Editing Damocles Crusade (section)

==Rematch==
250 years later, after dealing with Ork and Tyranid invasions into their territory while fighting small local wars against the Imperium, the Tau launched their own full scale invasion of the Damocles sector.

It started with a series of lightning strikes against the Zeist sector to which the Imperium responded by sending almost all available Guard forces from nearby sectors as well as a chapter's worth of Space Marines, mainly from [[Ultramarines]] successor chapters led by [[Cato Sicarius]]. At first it appeared to be a great Imperial victory as the space marines were able to drive the Tau raiding parties out of the sector. However, this was just a distraction to bleed the Damocles sector of reinforcements as the stationed Tau forces (which Sicarius mistakenly estimated as a million) masquerading as the entire Third Sphere army was really a token force while the main force stood primed to flood the Damocles Sector. Way to go being Shadowsun’s unwitting puppet, golden boy! To add insult to injury, the 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 during a smaller engagement.

The Tau then came in force, guns blazing, with a goal to take over the entire Damocles sector, conquering poorly garrisoned planets in the dozens while Imperial forces were scrambling to retreat and regroup. The first real battle happened on the hive-world of Agrellan, a major logistics node instrumental to taking control over the Gilded Worlds, which were a tightly packed group of mineral-rich planets in the center of the sector.

Despite an overwhelming victory for the Air caste in orbit, the stubborn Imperium still managed deploy reinforcements of White Scars, Imperial Knights of house Terryn and Catachan Jungle Fighters to aid local defenders. Initial phases of the planetary assault didn't go well for the defenders, as Shassera laid siege on the Prime hive-city in the blind zones of its artillery and forced the Imperials to sally out, only for them to fall into a textbook Kauyon trap. Following this Knighs and Catachans wisely decided to refrain from further counterattacks but not the Scars, who mounted a second sally-out with a goal to hunt down Shadowsun and cut off her head. Against an opponent infamous for her cunning bait-and-ambush tactics it went about as smoothly as you would expect. Marine strike force lost all of its aircraft (roughly 30% of manpower) and only managed to break encirclement and retreat back to the Hive due to <s>gue'la mind-science</s> a psychic storm summoned by Scar [[Stormseer]] and unexpected help from the Raven Guard who manged to outsneak and outambush Tau ambushers before they locked down the White Scar hunt completely. This set an overall tone for all White Scar engagements for the rest of crusade.

At this point both forces received new orders from their high command - the Tau to take Agrellan quickly with a swift blow rather than a series of patient and cost-effective but time-consuming engagements, and the Imperials to evacuate the world and join combined sector forces gathered to stop Tau invasion. While the 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 Agrellan if they wanted to conquer the Damocles Gulf in time, 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 (before you call bullshit this is including [[Planetary Defense Force|PDF]] that made the bulk of imperial forces), the Tau scored a decisive victory and took down <s>Agrellan</s> Hive Prime* in a single day. Thanks in no small part to Riptides serving as Distraction Carnifexes, Shadowsun's infiltration force killed Imperial Command HQ with ''perfectly'' placed shots, resulting in guardsmen running around like headless chickens; on top of that one of the new Tau experimental weapons ''accidentally blew up a fucking moon''. Even while [[White Scars]], [[Raven Guard]] and some Knights of House Terryn put some spot-on resistance, the rape train gained too much momentum and it had no brakes – the only thing the marines and knights manged to do was to pierce the encirclement to allow a few survivors to evacuate and barely secure LZs to let that evacuation happen, and it cost them. Agrellan was taken over by the Tau Empire and renamed to Mu'Gulath Bay - The Gate of New Hope - meant to become a new sept world and the base of operations for entire Third Sphere Army.

<small>*Later they realized that taking a whole fucking planet "in a single day" bit was really fucking stupid (and physically impossible) and retconned it; Agrellan was home to seven hive cities, and each one needed to be besieged individually. This took several weeks all told. Despite each city likely having more people than the entire Tau species, all of whom were armed and coldblooded killers and foaming-at-the-mouth fanatics. Nice going Gee Dubbs.</small>

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 Voltoris - a knight world of house Terryn and the last piece of meaningful Imperial resistance in the sector. She intended to stomp them for good instead of evading them like she had done the entire campaign), but it was a trap; the pursuit force got decimated and [[Kor'sarro Khan]] wounds her though she managed to escape with her head still on her shoulders. Continuing the trend for Tau possessing Astartes grade plot armour this minor engagement was the only true defeat the Tau had through the whole campaign, though it caused Shadowsun 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, the Tau attacked the fortress world of Perfectia, but their old friends, the Raven Guard, White Scars and the Knights of House Terryn were already there, with the Raven Guard bringing almost their entire chapter. The war turned into a a contest of cunning with Raven Guard captains and Fire Caste commanders trying to outsmart each other with limited success for both sides; 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 [[Stormseer]] 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 decisively, 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"; note "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 too many bodies, and the Imperium launched a counter-invasion on <s>Mu'Gulath</s> Agrellan, and this time - following their dogma of "throwing bodies at it until it's fixed" - arrived with a shit-ton 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 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 inflict much more casualties a force their size had any right to, but since the Imperium always loses IQ points when they face the Tau, they just threw MOAR men AND tanks at them, turning the second Agrellan 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). Pask and Longstrike covered the hulls of their vehicles with kill marks, and rows of Leman Russes got outranged by rows of Hammerheads (even though they have the same effective range) while [[Apocalypse|silly infantrymen were 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 controlled by the Tau). The Imperium actually manages to tank through their initial losses, cut off Tau retreat, and start pounding them into the dust through sheer belligerence and pinpoint shooting from Knight-Commander Pask. The battle continues to escalate as Imperial forces press onward to stop the Tau from retreating and regrouping to their ambush tactics forcing Shadowsun out of her Kauyon element, and requiring her to commit more and more of her limited reserves into a standup fight that the Tau forces couldn't possibly win. Complicating matters further, the danger to Aun'va's life clouded Shadowsun's judgement and prevented her from committing all of her forces at a critical moment, which allowed Imperial forces to deflect a key counterattack and begin turning what had grown into one of the largest battles of the campaign into a rout in the Imperium's favor.

Then [[Farsight]] drops into the fray at the critical moment, Manta striking out of orbit from ships that seemed to appear quite literally out of thin air (presumably he's been spying on the Tau Empire and intercepted the distress call). Despite having declared Farsight a outcast and a rebel, the Tau are emboldened and manage to rally to his Enclaves, slowing the Imperial invasion down to a crawl with a violent stalemate over the world. 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, 'shielded against orbital attacks (because that makes sense on a frontier world that had very recently faced war), built over the ruins of the former capital hive.

Rather than do the sensible thing that would have ended the war then and there, like have Terminators teleport next to the shield generator to destroy it, or have Assault Marines drop in to destroy it (like they were doing earlier in the exact same fucking book), the Imperium decides to 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'']] while Shadowsun... also performs a Kauyon [[derp|that the book calls a Mont'ka]]. This trap was meant to trick the Space Marines into attacking what looked to be a bunch of Tau training; despite being nowhere near the important battle, offering no strategic value to the Imperium, and being in an area that could've been leveled with ordnance or orbital strikes, they take the bait and attack, having learned no lessons from their earlier engagements and forgetting to bring vital equipment like scanners so that the trap would work. They end up caught in it and do not contribute to the final battle in any way. Shrike and two full companies aren't fooled by the trap though, and manage to massacre the Tau in a melee ambush, though [[FAIL|200 (give or take a few) Space Marines running rampant behind Tau lines amounts to absolutely nothing and the book very quickly forgets that they're even around.]] Luckily for the Tau, the author liked them and so the Imperium was more than happy to send all of their Imperial Guard walking [[FAIL|(what, you expected them to have chimeras?)]] in easy-to-pick-off formations directly towards the guns that were specialized in picking them off (sending vehicles right in front of the stormsurge suits for example) rather than going around to a part of the city that wasn't as heavily defended and attacking there (in case you're curious, yes the there was more than one way into the city and the Tau should not have had the numbers to cover all fronts), and since the Mechanicus forgot that they're supposed to hate the Tau, they don't attack either even though attacking through ruined cities is something the Skitarii excel at. Since the Imperial Guard [[Fail|cannot achieve anything without Space Marine assistance]], and the stormsurge suits are [[Plot Armor|invincible whenever they want to be]], the Tau actually manage to utterly defeat the Imperials on a frontal fight across the entire city even without assistance or guidance from Farsight or Shadowsun for a good portion of the fight (despite saying the two were critical beforehand), and despite the fact that they did not have the numbers needed to hold the Imperium back in earlier static fights. As you might have gathered at this point its going to become pretty much standard that any Imperial commander facing Tau have to turn into drooling morons and fail at even the one thing the Imperium are supposed to be good at.

While this was going on, 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'' (because they knew who the Deus Ex Machina was), and Aun'Va. While the first three end in some degree of failure or another due to plot armour (the Tau's ''perfect'' reactions), the Callidus manages to kill one random Ethereal (this has no impact even though it's supposed to traumatize all the Tau who hear of it), and the [[Culexus]] sent to kill Aun'Va succeeds by using his pariah abilities to literally hitch a ride into Aun'va's complex, murder his guards, and then brutally dispatching the Ethereal Supreme, 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 they apparently just had lying around as they decid to fall back. You'd think they themselves would despair over losing at least two Ethereals, but luckily Shadowsun's mind is [[Mary Sue|plot armoured too]], and Farsight no longer cares. And to put in a final insult, the <s>Adeptus Mechanicus</s> Admiral Hawke decide to drop the [[Exterminatus]] on Agrellan and the Adeptus Mechanicus did something to erect a massive firewall which made the Damocles Gulf impassable to the Tau (presumably passable by Warp-travel and the like), cutting any Tau colonies off from supplies from the empire proper. Luckily the main Tau building was outfitted with plot armour shield generators that can magically withstand a planet-killing weapon and the firestorm simply kills 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 military forces evacuate safely (though how they leave the planet and how Farsight returns to his Enclaves is left up to your imagination) 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. Especially when your "invention" is just a very poor copy of Imperial and Kroot designs without Gellar Fields.

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 talk 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 described 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 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 popping out of the <s>blue</s> red and the writers decide to make the victory look good by blowing the brains out of the Imperial Commanders so they fail to understand basic military concepts or even manage to send the right equipment to the right sectors.
* 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, completely forgetting that they're supposed to hate the Tau to the point that they want them all dead. 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 thrown in in such an unorthodox and complicated way we are starting to wonder where the traditional methods went.

IRL Tau gundams sell extremely well, expect next-gen 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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