This. So much this. I somehow managed to never play an army with smoke so far and it is so trivial, always on the cheapest units, usually "free" to put down without even spending an actual irregular order and utterly and completly gamebreaking bonkers good it's sort of a joke. "It's always your turn" or something used to be an ad line for Infinity and sititng on the other side of the table and just tiredly waving off "nope don't see ya, go ahead, do all the moves, press all the buttons" sure doesn't feel like that. In general I don't like mixed links at all and I'd be happy to get rid of them if they toned down just how silly effective it is. I could go on a whole book long rent on how crazy it is that it completly blocsk everyhting if so much as your toe is in it and yet you can somehow sit down and hack a console from within, how you can have flametrhower and hear an enemy right in front of you but somehow not even point it in that general direction, etc. etec.
I can agree on smoke. Smoke should almost be what Nimbus is. It should only give a minus to shoot through. Not completely block sight.
In general, I do not believe, that adding strong models to fireteams is a great idea. Fireteams are a fun way of giving line infantry a viable active role on the field, but just stacking bonuses on to already strong models takes tactical depth from the game - and lessens the use of TAGs.
Or only if you are compoletly hidden by it, not just becuase your left foot is hard to make out. And maybe with the Eclipse version that really does block everything but if it is thatthick you can't even see someone a foot in front of you, you don't get to CC or hack consoles or build jenga towers inside of it either.
As much as I tend to agree that having just your left pinky toe in the smoke shouldn't count as fully obscured by it, the second you start including such terms as "partially within the smoke" or "majority within the smoke" you open up a huge amount of debate over what exactly that means, and break out a bunch of geometric diagrams for fringe cases that are plausible but unlikely. So, for the sake of simplicity, "within the smoke" being defined as touching it is sufficient for me as it avoids unnecessary debate, and you can (and likely should) view it as more of an abstraction of the smoke cloud taking up a little more volume than is presented by the template. It would be interesting, however, if the blast template was marked with a 3" and 5" radius, where the inner 3" is complete obscurement and the outer 2" is just.. I think poor visibility? Whatever the -6 visibility zone is. [Would also allow for blast templates to have some variety, because LGLs and LRLs having a full 5" blast feels excessive but that's for another thread.]
Completely within and touching it would bring the same amount of work if there is no mention to "partially". And even with that, it would be not much complicated: You touch only smoke zone? Completely within You touch both smoke and non smoke zone? Partially within You don't touch smoke? Outside Is not so difficult to understand. I think is worse the situation we have now: to be unable to see someone on the side of the smoke zone pecause a little part of him is touching the zone, but the dude behind him, who is 90%covered by the smoke zone and the other miniature, but can be objetive without any problem
That's actually a really simple way to solve it! I just had in the back of my mind the Warhammer 40K debates about who is or is not under a template because "partially touching" wasn't defined and left all sorts of people debating what % defined "partially."
"Inside" versus "totally inside" versus "base to base contact" are defined within the rule set. http://infinitythewiki.com/en/Game_...minology:_Interaction_between_Zones_and_Bases I believe Warmachine changed many interactions from "inside" to "totally inside" for simple reasons of how some zone effects became very dominant and how some people made "toeing-in" an art form of annoyance.
I understand why they made it the way it is. To simplify it. You are either in or out. No in between. Touching it in, not touching out. Can you imaging the arguments over if a guys is partially in or out? Sometimes things need to be black and white.
It's for consistency with other template weapons and with terrain zones. You could use totally inside and it would be (almost) as simple, but it would also be a substantial reduction in the power of template weapons.
Actually it could be as simple. It doesn't need to be treated equally because one is a template and other is a zone, the same way could be a rough terrain zone. With the rule as is now, the smoke area grows depending on the base size of the miniature and creates line of vision shenanigans. Changing it to "completely within" is exactly the same complexity (works different, but is as difficult to understand and apply), and takes out all of those shenanigans. Another topic would be if CB want out or not those interactions
consistency in the rules should be strived for, the fact that all area effects are measured so long as if you are touching the area you are considered within that area (or range for that matter) is consistent throughout the entire book. having an exception for that to effectively make smoke merely an inch smaller in radius would be pretty questionable
Nice to see other people who think the smoke rules are absolutely insane as they are. Having the cheapest models be able to dispense the game's most powerful piece of wargear using zero regular orders always struck me as the most counter-intuitive part of Infinity. The fact that the game had to escalate to linked MSV2 just to effectively shoot a 6-point warband is kind of crazy to me. Part of me does miss the day when Suppressive Fire could hit Camo units, Cautious Movers and enemies in smoke, but required a player to pick a lane where the enemy would be. I think about that a lot for defending consoles or trying to deny areas to an enemy. Even a mook with a rifle was pretty lethal when you told him to empty every mag he had at that smokey center objective.
They almost all need a category shift. Smoke -3 to hit Smoke Plus -6 to hit Nimbus -3 to hit & -1 Burst Nimbus Plus -6 to hit & -1 Burst Eclipse works like old Smoke MSV 1 negates up to -3 MSV2 negates up to -6 The problem is now that those cheap war bands are easily taken out again. They need something to get up and do something themselves.
t. PanO player But seriously, it'd be ok if the non-MSV tricks for dealing with Smoke (mines, Perimeter Weapons etc) were more evenly distributed around factions.
I played ALEPH, Ariadna, and Yu Jing long before you met me as a PanO player. Part of starting PanO was challenging myself to get away from using smoke.
So smoke is too strong so we release new armies with linked MSV2 Sniper profiles. How is that not plain powercreep? If smoke is the issue here one should change smoke. Not add counterplay that is only an option to very few armies.
5-10 points troop with smoke and linked vm2 to deffend against... Looks at tunguska... Laughs for both
