There's been a little discussion in the Nomad forum about Puppetactica and how they work in N4 - mostly because I hadn't quite got to grips with it fully yet. It highlighted some potential issues and it was mentioned it might be suitable to be included in an FAQ because it isn't intuitive, especially if you played under N3. The rule in question is at the end of this post for ease of reference. There are really three questions. (1) Do you have to nominate a spearhead on deployment, and keep a 'persistent' marker by the spearhead? (2) Does the spearhead going unconscious mean coherency is broken, causing the other control peripherals to become disconnected? (3) If the answer to (2) is no, does the death and therefore removal from the table of spearhead break coherency? (4) An alternative approach if the above is an unintended consequence. (1) - I think the answer here is pretty obvious but the uncertainty is just an artefact of N3 >> N4 transition. The rule says 'the player must designate one member as the spearhead', That suggests it is like a fireteam marker which remains on the table to show who the spearhead is at all times. (2) - The unconscious skill tells us that automatic special skills and equipment do not work when unconscious, so you might initially think the spearhead being unconscious makes any other peripheral (controls) of the control group fail the coherency check. But a coherency check is not a special skill or piece of equipment. Whilst the spearhead is unconscious, I can't see anything which tells you to remove the token, and therefore if other peripherals remain in coherency there should be no issue of being disconnected. (3) - When you're dead, you're quite clearly not on the table and so the other peripheral (control) chaps can't be said to be in coherency with the spearhead, so they become disconnected. (4) If coherency is broken on falling unconscious/death and that is an unintended consequence there could be a simple answer in the third bullet of the rule: "The player must designate one member as the Spearhead". If the spearhead dies (removed from board) then it could make sense to move the spearhead to another. My trouble is that without doing so feels like a bit of a double whammy - if you kill the controller the control units become disconnected, but if the same is also true for killing the spearhead (even if only temporarily until you spend an order on them), it hurts a little. Perhaps more importantly for me is if the controller is controlling them, I don't understand why killing the spearhead should force all the others to be disconnected and it feels like the idea was to stop control units being able to move freely all over the battlefield, and instead have to stay within ZoC of one reference troop. @ijw can you provide any insight or just tell me if I have missed something really obvious? Peripheral (Control) There is no limit to the operating distance between the Trooper with Peripheral (Control) and their Controller. The Controller may have a maximum of three Peripherals (Control) under their control. These Peripherals form a Control Unit. The player must designate one member of the Control Unit as the Spearhead, placing a Spearhead Token (SPEARHEAD) beside it. Each Peripheral (Control) must observe the Coherency rule in regards to the Spearhead of their Control Unit. The player must perform a Coherency Check at the start and end of each Order or ARO. If a Peripheral (Control) Trooper fails a Coherency Check, breaking Coherency with the Spearhead of its Control Unit, it will enter Disconnected State immediately, before measuring any declared movement. If the Disconnected Trooper passes a Coherency Check with the Spearhead of its Control Unit at the end of an Order or ARO, its Disconnected State is immediately cancelled. Each time the Controller and Peripherals are activated with an Order, the player must designate one member of the Control Unit as that Order's Spearhead, placing a Spearhead Token (SPEARHEAD) beside it. In the Active Turn, if a Skill is declared that requires a target, only the Controller and the Spearhead will perform the Skill, and the other members of the Control Unit will perform an Idle instead.
1.) The rules state you must nominate a spearhead. That's it. You nominate a spearhead. 2) They become disconnected when they are not in coherency with the spearhead. When you activate them again through normal means you nominate a new spearhead. See IJW's answer here: https://forum.corvusbelli.com/threa...pearhead-enters-null-state.37847/#post-363942 3) n/a 4) n/a
The unanswered part of the question is whether troopers can be in coherency with an Unconscious spearhead. ijw didn't speak to that question in the previous thread as far as I can see. The other questions I think he did answer. So I think we know that: - If the Spearhead becomes Dead during an order or ARO, the other peripherals become Disconnected at the end of that order. - Once that happens, the only way to reconnect them is to spend an order on them, nominating a new Spearhead. During that order, only the Controller can act. At the end of the order, the peripherals reconnect if they're in coherency with the new Spearhead. We don't know whether, during the reconnection order, the disconnected peripherals perform an Idle and provoke AROs (my inclination is that they do). We also don't know, as the OP says, whether an Unconscious Spearhead is still a Spearhead who can keep the team in coherency (my inclination is that it can, for the reasons set out by the OP).
Is the Trooper with the Spearhead token still part of the Control Unit if it has no active rule that says it is? Peripheral is an Automatic Skill which has no effect when the trooper is unconscious. Edit: I agree with you on the part of triggering AROs. Disconnected prevents the unit from executing orders, it does not prevent it from being activated.
It's a good question, and definitely unresolved. My inclination is still "yes." For example, Lieutenant is an Automatic Skill, and we know that an unconscious Lt is still the Lt (until it loses that status upon entering LoL). And an unconscious Hacker is still a Hacker. The Fireteam Integrity rules explicitly say that a trooper stops being a member of the fireteam if it enters a null or isolated state. There's no similar rule for Peripheral. But I don't know! It could go either way.
I think you misunderstood my question. I didn't ask whether the Peripheral lost the skill, I asked whether the skill had any effect when its effects were all disabled. An unconscious LT still has the LT skill but you can't active them using the LT order and an unconscious hacker still has the Hacker skill but you can't use hacking programs with them. The unconscious puppet has the Peripheral skill, but it no longer does anything for the puppet - it'll no longer measure coherency, it's no longer in the Control Unit, it's no longer activated when the controller receives an order. You'll also note that the link I posted IJW responded to null states in general, including Unconscious. You'll probably be able to find more answers by IJW if you do a deeper search, considering how this skill confuses people, but that's plenty enough to convince me. It could go either way, yes, but the odds of this going one way is considerably higher than the other.
Fair enough. Given that ijw was answering a post that asked about unconscious as well as dead, I'd agree with you that it's likely that the unconscious spearhead can't hold coherency together.
I just reread the linked post by @ijw and I don’t think it’s clear whether or not you can draw coherency from an unconscious spearhead. Unlike a fireteam, there’s no explicit note that an unconscious spearhead loses their status marker and breaks the team.
It's irrelevant that the Peripheral Skill does nothing for the Unc Spearhead Puppet. The Peripheral Skill remains functional on the other Puppets who remain in Coherency of their Spearhead. Your analogy re: not being able to spend Lt orders on the Lt is misleading. In this situation we're not trying to do anything related to the Lt, but rather we're trying to spend the Lt order on an NCO. Despite the fact the Lt is Unc, the Lt order has previously been generated (the Spearhead has previously been assigned) and the NCO rule (the other Puppets Peripheral (Control) rule) still functions as normal. Imagine a scenario where the Spearhead Puppet drops Unc and is then repaired. Do the other Puppets enter the Disconnected state? No, they remained in Coherency of the Spearhead throughout.
I think you may need to do a bit more legwork to explain how my addressing of Queensgambit's LT analogy is misleading. Typically a model going unconscious doesn't affect the automatic skills of a different model, so I don't see how NCO is relevant here. LT as a skill has a fairly limited range of effects other than generating an LT order and allowing you to spend it on that unit. Luckily the LOL effects are replicated outside the LT skill. The main point I was trying to make, however, was that the LT skill not having any effects doesn't remove the skill from the unit, it only removes the effects of the skill while in null state. As for the Speardhead dropping to UNC: the Spearhead was UNC so they wouldn't be participating in the Coherency check. The other Puppets would not have a Spearhead in their Control Unit, though, so they would go Disabled until you can force a Coherency check again by spending an order on them.
My point is that the Reference trooper doesn't fail a Coherency check: it's the other troopers that do. Nothing in the rules says that you stop being a Spearhead when you go Unconscious, so it's irrelevant as to whether or not the Spearhead still has a functioning Peripheral (Control) skill, because it's not that trooper which is forcing the check its the Trooper that's skill active. You're saying that we're arguing they we're trying to spend the Lt's order on the Lt, which we can't do because the Lt is in a Null state. I'm saying that a better way to think through this is that we're trying to spend the Lt's order on an NCO which works because the Lt was active when the order was generated. The Puppet was eligible to become the Spearhead when it was made one, nothing in the rules has stopped it being the Spearhead. The second Puppet requires me to check Coherency or go Disconnected: it passes the Coherency check and so doesn't go Disconnected. Nothing in the Rules says that Unc models can't still participate in Coherency checks. Arguably they are no longer part of the Control Unit: but that's not a requirement, being a Spearhead is.
@inane.imp (it's easier than chopping the quotes up) I never claimed that Lieutenant skill's effect is what allows the LT order to exist, so NCO isn't very relevant to the discussion which is why I'm surprised you bring it up. I also never claimed that you can spend the LT order on an UNC LT, in fact I made the opposite claim because I noted that the LT skill's effects allows you to spend the LT order but the effects are disabled when UNC. The Spearhead isn't exempt from making the check, they're just basically guaranteed to succeed. IJW has written that a Disabled Puppet that is made Spearhead will be very close to the Spearhead of their unit when the Coherency check is performed which will remove the Disabled state from the Puppet, ergo the Spearhead still makes a Coherency check. The core of my argument is that a skill is a container, and the contents are the effects. When a unit is Unconscious, all Automatic Skills will still exist, but they will have no effects - no contents inside them. Coherency for Servant (Control) is part of the contents/effects of the skill and is written as such: "Each Peripheral (Control) must observe the Coherency rule in regards to the Spearhead of their Control Unit."and the way you identify whether a Trooper with a Spearhead marker is part of the Control Unit is by another effect of the Servant (Control) contents/effects: "The Controller may have a maximum of three Peripherals (Control) under their control. These Peripherals form a Control Unit."Because the Servant (Control) rule is on the Puppet, the Puppet being unconscious will no longer be in the Controller's control and will thus no longer be part of the Control Unit. The same logic, by the way, is what enables the Controller of a Servant to participate in a Coordinated Order when their Servants are all Unconscious/Dead. Italic added to make it easier to see what I've copy-pasted from the rules, underline emphasis added to show the most relevant parts of the rules in question. P.s. Hacker and Lieutenant skills are funny skills, because their effects are duplicated in other rules means they exist mostly as "empty containers" for other skills and rules to check whether they exist or not. P.p.s. Regardless of whether I'm right or wrong, the rules shouldn't be this hard to parse. It would be greatly appreciated if the rules just told you what happens when a Servant is Unconscious or Dead.
I'm saying that a skill is a container, but the container that matters is the other Puppet's. The other, conscious, Puppet requires you to check Coherency with the Reference Trooper. Going Unconscious means that skills have no effect but it doesn't cancel effects that have already been realised (in the same way that an Unconscious model in the Camouflage state doesn't have the Camouflage state cancelled). Becoming the Spearhead of the Control Unit is an effect that has already been realised it so it persists. This means that the Unconscious Puppet is still the Spearhead of the Control Unit despite the fact its no longer eligible to be part of the Control Unit. This is why when choosing a new Spearhead the Unconscious Puppet is an ineligible option (this would be a new effect using the container that is now closed), but nothing stops it continuing to function as the Reference Trooper for Coherency (this was an effect realised before the container was closed and so persists). Agree on the fact it shouldn't be this hard to parse.
I think a better analogy would be (via N2/N3 rules) to ask if you could spend your lieutenant order on your unconscious asawira lieutenant to try and regenerate. But it’s still a deeply flawed analogy, and I don’t really think the lieutenant skill is really informative in this situation.
