Reactions from my meta so far has been "time to start Haqq" Ah, he's Fury and not Impetuous? Well, all things being equal that'd only leave Nomads without having a questionable profile as their super-DT (which I'd point at Lupe rather than Kusanagi)
On the rules: I think you are missing my point. We have already delivered intensive feedback on the backdoor event, CB has listened to it and will most likely take it into account for future events. If you remember those threads, I was very clearly unhappy with how they set up the event. My question now, however, was how you would have RESOLVED the event. As far as I can see noone has a good answer for that outside of „I‘d have set things up completely different“, which to me is crying over spilled milk. I personally don’t think I would have come up with a better resolution to it if you had asked me to do so last week. On the fluff: I‘d agree that throwing some people in jail isn’t a huge accomplishment for the CA given that they were able to infiltrate the human sphere. But then again, throwing the entire sphere into chaos for a small narrative ITS event is probably out of proportion. So to me this comes back to us wanting a different set up for future events. On how to design future events: I think that you always optimize towards three targets: 1) Same magnitude of rule changes for all factions 2) Coherent and interesting fluff 3) Rules as easy as possible As players we can voice what is especially important to us, but putting more importance on something will likely cause drawbacks in another. In the way I understand you, you would favor a highly engineered solution catering to points 1&2. I totally get that, but that would be a horribly complicated event outside of the attention span of many casual players so not attractive for CB as it generated a lot of work for them, little involvement for the player base and possibly also negative feelings because many people would not have had the time to read up on the new, temporary rules. My opinion is that it would be best if ITS would be a very clean competitive mode and similar to the Merc button you can switch to a „narrative mode“, which could yield even more substantial changes.
Let's see. There are right now three kind of Datatracker uses: killer of X, Suviving the game, and Score something (some of the missions are "touch here and hold, no roll or specialist capability required"). For killing you want to go first, so Tarik getting another order for free is great. For defending... well, you can always use that extra order to jump to safety, or go down from your eagle's nest you were hiding during the enemy's turn and score For surviving, yeah, he's lousy, since the meta is to pick the cheapest legal datatracker and deploy it wherever the enemy can't reach... My point is, where Tarik was the good option for Datatracker, now its even better. And where he was not, well, he hasn't changed. From there to cathegorically affirm he is a "lousy datatracker"... frankly, he's not Achilles, but even if you don't want to spend orders on him (something I can only dig in Limited Insertion games) because you want those for your Fiday, you can always keep him under wraps hidden until turn 2. If you went first and the Fiday spent all orders, that is. If you went second then the Fiday is more likely dead, and the enemy spent 3-6 orders doing so. You know the Farzan CoC is still a specialist, thus he can push buttons, don't you? First, not "banning characters for a time then make them come back "stronger" with a one size fits all". Giving them Adhesive Launchers would have make the difference less great. Giving extra orders is like getting extra resources, and that is not a good idea. Giving them extra WP, or even being the last model deployed beyond the one we keep (and unaffected by Strategos). The main problem is that characters with a wide array of potential were chosen. Asimetrical from the beginning...
Gaslighting. False authority fallacy. False attribution fallacy. Straw man fallacy. False dilemma fallacy. Appeal to stone fallacy. “Better argument”. Top kek. The argument was he was never used in vanilla. Demonstrably wrong.
First of all, don't give the datatracker bonus they gave. That's unnecessary and questionably balanced. Second, integrate it into the fluff better - we just got a video with Voronin in it for the BoW campaign, and there was no mention about his status as being suspected of being an alien collaborator. It's clear that CB doesn't *really* care about B4ckd00r in terms of making it an interesting story - this was something decided on at a meeting somewhere and then half-assed. Fundamentally what needs to be changed to make the resolution better is 1. No ill-advised mechanical changes and 2. A better story presentation that isn't "and then everyone got out of prison and Tunguska took the credit. Please buy the Tunguska sectorial when it comes out!" And given the CA win, a story resolution that left the Sphere in a situation where they didn't know that they had gotten rid of alien spies, and people were still jumping at shadows, would be very apropos. Those three points you mentioned can *all* stand improvement. It's not a matter of allocating time and energy between priorities, it's just a matter of being honest with your engagement with the playerbase, not jerking people around, and taking the time to make the narrative interesting. Doing the kind of stuff that I had suggested wouldn't involve the rules being overcomplicated; I don't know if you noticed, but people barely engaged with B4ckd00r, since CB did a really poor job communicating what was going on, and seems to avoid communicating how the scoring actually works to avoid having to do things like adjust for faction population and so on.
I generally only see him used by people who don't know that the Kanren is a better thing to put MadTraps on.
And why does the one exclude the other? Also, yes the Kanren Mad Traps is a good profile imo, he always disappoints me as a specialist
Xi is a good DZ trooper with his flamethrower, flash pulse, can go on suppression, has madtraps (better than Koalas against many rambo troops) and is pretty inexpensive. As your Datatracker he also has a new role, he gets more orders to do that, so he can get up the board faster without leeching orders from the rest of your troops. I think it makes him definitely more desirable in vanilla!
yikes. O_O holyguacamoly, really? ¬¬ we try to hear all the feedbacks. About this, I heard good things and bad things. In a global way. but if I heard only my local area, I only heard good things , but not for this is everything is awesome. So please dont close the opinions to a local circle, try to see the global and look the final balance. ;)
@HellLois ArmyV is still not updated with the now-free characters. Is it intentional? We have a tournament this weekend and maybe someone would be fool enough to bring them...
Yes, but since I would need him safe in case of the LTs death, that is far to often not an option. It is a 26 points cheerleader then, with far less utility than the other two loadouts. Thats not worth the extra order for me.
Let's say I'm a Steel Phalanx player. I did not care when Andromeda was taken, because I was never going to put her on the table in a serious situation, and I continue to not care at all when she comes back because I'm still not going to put her on the table. Compare that to the benefits of having an extra order on Tarik and can you with a straight face tell me these aren't utterly imbalanced in value? To echo @Hecaton I have not heard a single person say that this bonus was well done, even the local Haqqislam players while pleased about their impending Tarik rampages, think that it was poorly handled and are confused as to why they are the only players seeing any significant benefit out of this event. Most people are confused why at a bare minimum this moment wasn't taken to at least re-balance some of the hot garbage models like Andromeda.
If you want to play a game that is even more balanced than Infinity, why not try chess, its alternating activation is almost like ARO....
Coin toss is, allegedly, evenmore balanced. Then again, telling people "if you don't like it, get the door" actually means "I care more for myself than the game, look how a stalwart defender of the Status Quo I am!". Which leads to people quietly leaving said game and letting it to rot. *shrug The other option is to use Saladin for a few more points. The thing stands: Kusanagi and Tarik are the two characters that really earned enything meaningful, and Kusanagi has more limitations and less tools to get use of that bonus. That still leaves Tarik as the best of the bunch.
Yes and no (maybe in a close future Voronin gets more interest. I undesrtand it. In my local circle, they see a power up for Andromeda. Thats a cool thing of Infinity, some character are garbage (as you say) for soma players and cool for others. For example, for me Rao is a "garbage", for other its too cool and see possibilities as a DataTracker. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ And to be clear, with this I didnt say that the solution or the challenge was perfect. There are much to improve and I continue listening.
Of course, another order is always a powerup. That does not change the fact she is unhandly to use because S4. That's her very problem, especially when we already have Thrasymedes who does roughly the same things, cost about the same, but is easier to use and perform usually better.
Why S4 is a problem? The only real one i can see are ladders. It's true S4 is larger than S2, but it's shorter. What visibility you lose in wideness, you gain in height. And if your table are so cluttered to NOT let a S4 model move, maybe it's not Andromeda's fail...
Wow, guys - hopefully your reaction on Christmas is a bit nicer, when grandma hands over your gift and it's only another pair of knitted socks... ;-) But I can understand your reactions - Infinity is a competitive game and therefor some of you are very competitive characters. In this case some maybe a bit jealous, because they got less than other factions; or they are disappointed with a slightly more objective view - they see CB tipped the scales of balance and made a decision which leads to a sadly unfair comparison of skills, because now you have differences in the capabilities of the different armies. I am far not experienced enough to tell, but maybe you can help me: I can see an absolutely focused view on the different in-game characters and their new order. They are not judged in context to their respective armies. This leads to the conclusion, that everything was perfectly balanced before and now that has changed. Is it possible, that strong factions got a "weaker" Data-Tracker-with-extra-order and factions, that are more difficult to achieve victories with, got a "stronger" one? tl,tr: Compare armies not data-trackers - yes/no?
