Content by Kai'lore, Written by Kai'lore, Edited by T0nkaTruckDriver
HQ
As per Codex: Tau. A Commander may be accompanied by a battlesuit Bodyguard team. If an Ethereal is taken, the Aun must be accompanied by a Fire Warrior team and be mounted in a Devilfish APC.
Elites
As per Codex: Tau.
Troops
Fire Warrior Teams (1+) must be mounted in Devilfish APCs. Kroot Carnivore Squads are often employed as forward scouts for a Mech Tau Hunter Cadre. In this role, they will infiltrate into the drop zone ahead of the main force and provide valuable reconnaissance and intelligence reports on enemy troop movements and concentration.
Fast Attack
As per Codex: Tau.
Heavy Support
Hammerhead Gunships.
Air Support
Is available on a as per needed basis, and depending on the importance of the mission, a squadron of Barracuda Air Superiority Fighters many be attached to the cadre for the duration of the mission.
So as you can see, it is not all that different from a standard Tau, the major exceptions being mounting the FW's in DF and taking Hammerheads exclusively. It does however, drastically change the dynamic of the army as you now have a very hard hitting force that can move and concentrate all of it's firepower at any point on the battlefield.
The really neat thing about the Tau Army is that the it's designed to fit together and work well as a coherent whole rather than to have any unit that stands completely alone. Imagine the codex as detailing a puzzle where all of the pieces can lock together into as many configurations as you can reasonably imagine, and you're getting close. In our army design, that's what we're going to try to do, in fact: lay out the units with a sense of how they fit in the grand picture.
It is easiest to do this when you think of units in terms of the roles they accomplish on the battlefield. In essence, you can give each unit a Primary and Secondary role in your army list. It becomes child's play then, to match up a unit to the jobs it is designed to do, and then to further match up those units to other units designed to do the same job. As I go through the list, I'll try to highlight each of the roles a unit can do, and give you a sense of how to team them up to accomplish bigger objectives as part of the whole.