Commander Farsight...

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**QuietOrkmi**

Why is it that I never hear anything about commander Farsight... Is he sooo bad that people pretend he does not exist?

**agnosto**

There are several discussion threads regarding the, "Farsight Bomb". Are you talking about Shadowsun? Now, she sucks.

**Lord Rogukiel**

Farsight is a unique character with a unique fighting style.

I think he's generally quite hard to use with Tau armies.

Shadowsun... no comments

**Rube**

Farsight gives a boost to your CC ability, at the cost of locking all the Tau CC specialists from your list. Yeah.

I think his only real use is a rather gimmicky 'deepstrike 8 Battlesuits accurately on the enemy' thing. A deathstar that can unleash a hell of a lot of fire power on the turn it lands but has all the resilience of 8 MEQS with 2 wounds each (besides Farsight's 4 wounds).

**rogueeyes**

Rube wrote:Farsight gives a boost to your CC ability, at the cost of locking all the Tau CC specialists from your list. Yeah.

I think his only real use is a rather gimmicky 'deepstrike 8 Battlesuits accurately on the enemy' thing. A deathstar that can unleash a hell of a lot of fire power on the turn it lands but has all the resilience of 8 MEQS with 2 wounds each (besides Farsight's 4 wounds).

Unless you deck out each crisis suit with shield drones. Now you're talking about having close to or over half your army in a single unit or so. I've priced out different farsight bomb squads and had one around 1000 points. Take that Terminators in a land raider!

**Dashofpepper**

Not to mention having target locks, so you can pop multiple land raiders, multiple TEQ squads...multiple vehicles in a single shooting turn from one unit.

I think the best performance I've ever given was against orks (ironically).

I deep-struck the unit (I think it had 12 drones that were a combination of shield and markerlight) right in front of the advancing ork army.

In one shooting phase:

1. Pathfinders lit up a battlewagon with 5 meganobs and a KFF in it, Railgun exploded it.

2. Farsight's unit declared nobs inside to be primary target; and target locked the battlewagon next door.

4. Farsight and friends drop three network markerlight hits onto the nobs from drones; two hit. Three firewarrior squads reach out and place two more between them from the handheld markerlights.

5. Farsight's unit declares -2 to meganob cover save and +2 to its BS.

3. Angling gives side armor to a fusion blaster, which explodes a second battlewagon, killing 5/20 orks inside.

4. The rest of the suits (including farsight) drop fusion and rapid fire plasma into 5 meganobs and KFF needing 2+ to hit, 2+ to wound, and three of the shots being instant death. He loses the whole unit.

5. For my assault move, I jumped into the crater of his battlewagon with several models to force an assault into terrain.

*sigh* Ah, the fun times.

**QuietOrkmi**

Could you give me the load out of that unit?

**StarHunter25**

From my experience with him, he has yet to lose in close combat. 90% of the time he kills about 5x his point cost in CC, then gets shot by the entire enemy army because they realize how dangerous he is. He can cut a landraider in half. He is well worth the 170 points he costs, and makes bonding knives free!!!
He deprives you of kroot which most people don't like, and makes everything but fire warriors, crisis suits, and gun drones 0-1.

This has been a great boon to me, as I've only ever fielded the enclave as my army. Thus, I know how everything in my armory, save auxiliaries and ethereals work. Sniper drones are suprisingly deadly, when you remmeber to put them on the table

**QuietOrkmi**

Sounds fun...

**Cohocat**

Now if you only want ONE Hammerhead and ONE PF Squad and ONE Skyray, go right ahead. But I do not think, at ALL, he is worth the points.

**QuietOrkmi**

Is the optimal number of bodyguards 7 or is it less?

**The Cry of the Wind**

If anyone has more info about this unit or this kind of army, Id love to hear more. I want to try some Tau that dont TOTALLY rely on the JSJ business (with the obvious exception of the 8 man crisis suit unit of death)

Ideas, feedback, is this even worthwhile?

Thanks!
T-

***apologies if this is really old, Ive been offline for sometime now.***

**augustus5**

I'd try to explain the farsight bomb army but I could not do it credit. Anyone wanting to research it some more should look up some of dashofpepper's old threads on the subject. He posted prolifically in the past about tau gunlines and the merits of farsight. When I did play tau, I learned alot from his posts.

**whitedragon**

The Farsight Council (known called the Farsight Bomb apparently for some reason) is built around Farsight and a max unit of bodyguards with drones, and the bodyguards all take target locks with whatever weapons they want and one suit with a failsafe detonator.

Another Suit is used as a Monat (or can be a Shas'el, Shas'O). This suit's job is to use a positional relay to either delay when the farsight council shows up (when playing a deepstriking enemy for example) or to ensure they show up right away (against gun lines or mobile enemies situationally).

The strength in the large farsight unit is that hits/wounds can be allocated against shield drones, which makes about 12-14 wounds before suits start taking saves. In close combat, most enemies will fall before the large number of S5 suit attacks and farsight's own Dawnblade, and in a situation where you can't win, you can pop the failsafe detonator to get away.

Sprinkle in whatever else you want, and it can be alot of fun and can catch alot of people by surprise. A unit of 8 target locked suits can do pretty much whatever they want.

**Trevak Dal**

I've asked this question before too. The Tau army gives players a boat-load of options for customization. Not that Space Marines and such don't have those options, but Tau actually have the bits to do it without extensive conversion that are largely included with every crisis suit and broadside you buy.

That said, the answer I got was that many players latched onto the the fact that they were making "their" commander (even if said commander was either a Helios (Plasma rifle, Fusion Blaster multi tracker) or a Fireknife (plasma rifle, misslepod multi tracker) or some variation of "shield'o" or "ninja'O". Farsight emphasized close quarters combat in an army which should avoid all close combat if possible and is expensive as heck for what he does.

For that matter, all of the Tau special characters are sub-par in comparison to say, the newest codexes that have come out.

However, Farsight, using the 'farsight bomb' can be a very fun unit to play, and is probabally the closest the Tau have to a Hammer unit, though they do it by shooting rather than by direct assault. It allows you to have crap-tons of suits with a limit on your FOC. Though honestly, not many people use more than one pathfinder team. Its when you get to the heavy support that you feel the pain.

Free bonding knives are cool, but you still have to have someone with 'access' to wargear, so you still have to buy shas'uis and team leaders and such.

I pretty much play a farsight list...except that I am quite reliant upon Kroot. I really like Kroot, they are excellent for bushwhacking enemies after they have been shot up. Maybe if Farsight could take gue'vesa troops to counter the lack of Kroot...

**augustus5**

If I remember correctly, when using Farsight you cant take kroot, etherials, or vespid.

**dbsamurai**

Personally, I've found it's best to field him as a "basic commander with bodyguard" who happens to be a god in CC (comparatively) because you can get more suits for less even with a normal list (I have one i call Warmachine in honor of all the battlesuit weilders with shoulder mounted rapid fire weapons it has) So i've found he's for when you want to sink your points into one unit that ROCKS at CC rather than several larger units that are so so (Kroot im lookin at you

) also I've found its a vile trick to equip a guard with the detonation system, and that way god forbid he should lose, he can use his slightly higher than tau Initiative to break off and he can spend a suit to zap those

ers and get away. Plus you don't lose that much. (by that I mean: if you're willing to play him it means you're willing to tailor your army a certain way. As such mentally you have already accepted that the units you can't use are worth losing) and some of them are *CoughSkyraycough* plus you can still field four railguns (hammerhead and three broadsides) and up to five fusion guns (on a full 5 unit piranha squad) which are, on their own 1000pts, so you're not really losing anything, simply changing your play style to a more mobile army rather than a more durable one (which can also be mitigated thru shield and gun drones providing extra wounds and invulns)

**Trevak Dal**

augustus5 wrote:If I remember correctly, when using Farsight you cant take kroot, etherials, or vespid.

Indeed, I'm sorry I was unclear. I meant that the list I normally use parallels with a Farsight FOC; heavy on crisis suits, 1 unit of pathfinders, 1 unit of pihranans, 1 railhead, 1 broadside team. I always have kroot, sometimes have vespid or drones.

Sometimes I whammy out a railhead and an ionhead with broadsides. I've never used my skyray before...

As I said, I've grown kroot dependent. I also really like how the Tau are alot like the Covenant, where each and every species is a cog in the warmachine. I've only played Farsight proper once (to be clear, when I'm running a 'normal' tau list, I don't use farsight, all the bits are magnetized so that I can use my Shas'O as farsight, or whatever. I can make him a broadside if need be) The only units I haven't tried using are Sniper Drone Teams (I've converted some from the bits I got), Aun'Va (I don't see myself ever using him...) and Shadowsun. I really like shadowsun's model, and I'm planning to use here next game I get to play (after I paint it ofcourse). The only ethereal I play with (if ever) is Aun'Shi (cause all other ethereals are lacking) but thats mostly in friendly games. Most often though I go with 2 commanders, and bodyguards for both, usually one team dedicated Bladestorms (PR/BC shield drones and Target arrays where applicable) the other either Fireknives (PR/MP shield drones and Target Arrays) or Helios (PR/FB shield drones and Target Arrays)

If I'm hunting vampires, or zombies or blokes in Arnie Armor, I stick with Helios to holy water and fire swirlie. My cadre is way into hunting. We got a couple of Avatars, Warriors, One Eyes and Wolflords tacked up on the bulkhead. Whats left of them.

**Tonytiger89**

In my opinion as a long time Tauist. Farsight is very good to a maximum of 2000 points, because I find at this level I rarely want to take any more of the restricted units. Not to mention as a character I find him to be very good. Better than Shadowsun and much better than '3+ cover save HAHA!! oh dear me he's got into combat now my 205 point model is dead' Aun'va

**willydstyle**

An effective Tau army includes at least two units of Kroot for blocking. Farsight restricts this, preventing you from making a competitive list.