No, that's not what I'm saying at all. You could just as easily have a Forward Deploy or Infiltrating model grab the HVT and run back like Hecatron said. It really depends on the situation. In Decapitation it means that you can get an easy 5 pts, and making it very difficult for your opponent to do likewise. Nothing works all the time, but in the case of straight on movement you only need to move the HVT a little bit from side to side. Who says they aren't? Not everybody takes full AVA of Mutts either, surely they're not a problem. Heck, Bolts ignore Mutts, so clearly they're not a balance issue, since there's a circumstance where they fail. Also you can tell Mutts aren't a problem because Haqq isn't winning all the tournaments. Since you brought up tournament play, maybe you could provide some information on what tournament players usually do.
No, muttawiah arent broken, especially in the context of the greater faction as a whole. They're a much needed oil for the Haqq machine to run properly. I've played infinity in multiple states with a lot of different people. I'm not claiming to be the greatest or all knowing, but generally you'll only find keyboard warriors complaining or whining about something like this. Have you ever actually tried this? have you put it into practice in a game? On some level we all have because of the Xenotech. How often has the Xenotech canceling a template won you the game? Would it even have been worth it or had the same outcome had you spent 2-3 orders to sync?
Considering the wording in the FAQ, the only problem is any player who tries to prevent others from using HVT as a shield. Maybe it's the Haqq machine that needs a thorough look at if it needs Muttas to run?
Mutts are good. Yup. Do Mutts break the game or give an unfair advantage to Haqqislam/Hassassins? No. Are Mutts the only unit with Jammers? No. Does Haqqislam need Mutts to play well? No, but they're really good, so taking them isn't usually a bad idea. It would be like playing VIRD competitively without a Kamau Multi-Sniper. Are Mutts better than that unit? No, they die horribly to it in their own active turn. Does VIRD get jammers AND one of the best defensive pieces in the game? Oh, and one of the best offensive pieces in the game? Yeah. Does using the HVT as a human shield defend against any of these things? No, not unless you're wasting a lot of orders and time to try. In that case, you're likely using because of poor play. If you think ANY of the above breaks the game, I'm willing to bet there's larger issues with your own gameplay. Example: I have some trouble dealing with the Kamau Multi-sniper. After some discussion and practice, I have learned how to deal with it. I know what needs to be done to complete my objectives and play around or hamstring the piece. Same goes for the cutter. I Spec-Fire eclipse or normal grenades, use highly mobile or AD pieces to sneak around and drop some templates, or I pie-slice to reduce the order group/fireteam. None of the solutions involve using Mutts or my HVT. (Mutts may be used to limit the order pool if they have the opportunity, just like any piece. They are better at capitalizing on attacks of opportunity then a lot of our other pieces, but not always the right choice. Against some poorer players, they can be used to greater effect, but the same can be said about my Ghulam missile launcher). I honestly get more value out of my Daylami in most games. Haqqislam is great fun to play, but Mutts aren't what make them competitive. To be clear, Mutts are a great piece. In other factions, they might even be too good. (Maybe, but only because of some combos like Joan). I like Mutts, I use them, but they don't single-handedly swing/win games.
not exactlyyyy. QK has no mutts and they're fine – although they have a mutt replacement in the form of a yuan yuan. Your question can be similarly expanded into other factions as well though. "Can MO run without Hospitallers?" "Can US run without Grunts?" "Can Vanilla PanO run without Nisse?" The answer is yes – but you're giving up a pretty big asset of your faction and a lot of it's flavor. It doesn't mean that the unit or faction is unbalanced, just that a particular unit allows it's parent faction to leverage its abilities. People just really hate mutts because of their high impact compared to their low cost while forgetting that a lot of other Haqq pieces pay just as high points for units that have a lower impact compared to other factions.
As to the HVT as a shield, can't you just lay down the template so it doesn't touch the HVT at some point during the order?
I think this might be harder than it was first portrayed. If the first move induces only template fire, those templates go down right away. Then, it's just a matter of the second move having the HVT/Xeno going through all of the templates to cancel them. Free Move-move. That said, I don't think this is a very useful tactic to try and employ on the regular, but it will likely catch a couple people off guard if you can engineer the scenario I just outlined. Once you do it, however, your opponent should be able to easily make sure it doesn't happen again.
Wow, a ad homenium AND a no True Scotsman. Your ability to create logical fallacies is truly a wonder to behold. Just because people are not generally doing this does not indicate it's not a problem. The number of people asking basic questions about this approach in the thread, or showing a lack of understanding indicates to me it's a nuance that most people are unfamiliar with. I haven't heard or seen any general discussion of it on this board, and I've been on here for a while. Now it's very possible I missed it, but if I did, so did a lot of other people. Then the faction is unbalanced, and the Mutts should be more expensive, and the other units less so. Also having a few dud units doesn't matter as much as having one unbalanced one because you can ignore the duds. Not to get too far into the weeds, the point is that broken or unfair stuff doesn't need to break the system completely to be a problem. You can be unbalanced and not necessarily fall over, go down a flight of stairs, and break your neck. Sometimes it's a combination of factors, not just one thing. No. All you need to do to break the LoF during any part of the first movement. Templates always effect all models that move through their space. So you can't wait until resolution, put down your template and just touch the non-HVT model. Here are some pics that better illustrate how you can use this. In these cases red is the ARO piece, Green is the active piece, yellow the HVT.
Thanks for the pics. I still don't see this as an issue, as the mine or other template can still be laid down, or has cause additional order expenditure for little to zero value. But ... You seem to have chosen to ignore my rebuttal while continuing to lean on an argument (the mutt is broken) that can't hold water. Tell me, how expensive should a Mutt be? Why? And how is it broken? Tell me what you would make cheaper in the rest of Haqqislam? What is the combination of these factors that you have such a problem with? Backing away from your straw man, how exactly does the HVT shield mechanic break or unbalance the game? Are there any factions that cannot use the tactic, if they saw value in it? (Not that they do).
The issue is that template weapons have to be places before the active player declares their second skill, so it's trivial at that point to declare a second skill move and cancel the template. Agreed.
Or in the case of where a particular model is bogged down in a gun fight 1. Shoot first, then move the HVT to all positions where there's templates -> risks assigning burst to wrong models 2. Move the HVT into the space of the controller and out again, then shoot everyone -> doesn't cancel any templates, but forces opponent to use direct shots, preserving cover ARM and preventing secondary causualties. It's not all that much extra order expenditure, but it does require a more static position. Still, I'm sure everyone who's bothered to read this has occasionally spent an extra order just to be able to engage from Partial Cover instead of risking not having cover. Depending on how deeply invested your opponent is into template weapons, it might be very worth it, but you'll just have to adapt. I think it's a bit more of a problem when this setup is mandatory for the mission than when you need to move up to your HVT as with the Xenotech you don't get the chance to counter-deploy against this tactic if you think your opponent is going to try for it which you do for HVTs. Plus the WIP roll and the extra orders with HVTs is most often enough to discourage it as a regular tactic and leave it there for the 'clever' player.
This. Especially the WIP roll and moving to the HVT. I personally think the Xenotech is a bad joke, but using them like this could just be seen as a way to make the lost point worth it? Dick around with this tactic and maybe get killed before you drop the scanner - Lose a point (i.e. silliest rule in ITSX). Drop the scanner successfully and you get to run around (slowly) with a civilian? Cool? Attempting the same thing with an HVT seems like a waste of time and easily countered.
This discussion pops up maybe once every couple of months. Just like the "Are Mutts broken?!?!" discussion. I know you think you're some type of genius because you've discovered some awesome new way to play that totally breaks the game!1! Perhaps you should pay better attention or begin to think of the game in greater depth than "Me sync with HVT which makes me immune to template!!" maybe you can think about the cost of orders to actually pull of such a move versus how much it would actually save you. Or what it's stopping your opponent from doing instead of pretending its some type of shield of armor. Who ever said those units were "duds". You're very quick to point out that game balance is a spectrum but are ignoring the fact that a unit who might pay slightly more for slightly less isn't a dud, but just something that is balanced against the background of it's parent faction. It sounds like you want every faction to be exactly the same, containing the same units at the same points cost. after all, what's more fair than chess?
You can always refuse match ups. Playing the game is elective. Of course at a tournament that you're playing to win at, its more difficult to refuse a matchup based on personalities and playstyles but thats where it comes down to conviction. If you know a player does something you don't like (smells bad / repeated negative play experiences / was your high school bully / slept with your girlfriend / etc) you always have the opportunity to refuse to engage them in play. Of course that action has consequences - which means, yes, you're probably not in contest to win the tournament, but that is a decision you have to make as a player. I've never done it in Infinity - nor have I ever felt the need to refuse to play anyone, but there's a different game of space battles and dice rolls where I once asked TO's to plunge me in the rankings because I had no interest in playing against a specific person that I'd had several long standing issues with.
They enable you to disable DTWs, with little to no expenditure of orders. The syncing is 60-75% chance of success, with is excellent. Then you need to position the HVT correctly to avoid the templates. In the case of DTW it's trivial to guess where they're going to be deployed, allowing you to eclipse the active model with 1/4" side to side movement to prevent DTWs. @hecatron just stated how easy syncing with DTs are to make Decaptiation pretty unbalanced. You deploy an infiltrator as the data tracker near the enemy DT, kill the DT, and then run yours into the depths of your DZ. That's 5 ITS objective points. Further this is easier for cheap troop factions with lots of orders, and cheap infiltrators. As stated earlier, DTW and mines are also commonly used for DZ defense, particularly during the 1st turn. This tactic allows you to walk past common defenders, and then do a Van Zant. How? I can post more picks, but in active turn it's not possible to prevent the active player from turning off templates. Citation needed. It's not in the first 10 pages of rules discussion, and I can't find any discussion with human shield as a search result. HVT is too common to find anything. It's not possible to balance when the "high points for units that have a lower impact" (aka duds) can be ignored, or not used. What usually happens is the game becomes less interesting, because the "high impact compared to their low cost" units (aka OP) get taken at max AVA, and the duds are ignored. Not the case, I want balance, but making all units the same, with equal access is only one way to achieve it.
@RogueJello this is going off topic from the OP now, but just because a unit is cost low and has a big impact for its cost doesn't make it broken. It took me a long time to realize that yes, I need to dedicate a whole order to killing my opponent's sub 10 point warbands. I lost many games because a well positioned morlock was able to destroy my forward pushes, or get behind me and tear up my order pool. It felt silly to have to dump an entire order from a fully linked HMG into that morlock rather than into the buffed TR bot or the sin eater, but ultimately even though they were cheap, those morlocks were a real terror that my opponent was going to spend orders on if I didn't take them out. The Sin Eater was going to spend the rest of the game standing in his spot, looking at a fire lane that I could avoid (if I took care of the morlocks...) The crux is, I needed to identify which pieces were important to my opponent's stragegy and neutralize them. The actual cost of the model is meaningless because an unsupported avatar may be less effective than a supported Zero for around 15% of the cost.
You’ve failed to convince me that this can even unbalance the game, let alone break it. You’re spending orders (before you say anything, yes you are) to do something that limits my ability to attack something with options that I don’t run, or run few of? You still get shot in the face and die to my linked msv2 multisniper or equivalent. Get good.
Sorry what? Play chess. EDIT: That came across a bit harsh. I meant, “play chess if you want a game balanced in that way That would be incredibly unappealing to me, unless I was in the mood for chess.”
Yeah. The synced Designated Target doesn't make Decapitation unbalanced. The whole point of Decap is to get forward and kill specific models / prevent that. Yes, I think Decap's scoring needs to be looked at. But this tactic can be as much of a trap as it is valuable: ultimately you're spending orders doing things other than blunting your opponent's counter. This leaves you vulnerable to being taken apart over the course of the game by an opponent who goes second and focusses on breaking your defences first and scoring second. Even when successful it generally falls into the category of "tactics that will make you win harder", because it needs 'spare' orders to achieve.
