Which is the best choice for a T’au Commander Battlesuit? The Coldstar, the Enforcer, or the Crisis?
The Coldstar. The answer is the Coldstar. Thanks for reading. Talk to you next week.
Just kidding.
The Coldstar is certainly the best option when it comes to the Commander — and almost all of the T’au community agrees — and in this article I want to explore exactly what makes the Coldstar so useful at the moment.
But let me begin with a mild rant. I try to keep things positive around here, so I ask readers to forgive me this small indiscretion.
Why does the T’au Commander hit on 3s?
A T’au Commander piloting a Battlesuit — known to the Fire Caste as the Hero’s Mantle — is a warrior at the peak of his martial abilities. In equal measure a deadly marksman and astute tactician, the Commander wields both the weapons on his Battlesuit and the warriors under his command with expert precision.
On the tabletop, however, our Commanders scuff their shots one third of the time.
Practically speaking, a Commander and his unit will be guided, allowing the T’au player to hit on 2s with the Commander and 3s with the Crisis Suits, but I would argue that this shouldn’t be necessary.
The Commander’s datasheet should be roughly equivalent to, say, a Drukhari Succubus or an Ork Warboss. Both the Succubus and Warboss hit on 2s with their main close combat weapons. This is, of course, entirely appropriate given both the lore and tabletop role of these models.
The Succubus also hits on 2s with her ranged weapons. Make of that what you will.
Here’s my point. The Commander should hit on 2s. There’s no practical reason why the Commander should hit on 3s.
And that brings us to the end of my mild rant.
Why is the Coldstar so good? Let’s begin with an in-built datasheet ability. When leading a unit of Crisis Battlesuits, the Coldstar grants a Movement of 12 inches to the unit, and ranged weapons equipped by models in the unit take the Assault ability.
Competitive 40k players know that the game is won and lost in the movement phase, so adding a couple of inches to a Crisis unit is a great start. But, of course, there is much more to come.
Crisis Suits have the Turbo-jets ability, which allows the player to forego making a roll when the unit Advances. Instead, we add 6” to the Movement of the unit.
Now we have a unit of six Crisis Suits — T’au players usually take blocks of six when it comes to Crisis Suits — with a Commander that move 18 inches a turn and are still eligible to fire all their weapons.
There is more to come still, but even this combination makes the unit particularly useful. Armed with Cyclic Ion Blasters, this unit now has a threat range of 36 inches. In most situations, 36 inches is enough to threaten key enemy units, especially if those units are advancing toward mid-board objectives.
Such a strong Movement characteristic requires opponents to always be aware of a Crisis block. Six Crisis Suits and a Commander all armed with CIBs can remove — or at least significantly damage — most datasheets in the game at the moment.
But it’s the Strike and Fade stratagem that gives T’au players the real value here.
For the cost of two Command Points, the Strike and Fade stratagem allows a Battlesuit unit to make an additional Normal move after it has resolved its attacks.
There are two items to note here. First, the unit is eligible to make a Normal move only, not an Advance move, meaning that the unit may only move up to 12 inches. Second, the stratagem may be played at any point in the phase, meaning that the T’au player may shoot all his Battlesuit units, and then choose which is the beneficial target of the stratagem.
Practically speaking, this tactic allows T’au players to apply force where it is most required, and then retreat to relative safety, out of sight of most of the enemy’s guns.
In the modern game, two CP is a significant cost, but most T’au players who use Crisis Suits and Commanders will be using Strike and Fade at least two or three times a game. In my opinion, it’s the best stratagem in the index, and it’s certainly worth saving up for.
This is, I would argue, the main reason to take the Coldstar over the Enforcer or the Crisis.
Both the Enforcer and the Crisis have reasonable abilities: the Enforcer reduces the AP of incoming ranged attacks by 1, and the Crisis grants re-rolls of 1s to Hit when the unit attacks with ranged weapons.
Of these two, I would argue that the Enforcer’s is slightly more useful overall, but neither is worth the opportunity cost. The Coldstar’s Movement benefit is simply too good to pass up. The game is won and lost in the Movement phase, and anything that makes units more manoeuvrable is very valuable indeed.
There is another item to mention when discussing a Crisis Commander specifically. The Crisis Battlesuit model is physically smaller than both the Enforcer and the Coldstar.
The T’au Commander boxset itself comes with options for the Coldstar or the Enforcer, but if a T’au player wants to build a Crisis Commander, he must use a standard Crisis Battlesuit boxset.
In fact, our T’au player could even go old-school and use one of the original Crisis Battlesuit models and simply change the base to bring it up to code. Those old models are small. I still think they’re pretty cool, but they certainly qualify as short Kings.
I must say that I’m not particularly convinced with this idea. In most cases, the Commander will be part of a Crisis unit, which means that the opponent must get through at least three Crisis Suit models — usually with 6 Wounds and a 4+ invulnerable save — before the Commander is a viable target.
The physical size of the Commander model, then, won’t usually make much of a difference.
We’ve got a good few months to wait before the 10th edition T’au codex is released, which means that we’re likely not going to see much change to the Commander datasheets. While it’s possible that future balance updates will change these units, I think it’s quite unlikely.
For the time being, then, the Coldstar will continue to be the Battlesuit of choice of discerning T’au players.
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