Just confirming something. The rules for Expel say: Source: Infinity N3 rulebook, p. 154, and also the wiki. Emphasis mine. According to that wording, Expel RAW treats Operators the same as Pilots. But then... The reason that FAQ 1.3 says Expel doesn't work on the Anaconda and Iguana is that: Those two (and only those two) TAGs have Operators, not Pilots. Operators don't have the Pilot skill that allows you to dismount and re-mount... Meaning they cannot dismount, they eject automatically when it's destroyed, and they cannot re-mount their TAG once they are out. Therefore if you Expel them you brick the TAG permanently, leaving just the Operator on the table... Which was not the intended rules interaction the designers wanted in play. So the FAQ says you can't do that. Question: Do I have that right? Follow-up question: Why isn't the phrase I underlined in that first quote crossed out on the Wiki? Or maybe my question is, why doesn't the FAQ explicitly kill that line? Or provide a re-wording of Expel? It seems tailor-made to confuse and annoy new players given that it basically says "This program works on Operators as if they were Pilots" but immediately below it there's a FAQ that just says "No." No explanation for the change, just "No." For three specific named troops. As if maybe it still applied to other troops besides those? To understand that the FAQ effectively cancels out that part of Expel, you have to first know that the only two TAGs in the game that have any form of Evacuation Device are the Anaconda and Iguana. So while the rule is theoretically still in play (the FAQ doesn't say to ignore that part of the N3 rules, it just says it doesn't work on those three units), there's nothing it applies to. You can disregard it, as the only units it could apply to have just been FAQ'd into immunity. But it doesn't say that, does it? Is the assumption that everyone has memorized the contents of Army by the time they read that rule? The fact that the FAQ just says "no" and there's not apparently been an errata or something that deletes the underlined sentence is just crazy-making. It took reviewing Army profiles for every TAG one faction and sectorial at a time, re-reading three different pages on the wiki, and spending an hour searching and reading the forums for me to feel confident I understand the rule and why it works the way it does. And I'm still not sure, which is why I'm posting this stupid rant-enhanced question. Which is just...y'all. I am medically prohibited from drinking and I am absolutely going to go raid the family whiskey stash now. (The Gorgos doesn't apparently have Manned, which is required for Expel to work. Not sure why it was mentioned in the FAQ in the first place? *angry chugging noises ensue*)
Because Gorgos is Ectros on steroids, AKA a trooper in a very fat SymbioArmor, who just happens to be fat enough to classify as a TAG instead of a HI. Technically, a Gorgos pilot can "dismount" by doing a CAST OFF of the symbiont armor, it's just that she can't "mount" it again (because the symbiont armor goes inactive after removal).
this is a problem from N2, and everytime I look at it, seems that some FAQ has disapeared/returned somewere. At some point, there were changes in that interaction of rules, and time to time there seem to appear changes that are not pointed in the FAQ document. First it was made viable using expel against those TAGs. Later the "faq quoted" dissapeared and also operators could dismount so all TAGs could be objective of expel. Now seems that they took out that option for dismout and the faq appeared again, but without the changes in Expel and the mount for operators. I think the intent is that expel allows to force dismount of the operators without activating their ejection system and without directly destroying the TAG, but allowing them to mount again, only in that case. To me seems that someone made a mess in here, and no one wanted to fix because reasons
Question 1: Seems you have it right. The FAQ supersedes all other written rules and answers. This is true for all systems, the official errata is the final word. Operators (or informally "pilots that can't normally dismount") can't be Expelled and this was written several years before they had separate structures for errata and for clarifications. Question 2: Probably because IJW missed it when updating. That happens. The important thing is that the FAQ is on the two pages it is relevant to; Expel itself and Ejection Device. We're close to a new edition, so it probably doesn't need fixing. Question tiny: I think at some point the Gorgos pilot was an actual pilot, but I can't verify because the Gorgos profile isn't part of the original rules, HSN3 rules nor HS Paradiso rules, and I don't have old enough copies of the Perfiles pdf.
Yes. Because, when that FAQ was released, CB still didn't differentiate properly between FAQs and errata. But please bear in mind that the FAQ is present on every page of the wiki that involves Expel or Evacuation Devices. I have updated the Expel wiki page to strike-out the text for Evacuation Devices, and added a note to the Requirements, to say that it only works on Manned TAGs with Pilots.
Thank you for taking the time to respond, and thanks IJW for making those edits! This first came up when trying to explain to a friend who is another new player in my area how this interaction works, and even with the FAQ right there it wasn’t enough info to understand the effect except in the specific case that you personally were running or trying to hack one of the three listed units. It worked fine for practical in-play purposes but was unhelpful for learning and understanding the way the rules work more generally.
