Welcome back to Warzone: Damocles. Last time around we talked about the Taros Campaign, which acts as a prelude to the major campaign goings on of Warzone: Damocles in the 40k seventh edition campaign books. This time we’re going to jump ahead seventeen years to tell the second half of the story of Taros – the story of the Imperium’s return to kick some T’au ass and show those perfidious xenos who actually ran the galaxy.
Released in June 2020 for Aeronautica Imperialis (so during the height of the pandemic in most places), The Taros Air War expansion introduced T’au aircraft to the game alongside craft for Imperial Guard and Imperial Navy forces. And roughly half of the 96-page book is dedicated to telling the story of the second half of the Taros campaign, this time focusing on the aerial battles between the Imperium and the T’au water caste, which makes sense given the game system is focused purely on aerial combat.
If it seems weird to revisit Taros within the confines of Aeronautica Imperialis and not the mainline 40k game well, it’s not. The original incarnation of Aeronautica Imperialis was released in 2007 by Forge World and unlike the 2019 incarnation of the same name, had more freeform measurement similar to something like X-Wing. T’au forces were a key part of the game, featured on the cover of the game’s lone expansion supplement, 2007’s Tactica Aeronautica.
It’s also a fitting follow-up to the original Taros campaign book: In addition to new vehicles, Imperial Armour Volume Three: The Taros Campaign is where rules were first introduced for the T’au flyers, providing rules for the Barracuda, Tiger Shark, Orca, and Manta, while the second edition of the book would introduce a new variant for the Tiger Shark. Meanwhile for the Imperium the book provided rules for the Aquila Lander and Elysian Drop Troops. Even in 40k scale, Taros has always had a heavy focus on flyer units.
If you’re interested in reading more about the rules for this one, you can dredge up our initial review of the expansion here. We really liked it at the time.
The Third Sphere Expansion
The campaign books that make up War Zone: Damocles essentially tell the tale of the major conflict of the T’au Empire’s Third Sphere of Expansion. The First Sphere saw the T’au establish their first sept worlds and innovate technologically, but their expansion was limited by the speed of T’au ships, which were not at the time capable of faster-than-light travel. The development of the ZFR Horizon Engine changed things dramatically, giving T’au the capability to move at near-light speeds by more or less “skipping” against the Warp and spurring on the Second Sphere expansion.
The Second Sphere Expansion was led by Commander Farsight and included contact with the Kroot and Vespid. The expansion ended with the fledgling race crossing the Damocles Gulf for the first time and making contact with the Imperium and Hive Fleet Gorgon. This was when the T’au first learned that, far from their initial beliefs, the galaxy was not theirs for the taking but instead a vast, hostile space occupied by a xenophobic, theocratic empire protected by a class of savage warrior monks.
The Third Sphere Expansion launched in 997.M41 and was overseen by Commander Shadowsun. Wars against the Tyranids and Orks had pushed the T’au into military might, and advances in ship and stasis technology meant they could attempt longer campaigns against farther targets. The T’au crossed the Damocles Gulf and began taking Imperial Worlds – some through Water Caste diplomacy, and others by force. The two key worlds in this campaign were Taros, a desert planet rich in minerals and terraformed during the Dark Age of Technology, and Agrellan, a Hive World home to more than 16.7 billion Imperial citizens.
The Taros Campaign and Taros Air War tell the story of Taros, with the latter taking place several years later and occurring at the same time as the T’au Empire’s attempted conquest of Agrellan.
It’s T’ros Now, Actually
The initial Taros campaign was a major defeat for the Imperium, resulting in some ten thousand dead guardsmen and another fifteen thousand wounded, with as many as twenty thousand captured. Add to that hundreds of destroyed tanks, chimeras, and artillery pieces plus most of the aircraft committed and it became clear that while the Imperium was not thrilled with the outcome, they were at the time unable to muster the force to retaliate. To make matters worse, the resources from Taros had already been committed to the efforts against Abaddon’s 13th Black Crusade and replacements would have to be found.
An Imperial battlegroup was launched to combat the T’au, bent not just on taking back Taros but also stopping T’au expansion into Imperial space. While the bulk of Imperial forces converged on Agrellan, the Imperium also launched a series of attacks against other T’au held worlds, one of which was T’ros. This was primarily done with aircraft forces, with the idea being to retake the world with brutal swiftness – hitting them less than a year after the initial Taros campaign, striking while the T’au were still refitting and rearming their forces. This did not go to plan however, as the Imperial battlegroup sent to Taros emerged from the warp several years later than intended, finding the T’au had consolidated and fortified their position on T’ros.
And yeah, it was T’ros now – following their victory over Imperial forces in the initial Taros conflicts, the T’au wasted no time fortifying the planet with additional ships from T’au and Dal’yth, renaming the planet T’ros and making it a formal part of their empire – not just an allied world. The Earth Caste had transformed T’ros, giving it rings and a space elevator to support massive, planetwide mining operations. They’d transformed the planet entirely, to the point where when Imperial forces began their assault, they mistakenly assumed that the planet’s former capital city, Tarokeen, was an important strategic objective.
Skies of Fire
The Imperium weren’t prepared for the T’au the first time around but the second time they brought overwhelming amounts of force to bear on the planet, and they began with a bombing campaign on Tarokeen. The T’au put up a fight against the Imperium but only as a smokescreen – they needed to convince the Imperium that Tarokeen was still important to them and as T’au forces began to pull back from the battle, the Imperium believed they’d scored a large victory. Meanwhile the human auxiliaries stayed behind to fight bitterly against the Imperium’s forces, unwilling to yield their home. Among these forces were the Union of Iron, a series of worker conclaves who had, under the T’au, been given a real say in their future and had come to enjoy a quality of life better than anything they’d known under the Imperium. They fought hard to keep the freedoms they had won and would see support from stealth teams and battlesuit cadres to harass the invaders even after the initial battle over Tarokeen.
Elsehwere, Imperial forces assaulted the Needle, the massive space elevator built by the Earth Caste to generate power and transport raw materials into orbit from deep below the planet’s surface. The Needle had been outfitted with a series of large metal discs capable of generating massive amounts of static electricity which could generate sandstorms on demand to protect itself. Unlike Tarokeen, the Needle was of primary importance to the T’au, and they committed significant forces to its defense. While they were allowed a hollow victory in Tarokeen, they were completely repulsed by T’au forces at the Needle.
In the following days the Imperium would clear the skies over Tarokeen and use it as the landing point for their forces, mounting a second major attack on the Needle as the ground war against the Union of Iron began in earnest. During their transformation of the planet the T’au had employed massive mining drones to work through the planet’s mantle, creating a network of massive tunnels that would eventually become home to many of the planet’s inhabitants, where they could be shielded from the harsh deserts above. These tunnels would protect the Union of Iron from Imperial bombers and eventually become major battlefields in the second Taros campaign.
The campaign dragged on for weeks, with the T’au continually withdrawing as the Union of Iron fought to the last man. After following the T’au from one defensive position to the next, the Imperium finally fought their way back to the Needle. In the massive final battle of the campaign book, the Imperium were able to destroy the Needle’s storm generators, forcing the T’au back and capturing the space elevator. The T’au were forced to yield the Needle to the Imperium and with it, Taros.
Aftermath
Some seventeen years after the initial Taros campaign book gave us a look at the T’au surprising the Imperium and scoring an outright victory, the Air War book returns things to the status quo. And it’s not necessarily surprising – the Imperium absolutely dwarfs the fledgling T’au empire. There’s no real long-term scenario where the T’au are able to match the Imperium in terms of resources and the sheer determination to throw bodies at a problem if it means defeating their enemies.
This ultimately is one of the major challenges of the T’au narrative: They only exist in the literal margins of the story for the Imperium, an annoyance on the fringes of the galaxy, attempting to eat at the edges of the massive human empire. As such their continued existence relies on being incredibly annoying and costly to eradicate for a galactic empire best on all sides by other threats.
Then again, there was also something refreshing about the T’au scoring a clean win against the Imperium on Taros, no matter how much of a glazing it appeared to be in the service of making the new guys seem really cool. Fifty-some years of, “The Imperium wins a narrow victory, but at what cost?” stories have made it difficult to take these lore campaigns seriously, in part because no matter how decrepit or cumbersome the Imperium is made to seem, they’re still written as the protagonists and triumph in the end.
So it goes with the Taros Air War, clawing back the gains made some seventeen years prior as the Imperium reclaims their world from the T’au. Is it realistic that the T’au would hold on to Taros forever or beat the Imperium once it started bringing the full might of its forces to bear on them? Probably not, but it is nice to watch the Imperium lose once in a while.
Final Thoughts
For the T’au, the Taros Air War campaign begins to cement a harsh truth: The T’au are not going to conquer the galaxy – they’re about 20,000 years too late to the party on that one. The Third Sphere expansion would eventually grind to a halt running into Imperial Forces in the Damocles Gulf, and in our next few articles we’ll explore that conflict, starting with Operation Shadowtalon and Burning Sun, the prelude to the larger set of battles that would define the campaign to come.
So check back next time when we’ll kick off the battles for Agrellan and Mu’gulath Bay.
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