A guy losses his lieutenant. That guy assigns his lieutenant to a dismounted pilot profile. (ex. Lizards pilot) If the reassigned lieutenant pilot mounts its TAG, does that make TAG as a lieutenant? Or it is another Loss of lieutenant since he got no fielded lieutenant?
The two profiles are functionally a single Trooper, so you’ve basically designated both as Lieutenant...except... How does it work when the TAG is your original LT at the start of the game? If the TAG is the LT, and is destroyed, but the Pilot is alive, the Pilot lacks the Lieutenant skill. Is the player in Loss of Lieutenant? If the Pilot becomes the LT, how does that interact with the rule saying Pilots generate no Orders—does the Pilot remain LT but not generate the LT Order next turn? RAW the Pilot effectively becomes the TAG when the TAG itself goes away, so a TAG LT arguably isn’t fully dead if the Pilot’s alive, meaning no Loss of LT applies, but the Pilot can’t generate Orders, sooooooooooo yeah. @ijw , sorry to bug you, but help? IMO manned TAGs should permit Pilots to become Regular troopers when the TAG is destroyed, and the trooper should inherit LT at that point as well. It would help make up for no Engineer rerolls on manned TAGs. Not gonna hold my breath for that change though. :p
Is the Trooper your Lt? Yes Is the Trooper in a Null state? Yes. What happens when the Trooper who is your Lt is in a Null state? You're in LOL.
The issue doesn't come up with RemPres TAGs because the Pilot is a REM and can't be LT at all. But for manned TAGs... The problem is that TAGs have the unique distinction of being a single Trooper with multiple models, each of which has an independent profile, so it’s possible for one profile to be in a Null state and the other to not be in a Null state simultaneously. This is going to get off-track, though; I'll make a new thread for it.
Yes, it's possible for one profile to be in a Null state and the other profile to not be. But that doesn't change the answer to this question: Is the Trooper in a Null state? There's 4 options. 1. Pilot - Normal; TAG - Normal = Trooper is not in a Null state. 2. Pilot - Normal; TAG - Null = Trooper in a Null state. 3. Pilot - Null; TAG - Normal = Trooper in a Null state. 4. Pilot - Null; TAG - Null = Trooper in a Null state. Because in cases 2-4, the Trooper (ie either profile) has a Null state. The same is true of Lieutenant BTW: its assigned at the Trooper level not the Profile level, so if either profile is the Lt the Trooper as a whole is the Lt.
I tried to logic my way through that already, and it creates a contradiction because of the relationship between TAG and Pilot, and the fact that some Pilots are REMs and therefore can't be Lieutenant creates an implied but also contradictory difference between the types of Pilot. I put up a new thread to see if I can get a clearer distinction, rather than going on about it here.
Can't be appointed as Lts. Nothing says REMs can't start the game as Lts. There's no contradiction. Honestly, I don't see why you needed to create a new thread. This is entirely on topic.
If you read my post, I actually have more to ask about than just this, and wanted to put it in one place as it's mostly interrelated. There's actually a possibility that Pilots of any kind shouldn't be nominated as LT because the Pilot rule says that without their TAG profile they don't generate Orders "of any kind," which presumably includes the LT Order. So it's possible that if your TAG bites it, you shouldn't be able to nominate the Pilot as LT at all, or at least that in doing so you're preventing yourself from gaining the Special LT Order. I really, really wish they'd gone the route of revising the Pilot rule for manned TAGs to reflect the AI Motorcycle rule, and given RemPres TAGs a special form of the Peripheral equipment instead of a Pilot.
If the TAG is in a Null state you shouldn't appoint the Pilot as Lt BECAUSE YOU JUST APPOINTED A TROOPER IN A NULL STATE AS YOUR LT. I mean it's legal to do this but probably extremely stupid 99% of the time.
Ok, except that the rules also refer to the Pilot as a Trooper twice, and every instance of "null state" in the rules indicates that it's a placeholder to avoid re-listing every null state every time they come up, and the Normal state exists. The important thing is this: Null is not an actual state itself. Troopers aren't "null." That's a shorthand, like smoke dodge. Any time a rule refers to a Trooper being in a "null state" it means one or more of the following is true: Trooper's state = Unconscious Trooper's state = Dead Trooper's state = Possessed Trooper's state = Sepsitorized Trooper's state = Disconnected Trooper's state = Shasvastii-Embryo In literally all of those cases where it's even possible for that state to affect a TAG, if the Pilot is outside the TAG, it is explicitly not affected by that state. The Pilot rule makes this quite clear. The rules refer to Pilots as Troopers twice. RAW, they're a Trooper, they just violate some of the other rules about Troopers, and they kind of sort of are a subset of a larger Trooper, which isn't well-defined in the rules for Pilot the way it is in every other case of multi-profile Troopers or linked models like Peripherals. Therefore, if the Pilot is not Unconscious, Dead, Possessed, Sepsitorized, Disconnected, or a Shasvastii-Embryo then the Pilot is a Trooper who is not in a null state. Which means that the Pilot is most likely in the Normal state. The TAG + Pilot superset Trooper may be, but the Pilot is not. So the Pilot should meet all the requirements for being declared a new LT without triggering Loss of Lieutenant. Trooper? Check (-ish). Not Unconscious, Dead, Possessed, Sepsitorized, Disconnected, or a Shasvastii-Embryo? Also check. Bam, new LT who is not in a null state. What you said is simultaneously also true, as long as Pilots are simultaneously a Trooper and part of a larger Trooper. Other multi-profile rules resolve that issue, and Pilot could, too, but right now it's Schrodinger's Trooper for the purposes of Lieutenant mechanics, and the rules aren't actually clear about which way to play it.
I'm unfortunately starting to come around to the idea that the Pilot and TAG should probably be considered totally separate troopers, where the Pilot just doesn't take up room in the Army List, but also isn't the LT, can't spend the TAG's Irregular (or LT) Order, etc. just for the sake of clear play, except that also contradicts the description of the two as Profiles in the Pilot rule, and results in some weird interactions around Lieutenant and definitions of "trooper."
I think @inane.imp does a good job of picking this problem apart. @wes-o-matic does it help you to consider that any states the pilot picks up will be transferred to the TAG if they mount and any states the TAG has, the pilot will also have when dismounting? The one difference is if the Remote Pilot is removed due to the Reset mechanic.
N2/N3 example, but you could have a REM as your lieutenant if an ei aspect jumped into an ikadron batroid via g: autotool.
No, because Lieutenant isn’t a state. I think I’ve worked out a functioning theory of how to explain the relationship between the Pilot and TAG profiles/troopers, but diagrams would help and I’m away from my desk so those will have to wait. I believe that the correct way to play it for now is that the Pilot is a Trooper; simultaneously the Pilot + TAG as a pair are also a distinct Trooper, and for the paired Trooper the TAG profile is the primary profile even when disabled if the Pilot is dismounted. So if you declare the TAG to be the new LT, both profiles are the LT and the Lieutenant skill goes on the TAG profile. If the TAG is still on the table and conscious, this would be the correct play. If you declare the Pilot to be the LT, then the TAG as a whole is not the LT and re-mounting the TAG would result in LoL. This means declaring the Pilot your LT only makes sense when the TAG is unconscious or dead. Fluff-wise, I can see losing the TAG’s comms and networking system as causing the kind of communication issues that would put you in LOL briefly if it got nuked while the Pilot is out for a stroll. Declaring the Pilot LT probably means the Pilot isn’t using the TAG’s systems for command and control (otherwise the TAG as a whole would’ve been declared LT), so re-boarding would also mean a system switch-over that could justify LOL. Which brings me to a question I’m hoping @ijw can at least give an informal ruling on: If your army list has a TAG LT, in Army the TAG profile has the LT skill, and the Pilot apparently does not. If the TAG LT is unconscious, the Pilot can still dismount. So: If a TAG LT goes Unconscious, and the Pilot stays inside voluntarily, does LOL occur? If a TAG LT goes Unconscious, and then the Pilot dismounts, does LOL occur? If a TAG LT’s Pilot dismounts and then the TAG is hit and goes unconscious or is killed, but the Pilot is unharmed, does LOL occur? If not, does the Pilot gain the LT special skill and if so, does she generate a LT order? If the TAG is killed while the Pilot is dismounted, the model with the Lieutenant special skill is no longer on the table, so unless the LT special skill applies equally and separately to both, or transfers to the Pilot profile automatically when the TAG profile is null, I can’t think of a reason why a dead LT TAG with a live Pilot wouldn’t cause LOL. Am I making sense? It’s pretty late here.
Actually, that’s an angle I hadn’t stopped to question. Under N4 rules, if you have a TAG LT and the Pilot catches Isolated while on a walk, does that cause Loss of Lieutenant? The two models track states separately when they’re apart, but the only things listed that affect the TAG model are that it can’t spend Orders or ARO, and if the Pilot goes to Dead then so does the TAG. If the Pilot being Unconscious or ISO outside a TAG LT doesn’t trigger LOL in N4, then the TAG model is the LT, the Pilot is not, and that would clarify some other points...but makes very little sense in fluff terms for manned TAGs.
The pilot and the TAG are more or less one entity, that has two distinct profiles that may both be on the table at once. A similar example is how posthumans work. From the G: Jumper rule, it’s treated as one trooper with multiple models, and you don’t enter LoL until all of the models are Null / Isolated.
That's because Posthumans tell you that "If all the Proxies of a G: Jumper Trooper are in Isolated State, or any Null State, then the G: Jumper Trooper will be considered a casualty until at least one of his Proxies recovers from the State" and "A G: Jumper Trooper provides a single Order no matter how many Proxy Models he has", which taken together are interpreted to mean that you need to track Null states at the Profile level. Neither of those apply to TAGs, instead we know that TAGs are different to Posthumans because when either the TAG the Pilot is Unconscious they stop generating Orders, that when a TAG is unconscious it stops scoring despite the Pilot remaining conscious and that when the Pilot goes Dead so does the TAG. The simplest explanation for all that is because *the Trooper is in a Null state* and (at the very least) Null states are tracked at the Trooper level. I think we'd all like the Pilot to be the primary Trooper and the TAG her armour but that's not what we have.
I think I agree with you, and I also believe that I expressed myself better in the other thread on this subject. https://forum.corvusbelli.com/threads/tag-pilot-questions.38584/
Where does it say that an unconscious Pilot outside the TAG prevents the TAG from generating Orders as long as it’s still conscious? N4 TAGs don’t go into an inert standby state while unpiloted, they just stop being able to declare Orders or AROs. My read was that they continue to generate Orders unless they are affected directly by a state that prevents it, or they are removed from play when the Pilot dies.
