You may be demanding a higher degree of perfection than I implied. That they have identified some combinations as problematic doesn't mean they have identified all of them, and fixing the problem on a mechanical level requires just the same awareness of the problem as fixing it by not designing units without the combinations - if it doesn't require an even higher level of awareness because how a fix might cause other problems. By the very definition, stuff that they refuse to design are combinations you won't be able to spot and it might be hard to realise just how broken things can be that CB has avoided. For example, putting Fatality L2 on nothing but snipers will effectively put a cap on how horrific the skill can get, but changing it to be +3 BS straight up (which is marginally stronger than crits-on-1) would have the consequences that Sheskin would be BS 21 prior to negative MODs which (obviously) a value over 20 and as such the fix goes from "marginally" stronger to "much" stronger than crits-on-1 -- A wound isn't a multiplier. What nonsense is that? You can't get a Haidao sniper to perform like two Djanbazan snipers, no matter how you twist and turn it. There's far too many weapons that leap over wounds, or even ignore wounds, for that to be true even for the must lower statement of "survives twice as long". Wound is also the single costliest attribute - by far. But I am in full agreement that the pricing according to troop archetype is actively hostile to a balanced unit design! Arguably, though, I think you really need to delve very deep in the design specifications of the Hsien before you make a statement that MSV2 is more useful on a costlier unit. Most people prefer a Rui Shi over a HMG Hsien, and a Multi Rifle Hsien is practically unheard of.
Part of the problem of us discussing stuff by ourselves always needs to be taken with a massive grain of salt is pretty visible in here. Applying reality to the game is always a problem. Full Auto from a technical point of view is perfectly viable - if you stop thinking about a meatbag wielding the gun and go to gun emplacements for reference. Anyone who ever handled one of these with small arms knows recoil is a very much a physical thing depending on the gun mount as well as the meatbag's physique on top of the skills to make up for the remaining kick of the gun. Speaking in game terms Shadowrun has decent(ish) representation for it. If you're a dude made pretty much entirely of metal weighing 600 points and can bench a truck, you can pretty much empty a full magazine into a target at full accuracy. Add in auto aim assists and better materials and you can do that with a SAW instead of an Assault Rifle. So, if you're an 600 pound Kriza Borac augmented by smart servo's automatically offsetting your already significantly reduced recoil you end up at BS13 Full Auto L2. And all of that makes perfect sense. If your gun can take the RPM without overheating the barrel while you're basically not affected by recoil and can cluster shots in a 5cm target circle at 300m, congratulations. That also requires to have belt after belt of ammo to, unlike a normal soldier, not have to care about trigger discipline to remain operational in a drawn out engagement. So far so good, here we stop making sense because this is a game. TAGs would realistically be built like this by default. They'd have a significantly increased ammunition capacity and stable accuracy despite increased rate of fire. That's the point where we should go back to Infinity being a game and as a result requiring things like game balance. Skills in Infinity usually add a pretty steep swing in performance and should always be regarded as game mechanics instead of realistic representations. Cherry picking a single example is probably the worst of all. Think about Camo for a second. Makes zero Sense that it keeps working for multiple Orders against the same target without moving. The other guy knows where you are, he can see that Hac Tao HMG's muzzle flash as clear as day. Still no one cares, it's just a game mechanic, never seen anyone second guess that one. Or Link Teams. Why does someone have to be in a Fireteam to warn you (provide Sixth Sense L2), how the hell do other people make you more accurate or provide more Burst to your weapon? Next to that, Full Auto is a very reasonable introduction. If you hate on Full Auto, hate on it for forcing the +1B MOD on lvl1. Would have been much better to have the -3 MOD available on stuff like the Gamma instead of the B5.
We've got two S5 HI built specifically for that purpose, where the HI suit is a fire support platform first and a protective suit more or less by coincidence, and neither of them have Full Auto of any level. I think the less you try to explain it being a skill the better. Can't I hate it for the -3 MOD and for how it upsets the cross-faction balance of Heavy Infantry? FA1 is fine, tbh. It's a mechanical shortcut where you want a unit to have the value of two guns but not the modelling implications of it (and potentially important: not the Fireteam compatibility).
... literally talked about TAGs not having FA is a good hint on why it doesn't make sense in the game. How does that have anything to do with the Yan Huo fielding a weapon class of a size that would normally require S7 to get access to? That's not one but 2 Silhouette levels. Isn't that kind of negligible next to an S7 Seraph wielding a basic Spitfire? There isn't a single S6 TAG or HI troop capable of wielding a MHMG or HRMC. Slapping one on S5 from a fluff perspective is an achievement. In spite of that the Yan Huo remains mechanically pretty bad in the game as it stands. Adding FA to it would make sense for that reason rather than realism. Mechanical balance is far more important than anything else. Fluff is almost exclusively hit or miss as far as representation of combat prowess on the table is concerned. Really though. Twin weapons. Let's talk about that for a second. Dual wielding guns (and Melee weapons for that matter) are more or less exclusively a movie/game inventions. Double the guns, double the dakka at least on Infantry doesn't really exist IRL on professional soldiers for a reason. As long as you're limited to a single person and ocular vision you screw over basically everything important for gun handling, opening doors, reloading etc by adding another gun to your other hand. You usually start seeing multiple weapons of the same kind on vehicles with multiple gunners. Even basic pistols benefit more from using both hands for aiming rather than adding a second one. The average person is just used to more guns = better - it's just present everywhere so we kinda assume that's how it is, even if it's really nowhere close to reality. Circling back to Full Auto I'd love if both it and Twin Weapons disappear in favor of separate Skills applying the "Saturation Fire" -3 MOD (which would also apply to SF) and just a flat +1B MOD to slap on stuff (including 5 man Fireteams assuming they stay as they are). Same for Fatality L1 and L2. Making that seperate Skills would be Personally I don't care for either fluff or realism in game. Balance, Balance, Balance. Having meaningful options leads to fun games. Asymmetric performance works best in single player, where you can add challenges and achievements to subsidize sub par performance. Watching people argue for what they believe to be realistic or represented in the fluff, and ending up very very wrong about, is all the more reason to argue for the game being built around it's mechanics instead of the mechanics being built to suit the rule of cool.
Do keep in mind the Overdron is S6 and has an HRMC. It does 'pay' for it by being BS13 and MOV4-4, making it a rather 'weak' TAG for what it brings. In any case, I do agree that the skills could be separate and that 'fluff' and 'lore' should take second place over game balance.
Oh I agree that Helots are ridiculously optimised. What I'm saying is that it works: it creates a cool unit that people want to take in a faction where it's pretty unique for the role and where it's necessary for overall faction performance. I'm not certain that the profiles are that lopsided: the SMR profile also gets a run in SWC tight lists. But sure, it could pretty much be just those two profiles; the other two are mainly there as 'funnies'*. The only point I go "Yeah that should probably be fixed" is the prevalence of Shock on their weapons but that's more general an issue than just Helots, and a personal bete noir. They could probably afford to be a little less optimised, but they don't need to be (well unless all Warbands get nerfed, in which case there's a strong argument they should be brought in line). Where I get disappointed is where the profiles go the otherway: when a unit/profile that should be unique and exciting just sucks. Prowlers are the perfect example. They're the only Infil Camo MI in the game so they should be awesome and special. People should go "I want to play Nomads because they have Prowlers" in the same way people go "I want to play YJ because they have Daofei and Su Jians". * British name for specialist tanks in Normandy. By which I mean, I could see someone taking them on a specific table for a specific reason in a casual game: I'm not certain all of those profiles should be eliminated, although certainly they should be reduced.
The other one is Az'rail, just for context, who's running around with guns the size of which it takes at least a PH10 light infantry to run-and-gun with. Which is kind of funny, right, because what's even more associated with extra attacks in the mindset of gamers than two guns? Two swords. Ain't no such thing in Infinity are two swords giving more attacks. Yes, asymmetric performance is indeed something that should be left out of games with other humans, and even in single player I think it's mostly a surrender to not make an effort to not make choices meaningful - though at the same time there are methods of adding "challenge runs" to multiplayer as well if you find a way to reward people in a meaningful way outside of the game. For instance, I can't remember which game it was, but you had essentially Classified Objectives which got worth more if you revealed them to your opponent. I do think that fluff reasoning is important - it sells the setting. If there's too much bullshit reasoning in the game that doesn't make sense, well... I have at least 5 friends who got burned on Infinity's obtuse rules, over the top approach to balance and weird justifications for why things are like they are and at least two of them returned to various Warhammer games (40k, AoS, etc) Fluff doesn't need to make full sense, but it needs to make some surface level of sense, and that's why I personally think the conceptualization of Full Auto is just idiotic. Oh, and of course, it doesn't help that I don't think it should be on the Kriza HMG for balance reasons. Especially not when I could point to at least 5 other units in other factions that could use it more for balance reasons (some are not even Yu Jing *surprised gasp*). @inane.imp I literally have to look up what the other *3* profiles are. Few around here runs anything but the Light Rocket Launcher Helot, and that profile has killed more Zuyong for me than anything I can think of.
Thanks for reminding me about forgetting to add *human technology as a restriction, I usually remember to, but didn't this time around. Vodootech is still very advanced compared to human standards. Yet the Overdron still pays for his ability to be a S6 weapon platform with the limits you point out already. Here's another thing that makes no sense in here. Humans have a ARM6 3W S2 HI. CA doesn't even have 3W S5 HI Aspects. You could go about explaining that in a variety of ways. CA doesn't care about minimizing the size of their Aspect host bodies, because they're not that many, Aspect host bodies are fairly old Ur tech, cramming the mental capacity of an Aspect is where all the space goes.... etc. Can you read that again? "Infinity is bullshit, I'll go back to beer and pretzels where everything is made up instead of just the things I took offense on. Fatality hurt muh feeling of immersion. Putting Nagash/a Primarch on the table with a hundred dudes per side is cool tho, because GW never gave a shit." You gave up arguing with those guys, didn't ya?
Just a random idea due to someone posting a Codename 47 picture... Scavenged Impersonation - enter Impersonation-1 state by scavenging an unconscious (or immobilized?) enemy trooper with a W attribute.
a wound is not a multiplier, wounds as atribute are. A dude with 2 wounds pays more for each atribute because each wound make it more valuable. How much is that attribute? I do not now. Nonsense would be ignoring that. Maybe the problem is that I do not manage to explain what I mean, or that you are too focused on other things different of what I put. yes, CB can be thinking different regarding what we think is broken. I can agree with that. But if that's the case, the reasoning they did for full auto makes less sense. They fixed it because there was a lot of rants from a part of the comunity. Even some testers came to say that the SF+FA was "the cool thing" and after that, was not intended? what about SF for feverbach? why can they apply the malus if it cannot enter SF? can it enter SF after getting FA? With Fatality there were also a lot of negative comments, but not as focused and not from the same part of the comunity. CB just listens to who they want to listen (and there are a lot of examples of it). I have to reafirm my statement: CB haven't identified almost anything. They mainly followed what some part of the community says, and sometimes make fix for them
I wish combis wouldn't cost such a ridiculous amount relative to what they actually do in the game. Seriously, they discount you get from a chain rifle vs combi is just rude, and having a combi on a HI profile generally relegates it to bench warmer.
Are we pretending now that I was the one saying Domari and Myrmidon CR cost too much? Because I was the one saying that profile is good and people take it.
New terrain type: Urban rubble. Anywhere humans go, they inevitably leave trash, rubble, rickety constructions and unfinished projects - particularly in conflict zones. What is one person's home is another person's work hazard. Urban rubble is the skill of navigating a city off the broadway, it's roofs and service areas, it's slums and the corpse a city leaves behind when it is abandoned. Examples: piles of trash, shelled city streets, dilapidated buildings, collapsed bridges, and sewers - but also construction sites, drain pipes, various service areas and other places not quite made for the general public to use.
I've always liked the idea of vertical terrain that doesn't hinder but allows the troops with the skill to use it like climbing+
You mean ladders, right? Modelling a table with drain pipes and saying "all drain pipes are ladders for S1 and S2" is within the existing rules.
