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I'm absolutely loving the clowns right now, and it's becoming pretty clear that strictly the "best" way to run them as a take-all-comers type army is as an approximately 50-50 split with either a DE or Eldar allied force using the following basic Harlequin CAD:

3x troupes
2x FA starweavers (if the allied force has units that like open topped transports, such as fire dragons, you can take DT weavers for the troupes and stick 'em in those)
1x Voidweaver with Prism
Loads of Shadowseers because they rock and maybe a Solitaire.

With that understood, I wanted to be more into the clowns, so I set about trying to figure out a good arrangement for the Cegorach's Revenge formation, which is harder than it seems given that besides the DT Starweavers every single unit is decided for you. What do you do with 6 Independent Characters when the best arrangement for all your troop units only allows you to attach one? In addition, what's the most efficient way to cover the Harlequins' weaknesses of over-reliance on leadership vs fearless or sort of fearless armies while also still playing what is definitely a "Harlequin" list rather than "X with Harlequins"?

This is what I came up with.

Harlequin Primary Detachment: Cegorach's Revenge Formation.

Dark Troupe: 5-man, 5x Embraces, Starweaver.

Light Troupe: 5-man, 5x Kisses, Starweaver.

Twilight Troupe: 8-man, 2x Fusion Pistols (one on the TM for BS5)

Skyweavers 1: 3-man, Shuriken and Bola

Skyweavers 2: 3-man, Haywire and Bola (Might consider upgrading these to Glaives with some of the floating points, haven't played around with it yet but Glaives were good at low points values. I just hate the lack of grenades...)

Voidweaver: Prismatic Cannon.

Death Jester 1

Death Jester 2

Death Jester 3

Shadowseer 1: no upgrades, Telepathy Discipline

Shadowseer 2: ML2, Phantasmancy Discipline, Mask of Secrets, Haywire Grenades

Shadowseer 3: ML2, Phantasmancy Discipline, Starmist Raiment

Solitaire

Dark Eldar Allied Detachment

HQ:

Archon, Webway Portal, Haywire Grenades, Armor of Misery, Animus Vitae (yes it's over-situational, but I couldn't resist trying it in one game and got absolutely spectacular results. Over 1000 points gone in the blink of an eye insanity. It stays for now.)

Troops:

9 man Kabalite warrior squad with Splinter Cannon
Dedicated Raider with Splinter Racks

Fast Attack:

5 man Scourges with 4x Heat Lances

Army Configuration

The Light troupe travels with Shadowseer 1, mostly seeking out high-AV targets to shriek and kill with Kisses. The Dark Troupe brings Death Jester 1 in order to try and cause morale checks in their targets so they don't lose Embrace HOW attacks to overwatch. The Twilight troupe drops in with the Archon and Shadowseer 2 and does their darnedest to use either -6LD Animus Vitae shenanigans or 2 melta shots and 2 Haywire grenades to make up as much of their 425 points as possible in a single turn (and they also help the Death Jesters immensely by dropping a -4 LD aura down on the board wherever you want for at least one turn-that causes some serious pain combined with fleeing enemy models directly into the troupe to delete them). Death Jester 2 hangs out with the Kabalites in their Raider, hopping out if he really wants to shoot a different target from the DE or if he wants to secure an objective. Death Jester 3 and Shadowseer 3 form a pair, using her Phantasmancy powers and the Starmist Raiment to screen them from enemy fire while they act as primarily a support team for the Solitaire. The Starmist with the Cegorach reroll makes them a really inconvenient target to try and shoot down especially combined with Veil of Tears, you can pretty much be sure they'll bop around their merry way casting psychic powers and fearing whoever they please while your opponent has to focus on other threats. The Solitaire does his darnedest to get into position for an attack coordinated with the Twilight Troupe's stage cue, as he can be pretty sure there'll be a fleeing infantry unit heading his way that turn he can easily mop up and sweep, and he'd love to present his pseudo-2++ ass as an alternative target for your opponent to increase your deep strikers' odds of survival.


Game experience so far:

Triptide Tau with Buffmander and Missilesides plus a bunch of fire warriors and pathfinders behind an aegis line, and one hammerhead with the character dude running it. Camelpask, whoever.

In this game, we learned that almost nothing the Tau have is fearless. Imagine my happiness! The first turn, I lose most of the Dark troupe to the missilesides, but the illusion launchers perform incredibly well against the Ion Cannons of the Riptides. What's a Markerlight? That's cute. The Twilight Troupe shows up right on cue and between the Animus Vitae, the Shadowseer's Laugh of Sorrows, and the two fusion pistols the whole buffmander squad is wiped off the face of the earth and a Riptide is left with 1 wound remaining. The Fire Warrior squads, in Mask of Secrets but not AV or AoM range, are unscathed until the death Jesters open up, causing both squads to fail LD 4 checks. One squad gets swept by the solitaire. The Raider finishes off the wounded riptide, the voidweaver takes a sizable chunk out of the now exposed fire warriors with its large blast profile, and everything else is now up and ready to be in the face of the remainder of my opponent's army. The Twilight Troupe gets vaporized by Riptides, but the Hammerhead takes a swing and a miss against the remaining starweaver, extremely lucky because he would've ignored cover with markerlights. Fire Warriors rally and kill 1 skyweaver with double taps. The next turn, pretty much everything is in melee, and the only Riptide who is not I manage to cast the reverse invisibility Phantasmancy power on. My opponent concedes.

Tyranids with a huge horde of gribblies, several Dakka carnifexes, a tervigon, two psychic tyranid brain-bug things, and two flyrants along with a couple spore pods.

This was the game the Animus Vitae secured my everlasting love and affection. Turn 1 I manage to kill one brain-bug and put one wound on the other. I had Mirror of Minds on my twilight troupe shadowseer so I figured my best bet was since he didn't have a ton of Synapse I could maybe kill the ground based-bugs and force the flyrants to play Farmer Joe for the gribbly horde instead of spending their time tabling me. Turn one though, my opponent got pretty cocky and flew his tyrants straight forward the max distance to claim objectives he'd drawn, leaving most of the horde in synapse range of just the tervigon and remaining brainbug. He blows away both my starweavers, killing most of the troupes inside. Top of turn 2 both my deep strikers came in, and the Scourges manage to pick off the brainbug while the twilight troupe mirror of mind's the tervigon to death, and with the last remaining die gets Veil of Tears up as well. Leaving the bulk of the army out of synapse range and no longer fearless. The AV takes out an enormous chunk of all the gribblies, and every single one of them ends up fleeing due to 25% casualties. The fusion pistols and kabalites account for a Carnifex, and my unit of Haywire skyweavers manage to get stuck in with the Biovores as they have nothing to Haywire. On my opponent's turn, chaos engulfs the Tyranid battle line as the LD debuffs affect his Instinctive Behavior and Rally checks, sending most of the swarm out of threat range and leaving the Carnifexes pretty useless. Both Flyrants turn 90 degrees to try and kill the Twilight troupe, but he deploys his spore pods to secure the objectives he's got this turn and they're out of range to hurt the troupe. Both flyrants fail the Veil check to shoot, leaving my opponent extremely frustrated and the Twilight troupe still somehow alive. On my turn, I figure I might as well try to use what I got to harm a flyrant, and I move the remains of light troupe and the Solitaire within range, and double tap him with the splinterboys to try and get a ground check. I cause two wounds (hooray for poison 4+) and he fails the ground check. Only the shadowseer survives the overwatch from Light troupe, but she and the Solitaire manage to finish off the flyrant in melee. At that point, my opponent being frustrated with his dice rolling concedes. Which was kind lucky because I probably would have still lost the game to objectives, he was fairly ahead and most of my objective secured stuff was toast. Still, the list did loads better than I expected against what I thought would be an auto-loss matchup given Tyranids' usual resilience against leadership shenanigans. I did mostly lose due to misplays by my opponent's moves with the flyrants though, so take the game with a grain of salt.