Setting up Change Facing shenanigans was, but that's to force a bad ARO or to allow a melee unit to walk into melee, but I haven't heard that forcing a no-ARO-what-so-ever-to-an-attack was intentional before. I guess we'll have to agree to disagree.
Then if I understand correctly, you're also saying that rejecting the premise that this rule needs an update is making the same mistake because we're accepting as true an intent for how the rule works? The intent may change in the future, so using it as the basis of an argument now is wrong?
Have you ever seen Hazard takes penalties? He literally lets the keeper dive to the side and nonchalantly rolls the ball into the open net. Some players hammer it down the middle. Others go for accuracy and hit a corner. But none of this matters because the keepers choice has a legitimate chance to change the state of play. In other words, make the save. How they decide to do this is simply playing the percentages or following their gut. In Infinity, dodging before an attack is declared is like making the keeper dive to one side before the other player has to decide where to kick the ball into the net. Does that sound fun? So why is it fun in Infinity? Your example only serves to illustrate how ridiculous forcing the reactive player to go first actually is. If standard procedure is to move gun raised and already firing as you come around the corner... the reactive player should know what's happening before they choose how to react. In other words, I should be reacting to an enemy moving and shooting at me. So why don't the rules reflect that? Are we trying to create some situation that mirrors not having enough time to react? I'd be fine with that. So lets come up with a situation where something like that makes thematic sense please.
To be clear, what you paraphrase as 'needs an update' to me is actually 'I think there is room for improvement and I want to improve it. I'm sure I've used the word 'need' as well but i've tried to make the meaning clear before. I just don't want there to be any confusion. I don't understand what you're saying after 'because'. Can you clear that up for me please?
The penalty shooter is the definition of an active player and the goal keeper is the reactive player. So what you're advocating for is the goal keeper in our game should get to wait to see which side of the net the shooter is going for before reacting (diving). Does that not seen counter intuitive to you? The advantage should not be to the keeper. I know you keep talking about state of play, but then your very example of Hazzard taking penalties the goal keeper didn't effect the state of the play. He chose the wrong reaction.
Several posters have used the intent of the current ARO rules to justify their arguments. I'm asking if you think that's valid in light of the fact that CB's design intent might change in the future.
Do you not consider them worth improving? Or just lower on the list of changes that would be nice to see? But more importantly, If you don't consider them currently as problems, would you actually miss them if they were removed? Keep in mind we can find another way to improve the catch 22s that make sense. And we wouldn't remove them until we had that solution. Something else occurred to me on the fluff side of this. The argument of preemptively Resetting isn't even the precedent set in Infinity. Getting hacked or jammed from out of LoF means you're completely reacting to the attack without any warning at all. So why are we being forced to decide between Dodge and Reset if I can just wait to see if I'm hacked and then Reset?
No and Yes. I'll see if I can make this clearer... It's about the number of variable in play. It's a subtle difference but an important one. The penalty analogy is flawed because it doesn't represent the same number of ways to 'score' as it does in Infinity. The penalty taker has one objective, to put the ball into the back of the net. The infinity trooper has two objectives. Kill the opponent or push the button. So in actual football the keeper always had a chance to save the shot if they guessed correctly. But in Infinity, that's not actually true. Imagine the penalty from an Infinity perspective. The penalty taker can 'score' a point for his team by killing the keeper or pushing the button. The keeper has to decide, do I dodge, or try to stop the button push. So the keeper decides, succeeds his dice roll, and does an awesome acrobatic dodge to avoid being killed, only for the penalty taker to go oh that looked cool... I'll just push the button instead then. Keep in mind, I used pushing the button to clearly show that second objective. But a second short skill move advances those objectives just the same. BRAINSTORMING: This is why I like these discussions because something just occurred to me. Cautious Move is another example of forcing an ARO. In this case it simply prevents you making any ARO at all but the concept is the same. It allows you to spend order towards advancing your goal while avoiding those FTF rolls if you so choose. These are the kinds of solutions we should be after imo. What about a Charge skill either for everyone or select CC troopers that prevents a BS Attack ARO when making a move out of LoF and that ends in base to base? This would just change the focus a bit. The skillful play is not letting the opponent get close enough to make that final charge. Or getting yourself in position as the active player to use it.
I read this far in your responses. Then I laughed. FYI - The Ancient Egyptians were able to calculate curvature of the Earth using their Obelisks. The Greeks, by Pythagoras, alluded to a spherical Earth in 6th Century BC. You appear to be solidly basing your argument on how Europeans failed to catch up until Columbus. EDIT - Sorry, you're not basing your argument on this... But trying to use it as an example to justify a point that justifies your argument. Except that it doesn't - because the Earth was never flat. That was not a fact. It was just a shared belief (again, mostly in Europe), perpetuated mostly by the Church - who was in power.
Not even Columbus. As far as anyone can tell, it's a modern myth that belief in a flat earth was ever widespread in Europe.
you may all discuss rules changes and game balance to your hearts content without my involvement but you start getting history wrong then you are in my house now boys. (or girls i don't discriminate on the factual whoopins) that is you yourself believing another fallacy about what people used to believe. correct, everyone knew the earth was round Pythagoras had proved it and even in the Renaissance no one but no one was going to disagree with a Greek philosopher that much, they instead thought that between Asia and Europe was a landless void generally called The Sea of Monsters. What 'ole Columbus thought was that Pythagoras had done the math wrong on the overall size of the earth, ran the numbers his way (which was actually wrong) and he could take a crew straight to Asia avoid alot of Portuguese controlled Africa and get straight to the spices and other trade goods. luckily for him there was land between Asia and Europe so that he and his crew didn't just fucking die because he thought he was smarter than a long dead Greek guy. now to extricate myself from the conversation because i have little interest in the main subject matter of the thread.
Your responses here indicate to me you have no real world combat experience. There is absolutely no room for waiting to decide your course of action. I've seen men die on both sides of the muzzle because they didn't react instinctively to a threat. I've seen them die because they got psyched out, as in feinting a juke to draw their muzzle away from where I am and shooting them in the face, or tossing a rock and yelling "Frag out!" and then clearing the room while they all run for cover. These are real world examples of the "Catch 22" you're complaining about, and I'm glad they're still in the game because it keeps just enough realism in the game to make it interesting. What do you mean by "thematic sense"? Because the current state of the rules pretty much does mirror not having enough time to react and needing to decide NOW. Yes, and I think it's the correct response.
You really need to go talk to some combat veterans sometime. There ain't no such thing as a sane trooper. Holding a 'cooking' grenade for 3 seconds to make sure the enemy doesn't have time to throw it back. When you don't know how long the fuse actually is. Wrapping a brick or two of C4 around a grenade for enhanced boom to destroy bunkers. I dunno, a cinematic "roll with the punch" might work, if Infinity had more damage points per trooper. Which shows a terrible knowledge of science. 'Law' is the mathematical description of what is happening. 'theory' is why we think the math happens. Again, it's been CB's design intent that you want to force the opponent into eating normal rolls since N1.
Normally its just a horrible an d dismissive statement, but yeah theres a handful of discussions where its relevant to occasionally. just needs to be used sparingly
How would you write that rule that achieves the same result without a whole caveats for models that are not the target?
TL:DR Community has reached common consensus about lacking interest to touching a part of the rules we actually consider "working as intended" for once. kthxbye Reminds me when someone wanted to argue against the existence of theoretically bad lists on the example of 30 Fusiliers.
I'm referring to how close Infinity's themes are to real life. How the sequence of events from an order translate into a film scene in real life. The post below is equally directed at you as well. Doing what needs to be done to survive or complete the mission, no matter how crazy, is perfectly sane or understandable. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. I've married into a military family and they laughed at the notion of military soldiers dodging first. Because they knew right away Dodging first is predictive and not reactive. Now before i get my head bitten off like usual, I hope you all realize how situational these real life combat vs Infinity examples really are. How a trooper chooses to react is based on their orders/mission/goals/training/whatever AND the situation they are in. So there are cases when Dodging first as a reaction to a movement is valid. However, Infinity and real life are two very different things. I know this is a futuristic war game, but I feel like a reality check is in order. I keep hearing about how the Infinity sequence of events does indeed reflect real life combat. Unfortunately, without some drastic change to the genre, it never will. Real life combat isn't about taking turns, where as in Infinity we take turns. Infinity tries its best to simulate real combat but ultimately it's going to fail because they are based on two opposing principles. Rolling dice and handling the resolution simultaneously is nice, but it's no where near the same level of simultaneous action found in real life or even an online FPS. (I really don't want to here about FPS games btw, it's just an example) Infinity creates situations where the reactive trooper must predict an event and choose a reaction. Sometimes the reactions available to choose from are ridiculous in the context of the game situation and that's a problem imo. Of course the way orders are split into two everything works out fine if the active trooper is kind in their choice of actions but this only camouflages the issue. While the active trooper gets to react based on what actually happens. Listening to everyone try to justify how all this thematically works extremely well is mind boggling to me. Now, none of this means we shouldn't do our best to make Infinity be as close to real combat as we can. I don't know of anyone who thinks the idea of an ARO based system isn't awesome. But be honest with yourselves about how close to reality and how much room for improvement there really is please.
Do you understand how you are arguing yourself in a circle here? Infinity, the game, is an abstraction. It cannot perfectly replicate real-life combat. The designers, and at least the majority of the players posting in this thread, are happy with the level of abstraction currently presented by the Dodge/Reset conundrum you're concerned about. We get your interest in improving the game. Surely, all players want the game to "get better." Most of us just disagree that your drive to "improve" the game in this area will actually do so. There is a happy medium between hyper-reality and hyper-abstraction. N3 Infinity is doing a pretty damn good job of balancing those ends and living in the playable middle ground.
That will come down to balancing. Which can be done in terms of limiting AROs to other troopers, limiting AROs to the target of the attack, or maybe adding modifiers to BS Attack AROs. Ideally, we need to decide in what context it functions first. What I mean is, it will depend on how much more power we give to the reactive player overall. Because odds are, we'd be cleaning up other catch 22s along side this one. Which will add up. We also don't know how many new skills we might add to allow the active player to force certain AROs. However, if we try to simply make new rules from the context of each individual catch 22 situation we'd probably have more success. I imagine it's easier for people to jump on board with each individual change they like rather than having to accept wider changes as a whole. So following that thinking... Making the Skill a Move+CC Attack might be best. We don't want any weird moves into CC while shooting another trooper or simply avoiding AROs altogether. Maybe all troopers with LoF to the trooper upon activation get AROs as normal and all troopers without LoF are caught unprepared. This unpreparedness can take form in game by removal or certain ARO options, or negative modifiers to BS Attack. These penalties can also be different for the trooper being engaged and those not.There's plenty of room to balance. If you want me to pick an exact rule to start I can do that. It can certainly be adjusted from there. I just know the moment I suggest the actual rule a lot of freaking out happens instead of discussion about how to make it better.
