Farsight Supllement Befuddlement

Well, the exact wording is "a Farsight Enclaves army cannot include Aun'Va or Shadowsun" (my horribad spelling permitting, I just looked it up, but don't have it infront of me).

So I'd say "No".

There's a weird argument you could make such that you can ally in an Enclave deatchment, but it's quite clear that you couldn't include "The Eight".

If that's right, you could ally in a Commander with the Talisman and a Warscapper drone. However, I'm sure that's stretching it and I'd interpret that as a "No" that if you're list includes a detachment from another book, you're army would be defined as <Primary Detachment>/<Secondary Detachment> and thus, would be a Farsight Enclaves Army.

(Logically, If you're A&B or B&A, your status of B is true in both cases. Replace A with Tau and B with Farsight Enclaves.)

Alrighty. Well I still have quite a few questions left, but honestly I really just needed to know a yes or no response. I'll have to leave specifics out until I can either buy the book when it comes out or take another gander at a digital copy. Thanks Mark.

And  Aegwymourn, the reason why I didn't just ask on the talisman and the drone is because they are just a tiny part of a larger problem and I figured we might as well cover it as a whole rather than running into it peacemeal. That's why I started with the extremes everyone would immediately recognise. Heck, as far as I can tell now, even if your primary detachment is tau you are not allowed to take a command and control node at all in ANY detachment if you ally in Farsight. After all if you are using a farsight enclave army you can't select any signature wargear from the tau book and no commanders come with it (unless that part was changed as well). This whole thing makes my head spin lol.

As for the possibility of Miv just trying to make light of the situation, I may be a little defensive here, but I don't see the second statement he made as being anything but mean spirited.

Also I still haven't found out what kind of drone Brightsword's Warscaper Drone is lol.

Yes you can mix signature systems if you ally in Tau. You just can't take more than one of the same,nor can you have Farsight and Shadowsun.

Like I said, I'm working with an older version of the supplement, but did they change the rule stating that "Any character in your ARMY that may select signature systems may not select from those listed in Codex: Tau Empire, but may instead select from the signature systems of the Farsight Enclaves, at the point costs shown."?

Cause if they haven't changed it uses the exact same wording as divergent destiny for Shadowsun and Aun'va (I.E. "A Farsight Enclaves army cannot include Aun'va or Commander Shadowsun")

Most of my ongoing confusion here stems from the fact that every rule changing the Farsight Enclaves I've seen is any army based rule. So what I'm seeing isn't A+B or B+A, I'm seeing if the Farsight rules do carry over whenever it says "army" as B+B and B+B.

I can see where the confusion for farsight/shadow sun team up comes from, but to tell you the truth Tyson, I don't think it should bethat big a deal. Fluff denies the possibility, and it's about forging that narrative, not including a handful of named characters just for a tactical advantage (that tau really don't need). Look at Tyranid players if you don't believe me, those guys get zero allies!
I think it's fair to say most people would frown seeing shadowsun and farsight in the same army. If farsight is a divergent warlord, then it's like taking luft Huron and sicarius together: Doesn't make sense!
As to suit rules: nope, I doubt very much the suits as troops rule carries over. 
My two pence.

Fluff wise a Farsight Shadowsun combination is in no way shape or form impossible as far as just the two characters are concerned considering that they are now allowed to be taken together. Its simply a matter of playing an army themed from before Farsight left the Tau. Both Farsight and Shadowsun were Commander Puretide's star pupils and pretty much the two strongest Tau currently alive in their entire race. Its been long said that the two of them represent the opposite spectrums on Puretide's teachings. As such I like the idea of putting two halves together into what feels to me to being a Puretide army.

As for their distaste of each other, on any normal day of 40k there wouldn't really be any large chance of them fighting side by side. However I'm not really the type of person who likes playing 40k for a mundane planet pacification in expansion X. I like to play with hero characters specifically because it emphasises more of the crisis, that the scenario is so important that these characters need to work together or the entire fate of the Tau could be at risk. That's the game of 40k that's meaningful and interesting to me.

As for the forging the narrative section itself, that section is specifically referring to allying in two separate books. You seem to have a distaste for me using two characters who are in the same codex and can be legitimately used together. I'm not trying to squeeze Shadowsun and Farsight together using the ally rules. I'm trying to add some flavor and variety (as well as some time saving convenience in the case of the Warscaper Drone lol) to my Shadowsun Farsight list that existed before any of these rules came out. If I want to play super powered all rules destroy everything then Farsight/Shadowsun/Eldrad will accomplish that a lot faster than anything the Farsight Supplement released.

You might have a point Tyson. I'll have to think about it a bit more.

It's still quite clear for the Eight though. The Farsight Enclaves have to be your primary detachment if you're to take any of the Eight.

If it mentions the 8 have to be a primary detachment in the updated rules that's fine. I'm all for it. I was just saying with the rules that were stated and that I've seen there were 3 prerequisites to taking the 8.
1. Take Farsight
2. Make Farsight your Warlord
3. Be playing a Farsight Enclave Army.
The reason why I pointed out taking the 8 with the Tau part of your army was simply because you could take Farsight with the Tau portion of your list rather than the Enclave allies, make him your Warlord, and because theoretically playing with the Enclave as allies makes your entire army count as playing a Farsight Enclave list you would have just made all three of the prerequisites to taking the 8. Not saying its right, just saying it was another potential rules oddity given the information I have available to me.

If you wanted to be really silly, taking the point of view that C:Tau and CS:Farsight are two separate and different things, you could run a Farsight in both.

i really think your playing the wrong game sometimes tyson. the idea that if something isn't implicitly disallowed makes it permissible just doesn't apply to the beer rand pretzels game that GW envisions.

You can't realistically tell me that GW intended for you to blend two books together in that way. I'm all for rules as written in most cases, but sometimes... sometimes you just need to go with rules as intended. the 8 are only intended to be fielded when you take farsight as your warlord in a farsight enclave army taken from the farsight expansion.

and while i'll usually defend folks that get sniped by the troll, i mean Miv. His barb has a grain of truth, i've only played you like 3 times, and every time there was some proxy-laden deathstar of wound allocation shenanigans that could only be deciphered by a flow chart.

I wouldn't mind playing against that, actually, so long as he provides the power point presentation and projector to go along with it.

Lol, this seems to have gotten off of the main point again. I'm gonna see if I can go through this case by case in order to try and avoid any further misunderstandings.

First off, I would sincerely like to apologise if I come off as a rule-munching jackass. I love rules discussions and theoreticals which leads me to talk about things that I would never in my right mind bring to a fair and fun game of 40k unless I knew for certain my opponent was interested in it. I do also realize that I am not without sin and that certain things I've done and been known for have driven people up the wall. Once again, I am sorry. I play this game for fun, and do not have the intention of ruining the good times had by other people either. I don't feel personally that I field too much that's unreasonable (I don't exactly have the greatest win/loss record in the league) but that's more of a discussion for a different thread. Honestly if I was just playing to win I wouldn't have bought 40,000 points worth of models so I could mix and match, I would have just stuck with 2,000 points of the most likely to succeed. But I find that concept to be repetitive and boring.

Also Mike has a point on the proxy thing too. I don't have too much in the way of fully painted armies (especially since the new tau codex came out and changed up my lists again) and I tend to sub out models both because I am a scatterbrain and forget models at home sometimes and because I want to see if I legitimately enjoy playing with some of the more expensive models before I out my hard earned cash towards them. I understand that many people play this game for the modeling aspect and feel like an unprimed proxy army on the table is either an eyesore or belittles the incredible efforts that you guys put into painting up your models. I very much respect your skills and apologise if I offend anybody in this regard as well. And I am trying to make some progress on this front. Slowly I'm getting my models painted and primed, and I've already finished break apart my farsight squad models (even the painted ones  ) to make them reflect what they will be using in 6th ed.

Anyways, now that I got that off my chest, lets get back to the actual discussion here.

Tom: This is the really easy one. Farsight has the Unique rule. This means no matter how many detachments or varied books you bring he can still only be fielded once. Its just a matter of who takes him. Ignoring all of the rules questions brought up in this thread taking Farsight with your Tau side of a Farsight/Tau list is a 100% legitimate option. Not sure what you would gain out of it, just putting it out there.

Mike: Somehow my argument has been flipped around here. I agree that the idea of taking Farsights 8 in a Tau detachment is completely silly. That's actually why I brought it up in the first place. I am saying that using the definition of army to include your whole list results in problems like that. The Farsight Enclave uses the term army for every special rule it put out so that they didn't have to reprint the Tau codex with their altered rules. This is why I personally felt that taking a Farsight Enclave should in no way shape or form affect what happens to your Tau detachment. They should be two separate entities in my mind.

It seems to the more common thought process that army rules and restrictions apply to the whole list be it Tau or Farsight however and I am just pointing out that if you want to go by letter of the law you cannot just pretend that these other rules don't exist. If you say that Farsight cannot ally with Shadowsun because of the army description, then the Tau cannot take their own signature wargear either, they could take crisis troops as troops, they would gain the preferred enemy orks rule and taken to the extreme would allow you to take Farsights 8 given the circumstances I stated before (assuming the change in updated book doesn't disallow it.)

This goes back down to my final point that if the entire books rules (and I do pretty much mean every single one of them minus the "8" rule that I can't confirm or deny until I read it) carry over then in all reality you are not allying Farsight with Tau, but allying Farsight's Enclave with itself which in my mind doesn't fit the mechanics, theme, or intentions of the ally rules.

Not saying that everyone needs to change their minds or that there is no compromise here, I just wanted to clarify my stance because people keep pulling out small sections of it and arguing them out of context. Mark seems to know the most on the subject and I'm honestly happy to say whatever he says on the matter I'm good with.

And P.S. Tom, Sadly I threw out the projector after they fixed look out sir rolls and made wound allocation much simpler so I can't share my wound allocation power point presentation with you anymore  

Way to snipe at the end that all of the clear quotes I provided were taken out of context. Apparently I am "people" now. lol.

Once again, we can house rule however we want, but I believe with the amount of quotes I provided from the rulebook that everything is constituted as "the army". The most important being the quote I supplied about each army having a warlord. Does this mean that GW is good at writing technical rules that they can easily be interpreted? No.

Actually that wasn't directed towards you. You've done a fairly concise job of arguing your opinion on the matter. I'm not referring to people using rules or lines from the book out of context. More to people reading or using what I've said as such. It wasn't really even intended to be a snipe in the first place. Just more referring to things like the 8, which seem to catch peoples attention but not in the context in which I had brought it up. Now it seems like half the argument is about the 8, and they really aren't important in the long run. Just an example.

Darksfear wrote:Like I said, I'm working with an older version of the supplement, but did they change the rule stating that "Any character in your ARMY that may select signature systems may not select from those listed in Codex: Tau Empire, but may instead select from the signature systems of the Farsight Enclaves, at the point costs shown."?

to answer this, the Ecodex still states if using the Farsight expansion, that your ARMY replaces the signature systems in the book with the farsight ones.

and to toss in to all of this discussion;

just because the book doesnt explicitely say something can or cant be done in a certain way, doesn't mean you should try it out on someone and see if you can get away with it. if you're not sure if it should be done just because they never say anywhere that you cant do it, think the following: "if im playing someone and i pull this off, are they gonna go "wtff?!" when they see me do this?" if theres a chance the answer is yes, welllll, maybe you shouldn't try that. unless you both agree to play a cut-throat list against eachother. nothing sucks more than bringing a simple list with models you like in it (which usually means it has shitty rules) and find your facing a tough list

dusktiger wrote:just because the book doesnt explicitely say something can or cant be done in a certain way, doesn't mean you should try it out on someone and see if you can get away with it.  if you're not sure if it should be done just because they never say anywhere that you cant do it...

I believe the entire point of this thread was an attempt to prevent that situation from ever happening, with the goal of coming to a clear and concise local consensus until such a time that GW, in their infinite wisdom, decides that they need to clarify their verbage with an FAQ.

I didn't take more than one type of harbinger per royal court until it was FAQ'd for this very reason.

Tyson: farsight got to arthas moloch, grabbed the dawn blade, and then ran off. So in no way can you say both of them fighting together is fluffy. If you wanted that, you would run a vanilla commander with shadowsun, and call him "young farsight".
You probably shouldnt say you are partly driven by the supporting fluff, as the enclaves are there specifically to show non-empire tau. Not shadowsun, heir to the heroic mantle of puretide, and farsight, humiliating reminder of old tau before the ethereals, holding hands and picking daisies. 
Who are you, Matt Kerr? 
 

I kid, I kid.

But seriously, stick to the rules advantages being your reason, there is zero fluff explanation.

All the above being said.
I've always worked under the impression that primary and secondary detachments were separate lists that had nothing to do with each other aside from the rules provided by the allies matrix. So if i was making a list, i may have come up with theorycraft list that may be illegal or against the rules as intended.

black legion is on its way, how does 4 heldrakes sound? and the farsight + farsight thing came to my mind as well, or in this case, Abbadon Twins?

Aren't all Special Character unique (as Tyson has alluded to above)? That would solve the Abbadon/Farisght twins, etc.

Seriously though, how many times does GW have to say they aren't in the business of writing iron-clad rules. They have repeatedly mentioned that they want the players to police themselves. There won't be an FAQ that addresses the issue because no one at GW HQ would think it's worth wasting time on it. Just like there won't be an FAQ that eliminates a CSM/BL list that takes 4 Helldrakes. Yeah, it's funny to hypothesize about but anyone who did that had better assume he/she won't be making many friends. If a group decides to allow it, so be it, but I'd assume the community as a whole isn't interested in gaming to this effect.

Just my 2 cents, which apparently (according to Rhaevyn) means I'm trolling on these forums despite the fact that I've been playing 40k in this community for almost 20 years and have miraculously formed an opinion or two!

A lot of this comes down to whether or not codices effect each other or not. If they do, then things like double character can't happen, and all kinds of cross book wierdness starts up, like basic Tau not being able to take their own tech because of restrictions imposed by the Farsight Enclave. On the flip side, if they are treated as independent entities who just happen to be in the same list, with rules interactions purely defined by what the Allies Matrix lays out, then double characters can happen, and the presence of one book would have no impact on the capabilities of the other book beyond what ally tier they exist on. It all comes down to whether "army" is supposed to refer to "the list as a whole" or "a detachment from this Codex/Supplement".

Heck, soon we're going to have do deal with the new C:Space Marines where it has the rules for Black Templars in it, but it is treated as a separate army for the purposes of the allies matrix.

I laid out the core queries behind this debate out in an email and fired it off to the GW FAQ team in the hopes to get the attention of somebody who can give us a definitive answer one way or another.

They FAQ'd that a combat knife is a CCW, so you never know.

alot of the tossup on whether it can be done or not, comes down to a fundamental question;  is a Codex supplement its own book? answer; no.  the supplements are expansion packs to the primary codex.  they're not a codex in and of themselves. this is made painstakingly clear when you read one.  they only states to alter this and that rule, these units are treated as this, those cannot be taken, and here's the stats for a new unit introduced by the supplement. and, the big rule book also defines "army" as the fighting force used on the table by one player.

and in parting, i give you supplement, as defined by google:

supplement  
Noun
Something that completes or enhances something else when added to it.
Verb
Add an extra element or amount to: "she tried to supplement her husband's income".
Synonyms
noun.   addition - addendum - appendix - appendage - complement
verb.   complement - complete - eke out - add - replenish

Rhaevyn wrote:All the above being said.
I've always worked under the impression that primary and secondary detachments were separate lists that had nothing to do with each other aside from the rules provided by the allies matrix.  So if i was making a list, i may have come up with theorycraft list that may be illegal or against the rules as intended.

black legion is on its way,  how does 4 heldrakes sound? and the farsight + farsight thing came to my mind as well, or in this case, Abbadon Twins?

You can already take four helldrakes in a normal game of 40k. You only have to take one troop more than you would if you allied it in. I can't see anyone playing four helldrakes in a game under 2000 points anyways.