A plan that deals with the Tau without allying them? Yes please! This plan only has one flaw though, don't forget to invade the Tau while they are fighting. Don't get too close as to enter a battle of Tau and Chaos but close enough to threaten the capital. The Tau will probably be worried and offer peace. However get a couple of Space Marine companies waiting to invade the weakened capital if the Tau disagree to Imperial demands. Make those demands so tough that they will weaken the tau but lenient enough to make them agree. Wait till the peace treaty takes effect then invade anyway. You will face a weakened Tau force, weakened both by the war against Chaos and the demands of the treaty. In this way we exploit the ability to make peace with the Tau and then crush them!

Misha, you sure you are not of the Alpha Legion?

Serpentis Fidelis

A plan that deals with the Tau without allying them? Yes please! This plan only has one flaw though, don't forget to invade the Tau while they are fighting. Don't get too close as to enter a battle of Tau and Chaos but close enough to threaten the capital. The Tau will probably be worried and offer peace. However get a couple of Space Marine companies waiting to invade the weakened capital if the Tau disagree to Imperial demands. Make those demands so tough that they will weaken the tau but lenient enough to make them agree. Wait till the peace treaty takes effect then invade anyway. You will face a weakened Tau force, weakened both by the war against Chaos and the demands of the treaty. In this way we exploit the ability to make peace with the Tau and then crush them!

The whole point of this is to put the Tau in a situation that when a deal is stuck to not kill them, the Imperium is the one calling the shots and in control of dictating the terms and because of all the **** happening to them the Tau will have to grin and bare just about whatever we say because they really don't have a choice in the matter. As satisfying as betraying them right away and murdering them all would be, that would kind of defeat the whole point of turning their planets into a three way battle between themselves, the forces of the foul ruinous powers and the oncoming wave of planet eating super bugs. Every enemy of the Emperor that is fighting over these cursed patches of rock and dirt is an enemy that isn't fighting actual Imperial forces elsewhere.

The only real downside for this plan is that the planets in question will be better off destroyed completely at the end of the day. Between the Xeno's, the taint of Chaos and whatever the hell happens to the planet due to the Nid's seeding the place, combined with the destruction that this three way war is going to cause... It might just be better for all concerned if we just burn these worlds and call it a day while there aren't any loyal Imperials on it.

A plan that deals with the Tau without allying them? Yes please! This plan only has one flaw though, don't forget to invade the Tau while they are fighting. Don't get too close as to enter a battle of Tau and Chaos but close enough to threaten the capital. The Tau will probably be worried and offer peace. However get a couple of Space Marine companies waiting to invade the weakened capital if the Tau disagree to Imperial demands. Make those demands so tough that they will weaken the tau but lenient enough to make them agree. Wait till the peace treaty takes effect then invade anyway. You will face a weakened Tau force, weakened both by the war against Chaos and the demands of the treaty. In this way we exploit the ability to make peace with the Tau and then crush them!

Misha, you sure you are not of the Alpha Legion?

Serpentis Fidelis

Careful guys, he's on to us....

Deploy lots of Riptides, Y'vahra, and Rhy'vrah suits to destroy everything.

For the Greater Good, guela.

Deploy lots of Riptides, Y'vahra, and Rhy'vrah suits to destroy everything.

For the Greater Good, guela.

Traitor! Hoow could you betray the Emperors Will?

Deploy lots of Riptides, Y'vahra, and Rhy'vrah suits to destroy everything.

For the Greater Good, guela.

Nah all gundams- err I mean Riptides!

I find this lack of faith and hate, disturbing. But in holy fire they shall be cleansed!

No peace with the Tau! No taint on our souls and body from alien artefacts! And no mercy for heretics! Through faith and fire we shall overcome the Alien, the Heretic and the Daemon! Imperator Vult!

I find this lack of faith and hate, disturbing. But in holy fire they shall be cleansed!

No peace with the Tau! No taint on our souls and body from alien artefacts! And no mercy for heretics! Through faith and fire we shall overcome the Alien, the Heretic and the Daemon! Imperator Vult!

While I understand where you're coming from completely, we've been trying that for a while and it hasn't been working so far. We might also be unable to get more firepower; At least not enough to boost us beyond our current numbers anyway. We need a new plan.

I find this lack of faith and hate, disturbing. But in holy fire they shall be cleansed!

No peace with the Tau! No taint on our souls and body from alien artefacts! And no mercy for heretics! Through faith and fire we shall overcome the Alien, the Heretic and the Daemon! Imperator Vult!

Stop thinking of it as 'peace with the Tau'. Because everybody else (including the Tau themselves, though perhaps excluding that idiot Ebongrave) is aware of the fact that as soon as the Tyranids are finished, the Imperium and the Tau are going to go right back to shooting at one another, and there will likely be covert infiltration activities going on while the Tyranids are being dealt with. And, the Tau are likely to be weakened more by the Tyranids than the Imperium will be weakened by the Imperium should the truce with the Tau against the Tyranids take effect.

It's allowing a temporary ceasefire with the Tau to permit the Tau and the Tyranids to kill one another better. It also has the side benefit of allowing the Imperium to kill the Tyranids better.

Letting one group of xenos kill another group of xenos instead of the first group of xenos killing humans is by no means heresy, especially when the second group of xenos wants to kill not just humans, but inhabitable worlds.

I find this lack of faith and hate, disturbing. But in holy fire they shall be cleansed!

No peace with the Tau! No taint on our souls and body from alien artefacts! And no mercy for heretics! Through faith and fire we shall overcome the Alien, the Heretic and the Daemon! Imperator Vult!

Let us cleanse the traitors to the Imperial Throne with blood and fire! For the Emperor and the Imperium! No mercy to the Xeno scum and no mercy to those that ally with them! No mercy to the Chaos bastards and those who ally with them!

I find this lack of faith and hate, disturbing. But in holy fire they shall be cleansed!

No peace with the Tau! No taint on our souls and body from alien artefacts! And no mercy for heretics! Through faith and fire we shall overcome the Alien, the Heretic and the Daemon! Imperator Vult!

Let us cleanse the traitors to the Imperial Throne with blood and fire! For the Emperor and the Imperium! No mercy to the Xeno scum and no mercy to those that ally with them! No mercy to the Chaos bastards and those who ally with them!

"-and those that ally with them." Right, thats half the Inquisition gone there. Bloody radicals...

I find this lack of faith and hate, disturbing. But in holy fire they shall be cleansed!

No peace with the Tau! No taint on our souls and body from alien artefacts! And no mercy for heretics! Through faith and fire we shall overcome the Alien, the Heretic and the Daemon! Imperator Vult!

Let us cleanse the traitors to the Imperial Throne with blood and fire! For the Emperor and the Imperium! No mercy to the Xeno scum and no mercy to those that ally with them! No mercy to the Chaos bastards and those who ally with them!

"-and those that ally with them." Right, thats half the Inquisition gone there. Bloody radicals...

Along with all the Space Marine chapters that have put aside their hatred of xeno's to work alongside the Elder or the Tau or any other traditional enemy of the Imperium in order to combat a greater enemy.

Have fun with that.

I really wish the Blood angels would stop teaming up with the newcrons! They are almost BFFs at this point!

Purge the untrustworthy of the Imperium! We need a geonicide of those who ally with our enemies!

I find this lack of faith and hate, disturbing. But in holy fire they shall be cleansed!

No peace with the Tau! No taint on our souls and body from alien artefacts! And no mercy for heretics! Through faith and fire we shall overcome the Alien, the Heretic and the Daemon! Imperator Vult!

While I understand where you're coming from completely, we've been trying that for a while and it hasn't been working so far. We might also be unable to get more firepower; At least not enough to boost us beyond our current numbers anyway. We need a new plan.

Yes, a new plan. A new campaign of glorious purging of the Alien! Grinding their works to dust and scattering their ashes to the void!

The Tyranids are top priority, I agree, but never peace with the Tau! We must guard our minds against the blasphemy of coexistance and the heresy of tolerance! Never must the sickness of peace and cowardice in the face of our enemies make us relent from the field of battle. Never given an ich to the enemies of mankind least they consume us all and corrupt our minds from the will of Him on Terra.

I find this lack of faith and hate, disturbing. But in holy fire they shall be cleansed!

No peace with the Tau! No taint on our souls and body from alien artefacts! And no mercy for heretics! Through faith and fire we shall overcome the Alien, the Heretic and the Daemon! Imperator Vult!

Stop thinking of it as 'peace with the Tau'. Because everybody else (including the Tau themselves, though perhaps excluding that idiot Ebongrave) is aware of the fact that as soon as the Tyranids are finished, the Imperium and the Tau are going to go right back to shooting at one another, and there will likely be covert infiltration activities going on while the Tyranids are being dealt with. And, the Tau are likely to be weakened more by the Tyranids than the Imperium will be weakened by the Imperium should the truce with the Tau against the Tyranids take effect.

It's allowing a temporary ceasefire with the Tau to permit the Tau and the Tyranids to kill one another better. It also has the side benefit of allowing the Imperium to kill the Tyranids better.

Letting one group of xenos kill another group of xenos instead of the first group of xenos killing humans is by no means heresy, especially when the second group of xenos wants to kill not just humans, but inhabitable worlds.

No parley with the enemy! We may redirect our focus but never shall we bend before our enemies! The galaxy belongs to mankind for He has commanded it! Never shall we open our minds to alien corruption and let their tentacles to where only faith in Him on Terra shall shine brightly!

Your "ceasefire" reeks of xenophilia.

I find this lack of faith and hate, disturbing. But in holy fire they shall be cleansed!

No peace with the Tau! No taint on our souls and body from alien artefacts! And no mercy for heretics! Through faith and fire we shall overcome the Alien, the Heretic and the Daemon! Imperator Vult!

Let us cleanse the traitors to the Imperial Throne with blood and fire! For the Emperor and the Imperium! No mercy to the Xeno scum and no mercy to those that ally with them! No mercy to the Chaos bastards and those who ally with them!

Agreed! With fire and faith we shall purge all those who stand before us! For the Emperor!

I find this lack of faith and hate, disturbing. But in holy fire they shall be cleansed!

No peace with the Tau! No taint on our souls and body from alien artefacts! And no mercy for heretics! Through faith and fire we shall overcome the Alien, the Heretic and the Daemon! Imperator Vult!

Let us cleanse the traitors to the Imperial Throne with blood and fire! For the Emperor and the Imperium! No mercy to the Xeno scum and no mercy to those that ally with them! No mercy to the Chaos bastards and those who ally with them!

"-and those that ally with them." Right, thats half the Inquisition gone there. Bloody radicals...

I am well aware of the rot spreading within the Inquisition, but worry not. We will get to them as well, in time. One by one. And then they will regret their heresy.

I find this lack of faith and hate, disturbing. But in holy fire they shall be cleansed!

No peace with the Tau! No taint on our souls and body from alien artefacts! And no mercy for heretics! Through faith and fire we shall overcome the Alien, the Heretic and the Daemon! Imperator Vult!

Let us cleanse the traitors to the Imperial Throne with blood and fire! For the Emperor and the Imperium! No mercy to the Xeno scum and no mercy to those that ally with them! No mercy to the Chaos bastards and those who ally with them!

"-and those that ally with them." Right, thats half the Inquisition gone there. Bloody radicals...

Along with all the Space Marine chapters that have put aside their hatred of xeno's to work alongside the Elder or the Tau or any other traditional enemy of the Imperium in order to combat a greater enemy.

Have fun with that.

Heresy festers everywhere but there many Chapters true to the Emperor's will; Iron Hands, Black Templars and Minotaurs, to name but three.

We're not giving the Tau anything other than the opportunity to shoot at Tyranids instead of Humans. There is no heresy in letting xenos kill xenos.

Both sides would be nominally holding in place along the salient, though presumably we would be fortifying and scouting Tau positions against the inevitable resumption of hostilities. Because they will resume. Right after the Tyranids are dealt with.

And, let's be honest here, it is better for the Tau to take an unclaimed world than for the Tyranids to take that unclaimed world. We can boot the Tau off of it when we get around to it, and the planet will still be in useable condition. The Tyranids will just leave behind a lifeless, and useless ball of rock while they get stronger.

Also, I'd rather let the Tau bleed on the Tyranids than spend Imperial lives on the Tau just to turn around and need to spend even more lives on the Tyranids. Let the Tau weaken themselves exterminating the Tyranids, who are our mutual enemy, before we turn from the exterminated Tyranids and crush the Tau.

The Imperium has not yet reclaimed the Reach. We don't control depressingly large portions of it. But any of it that the Tyranids take is lost forever. Anything the Tau manage to take and hold against the Tyranids (and Chaos) can be taken away from the Tau when the Tyranids aren't around anymore.

We need a new plan.

Did we already try the 'send wave after wave after wave of guardsman' thing?

We need a new plan.

Did we already try the 'send wave after wave after wave of guardsman' thing?

We did. It was working till the super bugs showed up.

A bunch of signposts leading from the area the Undred Undred Teef control to the warp gate, with a big glowing sign at the end that says "'Ard Skrap 'Ere!!"

Let Orks do what Orks were engineered to do. Kill all the things.

Just finished a 2+ years of playing in Deathwatch and this is what happened in our small campaign. First I (the GM) read through the official material and picked elements I felt fitted in with my own ideas. The I put up a vague sketch for the development of the Crusade through the next 15-20 years. Then I made some notes about what the plot was and who was behind it. Using this as a framework we played 40 plus sessions during the next two years or so until we reached 830+M41. Then the Watch Commander on Erioch, Mordegael authored an report for the Deatwatch and Ordo Xenos that he presented at a hearing on Talasa Prime, the Ordo Xenos fortress world in Ultramar space. Participants included leading persons from the Ultramarines chapter.

This was the 3 main points of his report:

I - The Crusades progress had stagnated to the point that more resources were consumed to maintain a status quo than was possible to replace by the Adeptus Administratum. Each world conquered took longer to pacify, and took longer to build up to contribute to the Crusade than in previous decades of the campaign. The Crusade was, bluntly put, using up more than it could get of resources, a sure way to going broke. .

II - The co-operation between the Astartes units and the Imperial Guard had deteriorated to the point where the Space Marines were used less in front line combat and more at non-combat tasks, due to severe lack of co-ordination and trust at top leadership level within the salient commands; Ebongraves paranoia being the worst, but not the only example. Result: More troops and material were needed to liberate new worlds. And by our timeline Chapter Master Maclir of the Storm Wardens chapter had left Hethgard and taken the planet Aurum as a 'protectorate' on which his chapter started to build a fortress world. His plan, to make a stronghold from which the Astartes forces could strike at the Tyranids should the crusade fail.

III - The co-operation between the Imperial Guard, Imperial Navy, the three salient commanders (Ebongrave, von Karlach and Arkelius/Theren) and the central high command (Tetrarchus), had been reduced to the level that the salient commanders operated on their own, more or less, and Tetrarchus was more and more unable to dare to lead, fearing he would be ignored by his underlings.

Bad guys: Alpha Legion, supporting and building up the Stigmartrix cult, and planning to crush the Imperial crusade with a diabolic plan (of course they would). A Dark Eldar cabal had a significant role here too. The Dark Eldar had managed to use an Eldar Farseer and a clone of Ebongrave to mentally torture him from afar, causing his slide into paranoia. Chaos agents had infiltrated parts of the command structure beneath the Warmaster and subtly sabotaging communications and creating distrust and inefficiency within the organizations. The Alpha Legions plan was at the right time to open a new warzone in the quarantine zone on the planet Rheelas, causing the crusade to bind up more troops there and weaken the Acheros front. In addition the fleet base at Arkhas in the Orpheus salient would be attacked by a major Tyranid fleet that the Alpha Legion would instigate using captive Broodlords. They had a chaos fleet ready to go in and clean out the remnants after that battle, taking control of this key system of major warp routes. (This was modified to fit the changes made by the players interference so instead the Tyranid fleet became targeted towards the system where a certain celebration would take place, see below.)

The player Kill-team first became aware of the situation at the fronts through several sessions giving them an insight in the larger picture. Among these, they were part in a battle against a large Tyranid fleet that were defeated by joint crusade, Astartes and Deathwatch forces. This was the largest and most important victory the crusade had experienced during the last 15 years, and a grand celebration with all the salient commanders and the Warmaster himself attending, would take place the year after. (This was when my bad guys planned to strike and annihilate all the command leaders with one blow and let one of their own agents, a lord general, survive to take command of the crusade. Of course they would.)

Then the players unmasked the Dark Eldar cabal's part in the plot, putting a stop to the torment of Ebongrave. But this happened to late to influence the bigger picture. The gruop also succeded in defeating a large group of Alpha legion chaos marines in establishing the new war zone. Travelling to the celebration they discovered a lost merchant ship in the system where the celebration would take place. Aboard the team found a new group of Alpha legion marines and their captured Tyranid Brood Lords, as well as a few thousand Stigmatrix troops. The Kill-team succeeded in killing everything abourd the ship, thus the Alpha legion could no longer lure the Tyranid fleet to them.

Before this the Inquisition, Deathwatch and Ultramarines on Talasa Prime had decided to intercede in the matter. To avoid letting the crusade fail and thereby exposing the Warp gate to the enemies of the Imperium, 2 companies and a strong fleet of naval warships from the Ultramarines, supported by the Inquisition and the Deathwatch, travelled to the Jericho Reach, led by the Ultramarine chaplain Cassius. They went straight to Aurum where they met with Chapter Master Maclir and got his support to their cause. From there a combined Ultramarines Storm Wardens fleet set course to the celebration. Their goal, to ensure a change in the Reach so even if the crusade failed, the gate would not be unprotected. It turned out that independent of this a Throne Agent of Terra arrived in system with her own agenda (an small fleet). This was a time of high politics.

The players used the fleet from the Ultramarines to fake an Tyranid attack on the system, causing the chaos agents to strike against the crusade leaders at a time of the players own choosing. Despite the presence of a summoned Demon Prince of Nurgle and hordes of demons, the chaos forces lost the battle. At almost the same time the chaos fleet attacked Arkhas, which was exposed and undermanned due to the celebrations, but they were caught between the defenders and reinforcements led by Commander Vycorious aboard the Battleship Belial, that arrived from the Canis salient, ordered there by Ebongrave, who, now still paranoid, had predicted an attack on Arkhas by the Tau (he's supposed to be a brilliant military leader, but his paranoia get in his way making him blame the Tau for most things). The chaos fleet suffered a humiliating defeat.

After this Warmaster Tetrarchus was still alive, but several other key members of the crusade command were gone including most of the chaos infiltrators. Von Karlack were appointed Tetrarchus new next in command and given the day to day leadership of the crusade. The Throne agent brought news from Terra that declared the Jericho Reach now the Jericho sector, and she was the new combined Battle fleet Commander and temporary sector governor. Part of the fleet in the crusade was transferred to start the new sector fleet. Arkhas were prioritized to build up a formidable fleet fortress world that would hopefully cause hivefleet Dagon to turn south and attack the worlds behind the Acheros salient, and the chaos controlled worlds there. A cease fire with the Tau brought a temporary peace to the Canis salient, and the crusade collected its strength to start a new push against the chaos forces in the Acheros salient.

So the reach is now a sector with a Battle fleet and governor holding the Iron Collar and protecting the warp gate. The crusade has collected its resources to one front, the Acheros front vs. chaos, and fortified its borders vs. the Tau and the Tyranids. With the purge the Inquisition is doing among the crusade leadership there will (hopefully) be a leaner and more efficient Imperial presence in the Jericho sector.

Became a longer post than I first thought this, but hopefully some of you enjoyed it.

(Edit: some spelling errors and similar minor matters corrected).