Fireteam Chart Confusion

1+2) These used to be issues, but I think they resolved them by bringing Army into line with the charts. As far as I know, there aren't currently any discrepancies between the two, so I think you can just rely on what's in Army and not worry about the charts.

3) Looks to me like you're right, there's no reason to take the haris profile. I note he doesn't have that profile in Kosmoflot. They may have just forgotten to remove it from CHA. Maybe there's a use for the profile that we're missing, but more likely it's just a profile to not take.

4) Is there a specific proposed duo you're asking about?

5) I think you're looking at the page for "Types of Fireteam: Duo" vs. the "Fireteam: Duo" skill. The skill is what allows units to form the fireteam. What is the discrepancy you're seeing between the two rules?

 

I actually didn't notice it before, but that IS a bit of odd phrasing for Duo rules which is not repeated for any of the other fireteam types about being from the same unit. However, since the same unit requirement is one of the Basic Rules of fireteams, I sort-of assume it's just a way of re-iterating that portion of the fireteam rules in the first text box describing a specific type of fireteam, and that Duo is otherwise no different than any other fireteam in that respect.

My interpretation has been that you would be able to form a Duo if at least one of the units has the Fireteam: Duo skill, so long as the other one has Wildcard (I interpret Wildcard's definition of falling under the requirement of "combinations of units indicated on their Sectorial Army List" since Wildcard implies too many legal fireteam combinations to actually list out).

I think what you're referring to is the fact that clicking on the link from Infinity Army takes you to the entry for the Fireteam:Duo special skill that is possessed by the trooper. This page describes the rules for the automatic skill, in terms of how it relates to forming a fireteam. The other page describes the Fireteam: Duo itself, so these rules are complementary rather than contradictory. It's a bit easier to understand why they are differentiated like this when you see them laid out in the fireteam rules annex pdf, because book has a section on skills and then a section describing fireteams.

 

The Cadin Haris option only exists in CHA, so I think we have to assume his listing of "Special" on the chart is encompassing of this in addition to Wildcard, even though other unit listings prove that sometimes all fireteam options are properly included on the chart. Other examples of wildcards that don't show correct fireteam options include Fusilier Indigo Richard Quinn (who has Duo only in Sval in addition to Wildcard but only lists Special on the chart), and Shang Ji, listed as Core, Haris, Duo on the WB chart (but NOT Special even though the next page shows it's a Wildcard) among others - it is admittedly inconsistent but I feel like it's more likely that those jpeg lists (which don't get live updated) are incorrect or out of date rather than the army builder.

Whether or not the Duo and Haris options are useful for Cadin is another question, but they are technically functional in a pretty narrow use case: He could use his Duo skill to form a Fireteam with William Wallace or Isobel McGregor (or a Haris with both), since they are wildcards but do not have any named fireteam skills and so cannot form a team on their own.

From a flavor perspective, it feels like Cadin's Haris option is meant to include the rule "Counts as Wulver for fireteam composition", since his very title is "Point Man of the Grenadiers Reg." and giving him Haris allows him to fit in with them... well, if it wasn't made redundant by his Wildcard Status.

So... yeah. It's a bit of a hot mess. There are definitely some fireteam facepalms in every faction.

 

Huh, interesting. I guess they didn't succeed in bringing it fully in line, unfortunately - so it's still necessary to look at the charts.

This one too.

In both cases, the relevant rule is the "Important" box in the "creation of a fireteam" rule, which says that "When creating a Fireteam that includes Wildcard Troopers, the player must include at least one Trooper from the Units listed for that Fireteam in the Sectorial chart, or a Trooper that counts as a member of one of those Units." The effect of that rule is that a fireteam has a base unit type listed in the sectorial chart, and you have to have at least one of those units in the fireteam.

Neither Wallace nor Cadin is listed as a base unit for a Fireteam:Duo in CHA (I don't think characters are ever listed as base units, except "counts as" characters. I agree with @Lawson that Cadin would have made sense as a "counts as a Wulver," but he isn't). So you can't form a "Wallace duo" or a "Cadin duo." Note that the Fireteam:Duo skill doesn't make a unit a base unit for fireteam composition - the Sectorial Army List does, per the Fireteams: Basic Rules - Common Requirements.

You could make, say, a Mormaer duo and replace one of the Mormaers with either Cadin or Wallace since they're wildcards. But you couldn't replace both Mormaers because you have to have at least one of the base unit.

I don't think that's correct. Wallace, Cadin, and Isobel aren't base units for Fireteam:Duo so your proposed duos wouldn't satisfy the "Important" box.

Having the Fireteam:Duo skill in Army technically doesn't contradict the sectorial charts, but the skill is useless in light of the charts.

It's too bad, I thought they'd fixed this. It definitely used to be worse.

 

According to a somewhat recent Hellois post, you're supposed to have one of the original troopers the Fireteam is listed under or a count as as the 1+.

If you have a Special Fireteam listed in the Sectorial Fireteam Chart under Trooper A, that consists out of Trooper A, Trooper B and Trooper C, apparently you always need to retain a Trooper A (or count as), because this is still a "Trooper A Special fireteam" and needs one naming Trooper A.
It does not matter that army lists the exact same Fireteam under the entry of Trooper A, B and C. It is a Trooper A Fireteam because the Chart says so and army doesn't account for that.
This was a surprise to me, but according to Hellois that's how that's supposed to work.

 

Not in this specific case, no.
Because all 3 units have the option available under their entry in the Fireteam Chart.

So you can replace whatever you want here as long as you keep any of the 3 troopers involved.

 

Unless the designers assumed that these two things would be in agreement - the Army Builder is never referenced in the rulebooks, but we know we need to go there for many things. There are oddities in both the Army Builder and on the charts, though. Here are some examples:

- Vanilla factions occasionally (but not always) list Fireteam options for units (everything but Core, usually) in spite of the fact that fireteams can't be taken in Vanilla. The Vet Kazak, for example, shows Haris and Duo in Vanilla Ariadna and adds Core in TAK. In essence, it seems that nearly all profiles show the same Fireteams in their vanilla profiles that they can make use of in the sectorials. I haven't yet found any non-character units that show a particular fireteam in their default profile that can't be used in every Sectorial UNLESS the sectorial version of the profile omits it. For example, Orc Troops show Duo and Haris in their Vanilla profile, Core and Haris in their NCA and Sval profiles, and Core, Duo, Haris in their Varuna profile. The charts back this up. They didn't leave Duo in the Sval army builder profile but take it off the Sectorial Chart options - this implies to me that Army Builder and Sectorial chart are meant to agree. It's a hard thing to test though because I have to go through everything manually to cross-check.

- Some profiles in addition to Cadin add fireteams in sectorials even if the chart doesn't show the fireteam. The previous example was Fusilier Indigo Richard Quinn. He gains Duo in Sval (only) but the Sectorial Chart doesn't give him Duo. Krit Kokram has Duo in IA (and in Vanilla) but it's not listed on the Sectorial Chart. Each of these characters having Duo is meaningless if the only Sectorials that they get it in they can't use it for. Their fireteam status is also reflected in the CB store page for their figures (that's obviously not authoritative but it's interesting)


- The flipside of this is someone like Miranda Ashcroft. She's in 3 Sectorials and is a Wildcard in two of them despite possessing Duo. The purpose of the Duo seems to be so that she can be treated as a Bounty Hunter in IS... but again it would have been easy enough to remove Duo from her in the other sectorials, the same way they removed Duo from the Orc in the sectorials that it didn't apply.

- Al Fasid's profile lists Duo in Ramah (to accommodate the Special Fireteam there) in the Army Builder. However, unlike Miranda, who retains Duo in the other sectorials, Al Fasid (correctly?) loses Duo in Dahshat and Ikari in the Army Builder, and the Sectorial Charts also show no fireteams for him.

I could point to other examples which cast doubt either way, but the point is that there's some inconsistency in how it's executed and it does make the intent a bit unclear. Not sure if someone can shed light on whether or not these weird Duos/Haris links are vestigial or what. I think a big thing is just that the army builder should remove link skills when they're not applicable. The fact that many figures show fireteam in Vanilla is just silly - if nothing else it mucks up the profile by adding non-pertinent information.

 

The thing is, all those except the Al Fasid are characters. I don't think that characters are ever used as fireteam base units (which makes sense since conceptually a fireteam is multiple units of the same type, and characters are by definition unique).

And as you say, the Al Fasid properly has duo only where it would have a rules effect.

Miranda is the middle ground - she's a character but also a bounty hunter - so as you say, she can be a base unit in a bounty hunter duo.

It seems like the issue is that they're making characters wildcards but also giving them fireteam skills that they can't use. But I don't think we can conclude that they meant to make a "Quinn duo" possible, for example. That would mean a fireteam of two Quinns, one of which you'd have to swap out for a wildcard, but the base fireteam wouldn't make sense.

Yup, that sounds right to me.

 

Yeah I was specifically looking for characters because they seem to also be the most common Wildcards.
I will say that (and in this case it's perfectly supported by the Charts so it doesn't contradict what you're saying) - that there are characters, such as Jing Qo, who can form her own fireteam... it's a Special Duo, but for me the implication is that characters can team up (e.g. it can result in a Jing Qo and Liang Kai team) in a way that suggests that it's not unintentional to give unique units fireteam options.

The wiki is returning 502 Bad Gateway for me currently so I can't check up on the rules there to see if they're different from the Annex, but a lot of the RAW makes it seem like the characters with Fireteam skills who are in a sectorial should just be able to create a Fireteam if you just read the requirements linearly (not that they'd necessarily want to create those fireteams). I see now what I hadn't been able to find before, which is this:

My eyes literally missed it before in all my perusing of the book (likely because to me there's no ambiguity in the RAW that this is clarifying; it's just contradicting one of the previously mentioned bullet points as well as the rules about Fireteam Special Skills) - as an aside, I feel like a lot of the pink-box rules do this and it's infuriating. They're framed like reminders or clarification, but they actually are frequently completely new/additional rules that should have just been included in the bullet point list - and of course I'd assumed that the Army Builder agreed with the charts (many of which are nearly a year old at this point) - compared to the much more frequently updated builder. I guess we should be requesting fixes on this stuff officially in the builder, then.

Something that just occurred to me...
Cadin is a Wulver Grenadier
Quinn is a Fusilier
Kokram is a Zuyong Invincible

Perhaps all of these characters were going to be 'counts as' which is why they have the fireteam skill in the first place. It doesn't really track because Kokram only has Duo (not Duo and Haris like Zuyongs), and Fusiliers can't Duo in Sval anyway - so just adding counts-as with the current fireteam comp wouldn't do anything. Maybe I'm just reading too much into it.

 

Characters are on occasion the base unit for Special Fireteams, see above example for Perseus and Raoul.
You can form a "Perseus Special Fireteam" or a "Raoul Special Fireteam" in TJC, since they are listed under each individual entry and not tied to either of them or the Stempler.


There's plenty of examples where Special Fireteams are linked one specific unit that's part of it.
For example the Kriza Borac + Hollowmen Fireteam is listed under Kriza Borac and has no entry for Hollowmen (there are no Special Fireteam Options for HM teams listed at all), but it specifically calls out the resulting Fireteam as a Hollow Men Fireteam.


In extension a Stempler Zond can only joind Hollow Men Fireteams.

If the KB entry wasn't specified to be a Hollow Men Fireteam, it would be a KB Fireteam and the Stempler couldn't join it.
Very messy, but it the end it mostly works out.


Here's a really messy one

The Special Fireteam Triad Kiel-Saans FTO, Draal Saboteurs FTO and Kaauri Paramedics is not specified as a specific kind of team like KB+Hollowmen and listed only under the Kaauri Sentinels.
Which means you can replace the Kiel-Saans FTO and Draal FTO with Wildcards, but will alsways have to keep the Kaauri Paramedic.
Gets even more messy because that particular Fireteam changed since release.
In the first iteration of the Fireteam Chart from September 2020 25th, it used to be available under all 3 unit entries, which means you used to be able to replace any two members of the team and just form it around the remaining trooper as his Fireteam, same as the Perseus+Raoul+Stempler Fireteam still works.


That was changed in November and now the Spiral one is only available with Kaauri as a base unit.

 

Wildcard characters like Cadin are pretty much straight forward as such. They can replace one member of a fireteam each, any member, as long as there's still original members from the fireteam left. CHA is also quite kind when it comes to complexity. Just remember to have a basic trooper in the fireteam as CHA and you'll likely be fine. (That is to say Wallace + Cadin + Isobel isn't okay (unless it is the Wallace LT profile and the team is a down-sized Core))

 

Agreed. There's a bunch of legacy stuff that's not currently relevant among particularly characters, such as Cadin's Duo skill, or stuff that's so weirdly written (take a peek at Liang Kai in Yu Jing, White Banner). I do think N3 veterans have it worse, though, having to deal with stubborn memories of complex fireteam rules that no longer exist.

One can only hope that things become more relevant once they make the promised alterations to the Annex rules (i.e. fireteams rules), whatever those alterations might be.