Saturday, July 20, 2013

Tau Farsight Review

I got sucked in. I bought an electronic codex.. because it was easy. An impulse buy. I don't own any Tau, probably never will. I might run a "battle suit army", but that's very unlikely. I'm more likely to run Necron... anyway

It turns out it this codex is quite good. I thought Iyanden was a bit light on, not worth the money. But farsight is pretty good, plenty of material. Colour me impressed GW.

So a synopsis of "Farsight Enclaves- A Codex Tau Empire Supplement"
First I think this is a supplement in the same sense as a sports supplement. You don't need it to play and it might make you more competitive.
It does scratch an itch of only fielding "Mecha" style suits that has been floating around for awhile. Your Elite X88 suits are now troops.
I think this army will be a bit more rock-paper-scissor. IF you bring Str 6 AP 3 or cheap poisoned weapons in spades this army could collapse in short order. One of the interesting things is that the vanilla suits are only 22 points but doesn't come with weapons- giving them plasma and a flamer hits you for 43 points- as much as deathwing terminators but without the melee or 2+ armour.. and str 5 doesn't mean a lot if you are WS2 and without a close combat weapon.
Their advantage over terminators is that they are jump-pack infantry. They can move around a lot. And you can upgrade them to have everything from 4+ invulnerable saves to skyfire
So I think you field (5 units of) them because you have to as scoring units, make them reasonably tough, keep them mobile, use cover and let the riptides bring the pain.
Interestingly there is lots of detail on "cities of death" and "planetstrike" addons as well as Altar of Tau ..err sorry Battle missions. I thought Cities of Death was dead as a thing. It's 4th edition right? Planetstrike is a bit more recent..like 2009... anyway, it's 5th edition.  Needs an update I say.
There are also a bunch of new bits of war gear and special characters. Special in the sense of, you can't change them, so like "special bus" rather than "very special". If you find one of the "one click purchase" units fits exactly what you need, that's great, because- no discount! Otherwise steer clear. I do like the fluffyness however.
There are also a "nice pics" and "cool story bro" sections.


No comments:

Post a Comment