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Reading too much into icons

Discussion in 'Yu Jing' started by Mahtamori, Jan 11, 2019.

  1. Mahtamori

    Mahtamori Well-Known Member

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    Just a few reflections on iconography of IA and Yu Jing in general.

    1: How to find which units can complete Hunting Party or Abduction objectives in IA?
    Until Army starts printing unit training: Look for Yin-Yang, or three stars or a chevron at bottom of the unit icon

    2: Daoying has a white laurel border, the same as Zhanshi.
    Maybe they'll make an appearance in White Banner? These white ones seem to symbolize non-exclusive army structure.

    3: Hac Tao, Sun Tze, Tiger and Guijia shares the black laurel borders.
    Maybe we'll see Haidao in White Banner? On the other hand, these black laurels might symbolize a non-affiliation with the "big" army structures within Yu Jing.

    So from what little we have of White Banner, likely it'll involve a release of 5-7 new units and a de-emphasis on heavy infantry. I think that Haidao might be a sweet middle-ground thing for White Banner to have, and I'm nearly exclusively looking at the sniper model here since if White Banner is going to lack stomping units like TA Zuyong, Mowang, etc, then using tricks such as MSV2-smoke might be opened up to fireteamed units and I think a Haidao-whatever-link could synergize nicely with Rui Shi and Monks.
    Daoying would be a bit more self-explanatory, however, it's unclear whether WB will feature any NCO, though I do think we'll see NCO become a bit of as common as MSV2 or smoke where most factions and sectorials will have one (might not be on a good unit, nor on high AVA, but 50%+ would) while some factions will just be denied it completely for all sectorials.
    TBH, Daoying is a bit of a "safe" inclusion. It's a solid unit that won't go haywire due to fireteams and the only thing that might cause it to explode in usefulness is NCO combo.
     
  2. ijw

    ijw Ian Wood aka the Wargaming Trader. Rules & Wiki
    Infinity Rules Staff Warcor

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    It does already. I don't remember which update it was added in, I think when the Third Offensive Sectorials were added, or the update before.
     
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  3. Triumph

    Triumph Well-Known Member

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    I noticed it change with the third offensive update.
     
  4. Mahtamori

    Mahtamori Well-Known Member

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    Heh. I've been skipping printing lately and just used my phone. Means there's no courtesy lists, but most people don't actually use them and we trust each other to not pull shenanigans.

    In either case. About those laurels...
     
  5. Solodice

    Solodice Freshly Squeezed Troll

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    Black laurels (with the white surrounding the lettering) might refer to special operations or special detachments to YJs army. We know that Haidao are not an organic unit of YJs army but that of the navy. Hac Tao and Tiger Soldiers are basically special forces.

    Then there's full black which is what Sun Tze and the Guija have. We also have the Wu Ming with black laurels but with yellow surrounding the bottom letters.

    White, blue, and yellow logos might just denote recon units which is what the Guilang, Zhencha, and Daofei are.

    So it might just be type of unit specific instead of sectorial specific.
     
  6. Ten Thousand Arrows

    Ten Thousand Arrows Imperial Sage

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    I think the unfortunate truth is that they don't mean much, as evidenced by the Daofei/Zhencha debacle.
     
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  7. Mahtamori

    Mahtamori Well-Known Member

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    While I'm on board with the general idea, I think the Daofei debacle lends credibility to the theory that the icons mean something rather than detract from it. Both are of the reconnaissance section but the Zhencha is the next generation light recon and owing to be the newer generation they are what's assigned to Invincible Army since the recon section is part of the larger army structure rather than specifically the Invincible structure.

    Personally I'd like to see more sectorials for Yu Jing explore different... flavours?... of the Yu Jing army, and having some overlap where certain units can fill different roles depending on the sectorial would be very interesting indeed. Intelligent overlap would also mitigate SKU issues. Only problem is that you can't just stick solos like Hac Tao everywhere and call it a day, it has to be units that interact with other units in specific ways such as Haidao who are eminently linkable and where the MSV2 profile in IA doesn't offer too much oomph, could shift to being the most popular Haidao in White Banner where there is smoke but no/few HI to link with.
     
  8. Durandal

    Durandal Well-Known Member

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    Actually, according to the background of the Zhencha, they were/are always the recon section of the Invincible Army. No reference is made to them replacing the Daofei, no mention of the Daofei is made at all. It is all very cut and dry.

    The Zhencha are described as the unit that was created when the IA found it needed a recon section.

    In general, a lot of the IA fluff feels really disjointed and the Zhencha feels like its background missed a chance to tie in to the ongoing modernization narrative (although, with so many new units technically being downgrades for nakedly gamist reasons... this makes that an awkward sell and it feels like CB dropped the ball by not making the new gen full of downgrades in to some kind of tongue-in-cheek satire of the military industrial complex). The passage on the "Viper" armour also makes me fear that the Daofei is going to be getting nerfed one of these days to justify the "Viper" suit giving up so much for its profile while the Daofei are literally wearing basic, old-school bird-beak suits with mimetic coatings.

    It really does feel like different folks designed the profiles, different folks wrote the fluff, and neither of them looked at existing Yu Jing fluff before doing so. It all feels very disjointed and fuzzy. Liu Xing have advanced guidance systems and are recruited from the Tiger Soldiers, but they have the same AD ability as Tigers and a lower WIP, Zhencha are presented as the one and only recon section of the IA and their armour is talked up as needing to get stripped down to allow their forward deployment despite Daofei doing it just fine with a full suit, the Hulang are undisciplined and rowdy but don't have Frenzy, the Haidao are special operations troops sent in to the most hostile environments and trained to be some of the best specialists in the StateEmpire army but they are literally wearing armour on par with 200 year old Ariadna tech and not at all equipped to delve in to actual hostile environments.

    I mean, we're wargamers, we're used to fluff and table performance differing. But it feels especially egregious with the IA, like some of these units were very different when their background was written and the whole pseudo-HI thing was a last-minute change as CB looked for an alternative solution to making cheap HI other than Frenzy and SMGs (though, for some reason it never occured to them to re-design the Zuyong in to a pseudo-HI to cut costs and make the tiers of HI within Yu Jing make more sense).

    *ahem*

    That said, at this point I think white/blue being for some kind of recon sub-section part of special operations is pretty credible... though if such a sub-section exists then it is something that isn't currently conveyed in the background. Maybe we'll get more details on it when the Yu Jing RPG book comes out? Because if there are sub-divisions in their special operations group, then that would be pretty neat to have info on as our current view of the StateEmpire army is currently pretty high-level without much idea of how all these various units fit within the various arms, or even how the arms fit together.
     
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  9. Barrogh

    Barrogh Well-Known Member

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    I'm pretty sure Training refers to Regular/Irregular property.
    I'm not sure what's up with ITS10, but I think that's not what you mean...
     
  10. Mahtamori

    Mahtamori Well-Known Member

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    You are technically correct, though IJW and Triumph both understood that I meant Classification.
     
  11. Barrogh

    Barrogh Well-Known Member

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    True, but useless prick in me is willing to waste forum space in order to propel an idea of unified terminology, or at least use that as an excuse to be nitpicky :P
     
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  12. Section9

    Section9 Well-Known Member

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    Yes, it would be really nice to get Army to print Troop Classification on the lists, since we (finally) seem to be using that for scenario or season bonuses. Has someone hit up @-V- for this yet?


    Yeah, had the Zuyong also been knocked down to 1W+NWI+Shock (along with about a 3pt drop and a Designer's Notes explaining why), I think there would have been a bit less hate&discontent about the new 'HI' units all being 1W. Still would have been some, mind you, but not as much.

    Especially since I've long been saying that Zuyong are ~3pts too expensive (across all profiles) to make a pure-Zuyong fireteam. This would have also made the Shang Ji significantly superior to the Zuyong. Still possibly too expensive for what they offer, though. I had some suggested tweaks to make them more like what they were in N2: Deflector L2 and Kinematica L2 on all profiles, I think that's about +4pts.
     
  13. Mahtamori

    Mahtamori Well-Known Member

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    You don't print on dead trees often, either? :p

    Just an example.JPG
     
  14. Section9

    Section9 Well-Known Member

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    Print to PDF, or just leave Army open.
     
  15. Mahtamori

    Mahtamori Well-Known Member

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    Print to PDF should work fine. As you can see, that Knight Montessa is a Veteran Troop, under its name
     
  16. Durandal

    Durandal Well-Known Member

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    This was generally my though after tooling around with IA for a little bit. The design feel haphazard, like parts of it were kludged together at the last second without a lot of thought given to the "why" of any of it.

    On the face of it, cut-down HI aren't a terrible idea (certainly I like it better than handing out Frenzy to troops that will never feel the sting of that particular downside), but where they put it seems odd. Zuyong suits are now generally superior to a lot of what more high-end units receive and that doesn't sit right in both overall design terms as well as fluff.

    CB were obviously concerned about the list being top heavy, but instead of dropping the Zuyong and Zhanshi prices down with a tweak or two, they instead cut costs on only new units with nothing old getting a proper re-design (outside of TacA on a couple of things). So specialist units still feel top-heavy since saving 3-4 points on a handful of them is less impactful than saving 3-4 points per model on something that makes up half your list and it still leads to IA lists feeling kind of homogeneous since that Zuyong link is sitting about 12+ points heavier than it probably should be given the nature of the rest of the list.

    A few weeks after release I had half a mind to do a redesign on it and flip the script with the low-tier HI getting downgrades and working up from there... But if I'm being honest, the IA release has also sort of killed off my ongoing interest in Infinity for the time being and spending energy on a fan redesign is energy that could go in to something else I actually enjoy in the hobby.

    I think this may be my signal to go on hiatus and put CB on the same "check in when a new editions drops" schedule that I am with GW currently.
     
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