Bit off topic but I feel like pointing out for IA, yes, Zhanshi are largely in here for mechanical reasons and don't fit fluff wise (best you can do is consider them part of a combat engineers detachment for the Gongcheng), but to reiterate what was said elsewhere, MO isn't thematically "The Heavy Infantry sectorial" they're "The Crusade Sectorial." Crusades features knights and their military orders, but thematically military orders also feature detachments of light infantry, every order be it Hospitaller or Teutonic all have their own gaggle of Order Sergeants that belong to the specific order and are commanded by Father Knights in battle. They're not a pure HI focused sectorial with HI as the line infantry like Invincibles. Thematically Order Sergeants represent the fanatics, peasant levies, mercenaries and glory seekers that joined the crusades on their racially charged murder fuck party in the middle east. Because before fucking up the middle east for Freedom, Oil, or keeping the commies out was the norm, you did it for God. If Military Orders was its own stand alone faction Order Sergeants would be divided into separate profiles the same way the various Knights are based on their specific order they belong to, but for mechanical reasons they all fall under one umbrella for the purposes of being Pan-O. Fluff wise though, each Order Sergeant belongs to a specific order even if nothing represents it in game. Playing heavy on Order Sergeants for MO gives you no less right to shout DEUS VULT and purge the heathens when you roll crits.
Ewwwwwwwwwwwww... well, that pretty much sounds the death knell of HI link teams, the #1 priority target is to murder every single AHD you can find before you spend a single order moving 150+points of your army. Yes, MO does have a (much) better excuse to take Order Sergeants than IA has to take Zanshi. What was MO's excuse to take Fusilier LTs again?
They were still part of the formal command structure of the PanOceanian military and the Fusiliers were there as specialist support and potentially command elements detached from HQ. Keeping in mind especially that "Lt" is just what "the officer in command of the operation on the ground" is called and that officer might be any relevant rank. It was literally "they could easily be the highest ranking officer here". Now, I accept the argument that MO didn't need that additional support and am ok with the change removing the Fusiliers, but WHY they could be Lts before was always clear.
Personally I think removing them was a stupid idea and they should've just gone with the usual deterrent of slapping a 1 SWC tax on things that they don't want to be acting as LTs frequently. I don't think that spells doom for HI links, keep in mind that requires Sixth Sense level 2, so basically core linked AHDs which outside the Brawler are relatively rare, and also access to pitchers or a decent repeater network. There's not many things that meet that requirement. Druze are the main offenders.
Neither Murrogh nor Saito are very different in price to a Zhencha and they aren't hackable. I don't think a bunch of hackers can do a terrible amount of damage to a force that has access to highly mobile solutions to hackers. IA's problem is that their solutions to hackers are also hackable meaning they will get challenged hard if they try to operate in a repeater. After all, how many armies can afford to have MSV2 ARO pieces cover their tactically placed AHDs/Repeaters without letting them get exposed to overwhelming long range HMG fire? Those repeaters/AHD will not do anything to McMurrough so he's pretty free to advance up and destroy them through smoke cover which will then allow the Zuyong to move freely, since again most armies won't be able to afford spamming repeaters at a rate that costs McMurrogh/Saito more to clear than they gain in forward progress.
...which comes right back around to the problem of giving everyone and their dog pseudo 2-wound units and then looking at heavy infantry. Being HI is really nothing more these days than paying for the privilege of being hackable.
I mean, half of S5 HI is raging trash, so compared to that a solid (if not amazing) shooter with NCO and 2,9 wounds sounds pretty good. Bringing Zanshi core doesn't mean not playing to IA's strengths or theme though. You can still have a Haris with Tai Sheng. With Daoying it's already 8 orders, so quite a representation of HI playtime, I'd say. You will also have what's probably a 10-order group on top of it for your Haidao / Zencha to act. I have to ask, is IA supposed to be a all-big-boy army, or is it just what YJ uses at frontlines, and being YJ they have a lot of power-armored folks? In latter case Zanshi wouldn't surprise me at all. I was under impression that being of HI type is a ground to get a discount because that label itself does nothing but making you vulnerable to hacking and E/M immobilization.
Nah, it's there to make that second wound of yours cheaper and the privilege of probably having enough MOV to move 8" in a single order.
Especially with all the 1W+NWI stuff that is showing up that is cheaper and has better stats! The fluff is that the Invincible Army is supposed to be the opposite of the Banner Armies' masses of poorly-trained light infantry, with everyone in power armor. [ edit ]: N1/N2 Invincible fluff: [ /edit ] Except no-one's been able to point to a single HI unit that is less expensive than a 1W+NWI MI unit with similar stats! McMurder is hard to price because he's S6.
This is exactly what "discount" is. Granted, apparently its actual presence isn't evident... It is given by MOV attribute, not unit type label.
KHDs ignore firewalls and Santiago has a Deflector-1 He just splits the burst on Redrum and cooks both of them alive, giving -6 Or throws everything into AHD because Gromoz is not that much of a threat Dashat plays like a typical spammy Haqq/Ariadna army; lot of irregular cost effective garbage to choke opponent and some hard hitters. They dont even need Zuyoungs aside from 1 or 2 models. It does not remotely play like IA and if you try doing a maxorders pain train there you are going to be disappointed. If you ever expected IA to be a spammy army I don't know what to say "Elite" armies in Infinity are a trap and will always lose to spam because of the lethality in game mechanics, you cant change it without an enormous overhaul. MO used to cheat around that with Hospi-Magisters but that got nerfed into the ground so good riddance.
Except that Adepticon was just won by a guy running a single combat group Hollow Man list. They're absolutely runnable.
Everything dies to a rifle The cheaper the unit with a rifle or, even better, an smg, the better it is. Camo is cheaper than high ARM or high BS but provides upper hand in FTF. Zuyoung costs as 1.5-2 hunzakuts, a single hunzakut easily destroys most HI fireteams in acitve turn thanks to mines and light shotgun because ARM below 6 does not matter and so on 20+ model lists made mostly of dorks with chain rifles, shotguns and smgs eat HI-heavy lists alive even in suicide attacks while not losing much in button pushing
Mission isn't the only variable though, your opponent's faction and board matters too, especially for a faction like IA who doesn't have smoke and therefore needs to gun down anything your opponent has set-up to stop you from doing the mission. Also, you're talking about context, but you forgot to put all those units you listed in the context of IA, where everything is bloody expensive and shares some horrendous weaknesses to E/M and hacking. A 5-games tournament with an unkown meta (like a satellite, the interplanetario, or whatever big tournament of your choosing) is just a nightmare to build list for in IA, there's just too many things you have to plan for besides the different missions. Kamau/buffed dakini in 5-man team in ARO? Starco/Druze/QK EM rain? Nomads hacking? Defending your army when you have one minelayer at 1.5SWC and no perimeter weapons? It all adds-up really, really quickly, and by the time you can start to think about the different missions you're already out of points, and chances are your lists are either some variation of a zuyong pain train or a zhanshi/REM based list that would be probably better if you gave-up the fireteam to play vanilla yu-jing instead. And honestly it's kind of heartbreaking because the IA roster is pretty darn good, but most of those awesome units never have the opportunity to work together unless you accept that some match-ups will start as an uphill battle solely because you decided to field those units instead of those who could have help avoid this situation.
Every single army has those problems during list building. You're never gonna come up with a list that can dominate every single potential problem in the game and press buttons like a champ. That's also not a bad thing. I dont want the game to be a solved puzzle like that.
Except Dahshat can do an order-spam army with a Zuyong TA Core Fireteam. This isn't all that spammy, it's only 15 orders (17 counting the TA): Dahshat Company ────────────────────────────────────────────────── GROUP 1 7 2 1 ZÚYǑNG Lieutenant Combi Rifle / 2 Breaker Pistols, Knife. (0 | 27) ZÚYŎNG (Fireteam: Haris, Tactical Awareness) Combi Rifle + 1 TinBot B (Deflector L2) / 2 Breaker Pistols, Knife. (0.5 | 34) ZÚYŎNG (Tactical Awareness) HMG / 2 Breaker Pistols, Knife. (1.5 | 38) RUI SHI Spitfire / Electric Pulse. (1.5 | 20) ZÚYǑNG Boarding Shotgun / 2 Breaker Pistols, Knife. (0 | 26) VALERYA GROMOZ Hacker (Hacking Device UPGRADE: Expel) Combi Rifle + Pitcher / Pistol, Knife. (0.5 | 21) RAFIQ REMOTE FTO (Fireteam: Duo) Rifle + Light Shotgun, Sniffer / Electric Pulse. (0 | 17) McMURROUGH 2 Chain Rifles, Grenades, Smoke Grenades / Templar CCW (AP + DA). (0 | 32) WARCOR (360º Visor) Flash Pulse / Stun Pistol, Knife. (0 | 3) GROUP 2 3 2 DOZER (Traktor Mul Control Device) Rifle, D-Charges / Pistol, Knife. (0 | 14) NASMAT Electric Pulse. (0 | 3) TRAKTOR MUL Katyusha MRL / Electric Pulse. (1 | 11) TRAKTOR MUL (Total Reaction) Uragan MRL / Electric Pulse. (1 | 18) HUNZAKUT (Forward Observer, Deployable Repeater) Rifle + Light Shotgun, Antipersonnel Mines / Pistol, Knife. (0 | 18) HUNZAKUT (Forward Observer, Deployable Repeater) Rifle + Light Shotgun, Antipersonnel Mines / Pistol, Knife. (0 | 18) 6 SWC | 300 Points Open in Infinity Army Zuyong Core with two TA models and an MSV2 Spitfire, McMurder to run solo, Valerya with a Rafiq, and a small artillery park with two spotters. I'm sure it could use a lot of polishing, this was just off the top of my head. I never expected IA to be a spammy army, I have always been wondering how exactly CB was going to make an all-2W army work. It turns out that they made IA work by not having a lot of 2W models in the list, and adding the really cool LT2, NCO, and TacAware rules to let the pain train spend more orders.
