Perhaps something like a disposable riot shield made with ablative armour? One time use, automatic, nullifies the effect of any template weapons that target the user. Give it to a Bao with MSV2 and a BSG or SMG, and let the doorkicking commence.
Or stun grenades and the PH/BS/equipment to make speculative firing them not a waste of orders. That's what breaching teams use to make breaches safer. Not safe, but safer. Roll the stun grenade in first, THEN peek enter and clear. This edition's entire design philosophy for direct template weapons is that they can't be stopped other than by the opposing model commiting to an action that will result in no effect. This is what TAGs use to shield themselves from extreme melee units and what extremely incompetent units use to punch upwards.
In that case, it's fairly easy to cheat the current system by just making the BS Attacks on these theoretical Good Bao count as Special Dodges against Templates using the attack roll, same as Smoke does against stuff requiring LoS. Could represent some good old Imperial Service "proactive security measures"; shooting them before they have a chance to draw their gun.
The game has to slim down and remove rules, not add even more. There are lots of people at my hobby club that don't want to play Infinity because it takes a fuckin PhD to know the rules and illogical interactions
On the other hand, if Infinity had a watered down ruleset and units that boiled down to playing fundamental game of move-shoot with them, I would've never considered it and thus would've never brought a few more people into our local community. Wargaming market has enough straightforward dicerollers as it is. IMO it's not number of rules that is the problem, but their delivery.
There's a sweet spot between where we are now and that mythical watered down ruleset though. We could Def lose a lot of rules without a negative impact on the playability of the game and it would serve to make it more accessible to more people
As one game designer put it to me, we could lose a lot of needless complexity without losing any sophistication.
Not that mythical, unfortunately. You can just check that game nobody likes to mention here, pretty much only thing about units that matter is how many dice they vomit and special rules often boil down to which of them you are allowed to reroll afterwards. But you are right that there's a lot of middle ground between here and there.
I think the rules could be much more clearly written. And a few trimmed off, like a spring garden. I don't think the game can lose a ton of rules though. Part of the depth is the number of options available as a result of bringing combinations of models. Strip too much of that and you trend even further towards a 'solved' game state where optimised profiles are truly the only good choices
No it's no, lmao. It's fucking garbage (40k, I mean). You need 4 books to field an army, they removed all the special rules, only to give EVERY single unit their own special rule (often the same rule with the variation on the name only) and then the chapter tactics and the allied detachment systems. There's zero player agency invovled the moment you place the miniatures on the place.
Often the same rule with variation in name only... mmm, I wonder where I have seen this too [emoji2357]
Yeah... no... I’m all ears for criticism of CB’s annoying CC charts that are variations of almost the same thing but this doesn’t even remotely compare to every single army having multiple units, all with different names of literally the exact same rule like deep strike, and there are TONS of those kind of rules that.
They need 1 chart and to differentiate Martial Arts, Protheion and Guard by use of alternate cc weapons. Let Guardian have a cc weapon that gives an arm buff, Protheion a cc weapon that targets BTS and saps wounds...
random though: what would you guys think of the zhencha hacker if he had KHD upgrade programs (trinity, or preferably redrum) on the assault hacker profile? I'm assuming CB doesn't want to give this guy a khd so he can't just waltz past mines with cybermask, but this solution would still let him perform KHD duty in the midfield and give him some ways to defend itself against other KHD.
In the current rule set, I see zero legitimate reason not to add Shock/Bio Immunity AND KHD to Zhencha (other than that Dahshat needs to be blocked from having the KHD) In a future rule set, that would depend entirely on what happens with hacking. I have a feeling hacking will change the most
That would be great. I don't see why Dashat should have every profiles we have for the units that we share now. I mean, IA is a State army with consequent means, there must be some equipment that isn't available on the blackmarket... (I know KH device is, but you've got my point) I've just realised that they even have more than us with the same units, since they got all the profiles and the Rui Shui Core too. Add it in IA then, unless the problem is that we have linked HI Engineers and it would make it too resilient/powerfull. Damn, I just noticed now that my salt cellar has fallen into my orange juice!
What I am saying is that they have everything we do have in term of profiles for the shared units, plus the core, but yeah Availability is the only thing that we have over them in fact. This is something I often forget to look at.