The Era of NA2 begun; now our NA2 got 7 armies rolling into action. Personally the concept of mixed factions under banners of 'Merc companies' are fun indeed, while not invading mother factions territory and still offering unique taste of gameplay. Yet the question is; Do you want more NA2 into battle, or do you think it is time to calm down? Wouldn't it too much if we get like 10 merc companies babbling? Even DDF another merc company clue was detected. White Company originating from ALEPH. Do you want more, or not? Lemme hear your opinions.
Not every faction has to have Merc subfaction. It was fun at first, but it's getting annoying now. And why would ALEPH have anything to do with Merc companies? They have OSS for subterfuge, and AFAIK only Yu Jing and PanO have enough funds to permanently have ALEPH units available to them.
NO. Aleph should never ever have any involvement with mercenary factions. It goes against the whole point of both Aleph, and it's efforts to keep its forces officially sanctioned.
I put down „depends“. A few more well-designed NA2s that increase Infinitys depth as a game without further increasing SKUs or rule bloat would certainly be appreciated. However, we do have plenty of factions that require a rotating catalogue anyways, so adding more factions feels very optional and probably doesn’t improve my personal gaming experience that much.
I think we could do with a bit of clarity around how much support each are likely to receive. As a guess I assume that ones like Ikari are essentially glorified CBL and won't receive much in the way of updates whilst JSA will continue to get releases. It would be good to know if cb have a similar attitude though.
I doubt JSA sees any releases in the next couple of years, honestly. The army is complete minus just a couple of sculpts, and I don't foresee any new units being added.
I think it would be really interesting to know how strongly CB backs the „paper armies“ among NA2. For the moment I think JSA and Ikari aren’t any different from each other in the sense that they have most of their miniatures and it is unlikely to see much more than maybe a different load out here and there. However, should N4 hit at some point with a big cleaning/rebalancing purge, I‘d be completely convinced that JSA will continue to be a part of the game while paper armies like Ikari might get purged for the sake of reducing the games complexity at least at the time of reset.
I'd like an actual Evil MegaCorp army, like MagnaObra. We have a couple pretty good-guy Merc companies (StarCo and Foreign Company), Druze and Ikari are rather dark gray, but we don't have an outright black merc company.
There is no good mercenaries. EVER. There's only mercenaries with good PR departments. Mercenaries are hired to do things a normal army would never do.
Not sure I understand your point? Aleph cannot afford to be tied to anything non-official. There is no point in "hiring" out its agents. No mercenaries would want an Aleph agent among them, as their atrocities (and they all commit atrocities, again, that's the point of using mercenaries) would be impossible to hide.
ALEPH commits atrocities too, though. Like I could totally see an ALEPH agent hiring a group of Druze to commit the Violent Intermission Mk. 2.
I won't debate now if Aleph commits atrocities, as it's not the point. I disagree on your premise, but for the sake of argument let's say it does and wants to stage "Violent Intermission Mk.2". It would still never have its agents working with mercenaries. Either it would hire some Druze and let them do it without any Aleph agents nearby, or it would use its own forces. Combining the two creates the worst of both worlds; it still risks exposure of having Aleph troops in the attacks, but also risks the exposure of acquiring services of mercenaries.
Don't know if we will go darker then Dashat and Druze. They are really criminals who are allowed to play war.
But if said mercenaries have good PR (StarCo, Foreign Company, KTS, etc), then nobody will care. You'll never get over the risk of having it found out that ALEPH is going around massacring civilians to maintain its own jealous grip on power, but nobody's going to think ALEPH is evil for having its operatives working with some of the nicer mercenaries out there.
I'd love to see some submondo thrown in there. Aida Swanson, Irmandinhos, Desperados, Jaguars, Wu Mings, Yuan Yuans, Le Muet, some sort of gang-related LI (Securitate? or no, since they are already in FC?) etc. Just straight up criminal elements, some kind of "Don" style special character with inspiring leadership? Really nasty characters, maybe a lot of viral and monofilament mines, not a lot of specialists Truly the worst the human sphere has to offer
There's plenty of Nomad conspiracy theorists to put out wildest conspiracies about Aleph killing civilians that any cover is essentially provided right there. Everyone will think Aleph is evil once the mercenaries are tied to the massacre. And mercenaries are always the type of people that rape, pillage, and murder anyone they can. Even the "nice" ones. So Aleph is risking something for no gain.