Unrelated suggestion: Shock should be taken off everything that hasn't got "shock" or "multi" in it's name.
Like mines? Or do you suggest to rename them into Shock Mines? From Template Weapons page: "The Area of Effect of a Template is the area it covers with a single declaration of use. For example, if you declare an Attack using a Template Weapon, all troopers or targets in base contact or inside the Area of Effect of the Template are affected by the Attack declared." Emphasis mine. Being Lethal or causing / not causing current profile stat changes has nothing to do with all this because rules directly state what counts as "affected" by template. Now, can we please continue with this in the proper forum section?
It's pretty silly that a basic infantryman can't get a non-lethal wound from a mine, the weapon famous for maiming rather than killing. It is also silly that a superhuman takes a more lethal hit from a mine than a grenade or bullet. So yes, AP Mines should lose shock by default.
@the huanglong Well, to be fair, mines we have in Infinity work more like smart versions of likes of Claymores / MON-50. They are fairly different from AP mines most likely involved into story behind that impressive photo you've posted, and they use noticeably more of explosive than hand or GL grenades, so there's that. And really, we do not know how different they are from modern frag weapons or Infinity chain-stuff. I'd rather go with "let's not bring up realism too much here" route though. If anything, I'm more concerned with more general-purpose BS weapon getting Shock.
To be fair, the rules have walled themselves in by strictly defining "Dead" as actually medically dead and unconscious as essentially knocked out, but recoverable through battlefield resuscitation. Huanglong's image up there is the grey area - a paramedic won't recover that person's foot in a few seconds, but they're certainly not medically dead. If you broaden the definition of "Dead" to "requires urgent surgery", then a more primitive "Shock" (maybe such as the type of shock that O-12 uses?) would include that which affects loss of body parts to a degree that it is impossible to keep fighting, but doesn't necessarily kill.
Honestly, I was always seeing Dead state as "messed up enough to make battlefield assistance inefficient at quickly restoring ability for the rest of encounter". Simply because I'm some naive civvie who isn't very comfortable with the narrative that involves these small teams being mostly cut down to a few survivors every time they go into action, even if they complete their task. Especially since not every faction is loaded with cubes and spare hosts to the brim. For the same reason I've never felt like giving my models any personality and questioned named characters being playable as such. But anyway, in the end it's basically game mechanics that doesn't necessarily translate very well into RL terms and vica versa, although you can use your imagination to make a picture of what's happening.
I enjoy the lethality of combat in INFINITY but I think it's too easy to massacre in the active turn, and this has led to convoluted solutions (retreat!) to solve this simple problem. Currently you need this bizarre rule to punish victory in combat because it is easier for a medieval Scottish berserker to cut down 15 super soldiers in a cloud of 20th century smoke than it is to mash WIP rolls against a box with a random paramedic.
You need that bizarre rule to punish the player that ignores the mission objective. If the one doing the massacre is also doing mission while on it, and forces the enemy player into retreat, he will still win, because with 2-3 orders is hard to take back enough consoles.
Maybe the problem is that it's too hard to slow an opponent down because Infinity's core rules allow too many orders to be dumped into a few well-positioned models? Perhaps an alternate solution like reducing the max size of an order group to 5 could do the same job.
that can be a solution, but also can create other problems, like when you have not enough tools to deal with something and those tools are in the same group or you need some extra orders on it. Is hard to make a middle point that will be ok for everybody, but I think 10 is good enough (but now there are a some heavy hitters that can go to 12 or 13 orders for themselves
I take the opposite tack, I think Retreat punishes people for playing the game too much, especially in zone control missions. In a tournament this last weekend I saw a player purposefully not use NWI on his Vet Kazaks so he could go into Retreat and win.
Yeah, it'd be good if Infinity expanded/changed the definition of the Dead State to mean "incapable of engaging in further combat regardless of battlefield medicine", I think we'd be OK. Might need some tweaks to the campaign rules, but no change to how Infinity currently plays as one-off games. And that change to the campaign rules could be as simple as "You get a Medevac roll on all models, even models in the Dead State, and if that Medevac roll fails you then make the Cube-evac roll." Call it "Mostly Dead"?
@Section9 Yeah, it makes sense for Doctor and Paramedic rolls too. "I can't do anything for this guy, get him to the field hospital" rather than "my knife slipped."
At least it’s not like war machine where souls and corpses are in-game resources you can collect and spend, guaranteeing that “dead” really is dead. Throughout most of human history, battles have been more about incapacitating your enemy and breaking their morale, rather than killing every last person on the battlefield.
Does anyone else think paramedic should be a bit more forgiving? Like just a straight phys roll? It kind of seems like a liability to me. I mean, it makes a cheap button pusher but still.
I would have preferred they rewrite the skill rather than create a new version (medjector) that works like that. It may just be an experiment to see how it pans out, or they may remain distinct forever. We’ll have to wait and see.
