I might be out of the loop, but how exactly are the NA Armies going to function? Are they a new faction - meaning, we can now have the Druze fighting against other factions on their own? Or is it somehow more complicated?
From what i can see they fight on their own. I think in general the non-alligned forces are going to be mercs or story driven groups. The Druze came from the outreach box fluff. I doubt there will ever be a non-alligned vanilla faction, just more fluff sectorals. I personally like it because I've been tempted to pick up a new faction for a while and this scratches my itch without being a whole faction.
It's basically a placeholder for all future Sectorials, which aren't part of a certain Faction. Most likely something like O-12 will be a Sectorial of Non-Alligned and all future Merc Companies, like White Star or maybe some rogue Alien Sectorial.
The Sectorials are playable on their own as any other sectorial too (as soon as they are released), but Non-Aligned is only a pseudo/proxy faction, which will never have a army list you can play on its own. Only Sectorials here!
So, if I understand this correctly: the NA Armies is a collection of mini-factions. There won't be one "NA Armies" list, but the Sectorial sub-lists (like the Druze) are going to be playable in normal games. Meaning, you could play a Druze vs. Aleph battles etc. Is that correct?
Yeah, I think that's exactly right. It's certainly possible that they might all be playable as a parent Vanilla faction, but right now there's no indicator that that's true. Druze is definitely a nice little stand-alone force, totally ITS legal and quite solid as an independent Sectorial.
It was a good change to make. 'Mercenary' means too many things... it still does, but now it means one thing less. So: New Player: Can I play a mercenary army? me before: Well, sort of, you see there's.... me now: Check out the Non-Aligned armies and see if it looks good to you!
Heck, they could even have some of the coalition or alliances from the background stories fall under NA2. For instance, Haqq and Ariadna allied themselves to fight off YJ or something, a cool little merger of those. Or some Anti-CA Coalition force where a few units from different factions could be available for the next Beasts of War campaign. I doubt either of those would happen, but the possibility remains. It's just a "catch all" for forces that aren't aligned with any of the major players.
As was discussed previously, the NAA will be a folder of sectorials that are completely isolated from each other. Simply a place for a factions that are not large enough to be factions, but still large enough to play (Merc Companies, Mega corps, O-12, etc.) I think its a great solution for making Mercenaries a legal faction to play, and can provide people with different and quirky armies.
I think that the idea is: We have enough material to create a small fluffy sectorial, but not even close to enough to have a full blown army with its sectorials. Where do we toss this? And so, non-aligned was created. Things that are integral part of the infinity universe but are not large enough to be a full faction will be tossed there as their own self-contained sectorials. Things like the Druze, probably O-12, maybe any other famous merc company.
The idea, as best I can tell, is to give an ITS-legal spot for army lists that aren't part of the Big Players. Our first example is a Druze security company, but we could also see companies that aren't powerful enough to mobilize the actual PanO military, Japanese gangsters, etc. Though I really kinda miss the old Mercenary Company rules from N2. (Take up to 3 factions as your sources, halve the AVA for everything. AVATotal goes to AVA4, AVA1 becomes 'AVA0' where AVA0 means 'can only take 1x AVA0 model for every full 200 points you are playing)
