"It's not your list, it's you" exists due to the overwhelming issues with new players trying to net-list their way to victory. Beasts of War's first Infinity Week really brought out the new players doing the usual "Rate My List" threads, all with about the same 300pt lists straight from BoW, and we got fed up with it really quick. "Your list cannot win the game for you, you need to know how to play" would be a more accurate description. "Infinity: play like you got a PLAN!" would work, too.
Yet there has been an abundance of people who religiously repeat it as a mantra and that somehow needs to stop. A bad list is a real thing, bad troops are a thing and thinking positive will not nix effective bad value for you. People need to accept that niche picks work in niche cases but are not great for general application. When my Kempetai MMR double crits a Kriza Borac HMG in SF in a single Order that doesn't mean anything. It just happens. Doesn't make the Kriza bad or the Kemp amazing. Good value is not reliant on personal oppinion or single examples cut out of context from a few games but on relative value compared to the internal competition. A list can be bad and hamstring good and bad players alike. It's not an autolose button, as your opponent might not be much of a challenge, has a bad day or lacks understanding of core mechanics. The ability to leave your Deployment Zone unharmed and strike your opponent under favourable conditions will always be good. Things that deal efficiently with the usual threats like TR Bots or Linked ML LI will always be good. On the other side of the coin Combi+LSG Profiles in your Link filler troops will have to be offset by something else to mitigate their negative impact on pointvalue. A list without Smoke, nothing deploying outside your DZ, no AD and with Spitfires as maximum +3 Rangeband is going to be bad. Some amount of killing power will always be valueable, being able to cover as many Rangebands as possible as efficiently as possible will always be valueable. Being able to push buttons/win the Mission will always be important. Evaluating that accurately is difficult as the whole thing can only be evaluated as a sum of it's parts. Some parts simply impact overall performance negatively in a majority of cases and that is just how it is. Most things still have a place, but it might be very, very limited. The dreaded Bolts gain a lot of value for Hunting Party to make an example. Shikami make excellent Datatrackers for some missions. You'd usually not touch those troops for a Annihilation or scoring game, because they do not contribute very well towards the Mission's goal in those.
That's how I ended up with Pano, because of TAGs and shooting sounded fun. Turned out 10 order lists are playing the game on hard mode and TAGs are lot less resilient than they seemed to be. Also in that ITS season it was all button pushing with WIP12, and TAGs didn't helped there much. And Pano is still missing half the game. So I'd say choose on looks and gamestyle. Ofc. gamestyle doesn't say much to a newbie. Just tell the newbies the drawbacks.
No man, you brought the wrong list for the job and got the bill for it. 10 Orders with a TAG for button pushing can't be summarized in any other way than "that's on you mate". Failing step one and complaining about step 3 not bringing satisfactory results is a brutal but honest 'git gud' verdict, I am sorry.
Now I just play Tohaa until I learn how to play, because while Pano is missing half the game, Tohaa is just ignoring half of it.
The "It's not your list, it's you." is a broad statement, not meant to be an absolute rule, and as a sweeping statement it does it's job well. New players often spend more time crafting a good list and less time reading the actual rules, when they should be doing the opposite. Generally, if you have specialists for ITS missions, you have 10+ orders, and some SWC weapons to help in fire fights, your list is in good enough shape to be used. In the time I've played, I haven't come across a unit that is just plan bad (a few odd profiles, like AD Lieutenants, sure), but I have seen many units not used optimally by the players who field them.
That is NOT what "It's not your list, it's you" means. "It's not your list" = There is no "One List to Rule Them All, and in the Darkness Bind Them". A list I write and kick ass with may not be one that @Dude does well with. And he's a much better player than I am. Just because it's using a couple units that I happen to totally grok and Dude doesn't grok. "It's you" = Your tactical skill matters. There's not enough dice getting rolled to get to expected results in a single firefight, like there is in 40k. No, "OK, I'm rolling 48 dice so I should see about 8x+-2 sixes, which will blow that unit off that table." There's not a bell curve of expected results to work with like there is in WarmaHordes. No, "OK, if I only roll 5 on 2d6 I will still do enough damage to take out his caster." You need to know how to stack all the modifiers in your favor during your active turn. If you don't, you will lose. You need to know how to deploy. If you don't, you will lose. You need to have a plan for what happens when a key model dies. If you don't, you will lose. This does NOT mean that there's no such thing as a bad list. They do exist, coming to the table with a bad list will cost you the game. Just like how deploying poorly will cost you the game. Just like how losing a key model without a backup plan will cost you the game. But the definition of Bad List is very short. Not enough orders, not enough different weapon range bands, not enough specialists, not enough speed, no plan is the entirety of my definition of a bad list. And 'no plan' isn't exactly part of the list itself, that's on the player.
Thing is, it very, very often is your damn list. And as long as someone is unable to figure that out he will be unable to fix it. That results in a snowball's chance in hell, he'll get good at evaluating strengths and weaknesses properly or to make proper use of niche picks. The example @Zsolt gave displays it niceley. Running a 10 Order TAG direct Action list for a button pushing tournament is a bad idea. But it is a lot harder to run a bad Tohaa list compared to a PanO one. A blind man can tell Sukeuls, Rasaiil and double Kaeltar CoCs are great. How to properly support something like a Cutter and how to use it properly is significantly harder, so it's easier to fail when trying that. 10 Order lists will be subpar when you need to move and click a lot.
Actually Sukeul is just a Kamau with two wounds (and some situational but useful skills strapped on it, like Stealth (unless your whole link is full Makaul + Sukeul you don't really get this one) and Veteran (once I got E/M thrown in my face so some Domaru had the chance for a FtF to come closer and survive)). What helps there is Symbiont armor, or Low tech with wounds or pseudo HI, because Tohaa ignores a part of the game, i.e. everything dies or everything can drop to the first bad rolls. Tohaa doesn't drop to the first bad order, because Symbiomates then you still have 2-3 wounds to chew through. Just try to count how many orders a Rasail with a Symbiomate can eat for 40 pts. Then comes synergy. Tohaa are bad shots (Fusiliers and the odd Kamau all around, BS12-13 on your main attack pieces with no vis MODs apart from Sukeul, and imo that's the main reason why she's good, a single piece of Mimetism (sounds like Pano and why Kamau and Swiss is good)), but you can put all these bad shooting dudes and dudettes into Triads, giving them +1Burst. And we all know Burst then BS MODs wins firefights. Then you have the Makaul, throwing B2 Eclipse smoke on 16, because you can just ignore the parts of the table you don't want to deal with. Then you have the order efficiency of the Triad, moving 3 troops with one order. And you can have a shooter, a Makaul and a specialist in each and every triad, and this may not even be the best composition, just the default one. My personal favorite is the abundant and cheap (10 for Chaksa, 13 for Makaul), high AVA (4 and 6, respectively) Heavy Flamethrowers. Because everything dies in Infinity you can just look at a big scary problem, like a TAG or ODD or TO or whatever, and start throwing cheap HFT at them until the problem magically disappears. And I'm only just trying out balanced list, with ridiculously high AVA on everything (4 or 6 on nearly everything you'd want to use with the odd 2 or 3), you can try out everything. Like if 1 Rasail is order expensive to shoot down, what about 4? So Tohaa has everything, mediocre shooting but high burst, order efficiency, eclipse and specialists everywhere, and everything and their mom is a tank, like trying to shoot dead dead a fireteam:core of unidrons. Out of all the above Pano only has superior firepower. And that's superior for sure, but lot else missing. It's hard to build a bad list with Tohaa, and really hard to build a decent list with Vanilla Pano.
I kind of question mission design that overly favors numbers (i.e. stereorypical "button pusher" missions). Why should a lower model count be so bad when the models that cost more points should be worth them?
Sure, but that's compared to Pan-O. Compared to anyone else they're average shots. Compared to Ariadna, they are good shots.
Yeah, I'm coming from Pano, people can shoot there :P Disagree on the Ariadna part though. While the average BS in Ariadna may be low, but when they start the shooting game, it's usually with Spetsnatz or Vet. Kazak or a Tankhunter. The first is BS12 with ignore cover and Ambush camo, so usually BS15 + -6 for the enemy, out of which either the CH or the Surprise shot usually sticks (it's rare to have MSV3 or SSL2 and MSV1+), the second is just BS13 with Mimetism (with AP HMG and 2 wounds), so like a Kamau with survivability, the last is a BS12 Camo dude, so the usual CH-3 and surprise shot -3. Ariadna are way better shots than the line troops suggest.
Everyone are capable of this. Ariadnan BS is lower than average on average, with their main attack pieces being BS 12, not even Haqq are that low on their premium pieces (though Haqq, interestingly, tend to start at BS12). Everyone also has a lot of profiles that can ignore MODs to some degree, though Marksmanship is most common with Ariadna. I just wouldn't say low BS is a Tohaa drawback.
As I see, Tohaa is compensated with +1 Burst due to Triad everywhere and the extra wounds on symbiont and symbiomate for their average shooting stats and mods. Overall Tohaa can survive lot more bad rolls than others, and they roll more dice to start with (Haris is widely available, but limited, so others can have B5 as well). Imo +1 or +2 points of BS is inferior to BS mods, as they come in bundles of 3. Plain old Camo can stack -6BS mod to the opponent for most troops, -3BS for troops with MSV or Sixth Sense, and there are few that can ignore both. On top of that a Spetsnaz has ignore cover, and usually firefights are done in cover, unless you managed to flank your opponent (good for you), or shooting something impetuous, so you get that +3BS from ML2 more often than not. Point here is, Ariadna may have lower than average BS, but it's well compensating for it with CH and ML levels. On the other hand Haqq rarely has CH or other BS mods on it's troop (rarely play against them, totally possible I'm missing something). Ariadna's shooting game is scary, even for TAGs, not sure if the same is true for Haqqislam.
Completly agree with you. The exception for Tohaa is the Sukeul: she doesn't feel like a Tohaa trooper with "BS 13 + Mimetism + Heavy Weapons + Linkable + many other things". Being affordable and with AVA 4, she completly disrupted the Faction's Internal Balance.
Great post, but I wanted to point out that this statement is very much false, and you are misleading new players. Yu Jing is no longer a close combat faction, they have less CC ability than Ariadna, Pano, Aleph and NA2. Note that Yu Jing USED to be a close combat faction when the had JSA (but they lost those 12 CC profiles). Now they have like 7 close combat models (which includes things like the Hsien and Guija who will still lose to most cheap CC focused war bands or skirmishers).
I can throw in a blurb about if someone wants to focus on CC, then nobody holds a candle to JSA. Would "Slight advantage" be more appropriate than specialization? Yu Jing still does have 1 or 2 more points in CC than others in their category, that's what I was getting at. Generally where others have 14 CC, they'll have 15-16 or even pretty big differences like between the Hac Tao and the Swiss going from 15 to 19. I didn't say they'd dominate CC engagements, I said it can help them survive, not that you'll use it every time or that you'll win against a CC focused combatant. Yu Jing
Actually, you said that they have a specialization in CC. 2 or 3 points in CC isn't what I would call specialization. While, yes, it CAN help them survive... its mostly an afterthought, not a specialization. JSA, ASS, and Ariadna would be better choices from a "what faction should I play?" and "I want to specialize in CC" perspective.
