i have just returned from a long break from Infinity. One of my favourite troops before was a Sierra Drone with monofilament mines. Now as far as I can see they are no longer available. Can Pan-O get monofilament mines at all without going outside faction?
Welcome back. Shock Army of Acontecimento has access to AVA2 Nagas who have a Monomine option. Other than that I'm afraid the option doesn't exist anymore.
Hi Teslarod, thanks for that. That is really disappointing. Since the Nagas are Aleph that was what I meant by going outside faction. I don’t understand why they took my favourite toys away from both the factions I play. Oh well. Such is life in the Human Sphere I guess. Stuff gets worse and we are all told how much better off we are. Sounds like 1984 to me rather than 150 years in the future.
N3 streamlined some profiles, and TR remotes are only one of the examples. SAA has a strong Aleph presence in general, it's the sectorial design.
To translate "You have bought all these wonderful Pan-O minis now you need to get a bunch of Aleph minis to Pan-O play competitively." At least they only killed off some of my favourite Combined Army minis they didn't put some fluff into place to say oh BTW you have to include three Ariadna minis and a Haqqislam mini in any CA army to have a chance.
Yes it seems that way certainly. which is annoying because I started out using Pan-O because of the nice things. Now they seem bland and lower tech than some of the other corps. Very depressing.
I never understood that backlash against cross-faction unit use. There are in all three sectorials in the game that make use of loaned Aleph units, so they can be easily avoided if someone is a faction purist. They were constructed like this since the original HS, both fluff- and army composition-wise, so it's nothing new. There's no Aleph in vanilla PanO, so if someone doesn't play SAA or NCA he can easily ignore the whole issue.
Not to mention you can easily play NCA competitively without using amy Aleph units. Even Shock Army can be playex without Aleph, although that one a little harder.
I will agree with both Stiopa and Nemo's comments. I am just having a little bit of a sulk over losing access to Monofilament mines without going out-faction. It was something I enjoyed using the last time I played Infinity and even back then I had made the decision to stay wholly within faction lines. CA is not hard considering the unlikelihood of finding Human Sphere "allies" for the marauding alien juggernaut. But before Pan-O seemed to be able to go it alone. Now? I'm not certain. And I definitely don't want to go anywhere near Aleph. I guess Neo-Cap or The Spanish Inquisition in Space, sorry I mean Military Orders, is the way to go. Unless I go militantly Vanilla which is always a viable option I guess. Unless you want to use link teams of course.
There's always a possibility that Varuna won't have any Aleph units, so there will be another 'pure' sectorial to use, if you want. As for Mono itself... yeah, it'd be nice if we could get it on another unit. It's a tech solution to problems, and it's supposed to be the PanO way. Designers doesn't seem to have the heart for the faction, though.
You make great points I wonder if they worry about monofiliment mine proliferation being too discouraging of Big Expensive Toy use.
I don't think so. Hackers and E/M are both strong counters to heavies and much more common. There are whole two units with Monomines in the game now, Nagas and Malignos. Mono CCW is a bit more widespread, seven units counting mercenaries. It wouldn't hurt if there were one or two units with such mines. And I'd love to see at least one in PanO, but if I were to decide I wouldn't mount it back on Sierra, because TR remote is most often stationary. I'd say they would be more useful on Bolts, which are decent at contesting the middle and could use some more unique tools.
Both hackers and E/M can be fixed and mono CCW isn't as much of a suprise (Except for Ninjas but Sensor can spot them) A mine suddenly being a TAG killer is pretty scary.
It is, especially given the Dodge penalties. But you know immediately what it is when it gets deployed, and can avoid it. Unless the infiltrator gets close and deploys the Monomine with TAG in its AoE, the mine acts more like a deterrent than active threat. Mono CCW on Oniwaban or - especially - Speculo can be actually more scary.
My two factions are Pan-O and Combined Army. They both seem to have taken the care-hammer from CB. I’d like to know why. But nowhere near as much as I’d like it not to be so.
I'd suggest getting back into the game before forming these kinds of judgements. Rules evolve. Editions change. That's a pretty natural and inevitable part of any system. Monomines on the Sierra was cool, but now the Sierra gets supportware, is harder to remove from play, is easier to repair, and costs a lot less than it used to.
If I have understood well, Seraph didn't have Super-Jump in N2. Things changed because it had to I think. Aquila isn't any longer a troop that kicks Ariadna alone. He is still very good but now he can't win a game alone.