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wows, i've not been on dakka in months and torgoch puts a very valid point up just before i come. its odd, like the time we both posted the near-identical farsight lists at the same time, independantly (although mine was better)

anyway i've been playing with this list recently, against GT-finalist standard players & their tournament armies:

farsight - 170
bodyguard, AFP, flamer, 2 shield drones, multitracker, targetlock (99)
bodyguard, plasma, fusion, 2 shield drones, target array, targetlock (117)
bodyguard, plasma, fusion, 2 shield drones, target array, targetlock (117)
bodyguard, fireknife, 2 shield drones, target array, targetlock (117)
bodyguard, fireknife, 2 shield drones, target array (112)
bodyguard, fireknife, 2 shield drones, target array (112)
bodyguard, fireknife, 2 shield drones, target array, failsafe detonator (127)

(bodyguard total: 801
farsight unit total: 971)

shas'el, plasma, fusion, BS5 - 97
1 elite deathrain, BSF - 46
6 firewarriors with score cards - 60
6 firewarriors with deck chairs - 60
BS4 fusion piranha - 70
2 broadsides, ASS, 2 shield drones, bonded - 195

1499

its extremely powerful. i took it to toy soldier V recently, and didn't do so well. main reasons was;
-2 of 5 games at alpha level, and this army struggles with numbers of scoring units (and with cleanse)
-1850 rather than 1500 means its possible for farsight to get ground down easier, at 1500 he just overwhelms everything

there's several things that make the army work:
-the brutality of mass crisis suits at point blank range
-14 pooled shield drones to get through before you start affecting the damage output. this is almost impossible before farsight has broken the enemy into bits.
-targetlocks, so you can destroy multiple units a turn with farsight, so you don't over-kill too much
-failsafe detonator, so you can't get swept in combat (and the LD10 helps too)
-the broadsides work really well, they get ignored mostly in favour of shooting farsight, so the 'sides have a great game


with this army at 1500, i've beat a drop pod army (7 pods, inc. 2x librarians with fear) by a huge margin, i spanked sisters silly, i've killed a death company in combat without even going below half strength, etc etcs.
my gaming group, who are pretty tournament-hardcore, are learning to fear the wrath of commander farsight.

a few caveats. you need to play it very well. the harder you push forwards, the more aggressive you are, the more damage you get from the unit. but you can't make mistakes.
also because the unit is so huge (22 models, on large or flying bases) then it becomes very difficult to manage it properly when moving around

it's much harder to get the most out of this army, normal/mech/battlesuit whatever other types of tau seem simple in comparison.

the things the army fears are drop pods, like all tau.
but the lack of mobile railguns means it also fears stature/speed/dreadaxe prince, and indirect ordnance. these are huge threats to the unit, and potentially very difficult to kill without the mobile rails. i'm attempting to compensate with the fusions on the piranha and on the deepstrike-able shas'el, but its still requires caution to deal with them.


you know, i think the positional relay on the shas'el might be worth 1 shield drone from farsight. its crucial that farsight isn't on the table when the pods fall, especially the librarian pods
but i can only think of a few specific situations it'd be needed:

drop pods in gamma with the shas'el deploying on the table (but he'd probably get targetted as i can't protect him)
drop pods in gamma with the shas'el deepstriking and turning up before farsight
drop pods in omega with the shas'el turning up before farsight

(same for all-drop-troop guard or lysander etcs as well)

in all of those situations, it'd be possible that you get lucky and farsight will just turned up AFTER the drop pods anyway

and its also possible, that because i only make 4 reserves rolls anyway that i have already brought on all my others and am then forced to select farsight's unit as the only remaining unit to 2+ for.

hmm those situations above are fairly specific, it should be possible to maths this out...

assumptions:
1 tau army has 4 units rolling up from reserve: farsight, the shas'el (with the p.relay) and 2 others of no consequence (piranha and deathrain)
2 the enemy army has 1 crucial unit that must be avoided (librarian with fear)
3 shas'el doesn't get killed by the enemy, ie. can be protected until needed

unmodified chances of having turned up from reserve:
turn 2, you have a 1/2 chance of having turned up from reserve
turn 3, you have a 5/6 chance ^
turn 4, you have a 35/36 chance ^
turn 5, you have a 215/216 chance ^
turn 6, you have a 1295/1296 chance ^

unmodified chances of a specific one of your units having turned up from reserve before a specific one of the enemy units, if you go first: gnnn i can't do this math, i think its 30% but i am struggling with my maths not being good enough

edit: turns out i was doing it right, and it was 29.95%, but if you include farsight turning up on later turns than the librarian, ie on turn 4 after the librarian turns up on turn 2, it becomes 39.52%.

so obviously getting to not go first is going to be the major factor there. but positional relay, hmm.

You need the Hammerhead - unless he gets feared off the board his survival is guaranteed for 1 drop.

Plus the Hammerhead whould help against chaos. I think a list without one mobile railgun will struggle killing the speeded demon prince.

I could be wrong it's been a while since I read the Tau Empire book, but do you need the Postional relay to be on the table to use it? I was under the impression you did not (IE it could be on a Deep striking unit). Also, I was under the impression that you needed something to drop in each turn to get the "+2 for one unit and no other units deep strike" effect, other wise you using normal deep striking rules. I figured that Drone squads fit this bill rather well, as they are cheap and can use Pinning aginst any none MEQ army. Over all I think a list with Postional relay and two drone squads to drop eairly should wax any drop pod army or Deamon Bomb. I've only gave it light thought and don't play Tau, so I have no Idea if it's really vaible. If I have anything wrong here, I hope my misinformation is pointed out.

More of a question than a comment.

Tournament cardgamers talk a lot about the "meta-game," referring to the decks likely to be faced in the tournament game itself. Sometimes decks that aren't good in a casual environment (Owling Mine and Turbo Stasis) are good simply because they beat what everyone else is doing (control and necropotence respectively in my example above).

Here's my question. Looking at the Chicago GT results, is it possible that pod marines have been outclassed in the current metagame? The only marine player in the top 5 played templars, so you can be darn sure he didn't use fear the darkness. There was one other marine player in the top 10 and one more in the top 20. Considering the popularity of marines, this isn't an incredibly strong showing. If marines (I assume more than a few of them used drop pods) which rely heavily on drop pods are getting regularly beaten by other lists such as demonbomb, than might we expect the drop pod fad to prove just that, a fad?

It is entirely possible this problem will go away on its own (possible spurred on by the new eldar and ork dexes), proof of the manifest destiny of four fingered fury and the greater good!!!

Now, given the expense and time involved with making drop pods this scenario might never play out. A few players might hang onto them for old time sake (I still rhino rush with my BT and it still works!).

Personally, I hate special characters for anything but scenario play, so I won't run O'Shovah in my Tau (even of my list is actually farsight legal)!

Posted By NinjaRay on 08/03/2006 6:06 PM
I could be wrong it's been a while since I read the Tau Empire book, but do you need the Postional relay to be on the table to use it? I was under the impression you did not (IE it could be on a Deep striking unit). Also, I was under the impression that you needed something to drop in each turn to get the "+2 for one unit and no other units deep strike" effect, other wise you using normal deep striking rules.

This is all correct. Look over the original list again, and should find all your points are satisfied.

NinjaRay: "do you need the Postional relay to be on the table to use it? "

yes. and you can only have it on crisis. this makes it rather useless in most situations, but because its so critical to get farsight's mega-unit down AFTER a fear-librarian, that it might be worth taking.

"Also, I was under the impression that you needed something to drop in each turn to get the "+2 for one unit and no other units deep strike" effect"

yes. so if you have a mega-farsight unit, you have only 2-3 other units you can roll for, making it less useful because they might not be in reserve in gamma (eg a skimmer, can't opt to go in reserve like suits which can deepstrike) or they might have already turned up anyway


ninjajuicer:"is it possible that pod marines have been outclassed in the current metagame?"
yea to an extent, pod armies aren't so threatening if you know how to deal with them properly.

and, with FEAR being seemingly less used as well... marines in my area are realising that most armies are fearless / LD10 etc so its not so useful. they're leaning more towards Fury & Veil, because they say veil lets you re-roll all of the dice, not just the one you pick. i'm not so sure about that... but they're using it, and if it counts as 'all dice' then Veil is very powerful.

How has the Flamer AFP worked for you? I'm considering the possibility I have too many missiles in the unit.

love it i do.

most of the time you play MEQ, and then AFP's not going to kill or pin anything.
but, its taken for 3 main reasons:

1- the army has a total specialisation to high-str, low-ap, low volume of shots. the AFP/flamer guy helps immensely with anti-horde if i face nids etc
2- shoot things that are hiding from me, the unit represents my guns all in one place, and if someone tries to sneak up on me i may not be able to shoot them without an indirect gun
3- getting a lot of models under templates before charging, is always good

also:
4- shoot enemy tau that are JSJ'ing, eg. stealths
5- deny cover. so will gut lictors, eldar snipers, kroot, etc


if you have too many missiles, you can directly trade some of them out for fusion. fusion/plasma makes more sense than missile/plasma, and its the same price.
you want to keep mostly fireknife, cos of the range, you need to be able to kill stuff anywhere because the unit is only in 1 place.
but, fusion is good as the unit is so aggressive. you need anti-tank in the unit, its also good against heavy infantry (oblits etc)


you need the unit to be rounded and capable of operating on its own, because the rest of the army is so stripped down it can get wiped out.

also, its good if you have a variety of configurations in the unit, you'll face a variety of armies. if i face chaos, AFP/flamer is pretty useless. so i'd pull him as first suit casuality.
if i faced orks, plasma/fusion isn't so useful, so they'd die first in that game.
(most of the time you don't lose all the drones, but if you do start pulling suits then you can choose which guns are least useful for you at the time)

but, the basis for the unit is always fireknife.

You need the Hammerhead - unless he gets feared off the board his survival is guaranteed for 1 drop.

huh? do you mean to hide the shas'el with pos-relay behind?

Plus the Hammerhead whould help against chaos. I think a list without one mobile railgun will struggle killing the speeded demon prince.

yea the speedprince is a pain. broadside's firepower is crucial though, if you can only afford 1 heavy then you need it to put out as much str10 as possible, and that means broadsides.


plus without any skimmers, there's nothing for anti-tank to do apart from waste their time on 15pt shield drones. this is more important than you might think. the broadsides have a good time and get left alone, but a hammerhead would get targeted more.

here's a batrep summary thing i found from playing against a deathguard army (lol i brutalised him, it was harsh)

Farsight is so badly broken its not true.

For those that haven't been following the discussion elsewhere, I'll give a quick summary:

Its a 960 point HQ, that still scores.
You have to punch through 14 shield drones to get to the crisis suits.
Thats a majority save of +3 armour & +4 inv.
It can target multiple units with shooting.
Assault troops get bogged down, then chewed through, due to sheer volume of attacks, and farsights own 4x S5 power weapon attacks.
Its backed up by rail and missile suits elsewere, along with minimum sized firewarrior squads.
Its tournament legal.

How I fared:

Farsight massacred me. I tried to use my standard anti-Tau tactics, I surrounded them, tanks and rhino to the fore, defiler hung back, and 2 units of infil behind, nicely encircling the entire mess. Unfortunately this is exactly what Pete needed. He sped forwards, taking the suits under the defilers min range, and out of the max range of the infiltrators. The Pred, rhino, nurglings vanished pretty much instantly. The rhino squad got entangled, and 2 untis of PBs only tarpitted farsight for a couple of turns. The infils, GuO were left slogging back towards my d-zone, and got shot to pieces. The pred des and defiler died on turn 6. I'd only killed 100 points of shield drones, for the loss of my whole army.
I had absolutely horrible luck, anything that could go wrong did. There was some absolutley craptacular rolling. I killed my own troops with ordnance scatter, things died to rot in an improbable fashion, preventing assault etc. etc.

One thing occurs to me... We all keep talking about holding the Farsight unit back to deep strike it, so that it will be safe, but this unit has a pretty big footprint, and it's generally hard enough to keep a normal sized unit from scattering onto terrain without some form of assisting wargear (drop pod, teleport homer, marker beacon).

That raises a question. Do you drop in the place where you can most effectively bring your guns to bear, because heck, you'll be dead anyway if you don't? Or, do you drop in the safest, most open area on the board, in order to protect the hefty investment?

Against armies other than drop pods, I'd be inclined to not run the risk of deep striking at all and just jet across the table normally.

@Spooky

The guy's battle report does admit his tactics were a bit off and he had rank dice rolls. He could do better next time. It's premature to say Farsight is totally broken after a single game.


@Davian

As I understand it, the strategic concept behind the Farsight list is three-fold:

1. It's the only Tau list that has a good chance against Pods.
2. It's better than standard Tau against normal MEq armies thanks to the volume of high-impact firepower.
3. Compared to other Tau armies, it's not bad against non-MEq armies thanks to general volume of fire, mobility, suprising assault capability and being half MEq itself.

If point 2 is particularly valid, we may start to see a lot of Farsight Gundam Wing armies even if Pods fall in popularity. SMs in general are never going away.

I would be interested to hear Torgoch's view on it.

How much impassable terrain do people actually play with if deepstriking is dangerous?

Round here implassable terrain is relatively rare, certainly not more than 2 such terrain pieces on 1 board.

Unless I am wrong, deep striking units are only destroyed if they deepstrike into "impassable terrain," not difficult terrain.
As vsurma just wrote most gaming groups I've seen don't use much impassable terrain, though there will inevitably be scatters into difficult terrain.

As I read the rules, there is no intrinisc drawback to deepstriking onto difficult terrain unless you are jump infantry. As jump infantry, the crisis suits will only die on a roll of 6 and farsight will only go down on snake eyes. If I am reading the rules correctly, I wouldn't worry too much.

Yeah, I went back and double checked the rule. Open mouth, insert foot, etc. There goes any credibility I may have had.

As jump infantry, the crisis suits will only die on a roll of 6 and farsight will only go down on snake eyes.

Actually, they'd only take a wound; since suits have 2 wounds to start, they can even land in difficult terrain on purpose and still be hunky-dory.

I'm thinking perhaps there was a penalty back in 3rd ed as this seems to be one of the most commonly mistaken rules.

Davian:
oh yea you'd never want to deepstrike farsight normally. the unit is huge! its far too big a risk. if it dies, you're totally screwed, as thats your army gone.

but against pods, there's less risk because they're off the board themselves so there's more space available, and also it's crucial that you drop after them, because whoever arrives first gets shot at first.

the only time you should deepstrike such a huge stupid unit is against all-drop pod, or all-drop troop armies.


and as for the placement, well i'd go 12" from a table edge, 12" from a enemy unit. and try and get some shots off. you can still shoot full range with all the guns so its better to be cautious and ensure you land safely, as a priority over getting rapid fire plasma.

Kilkrazy:
yea the guy had really bad luck in that game, and was surprised when i steam rolled him with very aggressive crisis suits.

i don't think his tactics where that bad, apart from infiltrating in my back quarter was a waste. it meant i wasn't as pincered between indirect ordnance and the rest of his army.
the worst situation for farsight's unit is to be trapped, indirect ordnance's minrange cap meaning i need to be within 36" of one quarter of the board, and the rest of the enemy sitting in front of it ready to punish me for getting close. he wasted that a bit by putting the infiltrators behind me.

1. It's the only Tau list that has a good chance against Pods.
2. It's better than standard Tau against normal MEq armies thanks to the volume of high-impact firepower.
3. Compared to other Tau armies, it's not bad against non-MEq armies thanks to general volume of fire, mobility, suprising assault capability and being half MEq itself.

1- no, tau can get draws against pods. you deepstrike everything, disperse the rest, hope for escalation, choice of first turn, and a mission you can out-score him on. i've beaten several pure drop pod armies with non-farsight tau. it's easier at 1500 than in larger games though.

2- again, not really. on paper its got similar firepower as my normal list, slightly less, and less anti-tank.
on the other hand, you tend to be closer more often, so can rapid fire plasma more often than in a normal tau army, which makes a lot of difference.
it does kill infantry well though, not just because of the firepower, but because you can charge as well as shoot.


3- no. normal tau armies have better volume of fire, this farsight is almost completely specialised to high-ap, few shots. in normal tau, you have more stealth, kroot, submuntions, etc.
farsight is purely anti-meq, and if you face a horde you'd struggle (you can't even skimmer-block them)



if you deepstrike a jetpack into terrain you take a terrain check and lose a wound on a 1. if farsight drops into terrain, thats 22 checks, 3.6 dead drones on impact. not good.

here's some summary batreps from when i was developing anti-drop pod tactics, using the old codex. (2 shas'els, 14 stealths, 3 railheads, 20 kroot, 10 FW in fish)
the full article is here:
http://www.advancedtautactica.com/viewtopic.php?t=201 and here http://www.dakkadakka.com/Default.aspx?tabid=93&forumid=18&tpage=1&view=Topic&postid=32334

(i think new crisis based tau would fare better actually, rather than my old stealth based army. it'd kill the dreads & speeders & termies faster, and shield drones help more than the stealth field when they drop right next to you.)

Game 1: (john)
1 librarian pod, 1 tac squad pod, 1 dread pod. 2 razorbacks, vindicator, 3 speeders.
Omega Recon, His First Turn

Draw. we only had time for 5 turns, and I had 400+ pts of scoring units sitting just outside his recon score zone, I think I would have won if we played full length game.


Game 2: (chris)
5 power armour pods, 3 speeders, librarian with Fear & Fury. all squads have apocathery and 2 specials.
Gamma Seek and Destroy, My First Turn

Massacred. brutal.


Game 3: (lee)
5 power armour pods, 3 speeders, librarian but no Fear & Fury.
Gamma Take and Hold, My First Turn

Draw. he killed slightly more than me, I scored slightly more than him.


Game 4: (jimmy)
3 tac squad pods, 2 Dread pods, 1 Termy Librarian Fear & Fury pod. 3 speeders.
Gamma Recon, My First Turn

Draw. again he killed slightly more than me, I scored slightly more than him.


Game 5: (ade)
Space Wolves, ven.dread in pod, termy lord in pod, 2 power armour squads in pods, 6 speeders
Omega Secure and Control, My First Turn

Minor Victory! we tied on loot counter scoring, and I killed about 300 more than he did

Eldar are gonna mess you up

I don't really think eldar are that scary against farsight. Farsight's unit has really swinging odds of killing falcons if they've got enough missile pods (and they should almost all be fireknives).

And 3 falcons firing for 3 turns will just barely get done killing the drones. And you don't have any units that can reliably beat them in assault even assuming they don't kill you first with shooting (farsight is only about half the army!).

i want to ask a little question to spooky:

- How do you use the Farsight council against say a shooty smurf?

I think this unit is too big to effectively JSJ and you have to find many targets to repay the huge point cost of this unit...
Do you start running on the open board? I think you will take a lot of pain...what do you do in this case?

meh fear shmear

my tau don't fear s$&t when they are inside thier fish.......which they always are. >

 

so take youur podding glancing only shots on my FOF, if you don't get lucky on the glance your footsloggers will be chasing me for the rest of the game. 8)

@ mughi3:
...

@ Aglim:
yea you always start on the table unless facing a pure deepstrike/pod army, run forwards, rapid fire and charge them

the unit is to big to properly JSJ, but you can use terrain to try and cut down LOS to your unit from as much of the enemy as possible

in the first turn you can shoot all your guns at full range, then second turn you can rapid fire, then you can rapid fire and charge in the 3rd turn.
you can split your shots out so you can kill 1 unit with most of your shooting, and also kill another unit with the rest of your shooting and the charge in the 3rd turn, this means you only get shot at for 2 turns, and the drones will protect you against that

if you played that aggressively, you need to be very careful with judging the charge. you need to be super careful to not wipe out the enemy and get not enough consolidate distance to hide, but also careful not too ambitious that you get several other units able to pile in and tie you in combat.
if it works, its totally devastating, but you need to play really well, and have the rest of your army supporting farsight (ie the shas'el, maybe use him to charge a nearby unit to hold them up so they cant charge farsight)

if farsight is getting all his shots and attacks in combat, he can kill as many as 20 marines a turn. so it can be brutal. you can't really run up the middle of the table though, you need to just engage 2 units or so at a time which kinda means swinging in slightly at an angle from the side.

basically, farsight can murder static shoot marines, but you have to play really well to get the best results from it.

if you get caught up in combat by too much and more stuff keeps piling in, you're screwed, so you need to play with a margin for error. the finer you cut that margin down, the less room for error you have, the more attacks / shots you will get from farsight, but the more dangerous it is. thats what i like about the list, that and the aggression.

So I tried out this variation on the Farsight list over the weekend and it was a complete disaster. I played two test games, both against the same opponent who fields Slaanesh Chaos.

First game turned into one of those circular games, where I overwhelm the right flank and he the left, so we end up fighting along the length of the table. I was being very aggressive with the large HQ and charged forward, trying to circle correctly. I killed about four Chaos Marines with the unit, then got charged by Daemonettes. Entirely my fault and it could have been a lot worse.

End result is that O'Shovah and his entire unit got chewed up by six Daemonettes.

Second game I played more cautiously and kept to my baseline, using the missile pods solely until the enemy was in range. The result wasn't very different. This time I got charged by Daemonettes and his tooled-up HQ and got slaughtered.

Both games we called early, Game #1 at the end of Turn #3, Game #2 at the end of Turn #4.

Things I learnt:

1. It's incredibly tricky to keep the unit from getting charged and somehow to figure out the best way to charge with such a large, cumbersome and (most importantly) expensive unit.

2. You either have to go after weakened foes with I4 or worse (which isn't easy against Slaanesh Chaos unfortunately) or remain in cover (again, not easy on most boards due to the size of the unit). You have to strike first with O'Shovah.

3. The Shield Drones can actually be a pain in the arse. They make moving the unit more tricky as you have to keep them with the Crisis Suits and in the right place. In addition, when you're being attacked they lower your WS to 2.

4. O'Shovah not being an IC is a hindrance, as it means although he's WS5 he gets hit as though he's WS2. Not good.

5. The mass of firepower isn't as effective as it looks on paper. I had some bad luck in both games (although my opponent did too) but things average out - even so, I found it difficult to wipe out a single six-man Chaos Marine Squad. 6 Plasma shots (all at BS4 or better), 8 Missile Pod shots (all at BS4) and the AFP = zippo. Statistically I should have done it easily. But it took me several turns of firing just to kill the four men I did, and I was rolling averae overall.

6. I'm not sure how I feel about the AFP. Reducing my chances of hitting from 66% or 50% to 33% or less isn't great. Maybe it will do better against a horde (non-MEQ) army. I'll give it another chance.



I'll be attending a big tournament in the early part of October with the list. If anyone's interested I'll post what happened.

New Tau FAQ states that Farsight IS an IC afterall

FYI

Posted By whitedragon on 09/25/2006 8:57 AM
New Tau FAQ states that Farsight IS an IC afterall

FYI

You're right, I missed that entirely.

(Although once again, the FAQ contradicts the Codex, which in turn contradicted the rulebook. 3 different rulings? Way to go, GW!)

How did 6 daemonnettes chew up the unit? Assuming you had some shield drones to absord the rending attacks, the Shasv're and Farsight should've wiped the floor with them.

Something I learned the hard way, you don't necesserily need to wipe out units with your shooting, just hurt them enough that they can't really hurt iyou in assault the next turn.