Tau flechette dischargers rule in squadrons

[pigvomit]

Hello tyranid hive, I am about to return to 40k after a bit of a hiatus, including reading a monster sized main rule book. A friend of mine is going to be my main opponent and he picked Tau as his army (with me playing nids). He has brought up a rule argument he saw on one of his Tau sites about squadrons of piranhas with the entire unit being equipped with Flechete Dischargers.

The rule:
Any model attacking the vehicle in close combat will be wounded on a D6 of 4+, with saves allowed, before resolving its attacks.

The issue is if there are 5 piranhas in a squadron, would each one fire his flechette at each model in the assaulting unit? That would mean if 20 gaunts attacked he would get 100 rolls! My opponent is already convinced that this is how it will work, he is a new Tau/40k player so I am not surprised, but to me it seems like this isn't correct.

Now I am not trying to start a big debate because there are some out there if you google for it, but these debates are a few years old -2008,09,etc- and there must be some consensus by now. I don't want to have the same debate with my friend essentially trying to quote some RAW argument I read online.

What I do want to know is if anyone is familiar with this situation actually happening in any sort of "official" setting like a tournament and how was it resolved?

What is the accepted ruling in the community or at big games such as 'Ard Boys or Gamesday type events.

Thanks for any assistance or experience you can share, I would like to come to an agreement with my friend while I am still building my models, not during our first game, for obvious reasons.

[snowdaman]

tau are one of the armies that i play and i found the rule very strait forward, if you look in the tau rule it says any models attacking the vehicles in close combat. on page 23, of the rule book it tells your that only models in base to base contacts or models that are 2" of a model that is in base to base contact are in combat with the model.

now this is not an official ruling but since each model can;t attack more then one vehicle at at a time and the rule does say attacking it in combat i would say you roll once for all the models in combat with any of the vehicles in the squadron

[gigasnail]

without having the codex in front of me i'd have to say you're just going to be rolling once for each model in b2b. i hate to stick my neck out like that though. have you checked the tau FAQ on GW's website?

[rampagingfex]

This should be a moot point once you look at what Hive Guard do to Pirhannas.

Regardless, I'm not seeing any scenario that those rule wordings would allow any more than one roll per model... It does say "Any model attacking..." and not something like "for every flechette charger in the squadron...". I could see that if it was a Heavy1 or Assault1 weapon, but it's not... it says roll once for every enemy model. What's the argument, that the Tau should get to roll many times to try and wound one attacker? Or that they should just get a stack of dice to wound the entire unit?

-RF

[snowdaman]

What fex said. i think ur friend is confusing "attacking models" with charging units

Sent from my GT-I9100M using proboards

[drakiskier]

I play tau and tyranids, and as i see it, flechettes work like this:

if a model is performing a close combat attack against a vehicle with flechettes, it takes a hit. it does not matter if it if a squadron or if it is a single vehicle, it is based on the # of models performing attacks.

[Anggul]

The only situation where this would happen is if you had a model with multiple attacks which manages to get into base contact with multiple vehicles and splits it's attacks between them all.

[icki]

In 5th Edition, the Vehicle Squadrons section in the BRB stated:
"When engaged in close combat against a squadron, enemy models roll to hit and for armour penetration against the squadron as a whole."

So if you were assaulting one model in a vehicle squadron of five, you also counted as assaulting all the other vehicles in that squadron, even if they were 20 inches away. As far as I can remember it was possible for the assaulting unit to actually damage a whole squadron of vehicles like that, even with that distance between them. It could therefore be deemed fair then that all the Piranhas should be able to retaliate.

Because of this "counting as attacking all other vehicles", RAW would have let the Flechette Dischargers work as the OP described, with every Piranha getting to roll against every gaunt, regardless of the distance between them. That's what all those debates you found will be discussing, but RAW that's how it worked.



In 6th Edition, the wording is different:
"When a squadron is struck in close combat, roll To Hit as normal, and resolve those hits one at a time first against squadron models in base contact, then against models further away, once the closest model has been destroyed, just like normal"

When you assault a squadron, you no longer count as attacking every model in the squadron, which would trigger the effects of all the Flechettes. It is still possible, however, for you as the attacker to actually destroy all the models in the squadron. It's only fair then that all the Piranhas to get a chance to use all their Flechettes in defence?

I would like to say that the the first Piranha that your unit gets base to base with gets to use its Flechettes. Then as soon as you start doing damage against a second Piranha, its Flechettes can be used also, and so on. The unfair thing here is that a Piranha would be taking damage from models that may have been killed had its Flechettes been used earlier. Of course, if all the Flechettes were used at the beginning of the assault instead, you will never know if some of the piranhas would have been taking damage anyway.



So all the old debates you've found will now have been debating the wrong thing, as the issue here is slightly different. However, you need to remember that if your opponent takes a group of five Piranhas, he doesn't want them being assaulted. He's buying Flechette Dischargers for all of them to deter you from assaulting them with large groups of models. That's their job and they do it well. It's hard to call that unfair, although they could cost a few more points.

[rampagingfex]

icki,

Good points. So the issue is really what constitutes "attacking the vehicle in close combat" since that terminology doesn't match with anything in the rules. "Assaulting" the squadron doesn't seem to be enough to trigger it since it specifies "attack in close combat", but once you roll to hit and start generating glances/penetrating hits, you don't know which vehicle is being attacked until after the hits have been resolved and damage rolled. Fascinating. They haven't FAQed this? I imagine, if there is not house rule or TO decision, dice this one off before the game starts?

Like I said in my first post, this should be a moot point if Tyranid player brings any Hive Guard. Anyway, I never really begrudge the Tau player for taking something like this, because if they are taking a bunch of Pirhanna and they are playing against a Tyranid army, they are probably fairly behind in the game anyway. A mobile meltagun just isn't that good in this matchup, and those things have never proven to be resistant to Hive guard (or dakkafexen) to really rate me having to assault them. Maybe my opponents don't take the optimal gear on these units, but i've never seen one affect the game outcome and I've played against them probably 5-6 times now.

-RF

[icki]

Piranhas can be a nuisance. Usually they're best for simply blocking and slowing an opponents unit. This could be a transport that's racing towards the Tau lines to dispatch an assault unit, or in this case, to force a Tyranid unit to walk around the Piranha giving at least another turn of shooting for the Tau. Of course, the easiest solution to that would be to assault the Piranhas, which is why he's taking the Flechettes!

As for the original question, there is no official answer in the Tau FAQ, and no reasonable conclusion I can think of that wouldn't be a house rule. So yes you should contact a TO if applicable or house rule it. Or shoot the damned things.

I recall one of the relatively important GW staff saying at a GamesDay that it works in the way most favouring the Tau, (All Piranhas use their Flechettes against all of a unit, regardless). Of course, that counts for nothing and this would have been in 5th Edition, if at all. I could be making that up since I was a Tau player before Tyranids

[fragile]

It would be resolved singly. Multiple fletchette launchers do not add additional hits.

[Jabberwocky]

It seems fairly simple I think. Any model which is making attacks (i.e. engaged in combat) will suffer a hit before it strikes. Similar to how only models in b2b, including those that move into it, are I1 from lashwhips.

The only confusion could come facing squadrons where only some vehicles had the upgrade. In this case you'd just look for the models who were actually engaged with the flechette vehicles.

[fragile]

In the piranha team, the entire squadron gets upgraded with the fletchette launcher.

[icki]

Dec 25, 2012 8:01:46 GMT Jabberwocky said:

It seems fairly simple I think. Any model which is making attacks (i.e. engaged in combat) will suffer a hit before it strikes. Similar to how only models in b2b, including those that move into it, are I1 from lashwhips.

The only confusion could come facing squadrons where only some vehicles had the upgrade. In this case you'd just look for the models who were actually engaged with the flechette vehicles.

That is the confusion. The OP was talking about an opponent that was looking to take up to 5 Piranhas in a squadron I think.

Like I said before, in 5th, when a unit assaulted a vehicle squadron, every model in the attacking unit counted as being engaged with every model in the squadron. So a unit could attack one Piranha of a squadron of 5, and trigger the Flechettes of every other Piranha in the same squad, no matter how far away they were from each other. This was RAW, but would make little sense in a real context, and so there were cries of cheese and people arguing that it couldn't be right.

In 6th, even RAW is inconclusive. You don't know which vehicles in such a squadron will be engaged until an attacking unit starts rolling for damage against them. So the number of Flechettes that would be used cannot be determined when the rules ask you to. Assuming that every Piranha in a squadron gets to use them wouldn't work, as you wouldn't know if every vehicle would have been engaged had some of the unit not been killed by the Flechettes.

At the moment there appears to be no answer, and this needs to be house ruled.

fragile said:

It would be resolved singly. Multiple fletchette launchers do not add additional hits.

Why?

fragile said:

In the piranha team, the entire squadron gets upgraded with the fletchette launcher.

That's just not true...

...However, that does give an idea for what could be a balanced house rule:

• In a Piranha squadron, every Piranha can 'count as' having Flechette Dischargers, at the cost of just one set.
  
• When a Piranha Squadron is assaulted, only one set of Flechettes can be used, regardless of the number of Piranhas that are initially in base to base contact.
  
• The benefit to the Tau player would be that even if one of the Piranhas gets destroyed, all the other Piranhas still count as having Flechettes.
  

Allows a Tau player to pay just once to upgrade all the Piranhas with Flechettes, (Without this rule, a single Piranha with Flechettes could be singled out and destroyed, taking flechettes from the whole sqaud), and limits the effectiveness of the Flechettes to a reasonable amount.

[fragile]

Your attacking a squadron, which counts as a single unit of vehicles. Any of your models engaged with a squadron of Piranha would get hit by the Flechette Dischargers prior to making their attacks.

That's just not true...

The FAQ says that it is... first page.. ""Piranha Light Skimmer Team, Options... Change the second sentence to “Any model may take any of the following vehicle upgrades: blacksun filter; seeker missiles, targeting array, target lock. The entire squadron may take any of the following vehicle upgrades: decoy launchers, disruption
pod, flechette discharger, sensor spines.”

Note the bold....