As you well know this is a topic that is VERY dear to me. For once I wished that CB wanted to live by the lore and start off by thinking "Aleph is an Elite faction, let's work from that", but Alas! No or at least not enough. Certainly OSS needed some update to N5, but that could have happened in a separate release way, while the elephant in the room gets addressed: Corregidor gets a pseudo new sectorial (once again against what the Ambassador, he who is entitled to speak officially, said on several occasions at the onset of N5... CB do you believe in your own Ambassador? Begs the question...) and Aleph doesn't even get to par with other factions (and don't say you don't have material since I am working on it at least on the side of inspiration). The new sectorial could have been an opportunity to introduce the wow factor for the most technologically advanced faction that gets money from the whole of the human sphere inside O12 and is led by an Artificial Intelligence that is the ultimate intelligence tool since it monitors data traffic in the HS that now includes Combined Army... it is the lore CB wrote, it doesn't take much to be honest. That being said the bulimia of Optimates is very welcome on this side of the board and opens up some interesting lists, together with some much MUCH needed profile updates (Asura, which is the pinnacle of OSS, with a MULTI rifle was an eyesore!, now AP-Spitfire and MULTI marksman rifle and ECM-3 is somewhat back on track). I particularly like the concept of "faction identity" which I too believe is becoming somewhat of an issue and I blame the inflation of sectorials some factions have: increasing the number of distinctive units in sectorials (take line troopers as an example) ends up needing to add equipment and skills other troopers of the same units don't have in the same faction. In turn, since the skills are limited (and better be so otherwise the management of the skills becomes highly time consuming), ends up giving new troopers some skills that were more characteristic of other factions... and so the situation blurs. I hope it makes sense LOL. Maybe we need to start removing all a bunch of skills from the main manual and relocate them to a faction specific section for better management?
