Editing Damocles Crusade

The '''Damocles Crusade''' (also known as the Damocles ''Gulf'' Crusade) was a major campaign against the [[Tau Empire]] by the [[Imperium of Man]].

It began as a response to first contact between [[humanity]] and the Tau, during what the Tau called their Second Phase Expansion. The Tau's colonization efforts brought them across the Damocles Gulf, and they encountered human worlds on the other side. These frontier planets were easy to subvert, as they felt little attachment to the Imperium, and even when there were loyalist factions, they were in the minority.

The Imperium was not happy to be losing worlds to Tau rule, so they sent a Crusade to toss them out, and eventually crush them all the way back to their home. They were so serious about this Crusade that they printed a special edition of the [[Imperial Infantryman's Uplifting Primer]] just for [[Imperial Guard Regiment]]s going to the Damocles Gulf. They were initially successful, but as the Tau brought more of their armies to the front, the Imperial advance slowed and eventually halted on the planet of Dal'yth Prime. This was mostly because the crusade had outrun its supply line by many years. You'd think the Imperium would know better than to do that by now. They aren't exactly inexperienced at war.  In this case, they underestimated the Tau, who up until thatpoint had only offered token resistance as they tried to evacuate worlds in front of the human advance and buy themselves time to recall their fleets to regroup at Dal'yth where they would make their stand.

Mind you, Dal'yth was a sept-world of First Sphere, meaning it was heavily fortified and there were shitton of fire warriors and auxiliaries garrisoned on it. Imperial fleet sustained heavy casualties even when approaching the planet, and while they managed to destroy or repel all Tau and Kroot spacecraft, literally every battleship of the crusade was damaged rendering the fleet useless for anything but guarding Munitorum transport ships till the end of campaign. Regardless, Imperial forces successfully made planetfall, and on the first day they crushed the garrison forces on their landing zones with relative ease. This was the only thing they got easy on Dal'yth. As war progressed, Imperial forces found themselves constantly harassed by Tau night raids, carpet bombed by thousands of Barracudas and Tiger Sharks, and ambushed by Kroot kindreds. Even with their overwhelming numbers and orbital bombardment support, Imperial forces were tied up by maneuverable Tau forces and unable to move far away from landing zones due to the supply lines being torn apart by stealth-teams. Thousands of Imperial Guardsmen clashed with Kroot and Fire Warriors, while Space Marines were engaged in firefights with Tau battlesuits. Imperial titans found themselves in fights with Manta destroyers, which weren't favorable engagements for them at all, considering most Titan weapons aren't suited against fast flying targets. [[Humanity Fuck Yeah|And yet humans advanced against all odds]]. Then Tau brought in reinforcements, lead by the now (in)famous commanders Shadowsun and Farsight, and Imperial reinforcements got lost in the Warp only to appear one hundred years later (ironically to help Tau destroy Hive Fleet Gorgon), and the conflict went to stalemate. Stalemated because, now that the crusade's supply line was who-knows-how-many years away, the rest of the Tau military had arrived. Not enough to stop the Imperium, of course, but enough to slow them until their lack of supplies eventually removed everything but lasguns and swords from play.

The Imperium probably would have kept throwing regiments and [[Titan (Warhammer 40,000)|Titan]]s at the Damocles Gulf, but that was when [[Hive Fleet Behemoth]] showed up and they needed every ship and guardsman they had to repel the invasion of [[Macragge]], so they negotiated a cease-fire with the Tau and withdrew. The Tau Empire, shaken by the show of force from a power they thought weak and distant, tried to reassure the people and regain their expansion's momentum by re-taking all the worlds they had lost to the Imperium, and later launched the Third Phase Expansion to take further advantage of the Imperium's retreat.

At the end Tau learned valuable lessons about Imperium's strengths and weakneses, and their own blind spots (such as shitty merchant fleet), which they then patched ASAP. Imperium, being Imperium, learned nothing, making the same damn mistakes with overstretched supply lines and frontal assaults through killing grounds during Nimbosa, Taros and Zeits campaigns, and ultimately losing all of them, despite initial success. However, it is strongly hinted that, despite all their advanced technology and everything they have learned, the only reason the Tau have been largely successful with their Third Phase of Expansion is that the majority of the Imperium's military might has been diverted to defend against Tyranid hive-fleets, WAAAGH Ghazkhull and the Chaos assault on the Cadian Gate along thousands and thousands of other conflicts with a threat level far above those of the Tau Empire. Abaddon's 13th Black Crusade alone has tied up hundreds of guard regiments and dozens of space marine chapters, including almost two full battlefleets; leaving only token forces along with Ultramarines in the Ultima Segmentum. 

==The Name==

Damocles, who the campaign and region was named after, was a man in Ancient Sicillia, who was stern fan of the local tyrant called Dionysios and considered him to be very fortunate. Dionysios wondered why Damocles liked his job and his kingdom so much, and went to teach him a lesson. He invited Damocles for a party at his residence, which Damocles of course was superexcited about - there was only one thing that Dionysios hadn't told Damocles, and that was that, while eating, Damocles would be laying under a hanging sword, attached to the ceiling by a single hair from a horse' mane.

After a very strained and unhappy dinner, Dionysios explained the act to Damocles - He wanted Damocles to feel like he does, like a tyrant. A tyrant always has a sword over him, that can fall down and strike him down at any moment. He is never at peace and can never relax, but can't do anything about it, either: That would just result in him killing innocents and doing henious, but ultimately useless acts. Damocles was scarred for life, but had learnt a lesson. Never again did he talk to Dionysios' praise.

What has that to do with the Damocles Crusade? Well, the Imperium ''did'' attack the Tau Empire, a faction notorious for being unassailable by your usual means, and ultimately ended up being humbled by their futile act, while the Tau Empire only grew stronger from the experience... 

My god, have [[GW|they]] got no clue.

==Rematch==

250 years later, after dealing with Ork and Tyranid invasions into their territory while fighting small local wars against the Imperium, Tau eventually launched a full scale expansion into Damocles sector. So the tides had turned and it's ''their'' crusade now.

It started with a series of lightning strike attacks against Zeist sector, to which Imperium responded by sending almost all available guard from nearby sectors and a chapter-sized space marine force from dozens of [[Ultramarines]] successor chapters led by [[Cato Sicarius]]. It appeared to be a great Imperial victory, as the space marines were able to rout local guardsmen and drove Tau raiding parties out of the sector. In fact, it was just a distraction to bleed the Damocles sector of reinforcements and the stationed Tau forces (which Sicarius mistakenly estimated as million-sized) masquerading as entire Third Sphere army was really but a minor fraction of what the Tau Empire actually prepared for war. Way to go being Shadowsun’s unwitting puppet, golden boy! To add an insult to an injury Tau learned that little trick from the Ultramarines, when Ageman and his first company pulled something very similar on a much smaller scale about 50 years before that against small Tau colony.

And then Tau came in force all guns blazing with a goal to take over entire Damocles sector, conquering poorly garrisoned planets in dozens, while Imperial forces were scrambing to retreat and regroup. The first real battle happened on a hive-world of Argellan, which was a major logistics node instrumental to taking control over the Gilded Worlds (a tightly packed group of mineral-rich planets in the center of the sector). While Tau are generally uncomfortable with sieges and city-fighting, preferring to lure their enemies to more favorable positions, there were simply no alternatives to taking down Argellan if they wanted to conquer the Damocles Gulf, so Shadowsun [[Heresy|took a page out of Farsight's book]] and planned and executed a [[Indrick Boreale|MULTIPLE, SIMULTANEOUS, AND DEVASTATING DEFENSIVE DEEP STRIKES]] on Imperial defenses, using all the cheese she could get, namely spamming the new Riptide suits humans weren't familiar with. Even though they were outnumbered six-to one, Tau scored a decisive victory, thanks in no small part to Riptides serving as a perfect Distraction Carnifexes, Shadowsun’s infiltration force killing Imperial Command HQ, resulting with guardsmen running around like headless chickens, and one of the new Tau experimental weapons ''accidentally blowing up a fucking moon''. Even while [[White Scars]], [[Raven Guard]] and some Knights of House Terryn came to the rescue, the rape train gain too much momentum and it had no brakes – the only thing the marines and knights manged to do is to pierce the encirclement o allow few survivors to evacuate and barely secure LZs to let that evacuation happen, and it costed them. Argellan was taken over by the Tau Empire and renamed to Mu'Gulath Bay, meant to become a new sept world and the base of operations for entire Third Sphere Army.

In an uncharacteristic display of [[Farsight|hot-headedness]] (likely [[Warhammer 40,000: Fire Warrior|coaxed by daemonic whispers]] of the Agrellan wastes), Shadowsun lead a pursuit of the retreating imperials to a knight world - the last piece of meaninful Imperial resistance in the sector (intending to stomp them for good instead of evading them like she had done the entire campaign), but it was a trap, the pursuit force gets decimated and [[Kor'sarro Khan]] wounds her (i.e.: the cover of Damocles), though she managed to escape with her head still on her shoulders. This was the only true "defeat" the Tau had through the whole campaign, tho, and it caused her to regain her cool and return to her regular cold-hearted calculative bitch behavior, mainly because Aun'Va decided to show up in person at this point.

Following their advance towards the Gilded Worlds, Tau attacked a fortress world of Perfectia, but their old friends of Raven Guard, White Scars and Knights were already there and with reinforcements, with RG bringing almost their entire chapter. The war turned into a a contest of cunning traps and escaping them with Raven Guard captains and Fire Caste commanders trying to outsmart each other with a limited success for both sides, and while the Raven Guard was familiar with that kind of war, the White Scars ended up completely out of their field of expertise and in a hilarious chain of fake retreats and ambushes, Shasera out-tricked Kor'Sarro so hard Tzeentch himself took a moment to admire the amount of Just As Planned involved. The resulting clusterfuck ended with a massive battle where Shadowsun proved herself a superior trap mistress and even pulled an Alpharius gambit on the Raven Guard chapter master, blowing him to bits with her new Ghostkeel suit while giving her own XV-22 to a sitting duck volunteer. White Scars retaliated with <s>FOUL SORCERY</s> psychic storms, conjured by their Sormseer conclave (turns out the librarian survived the melta shot from the previous book), but once again it was while effective, not effective ''enough'' to do anything but buy more time. When the war turned into a meat grinder despite Shasera's best effort to end it quickly and decisivelly, the deployment of the new Stormsurge suits proved instrumental to fighting off imperial Knights, and when surviving Knights begun their retreat and evacuation, the rest of the Imperials broke and retreated too. While the marines continued to resist, and Shrike even lead a successful counter-attack to retake Severax's gene-seed, the war was pretty much over. It wasn't as curb-stompy as the Mu'Gulath victory, but despite suffering heavy losses (like it was an [[Imperial_Armour|IA]] book), the Tau conquered Perfectia and renamed it Vas'Talos ("Boundless Scope", but "Talos" was a greek giant treasure guardian, kinda like this sept guarding the advance on the Guilded worlds).

While Tau propaganda hailed it as a brilliant victory, it took too much time, and the Imperium launched a counter-invasion on Mu’Gulath, and this time - following their dogma of "throwing bodies at it until it's fixed" - arrived with a shitton of guardsmen and Leman Russes [[derp|(but they kinda forget to send anything else)]], who are only good at "proper", frontal fights, being easy prey for the perfect guerilla Kauyon tactics the Tau had been using the entire campaign. Imperium, [[Derp|being Imperium]], merely orders them to [[Chenkov|march forward nonetheless]], ''expect to be ambushed'' and hope for the best.

This in turn allowed the badly outnumbered and besieged Tau to perfectly inflict much more casualties a force their size had any right to, but Imperium ''being Imperium'' just threw yet MOAR men at them AND tanks, which turned the second Argellan campaign into a shameless [[Warhammer_40,000/Tactics/Imperial_Guard/Armoured_Battlegroup(7E)|tank porn fest]], mainly because most of the battle zones were [[Tallarn|almost featureless irradiated deserts]] with a few ruins and dunes here and there (Agrellan's a re-settled [[Exterminatus|virus-bombed]] planet after all), with Pask and Longstrike covering the hulls of their vehicles with kill marks, and rows of Leman Russes and a Baneblade getting perfectly outranged by rows of Hammerheads and Stormsurges (somehow, even though they have the same effective range as the Hammerheads and more than twice the range as the Stormsurges) while [[Apocalypse|silly infantrymen get mowed to red or blue paste]] in between them and air support was mostly unavailable because of the pollution/sand-storms of the planet (which were actually perfectly controlled by the Tau) [[FAIL|and the orbital bombardment advantage is completely forgotten about]].

[[Humanity_Fuck_Yeah|And still, mankind pressed forward]].

Then [[Farsight]] perfectly drops in, [[wat|arriving in stealth ships that appeared quite literally out of thin air.]]  Despite having every reason to shoot him, the blueskins manage to perfectly rally to his Enclaves and [[Mary Sue|perfectly win every single major fight]] on the planet (offscreen of course). Despite their victories, because the Tau are still severely outnumbered they cannot hold their ground and end up falling back to the final shielded fortress, conveniently proof against orbital attacks, perfectly built over the ruins of the former capital hive.

This in turn allows the Imperial Guard to finally engage in a proper static fight (their specialty), in this case an offensive siege. However, Farsight, master of Mont'Ka, in a book called Mont'Ka performs a, you guessed it... [[Troll|''Kauyon'']], thus perfectly preventing the Space Marines from contributing to the final assault (your guess is as to how he does this is as good as any since it happens offscreen).  Because apparently the Imperial Guard [[Fail|cannot achieve anything without Space Marine assistance]], the Tau (specialized in guerilla warfare) actually manage to perfectly defeat the imperials on a frontal fight, and without their main commanders despite them having vital roles to play.

In response, the Imperium decides to employ the [[Officio Assassinorum]] Execution Force, using the final battle as a cover, on four of the top Tau Leaders: Shadowsun, Farsight, Farsight ''again'', and Aun'Va. While the first three end in some perfect degree of failure or another due to plot armour, the [[Culexus]] sent to kill Aun'Va succeeds (despite being specialized against psykers, which Tau don't have), leading to the actual death of a named character with a model for the first time in....fuck, '''FOREVER'''. In order to keep everyone calm, they replace the xeno-pope with a perfect hologram as they decided to fall back. You'd think they themselves would despair, but Shadowsun's mind is perfectly plot armoured too, and then there's Farsight. And to put in a final insult, the Adeptus Mechanicus decide to drop the [[Exterminatus]] on Agrellan and erect a massive firewall around the Damocles sector, cutting any Tau colonies off from supplies from the empire proper. Luckily the main Tau building was outfitted with plot armour generators and the firestorm killed anyone outside of it (including millions of Tau and imperial leftovers) without cooking the people inside (think bread in an oven).  Agrellan is lost, the Tau perfectly evacuate (though how they leave the planet and get back home is left up to speculation) and decide to learn how to build firewall immune ships. This causes massive casualties in the process, but failure is the mother of innovation, and EVERYTHING causes massive casualties in 40k anyway.

In the end, Shrike now has to take on bigger roles, Kor'sarro's still salty about getting owned, and Shadowsun and Farsight decide to agree to disagree, if only because they don't have the taupower to waste on killing each other.  And speaking of that red bastard, he has to leave because his Enclaves are being eaten by [[Tyranids]].

Some reflections:

* Aun'Va has been replaced by some holos and some other ethereal may be doing the speech writing job.
* Farsight enclaves are getting NOM NOMned by the tyranids...AGAIN.
* The Imperium manages to lose yet another huge battleforce (mostly off-screen). Do notice the Raven Guard get Boreale'd (also off-screen), and while GW will be talking about some rubbish like honour in sacrifice and keeping the spirit in dark times this pretty much confirms they are becoming just another punching bag fallen to the level of the Astra Militarum {{BLAM|'''*BLA-*'''}} BURST CANNON FIRE! PEWPEWPEW! Yeah, pretty much what happened. ([[Drop_Site_Massacre|As if they weren't before]]).
**The battles could be resumed as "BUT THEN RESERVES ARRIVED". Everyone tries to out-Alpharius each other, too bad the imperials had to work with whatever was at hand and Tau brought a full perfect crusade with them. And, because this is a Tau book, when the Imperial reinforcements do arrive the Tau get yet more ''unexpected reinforcements'' in the form of Farsight perfectly popping out of the <s>blue</s> red.
* The Mechanicus decided to show how it's done and set fire to the nebulae, as it seems they are the only human force which took everlasting measures in the wake of the battlegroup's failure. If you were expecting much AdMech involvement, sorry, they just snatch xeno-tech (Heresy!) and return to orbit. Not content with merely abandoning their IG allies, they keep to [[Grimdark|watching the many ways they die]] (mainly to see if there was [[Blood Ravens|anything else to steal]]). There was, so they send an entire Skitarii battleforce to try and abduct some stormsurge suits, which catches the Tau in an ambush...only to cut to Pask doing what he always does, the Skitarii forgotten for the rest of the book. If ''anyone'' even remotely won, it was them.

* Are you starting to see a pattern here? Most of these campaign books seem to be ending with Exterminatus, just thrown in such an unorthodox and complicated way we are starting to wonder where the traditional methods went.
* IRL Tau gundams sell extremely well, expect nextgen battlesuits to conquer the entire Eastern Fringe FOR THE GREATER anime show (No, seriously, their holos are used as propaganda among the Tau kids)! And then got NOMNOMed by the Tyranids to boost their sales.
 
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