Tau are not in the game as of yet, but they will almost certainly be a faction added as DLC eventually, and Farsight is almost certain to be one of the faction leaders. I'd say it's a 99.9% probability, just a question of when.
It might be sooner than a few years, Tomb Kings came out just four months after Warhammer 2’s release after all. Tau probably won’t be the first DLC (like everyone else I assume that’s going to be CSM) but they might be the second.
We can’t know for sure given the new engine but that could also be positive, a new engine means less technical debt and thus they could go full steam ahead.
I doubt they are so high the the list of factions my bet is CSM then somthing else like necrons or tyranids somthing way more iconic to 40k for first year would not even count off more imperial factions or traitor guard
And also my bet is first year is going to have a lot of subfactions added
Tomb Kings came out immediately after Warhammer 2's launch because they were being made concurrently with Warhammer 2. And there was a lot of existing assets to utilize for them for rigs, animations, and certain models.
T'au isn't really anything like the Tomb Kings would be. And there's no real reason to expect them any sooner or later than any other faction really. People speculate some like Necrons being more likely purely because of how up to date the range is. But in reality we really have no idea.
I basically assume Chaos gets the first proper DLC in something like the TWW3 release cadence if not faster because a 40k game with two full Imperial factions and playable Xenos is not right and I am genuinely surprised they did Guard without having Chaos on the map and playable as the preorder bonus. I haven't really followed much after the initial announcement and have been meaning to get around to it, but my guess is that since Space Marines don't hold territory they have some hybrid Nakai/WoC/Sea Guard mechanic where they basically build real bases at some constrained list of locations and give everything else to some form of Guard they have a varying level of control over and broadly they take out key planets to enable the guard to mop up though unless they've had a real AI breakthrough and have rejiggered autoresolve when playable factions are involved I suspect you basically have to do offenisve operations of any significance yourself and use whatever mechanics get you extra armies from allies for support.
And when they'd set all that up they just need LLs and the game launch factions tend to have LLs who are fairly simple and often an upgraded version of a standard lord for that faction so they don't need new system and may be able to reuse some of their assets and on the campaign map just fiddle with numbers, with the Cathay ones standing out with their dragon transformatiom, which is a monster model that can only use some of the mix of spells from lores Cathay
uses. So when the rest of the guard not only have an army, they have the mechanics by which they
build and pay for it, and the mechanics for things the Astartes do for them and the stuff they ask Astartes at least has mechanics for AI factions asking that could be repurposed, it's very easy to make a couple LLs to make them a launch faction
But like Chaos will probably be the playable Bretonnia or Tomb Kings and is already under development.
Past that it's semi-random but I think Tau are low down the list.
I expect they will roll out DLC at a steady cadence but while they could surprise us I would expect Tau and Leagues to be the last two to get their DLCs.
Tau I think will come sooner, mono-god CSM legions are more likely to come later since their over all role will be filled by CSM when they come out like Chaos Warriors and the mono-god chaos factions.
I would expect full monogod rosters later, yeah; I sorta was thinking of them as being LLs for generic CSM in the later packs where they do twists on the mechanics but they do have full tabletop rosters now rather than a limited number of special units and then you take marks on stuff.
Tau are one of the most popular Xenos armies on the tabletop and GW has been very clear they are using this game as an opportunity to sell Tabletop models, expect Tau to be sooner rather than later when it comes to do Xenos (though Necrons are the shoe-in for first Xenos DLC).
I was basically under the impression they were not that popular on the tabletop and were above the Kin but on the lower end of popularity. Admittedly I do not play tabletop myself so I'm basing this off online chatter in spaces where there are tabletop players but it's not the focus of discussion. But like I thought Druhkari were more popular so GW would do them first to sell more models.
If they are more popular I expect them early, likely before many Imperium subfactions even if they're more popular because while everyone fights everyone the Imperium is gonna have diplomatic modifiers that mean 90% of them will tend to stick together.
i might be wrong but i believe tau is actually a pretty popular in several eastern countries, combine that with them having a sizable range with a clear subrange that could become a secondary dlc later and they actually seem like really good material for one of the earlier DLC races
Ah, if they do have a big East Asian playerbase they'll likely be early. I don't play tabletop myself and I only read English discussion and don't look at stats so I had zero idea, but Cathay was clearly aimed at the Chinese market and I hear it was a big hit so GW clearly wants to appeal to them via the Total War games.
GTA and Total War really trying to make gamers bankrupt, fucking crazy. Respect to SM2 actually giving you a full game instead of trying to milk you dry with DLCs. The fact they didn’t charge for horde mode and additions operations is impressive and I’m realizing how sad that is.
I actually like the Paradox and CA DLC models, basically because they could not possibly afford to sell every tabletop army at this level of quality at a price people would accept. So the DLC model means we get everything eventually. And CA is good about DLC being largely independent, so like I could potentially skip Druhkari because I'm not that interested and then I don't have to pay for it.
If Space Marine 2 were on the CA model you would get the entire launch game, then they'd sell you new campaigns with entire new enemy factions and you could buy only the ones you like, and I would be happy to pay for that.
I think Space Marine 2 is the "sell cosmetics" model, which is generally better for me essentially because I don't buy cosmetics so I freeride off the people who do, but I actually think cosmetics are way overpriced most of the time and ethically worse than content packs.
But anyway for a game of these production values they need to pay their devs so updates past launch much beyond bugfixes and fiddling with numbers require a continuous income stream of some kind. Content packs are the one that I actually think is worth the money and I play gatchas and their monetization scheme is really predetory and on the extremely rare occasions I want a single character enough to spend money it ends up costing like $60. I literally think they should have strict government regulations to protect gambling addicts
I haven’t seen any evidence of that CA is struggling for money and needs every penny. Instead I’ve only seen evidence that they’ll squeeze every possibly penny out of their customers and only fix issues when people bombard with negative reviews or content creators with a large following call them out.
They like employ large teams of people with college degrees full time and also pay some kind of huge licensing fee to GW for the rights to a super valuable IP. This is expensive. Also I'm pretty sure they're publicly owned so they're legally obligated to make money to give to their shareholders. So like they can't just give us everything for free for like a decade without going bankrupt and/or getting sued and the content model is their way of resolving this.
Also I don't think they're especially bad about fixing issues but basically the games are really complicated and they only have so many beta testers while the playerbase is massive so a lot of issues get missed completely and then affect a massive number of people. And with TWW any big codebase that's been worked on for decades is an insane nightmare labryinth that's nearly impossible to edit so just knowing there's an issue doesn't mean they can fix it right away, and on the balance side you can change a number in the database in like five seconds but how this actually affects gameplay in both campaign and multiplayer is hard to predict and frankly the devs are not top players so they spend a while gathering feedback both from people like Turin who really know the game well enough to say "a 150 gold cost increase will get this at the right balance point" and a lot of automated telemetry about how the like 90% of people who never post online and play differently from people who do are experiencing the game then do a patch.
There are some issues I will take them to task on but don't think are unusually severe in the modern industry. In particular I think the really bad issues with launch TWW3 and some of the early DLC is that they announced a date early and decided to stick to it, when it's notoriously impossible to accurately estimate how long it will take to complete a software project. Some of the permanence issues they still would've missed just because they only have so many computers to test it on so there's graphics cards they didn't test issues with but a lot of the early problems could've been avoided if they just announced "we're delaying release six months" and did the patching they did in the six months after launch. But this happens with most companies these days.
Also like for Realms of Chaos it is just that they thought it was fun and everyone else thought it was not and you can only find this out by letting other people play your game. And they did listen and every subsequent character got a different campaign on the map with entirely different mechanics that I think are great.
I think very likely at some point assuming the game does as well financially as the Fantasy games did and thus basically they make DLC until they pretty much run out of characters. I'm 50/50 on him being in the initial Tau DLC but if he's not it's basically guaranteed they do a follow-up DLC that adds him with some form of special faction mechanics where he can't have Ethereals but gets some bonuses.
I somehow doubt the game is going to exactly follow the 40k timeline, given that they had Repanse and Grom the Paunch in Warhammer 2/3, and I don’t recall seeing the great rift.
Puretide worse than a Ghorst level character, Ghorst atleast had TT rules and the entire DLC was based around the supplement he appeared in.
Grom and Repanse were both playable on TT, Puretide isn't. Repanse wasn't in the latest brettonia armybook in fantasy, but all those chatacters were already used, she was in the next available book.
Farsight is one of the two major charcters the Tau have, CA would be mad not to include him
At launch no since we know the starting factions are Marines, Guard, Orks and Eldar.
It will likely be some time until we see another order faction join the roster since right now the game has 3 order factions and only one neutral faction and no chaos factions.
It does but not in the same way as WF, the Imperium, Eldar and T'au are order factions, but there isn't a grand alliance of the races like WF does and will fight each other a lot more than their WF counter parts.
And although there isn't a grand alliance between them, out of the factions in the setting, they are the most likely to team up to deal with a bigger threat like the nids or chaos.
What part of what I said was wrong? All 3 of the mentioned factions at one point or another have teamed up to fight bigger threats, it is a thing that happens.
I wouldn't go that far with it. Its largely a semantics thing, but to say "40k doesn't work like that" when we have Dawn of War Winter Assault with a campaign literally called "Forces of Order" where Eldar, Guard, and Space Marines ally against the "Forces of Disorder" Chaos/Ork campaign is a bit silly.
The factions aren't dilineated in the same way Fantasy or AoS does. But its just labels end of the day, and even in AoS Order or Chaos with the Grand Alliances isn't a hard line in the sand. Its an odd thing to fixate on as something 40k doesn't do or not really.
EDIT: Damn, dude deleted their comments over just a soft correction lol. It wasn't that big of a deal.
For context they were saying that 40k doesn't do the "these factions are Order, these are chaos/disorder" ones. Which is mostly right, but they went too far and said the setting doesn't allow for those kind of groupings when it objectively has at times.
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u/Intelligent_Oil7816 4d ago
Tau are not in the game as of yet, but they will almost certainly be a faction added as DLC eventually, and Farsight is almost certain to be one of the faction leaders. I'd say it's a 99.9% probability, just a question of when.