There are too many variables here for me to consider this low-risk. Sun Tze starts in the enemy deployment zone and pitchers are -6 beyond 24", so you'll need a good amount of maneuvering to even get in range to have a decent chance of succeeding your roll with your BS11/12 dudes. And this is not even considering terrain which should make it even harder to get LOF and land the pitcher within 8" of Sun Tze, plus you'll be provoking enemy AROs along the way. And even if we just look at it in a vacuum, success chance is only around 50 %, which is pretty bad to begin with.
You can also interpose killer hackers between Sun Tze and the enemy, and use Holomask models to provide the enemy with multiple Sun Tzes to risk engagement against. Additionally, Yu Jing's chain of command options appear improved in N4. The threat of having a model like Sun Tze isolated is commensurate to the benefit of having one of the game's premium lieutenant choices. Arguing that the risk associated with taking a premium, visible lieutenant should be mechanically compensated for purely to mitigate the likelihood that a player's opponents engage cleverly with the fact that they've taken a visible lieutenant but failed to properly mitigate the associated risks is literally farcical.
Pitchers are often found in link teams now, and some profiles like Nomads put them on things with X Visors. Maneuvering into position to fire one off on decent odds really isn't a big ask when we're considering there's a pretty good chance they're just tagging along behind some guy with some kind of HMG shooting his way forward anyway. Frequent one I see is a Hollowman with the pitcher tagging along with a Kriza leading the way, that particular player actually views that as the Kriza's primary job is to open the door for the Hollowman to get into position to do his thing. It may become more relevant as things go on and fast pandas show up in more places, but the Heckler is also fairly difficult to prevent getting his fastpanda down range. Getting DZ coverage doesn't take them many orders at all. As far as are those bad odds? I don't think they are, they're pretty decent as far as odds in Infinity go. Would you consider a marksmanship Rui Shi shooting through smoke at say a Dakini MSR in a core defensive link a bad idea at 24"? Because the odds of success are practically identical to that 3 man coordinated order Oblivion on Sun Tze.
I've considered trying to interpose killer hackers, the issue is that has drawbacks all of its own. Namely I am now sticking all my specialists next to my (probably) 50+ point model. Many eggs, one basket and the further back you try to hide from enemy repeaters the further back your KHDs are being leashed. This also has problems of if I am fighting into a superior hacking force I'm now also revealing my KHDs for his (probably better) KHDs to nuke with surprise shot. I don't think it's particularly viable. Deploying KHDs is also a retaliatory measure, not a preventative one. They can't prevent the attack, which has pretty decent odds of succeeding, from occurring. Paying for Holomask models to hide at the back of the table and pretend to be Sun Tze would be more viable if the LTs we're talking about didn't range from 50+ to 100+ points. We're moving into an incredibly expensive territory here. Maybe if alot of things get cheaper this will be more viable but right now I already struggle to fit things into my Sun Tze lists, let alone if I was someone trying to play the Avatar. Chain of Command works fine for regular HI/TAG LTs, it's not as good for leadership based LTs as you lose their skills like Strategos or Inspiring Leadership despite avoiding LoL.
My point is: It's not as simple as you make it out to be. Nomads may very well be in a prime spot to pull this off, but they are pretty much the best case example. Your scenario also disregards counterplay from your opponent. If you put Sun Tze in your list, you will want to defend him properly, and YJ definitely has the tools to do so. Tian Gou KHD disguised as Sun Tze will introduce another 50:50 choice into that equation, for example. As for your example: The odds for the Rui Shi are still fairy bad in that situation, but I'd be willing to engage in those odds more freely, since the investment is not nearly as high. Again, your premise is a coordinated order + several hackers + a core/haris fireteam to get into position and land the pitcher, when Sun Tse will have had every opportunity to mitigate this situation both during list building and deployment.
Depending on the list if I was genuinely concerned about my Sun Tze being the victim of a coordinated infowar attack on a regular basis I'd probably go for Taowu as my decoy. He's cheap enough and offers enough utility by himself thanks to counterintelligence that the overhead for including him feels manageable. I'd generally just live with the risk, though. As interesting as N4 hacking promises to be, I don't really think seeing 4 vanilla hackers in enemy lists is going to be common. And if I'm wrong about that, those lists will be very susceptible to adaptation and subsequent predation.
I don't know if he's getting cheaper in N4, right now he's in my midfield specialist window of expensive and I don't really want to spend those extra points on that role when we're talking about the overall total package cost. Personally not a huge fan of counter intelligence in general unless it comes with something else, if you go second it just feels like a huge waste. I think 4 will be rarer for sure, but I already see 3 pretty commonly and like I pointed out they've got solid odds on it Maybe this is because I'm approaching this from a Vanilla perspective rather than having the luxury of link team bonuses, but without link teams your odds when shooting at stuff is quite often floating around the 50% mark, it's pretty normal.
Just as an added point as to why I think the 3 HD will be the sweet spot for hacking based lists (for any faction trying to build this archetype), it's because of the stacking -3 to Reset that IJW pointed out elsewhere. Assuming we can reset out of Isolation and it also provides the -3, 3HDs gives you full coverage for AROs. If you can get a repeater on top of a expensive hackable(s) you can potentially zap it all at once with Isolated, Immobilised, and Targeted so it's looking at a -9 to WIP to try and get unstuck. For a WIP13 model that's probably time to take the hands off the keyboard and phone tech support to send an Engineer.
That is the opponent managing to put a Repeater in range of your Sun Tze, which is difficult but can happen, them paying premium game resources to do it (2 SWC and a Command Token for what is roughly 40% chance*) and you not having any (or sufficient) hacking defence to discourage it. With a Sun as LT, it makes sense to have at least some form of hacking protection and with playing Yu Jing you'll probably want 19 points into an EVO to give Sun a Firewall anyway (which makes sense, if they spend 1,5+SWC to isolate your LT/HIs you should be spending 0,5 SWC to protect them). I would caution that we don't yet know if Total Immunity will go back to offering protection against Hacking (negating Breaker), but I'd say that for now that seems likely considering how they've treated Fatality and a few other sources. "Ignores the special effects of ammo and continuous damage" seems more likely than "ignores the special effects of ammo and continuous damage except that of hacking and technical weapons and stuff that doesn't target ARM/BTS but not stun and..." While I think this is overstating the problem as, in my experience, this is less likely to happen than someone declaring Assault, fact remains that Sun Tze is a pretty mediocre combat unit (the very literal definition of mediocrity in this game - BS 12 with mimetism and no SWC guns, both fairly average and disappointing). Yes, an absolute unit to kill, but also worse at shooting stuff than a Bolt while being 3 times as expensive and the Avatar (the other projected LT2 Strat3 Adv.Com. unit) which looks like it'll be shy of twice as expensive is also both significantly harder to kill and many times deadlier than Sun. So, as much as I think this problem is a relatively unlikely problem to face, there is a solution to it that is both thematic, reasonable, and uncomplicated. * 13.35% of those 46% is a direct result of a critical hit using old critical rules, which under N4 will result in about an average of 2.2 saves to be made instead of direct isolation of which Sun will save between 1/3 to 1/2 of, so the actual value should go down by up to 7% depending on how Total Immunity works with Hacking. And also relies on not giving Sun the opportunity to Reset out of it before LoL kicks in.
Yes. Based on reports from people whose books have arrived, isolation by itself is a whopping -9 (although obv. being able to reset out of it at all is a change from N3). Two enemy hackers each successfully applying a negative state (isolated + targeted for example) can apply -12 to subsequent reset rolls.
The other two are -3, presumably Isolation is -3 as well. Putting the full complement of debuffs on Sun requires a lot of orders in which Sun can Reset or to put them all on at the same time which makes the likelihood of each debuff smaller. Edit: -9!? Whooof. That's harsh. Sun should still have a 25% chance of Resetting given the opportunity, even worst case, IMO, meaning your opponent will be forced to challenge him with FTF skills to prevent it.
The issue I look at it is if they go first, there's no defense for Sun Tze. Can't link him, don't have fairy dust, etc. Like I said earlier I don't think simply having KHDs is a deterrent. If someone is playing into a hacking game baiting out your KHDs and killing them is on his to do list so you can't run around the active turn killing all the hackers he was building his list around. That's been my current experience anyway when playing into people with hacking lists, they come looking for your KHDs first to eliminate them. I'm not really factoring in resetting out of it by the way as any part of this discussion, kind of really want to not have the Strategos LT isolated in the first place because it turns off his Strategos. Same for Joan with her Inspiring Leadership.
*shrug* My experience is that that usually takes so many orders that they don't have enough orders to get the Repeater in range of my DZ. But you play on Shotgun heaven boards, if I remember correctly? Or at least boards where you feel HMGs and snipers are pointless?
I play on fairly dense boards, but certainly not HMGs and Snipers are useless. I think winning a firelane with an attack piece/link then punting a pitcher down it is pretty reasonable to achieve in a few orders. In fact that probably happened in that picture, looking more closely that's against Druze I'm pretty sure. EDIT: No that's just Druze on the tray next to the table. The camo tokens belong to a Pan-O player.
I just realized something. With TAGs no longer having -6 dodge but instead dodge= something around 11 you can now stack full -12 on top of that. Lets take Adil for spin. He meets mr TAG in b2b and decides to smack it with taser. TAG gets full -12 for his roll due to para weapon MA and Adils -3 in CC. any 19 or lower CC TAG can only win f2f with crit in this case. with 17ph tags we have 51% chance of inflicting immobilise, 46% nothing happens, 1,5% Adil gets 1wound and 1,5% Adil takes 2w and dies. With these odds it takes 2 orders on average to Immoblise any 17ph tag. after that with dodge at 11 and -6 from immolise -3 from ma and -3 from Adils skill we have -1 for dodge. 1 or 2 oprders and tag is monofilamented to death after that. I know that getting in b2b is the hardest part of using cc in this game but just looking at these odds and virtually no risk on Adils part is insane.
In the first aro he does, thats why I used 19 CC. But after getting hit with para CC weapon he gets immoblised and he can only dodge on -6 now. So now instead of Para ccw adil uses Monofilament sowrd to kill tag without any f2f roll as tag has -1 PH to do it.
