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I'm a Tau player and I was thinking about expanding my army quite a bit. I heard that with the rules in the Farsight Codex Supplement you can take Battlesuits as Troops and other cool things like that. However, it's priced at about $50 if I remember correctly, and I don't want to spend that much on something if the rules aren't useful. Is buying the Farsight Codex Supplement worth it?

It comes with the best gear ever, Re-rolls to Novacharge

If you want Crisis Suits as troops it's worth it.

The rules are quite simplistic....and very few.

Do a few google searches and you should be able to find various reviews of the rules for you to decide yourself.

I personally, was not going to buy it, but I got lucky and received a copy for my birthday for a friend.

I can say....it was totally awesome. I should have bought it months earlier.

The story in it is really cool if you love tau, and the lists are a total blast. I REALLY love having crisis suits as troops....(there are downsides...be careful of low model count scoring units) but its TONS of fun.

I highly recommend the book.

Thanks everyone! These comments have been really helpful.

Fluff wise I hear it's good, but haven't gotten around to reading it all yet.

Rule wise, I honestly think not. The main differences is you have the bonding tax army wide, trade the very good standard wargear for 2-3 expensive items, and taking Crisis suits as troops.

Really that could have been summed up within 2 pages in the actual codex, but I'll avoid ranting at that.

My biggest issue with supplement is you have to take the bonding ritual on every unit, which is cheap but starts to stack up. However the ritual really acts as a tax on Crisis suits. There is literally no benefit ever to taking a bonding knife on a unit that can never drop below 25%.

Basically its an epic bit of fluff telling us the detailed story behind Farsight, his rise, his schism with the Tau and how the enclaves and he continue to endure.

At the end is a small amount of rules adjustments to Codex Tau Empire to play a more Farsight style force (without having to take Farsight) as well as Cities of Death Stratagems, Planetstrike Strategems and alternate missions that allow you to represent the rise of Farsight better on the tabletop.

If you are a fluff fan, its a must have. If you are after rules, understand that these are adjustments to the Tau rules not unlike Chapter Tactics plus a few items of gear instead of a full on new army list. I personally like the adjustment, but its not for everyone.

If you buy the print version of the Farsight codex, it does not have the appendix at the back of the book. This means you have no point costs/ stats for "The 8".
GWs official answer is "you can point cost them out from the tau codex".

Do you guys think I need to actually buy the Codex, or would it be okay just to play with the Bonding Knife and Battlesuit Troops rules? I honestly don't really want to spend $50 on something if I'm only using it to verify that I can take Battlesuits as Troops.

The basic rules of the book are about 2 to 3 pages. Applying a little effort, you could probably find out what those are. Most the fluff is probably summarized on one of the three major 40k wikis.

If it was a $20 splat book, I'd say pick it up and add it to your collection. At $50, it just doesn't have the content equivalent to your actual codex. It doesn't even function as a stand-alone game book, as mentioned before. The new characters have to be built from points cost using the core codex.

If you can find it for cheaper or second hand, it's a neat book. But I'd vote no on the $50 codex. If you wanted to run O'Vesa or some of the neat war gear goodies, you'd have to have some rules, but if you intend just to bring Crisis Suit troops, just know that you need one squad of three suits and bonding knives. And you can't bring the other named characters, but you can still bring an Ethereal for some puzzling reason.

If you have the core Tau codex for points and then use battlescribe for Tau/Farsight, you should be able to piece together all the pertinent details. Battlescribe is a widely available free army builder. It's really something GW should be looking at, buying out the rights from the developer, and making a "legit" thing. It's a bit like the Warmachine Game Room app.

 Savageconvoy wrote:
Fluff wise I hear it's good, but haven't gotten around to reading it all yet.

Rule wise, I honestly think not. The main differences is you have the bonding tax army wide, trade the very good standard wargear for 2-3 expensive items, and taking Crisis suits as troops.

Really that could have been summed up within 2 pages in the actual codex, but I'll avoid ranting at that.

My biggest issue with supplement is you have to take the bonding ritual on every unit, which is cheap but starts to stack up. However the ritual really acts as a tax on Crisis suits. There is literally no benefit ever to taking a bonding knife on a unit that can never drop below 25%.

They can drop below 25% if they take drones.

And really when you're using Crisis teams to hold objectives and as your main source of dakka (such as in a Farsight list) having some ablative wounds to preserve your firepower is kinda useful.