I would amend that to "the purpose you aling the troop in the list is only to generate orders, without any intent to spend them"... After all, more than one specialist of mine has turned into an improptu cheerleader due to circumstances XD Imetron & Netrods are there to offset that, for those armies, the cheapers troop (that provides 1 order and is not a mercenary/Remote commonly found on all factions, like the baggage bots or the flash pulse mimetic ones, even when CA's baggage bots are kinda... impressive) costs around 13 points... not the "cheapest regular troop", mind you, but the cheapest troop... Aleph has 13 points as the bare minimum (Posthumans cost 10 points, but you have to align at least 2, so the cost is 20 points for a single order), and CA is around that cost too, not counting the strange Seed Soldiers (that deploy as an egg, so they are total cheerleaders for the first turn XD).
Yeah, it feels kind of wasteful to simply bring a unit for the explicit purpose of a cheap order. At least have the poor sod cover a corner or two, or a room or anything really. Doesn't even have to be in Suppressive Fire if the fella has something like a light shotgun or other low-burst close-range gun. I don't have any real issue with Imetrons or Netrods. Cheap, low AVA regular orders with rather unreliable means of deployment. Can be nice to fuel a second support-oriented combat group. What I do have an issue with is taking a cheap baggage bot ( This doesn't apply to CAs Bagbots though. They can corner guard too, especially if a friendly EVO hacker is around. ), not even for the purpose of reloading stuff, and simply parking it deep in their DZ and having it ferment there. At least taking a Flash Pulse bot instead might prove to do something over the course of the match with it's Flash Pulse or Repeater/Sniffers. Really feels like a waste, honestly.
Non-EVO baggage bots have a Repeater... Granted, they are mostly used for Control missions, to do a single Move and be parked there for those 28 points of control. Let's hope they all get a gun.
Like, just a mere pistol would be nice, really. Or a stun pistol. And I have no issue with the TR Bagbot. Actually sounds like a rather useful thing to have following your midfield control pieces around, like minelayers, for example.
I actually fundamentally disagree. But more with the argument that the PanO style of optimisation is a strength, I see it as a weakness Theres 2 types of optimised in this game Theres the "I do one role and one role only" Optomised where units have little to no bloat rules, and that works fine on an individual unit perspective but really falls down across an army as it required buying entirely new troops to cover different niches in your army list Then there is the "Im optomised to multi task" These units do a few roles well. Take galwegians for example, with good CC, Smoke and a WIP14 Chain rifle, not only are they disposable frontline troops they pull secondary duty as anti-Camo troops due to high WIP and their DTW. These are the profiles that really make an army strong, because you are able to hit a design space withe your list but have enough "Good enough at the task" units that are optimised multi-taskers covering your other bases that you can atleast engage in that aspect of the game. Conversely when writing a PanO list I hate it, I really hate having to decide which parts of the game I am just not going to bother playing at all. No other faction in the game must make that kind of choice.
Combat Jump gives them risks though. There's a 60% chance you land your jump, so most players will play it safe and pick positions where dispersion off the table is unlikely. This means they're probably going to be towards the center of the table. And if they do disperse, they should be considered dead on turn one. My issues are which armies they are in, honestly. Thematically I understand them, but giving them to the army with Proxies (and inventing a special mechanic to make proxy orders almost impossible to remove from the table) is just dumb.
Doesn't help that the Ghost: Jumper rules changed in N3, either. Used to be that each proxy for a posthuman took up a slot in your combat group, and only provided one order per posthuman. Running 3 proxies meant that you had a maximum of 8 orders in that combat group.
Or totally fucking the scenario rules in Decapitation and Hunting Party. IMO making a Proxy the Lt should work like Datatracker, where you have to choose a specific body to be it.
The problem was more on the lines of "now, for the ARO, prepare yourself to really be screwed if you pick the Mk2". Not because it was hard to ARO, but because the rules were a mess for a time XD
Yeah, I think the one thing that really needs to change about Proxies is ditching the Netrod related rules.
