White Banner so far...

Perhaps not the greatest examples. Haidao and Hortlak provides some highly specialized equipment that Zuyong (which are cheaper than Jujak) and Jannisaries don't have. Jujak by contrast are to Shang-Ji mostly a a slider with ARM on one side and "big side-arm" on the other (yes, there's more to it than that, but that's would require a huge analysis that's just a waste of time)

Equally there's cost to consider, Haidao and Hortlak are both significantly cheaper than Jujak and Zuyong and Jannisaries are both cheaper than Shang-Ji, and here the main issue with the Jujak is cost vs performance, so pointing at two HI links that are both cheaper for a similar performance... ya know...

Do you play White Banner and Yu Jing a bunch? That's not a bad list theory, but I've found in practice the Zhanshi makes for a fairly bad defensive link team with no real good defensive long range wildcard and inherently costly weapons (in SWC)
For me the net result is usually that a vanilla list can be configured more and have more orders while the key pieces remain the same.

What I mean is, your other list is going to have to be a serious curveball or you are better off playing vanilla if you go into it with tthe goal of only utilizing a defensive LI core among the sectorial features.

 

I'm sure I've mentioned it before somewhere but it feels intentional that WB has more limited fireteam options, particularly core.

 

The main problem being that if the fireteam options are less valuable, they have to make up for it with worthwhile availabilities for useful and specialized troopers, otherwise it just becomes vanilla without the glue.

I'm not saying that that is specifically the case for WB, but in my limited time playing with listbuilding for it (I'm more inclined to just wait for N4 to really sink my teeth into things), I've hard a hard time building a list that 'comes together,' for lack of a better term. There's a lot of great trooper profiles in WB, but they tend to be pretty costly with little room to get filler in. In a less order-spam dependant meta, that wouldn't be as much of a problem, but currently I feel uncomfortable with my order counts with the lists I have managed to put together.

 

Did you... did you just... describe gameplay nirvana?

 

I wouldnt condsider WB fireteams options as limited
You can fill the basic core with premium wildcards or run a simplest order bunker of 4 zhanshi+1 tian gou and everything in between.

 

Compared to pre wildcard fireteams, sure, but compared to modern sectorials they are relatively limited due to very few base fireteams to build from and they carry the YJ limitation on wildcards.

Winterforce for example carries the options to build from 4 Core link teams and 4 Haris link teams, Varuna builds from 3 Core and 2 Haris, comparatively WB has the option to build from 2 Core and 2 Haris link teams. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, but it is a trait of WB.

 

A special Yu Jing only restriction!

 

You know, I can add more of the same complaints you guys have over WB and this Game’s Balance, so I’m gonna say this once.

Infinity is a game where high Lethality is a thing, and oh boy it is brutally, In fact games end up as Snowballed SteamRolls or AROFESTED Ties.

With no in between, no actual strategy or mechanic makes any kind of impact that deters the match from this Outcome.

So if they want to solve the Game Balance of this game in one fell swoop, they should do this: MAKE 2 WOUNDS STANDARD, not a Premium, basically Fusilier? 2 wounds and so on, you get the thing, make everyone (except warbands) get an extra wound and call it a day.

(like seriously, they have been doing it already with new releases so might as well go full way)

 

I agree with the principle, but (among many other things) MULTI weapons would need to get full burst on their Anti-Materiel mode. Otherwise Tohaa, Haqq and Ariadna would wind up with a marked advantage thanks to their multi-wound ammo on mid-burst platforms. I agree more with CB's current idea of softening the spikes (such as with crit remake and Code One paramedic changes), although I wish they'd stop putting the HI-lite combo on MI characters. I want the power armour to feel useful, damnit!

 

As a tangent to that tangent, I've been toying with the thought of how ARM could get re-worked. If all ammo has a native AP and a native DAM, and where DAM is reduced by ARM unless ARM is fully defeated by the AP value (with cover added, but defeated separately). As an additional aside, if ARM is defeated by up to -3 the attack deforms and causes extra damage.
While this ups damage complexity significantly, the general "goal" of this brain toy is to somehow simulate where a bullet is most dangerous against targets where it deforms while still inside the body. A Warband would be defined by having 0 ARM, much like a civilian, and would as such suffer deformation versus frag grenades and pistols while even light ARM that light infantry carry would prevent this extra damage and Medium Infantry would find that their ARM is high enough to be fairly effective against most civilian-grade ammo but cause deformation against stuff designed to penetrate Heavy Armour.
So Pistols, Chain Rifles, and stuff like Red Fury and possibly Light Shotguns (envisioned as non-slug Shotguns) would be low on AP and cause significant damage to very light targets.
Medium-ranged guns such as Combi Rifles, Spitfires, etc, would have enough AP to penetrate but not deform against your typical Heavy Armour (or alternatively, Heavy Armour is designed to provide a degree of protection against by far the most common threats on the battlefield) - or light units in cover!
Then you have the guns that's basically designed to take care of armoured personell carriers, AP Rifles, Portable Autocannons, etc, which would typically have so much AP that they'll ignore or deform against Mowangs, Szalamandra, or even Jotums (provided the latter is not in cover).

In either case, it's very complicated, but it would create certain interesting ARM stepping stones where, for example, ARM 4 would be fairly significant since that'd be immune to rifle penetration while ARM 2 is significant as being immune to grenade and pistol penetration. So when shot outside of cover a Zuyong would suffer a (*grabs number from hat*) DAM 10 hit from a Combi while a Zhanshi suffers a DAM 13 from a Combi and a Shang-Ji suffers a DAM 6 from the same Combi.

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In either case, to return to the original tangent, I don't think you'll effectively be able to slow the game down unless you directly address the order mechanics and the fragility that some factions have in certain missions (because let's face it, some have just terrible specialists of a certain type or terrible specialists in general while other specialists are just terrible at anything but what they are specialists as and having missions be dependent on those units means some factions gets deceptively fragile)

However, equally to how some games can snowball hard, I find that often a game can completely and utterly flip on a Hail Mary as long as you let your opponent have like... 4 orders to work with on the last turn.

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And to return to topic, I do think there's a bunch of small things that N4 could bring that would change things for both WB and IA by a decent degree. Not only Hidden Deployment on Hundun, but I can see some changes being done to Shaolin to drag them away from their current role which is a bit of an odd-ball for Yu Jing now a days and allow them to more effectively act as a linkable unit. Equally, I'm excited to see what the Light Shotgun changes does for the Panggo-doggo in IA (IMO, the "correct" set up is to have a Mowang always have a doggo)
But there's more, I don't think we've seen the full picture of Shang-Ji. I hope we haven't seen the full picture.

 

"You have a heart of gold. Don't let them take it from you."
I see so much faith that CB would do anything cool with YJ :)
But jokes aside linked shaolins that can use irregular orders in links in the same way TacAware can be used was my hope for WB after they showed us fireteam list for WB and WF. Special on shaolin with liang counting as one of them had my hopes up. And then we got Duo witn Qo with Liang as alternative for shaolin -.-

 

Shaolin have always been a poor match between mechanics and fluff, and I also find they work somewhat strangely in White Banner. It's like they fill a useful role, but they feel more mercenaries to me than even Krakots. They're supposed to be a special forces unit, they're equipped like a special forces unit, with one exception, and they've got stats like a special forces unit (except for the low BS). Yet it's that exception that we pick all the time.
We'll see what happens. They're probably gonna remain a cheap horde throw-away, but I do like the idea that Irregulars in links spend them like TacAware orders.

I'm also excited to try out the Long Ya with the new shotgun rules. I think the Heavy Shotgun worked brilliantly on them before and it always hurt when I had to save 5 points each by downgrading to the noticeably worse SMG.

Then there's that one weird profile for Jujak that really shouldn't cost what it does. Personally I think that one has a brand new ability in N4 but they didn't bother adjusting points cost on it for not being in N3 and just gave unit-wide adjustments (although it's equally possible they just forgot to print "Engineer" on it, because that, too, would fit the pattern for the unit).

I know Pan-O are putting a lot of hopes on Nökken getting Hidden Deployment (though I don't personally see why), but could there be more? Even though Guilang are supposed to be camouflage trained Zhanshi, they always felt super-elite compared to a lot of skirmishers out there to me.

I also think that we've not seen the Blue Wolf's final form just yet. Hyper-Dynamics on it is a bit of a weird one and I think there might be an interaction missing here other than them just cheating the system by giving it low PH and upping dodge through a very cheap skill. I also can't quite get the points to make sense between the Wolf and the Turtle. Guijia has so many points stored into some fairly over-priced stuff that the Wolf has a lighter and much cheaper version of that the silhouette shouldn't be such a discount and the increased CC isn't that high on the Wolf if you glance towards the O-Yoroi. It would be intensely interesting if the Wolf ended up better at dodging than a Libertos is what I'm saying.

 

I for one intend to buy the inevitable Shang-Ji box and run a core of them even if it’s still a bad idea, purely because based on the BKS model they’ll be really fun to paint and put on a table.

Regarding armor and damage, something I’ve wondered for quite awhile now is why the ARM and BTS rolls are still roll-high and their stat values are effectively MODs, since none of the other roll-focused attributes work that way. Let me propose a simpler alternative:

Add 10 to listed ARM and BTS stats to normalize them with the other parts of the trooper stat line, subtract 10 from all weapon DAM values, make the DAM a MOD to ARM/BTS, and make ARM/BTS just regular old Normal Rolls. Leave the AP ammo type alone (halves ARM/BTS), and have the MOD from cover reduce DAM.

You could introduce another ammo type for weapons designed for soft targets, like pistols, that reduces ARM by a set -1 to -3, then tweak the DAM from those weapons down accordingly.

The net result is primarily the same odds as a current roll, but AP is that much more impactful against high ARM units (it applies a -10 penalty to a Jotum vs. a -6 penalty to MI). Tweaking damage down for small arms makes them less useful against harder targets, and their small ARM/BTS penalty gives them their current full damage against most other troops.

Weapons that might be interesting choices for the latter treatment include knives, pistols, chain rifles/colts, shotguns in template mode, and maybe the tac bow?

This also opens up options for weapons that have variable damage by allowing, say, Monofilament weapons to be DAM 0, and instead the attacker rolls a FTF at PH+6 vs. your ARM roll.

 

Monks being able to fireteam with Jing Qo and not Liang Kai was definitely... odd.

There are actually a few fireteams that would be pretty cool to add Liang Kai to.

 

If the points reductions from CodeOne is anything to go by, then it might be enough to make it not a bad idea to run the Jujak link simply by pushing Jujak and Shang-Ji down to levels where you can support them with orders and skirmishers.

If everything has 10+ ARM, then any MODs to DAM and any MODs to ARM will effectively be the same thing. My thought experiment's main goal is to create a sweet spot, but it also has the curious side-effect of making Cover behave a bit more weirdly by altering the sweet spot to a different weapon category as a nod towards the US Army's "concealment does not equal cover" video where they test material penetration of a range of weapons.

That version of Monofilament would go diametrical to what it functions as atm. Leaving aside that there are mines with Monofilament, but the main feature of those weapons are that they completely remove any form of damage from the equation because there are no materials that protect against it so all you can hope for is a non-life threatening flesh wound. As such, Monofilament is put into the hands of units with low PH.

 

There is definitely something weird going in with the Blue Wolf. It has Kinematica 1 as well.