Oh, I'm sorry, forgot about this one. So, what I mean is stuff like infiltrators in Hidden Deployment having to announce their presence if they decide to deploy in the enemy half of the board, initial Lt. roll-off that can occasionally give out your Lt. identity, stuff like that. Sure, rolling for infiltration is already very risky and most people just use reliable option, but then we have a rule interpretation that makes that big risk less rewarding. Sure, people can see a pts. hole in your list and may know that something is going on. But normally you can create a mixup between HD / AD, further masked by minelayer/non-minelayer profile of some similarly costed camo unit - which goes out of the window if you decide to go with "hard" infiltration. Some people play with secret rolls for things like that and an arbiter or other third party that verify them, but that's pretty much house rules.
Oh. Right. You mean Chain Rifle when you write CR. I read it as Combi Rifle. I'm not sure I agree on the cost issue, while the Chain Rifle does wonders for proper Warbands, I don't think a 10 points Shaolin would see much table time at all. Considering how seldom I get to use the Chain versus Pistol on my Shaolin, I'd consider that a very serious buff and it's one of the reasons I think Shaolin should be revamped with more appropriate gear - i.e. SMGs instead of Combi Rifles. Seems like switched cost on BSG and ChR is more a Mutta thing, since even the BSG version will have the E/Marat to fall back on which does a serious number on nearly all units, and is a strong reason to ask "why even Jammer?" in the first place. Quite right. I think most of the veteran forum goers would be able to design a main attack piece that's universally very well optimized and within design parameters of the faction it's designed for and more optimized than any of CB's designs in the same faction. Some of the new designs still have point sinks, but looking at the new Tunguska profiles there's fewer of them and more purpose designed stuff. Another way to look at it is that it'd be nice if these "points sinks" were less points sinks and more viable on their own, but the only fix I can think of is that gear that has overlap should have discounts - i.e. Combi + LShotty shouldn't cost Combi + LShotty because of the overlap of purpose and range. Taking this to its extreme, then maybe a Shaolin with a Boarding Shotgun should get a small discount because CC strength and the Shotgun overlap while a Hollow Man or Zuyong probably shouldn't pay for their Breaker Pistols - but that's in itself a bit of a problem when a Breaker Pistol is used to increase points on a profile that's extremely slimmed down like the Hollow Men. However, I'd be cautious about proclaiming that it's a matter of power creep since CB has proven that both very new profiles can get called "utter garbage" (Yan Huo. I don't personally agree with this, however) while some of the oldest designs still hold a place well above the average (Kazak Spetsnaz)
Outside of an arbiter, the only way I can see that working is if you have 2 profiles for a unit, one that has to deploy on your side outside of your DZ and one that has to deploy on their side outside of their DZ and remove the roll, but increase the cost of the latter substantially to pay for the consistency. One thing I dislike against playing against infiltrating camo heavy players is the amount of trust I have to give them at the tournament level. Rolling for one of many infiltrations, i can't imagine it being hard to switch out which model that roll was for after it fails/succeeds, and hard to remember/check after the fact. I imagine it must have crossed some peoples minds in the past. Not that I suspect cheating is rampant in this game or that the people I play with are generally dishonest, but as far as a ruleset goes I want it to be as watertight as possible.
Well, part of that can be solved by writing everything you're secretly doing down; I think Maya even have appropriate feature. Otherwise I don't think even current rules could save your games from being a bit too dirty. But yeah, I can understand why rules are written the way they are - CB likely wanted to ensure the game is playable by 2 people without relying on falsifiable operations too much. It feels like a missed opportunity though.
Yes, I suppose ultimately it can be all resolved with very explicit notes but adding paperwork to a faction that can be predisposed to take a long time to play out in a tournament setting (ariadna) isn't the most comforting solution. I haven't played many games against big Ariadna lists that haven't gone to time, but that might just be my most regular opponents. But it's the best one we've got right now.
Scylla AHD, maybe? I'm not sure which would be worse, KHD or AHD, to that NOMAD TAG that Daboarder suggested, though :p
Oh yeah, it spreads to the G:Synched REMs... Did we ever get an answer whether losing IMP on Scylla removed it for the REMs?
Yes, it does, because losing IMP state cancels the program, and therefore cancels the state for the REMs: The effects of this program persist until the user reveals himself as per the Impersonation-2 state rules.
Well, back in N1/N2, your Troop [ edit ] Type (WB or whatever) is what controlled your ability to move through terrain. Sadly, the N1 terrain rules were so bad that pretty much nobody ever used terrain. It would have to be balanced. I mean, gang-bangers don't blow holes in walls to attack. The police SWAT rarely even do that, and the police clear the area before doing it. Blowing holes in walls is very much a military thing, which would negate the 'deniable' part of Infinity operations. I do agree with this, I'm not sure the points calculator is still correct. ARM seems to be significantly overvalued, for example, and a second wound may not be as expensive as it should be. The problem is that a more intelligent points calculator means you need a big-time math heavy to write it. An Engineer (as in, someone with at least a Bachelor's degree in Engineering, but more likely a Master's or PhD) can do it, so can a statistician or other mathemagician. Because you're really talking about something that involves calculus. Calc isn't as hard as all those lib-arts majors make it sound (it's just math where the numbers are changing constantly), but it is something you need to use all the time or it goes out of your head. I took Business Calc back in 2009, but don't ask me to do calc now, I haven't done anything with calc since.
A second wound is very expensive, though. HI come with a significant discount due to hackability. Not sure which unit is getting a wound at too low cost?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but that's not how destructible scenery works. For one, blowing a hole in the wall doesn't remove the wall, it creates an access port in it. You cannot draw LoF through access port.
I never said we were following the actual rules, but that we used totally destructible sceneries. And that was not that fun.
Well, since you heavily adjusted destructible scenery rules, I can really see the game being not very fun when played with stock Anti-materiel rule that was designed around significantly different environment. Perhaps, tweaking what it takes to destroy buildings was required in that scenario.
Well, AD4+Mimetism is one point less than +1ARM, +3BTS, +1W, Kinematika L1, and 2x Breaker Pistols. (comparing Tiger shottie to Zuyong shottie) AD4+Mimetism is somewhere around 10-12 points, which means that +1ARM, +3BTS, +1W, and Kinematika L1 is the same. Might have been more fun if you were following the actual rules. It takes one hell of a bang to knock a 'mousehole' (a roughly human-sized access point) in a moderately thick concrete wall (general construction, not military bunkers). A 120mm tank gun firing either canister (eat ~11kg of tungsten pellets at 1400m/s!) or the HEAT round that will punch through over a meter of steel armor plate will do the job. I think an AT4 (that's the American M136, not the Russian antitank missile) will do the job. I don't think an M72 Light Antitank Weapon will, which makes an Infinity ML unlikely to be able to one-shot an access point. It'd take quite a few rounds from the Bradley's 25mm autocannon (broadly comparable to Infinity's Portable Autocannon) to chip through a concrete wall (Probably 10 orders shooting from a Tankhunter...). Keep in mind, I'm talking the fairly heavy 30+cm thick concrete walls like you see in the Middle East. Thinner walls aren't quite so tough, and if you can start from an edge even AP rifle ammo can chip through 4-6" of concrete to get to a bad guy on the far side. Thicker walls would be military bunkers, some of the Maginot Line bunkerhouses had meters-thick walls!
My worry is that CV undervalues the skillset of a statistician. The thing about stats is that your layman will reckon they can do stats and data analysis, because it's 'just numbers'. Except the actual considerations and crunches you have to do with even a meagre data set to get something useable, as well as spotting all the exceptions and flaws in your data is Skilled work. You don't get plumbers to fix lightfittings, and you don't get games designers to do complicated stats algorithms. Which means as far as I can see, unless they do secretly have some mathemagician tucked away somewhere they either: A) Won't create an intelligent calculator because they don't have the skills, or B) Will try to make one anyway and not really solve anything satisfactorially.
Don't forget the WIP 14, which it looks like all (non-Securitate) troops pay a lot for. In fact, just brute-forcing from those two units, AD:4 works out at 8 points (pretty universally it costs 10 points for a wound/structure, and NWI increases in cost as your W/S total increases).