a Devilfish in shooting.

If they pass, they're shooting at Firewarriors. Between 4 and 10 models are now shooting at 24 who have 4+ on a D6 for their armor to block the shot.

Lets say they say "fuck it" and try and use their tankbuster grenades on the Devilfish. Well it's a skimmer, so they only hit it in melee on 6s on a D6, and they only get 1 attack to try and do so from the one guy carrying a tankbuster grenade in the squad.

Well maybe they'll try and assault the firewarriors? After all, when your strongest muscleman is Connor McGregor, going up against 8 feet of either fungus muscle Orks or Adamantium Armored Space Marine, Conner's going down in round 1, right?

Well if you look back at the diagram you'll notice that there's arrows coming off the "Enemy Squad" box yea? And how they don't quite touch the Firewarriors? Those arrows are the maximum distance a unit can move and assault in one turn. Devilfishes are just big enough that you can't assault around them into the firewarriors. And even if you could, 24 Connor McGregors can probably take 4 Space Marines in melee.

And here we see the clusterfuck.

Results

So people quickly caught on to this cheese. It became simultaneously so ubiquitous and so obnoxious that people started building whole lists around killing devilfishes as fast as possible. But sadly even that wasn't enough.

For many armies the best vehicle killers they had were infantry based missile launchers and large tanks. Enter Pathfinders, Broadsides, and Hammerheads.

Hammerheads and Broadside Battlesuits both carried, at the time, the strongest guns for pure damage in the game. Hammerheads were nimble hover tanks which could fire a single Strength 10 shot (meaning even the toughest tanks in the game would require only a 5 on 2D6s to do serious damage to) or a huge Area of Effect cannister shell that would tear through light-medium infantry. Broadsides had only the Strength 10 shot, but came in squads of 3s. Pretty nasty, especially with ranges that were typically longer than the board the game is played on, but nothing too nasty because Tau units only hit half the time.

Enter Pathfinders, whose markerlights can be used either to fire ordinance, or to boost the ability of nearby tau units to hit. Now that Broadside squad is hitting 5/6ths of the time.

Combined this meant your anti-vehicles options would be blown away before they could take down your opponent's devilfish, at which point the fish of fury would tear any squad it liked to pieces.

This combo got so ridiculously overplayed that even to this day people have an irrational hatred for markerlights, and even at the time there were people bringing Tau armies to tournaments who deliberately didn't bring any devilfishes simply so they wouldn't be affiliated with it.

This is a community, I'll remind you, that gave us this, and people were forcing all their Firewarriors to walk into battle under a hail of gunfire and artillery, just so they wouldn't be affiliated with how hated the Fish of Fury was.

That'd be like the best Melee players showing up to EVO and only playing Kirby so they wouldn't be associated with the "Fox, No Items, Final Destination" meme.

It'd be like if Tom Brady quit the Patriots because he didn't want to keep being associated with their scandals.

It was, in fact, very similar to when Jace the Mindsculpter was everywhere, and people would go out of their way to not use him, just to avoid the damage to their rep that his cheesiness would bring.

That was the level of shooting-oneself-in-the-foot that people were going to to avoid being affiliated with the rage.

Consequences

Games Workshop is a famously lethargic company. Even when they can be assed, their FAQs and Erratta tend to add a problem for every couple they fix.

Hell it's not uncommon for them to have gone 15+ years without updating an army codex. The necrons dropped early 3rd edition and didn't see a new rules revision until almost the beginning of 6th edition!

So when I say that Games Workshop immediately came out with a new Tau Codex it should speak to the level of game-destroying bullshit that Fish of Fury was causing.

The Tau codex was literally the newest codex at the time, and they still completely replaced it with a "3.5 edition" codex. This changed Devilfishes to have landing gear, so they stopped being skimmers if they were stationary long enough for Fish of Fury to work. Ergo, Firewarriors couldn't shoot out, and melee fighters could tear the transports to pieces.

A few years later 4th edition really put the nail in the coffin by changing how the line of sight rules worked, so then even if the Devilfish was a skimmer, Firewarriors could no longer shoot underneath it to get at an enemy.

Sadly even to this day Tau have a bad reputation, despite four editions of nerfs to markerlights they're still widely hated by non-tau players for being one of the few army-wide Ballistic Skill improving mechanics, where other armies have to depend on expensive special characters who target only a small bubble around themselves

Fortunately however, Eldar are rapidly shaping up to be the new bullshit in 8th edition, helpfully pulling some of the vitriol away from us Blue Skinned Mechwarriors!

Submitted September 23, 2019 at 09:43PM by blaghart https://ift.tt/2mEkLXf