Yeah, combination of Triangulated Multi rifle, dual nanopulsers, sensor bring great in general even without Sniffer Mimelayers, enough CC to threaten most troopers and worry nearly everything, plus linking with relatively cheap LI. Only thing I could ask for is a Haris or even Wildcard option (though Wildcard in a sectorial with KS is... problematic). If ARM and CC are getting cheaper in N4 as I suspect then Cranes become very attractive.
15 orders is enough to gouge a DZ. I have done so on multiple occasions. It does require two important component: 1. you need to not make any bad luck rolls (you can take a crit, but not against Stun or E/M or T2) and more importantly 2. an opponent who thinks AROing with "real" units is a good idea and thus presents several layers of AROs for ypu to shave off in YOUR good range band. - I've never played ISS as order spam oitside if pure REM lists and my experience is that Hsien and Su-Jian are awesome while Crane mixed links are kind of hard to work with because Celestial Guards are such a liability. Wu Ming are interesting toolboxes but sort of expensive. Still doable, but more for when you're tired of playing the game on "normal". I think Zewrath is probably the best ISS player on the forums, though. Certainly better than I am with them.
Well, they are, but there's a reason the usual IS playstyle didn't involve a lot of cranes. I did see a list for Biotechvore that had a fireteam of 3 cranes, the Dire Foes Imperial Agent, and the SGL Launcher Kuang Shi Control Device CG. That was pretty brutal when it got into the midfield. As far as the change goes, I haven't voted, because I think it's too early to tell. I don't think it'll be a huge problem for my USARF, and my Onyx was around 15 orders anyway. My main hesitancy is that I'm not 100% sure it will result in more list diversity, but might instead result in more list orthodoxy organized differently than it was in the past.
I think it's in the nature of a competitive game to tend towards what's optimized to the exclusion of unoptimal. The 15 model cap is no different - for all the talk of "[X] faction is dead" there is a lack of acknowledgement that there are already "dead" factions right now because they can't compete with lotsa bodies. So yeah, even this change will eventually converge to whatever the new optimal is but every competitive game will reach that point. The question is, and I think CB is addressing the right one with this, is "is this going to lead to a more positive play experience?" because just because a list or playstyle or whatever you want to call it is the peak of efficiency doesn't necessarily mean it's a negative play experience to use or go up against. So while I share your concerns that it is too early to tell and this may just go guardrail to guardrail and make elite units the new negative play experience, I think it's important to note that the new peak build will happen no matter what changes are implemented.
Just goes to show how the problem was costing chain rifles, SMGs and LSGs. If they have fixed any of these players may not even notice the hardcap on units.
Uh... what about when your opponent has equal skill? In that case, relying on the inherent advantages of a high-order list would give the edge.
Yeah but if you need that edge or you can't play those factions then you suck The idea that somehow 16+ order is necessary for some factions is ridiculous. It is not, at all.
This is untrue. What if you're a good player vs. another good player, and you can get an advantage by running more than 15 models on the board in a spammy playstyle?
By that theory what TW does is level the playing field, so the competition comes down to decisions and "skill" while playing, rather than inherent advantages from list building.
Now we've used two incredibly qualitative terms, "skill" and "balance" which are both very complex and hard to specify, especially when we don't have the full N4 rules or points costs.
In theory, sure. It could also create a new breakpoint for one army or another being powerful at that order cap (I know Posthumans make ALEPH extremely viable in LI). But @Solar 's quote was making a much stronger argument than that, that if you don't handicap yourself by not making a list as strong as you could (by using less orders), and win anyway, you suck. I don't go around telling ALEPH players they suck if they use Posthumans... but it's pretty indisputable that lists w/ Posthumans tend to outperform those w/o in ALEPH and OSS.
Updated figures, from 633 voters: NA2: 46.6% Nomads: 33.6% Combined Army: 33% PanOceania: 31% Ariadna: 30% Yu Jing: 28.8% Haqqislam: 25.8% ALEPH: 25.4% O-12: 21.6% Tohaa: 14.1% 162 players play 2 factions 149 players play 1 factions 133 players play 3 factions 88 players play 4 factions 45 players play 5 factions 30 players play 6 factions 13 players play 7 factions 6 players play 10 factions 4 players play 9 factions 3 players play 8 factions Total players who ticked Ariadna and/or Haqqislam was 307, so 48% of everyone who voted. Much higher than even my guesstimate. Single-faction player numbers are as follows: PanOceania solos: 16 Yu Jing solos: 11 Ariadna solos: 19 Haqqislam solos: 20 Nomads solos: 30 Combined Army solos: 18 ALEPH solos: 9 Tohaa solos: 5 O-12 solos: 4 NA2 solos: 17
So, 39 out of 663, less than 6% are those who would be most likely to be against the change to TW. I suppose since there's a similar number of 2-faction players, we could make a lenient assumption that distribution is similar and Ariadna+Haqq duos are another ~40 players, which gives us ~11-12% total in the population for "either A/H or both". About the size of the negative voice in the FB survey, a bit lower than here. Small wonder.
Nuada, your assumption is not true. Cross-referencing the two polls, Of the 19 pure Ariadna players, ten voted in the 15 Trooper cap poll. 4 likes, 3 neutral, 3 dislikes. Of the 20 pure Haqq players, 7 voted in the 15 Trooper cap poll. 4 likes, 1 neutral, 2 dislikes. I haven't isolated voters who only play Haqq + Ariadna, but there are 59 who play Ariadna plus a single other faction. Of those 59, 29 voted in the 15 Trooper cap poll. 14 likes, 7 neutral, 8 dislikes. The idea that all the keen Ariadna or Haqq players voted dislike is not supported by the poll data.
I actually think the bigger predictor of "will you be against these changes?" is not what factions you play, but how you play and how you view the game's balance - that is, if you prioritize player freedom and ability to find the most optimal choice unrestricted, or if you tend to want a game that might encourage less optimal but more "interesting" (for lack of a better term) choices such as toolbox units and more mid-tier priced models. Though it's anecdotal - we've seen a number of Ariadna/Haqq players already in this thread voice their positive/neutral opinion of the change, and as someone who plays both Ariadna and Haqq I still see no problem here either, and with IJW's numbers I'm not sure there's a case for these changes being viewed as negative only by the players of Ariadna and Haqq (or whatever players play both). If you were a player who had success competitively with 16+ models, and have played that way for some time such that you not only view it as your play style but how Infinity is played, then this feels like not only a threat to your success as a competitive player but can be construed as (legitimately intended or not) CB actively saying that you are, in fact, playing Infinity the wrong way. Which, then, is understandable why people are having an adverse reaction to this. Because while CB could have (to unknown results or effectiveness) simply rebalanced the game around points and core rules, it's a bit more on the nose when a hard cap is placed that essentially says people are playing it the "wrong" way when everything else has pointed to this being the "correct" way to play Infinity because, hey, it's really effective at winning, and this is a competitive game after all. This change pushes a hard cap on an at least 3 year ingrained play style and was done so with only a minimal debut in the form of an optional "Tactical Window" mode for ITS however many years ago it was introduced. So while I'm understanding of the adverse reaction, I think it really boils down to what type of player you are, not necessarily what you play because to say that every single Ariadna or Haqq player plays this way and is upset is too generalized a response even if the math Nauda outlined works out to be correct.
Out of curiosity, I took the results for all 'plays one faction, or that faction and only one other' results and put them into a chart to make it easier to read. As expected, the proportion of dislikes is higher for Ariadna and Haqq, but likes outnumber dislikes across the board. The Nomad result is a bit of a surprise, as the Nomad ITS average numbers aren't much lower than Haqq. No dislikes from 'Tohaa +1' was also a surprise given how many bodies Tohaa tend to run, but it's also a tiny sample due to the low overall number of Tohaa players.
