Was hoping and asking for a limit of 2 combat groups to make balancing and design more manageable. This exceeds expectations. 10 Orders is definitely too little for balanced 300 points, 15 is a pretty good spot and lets you cover some losses before suffering crippling loss of efficiency in your main group. Not to mention Hidden Deployment and AD are kinda broken in tandem with LI. Not sure how it pans out with Tactical Awarenes, Strategos and NCO potentially increasing that up to 20 again. But it makes the game easier to play for the newcomers and easier to build a list to deal with a mission and a variety of opponents, rather than against spam lists. Will be interesting to get our hands on the details. Funny enough this actually helps some of the weaker armies, who's main problem was bad availability of efficient Order Monkeys. You can now actually spend some of your left over points on toolbox MI rather than just fill up on cheap Orders and cheap ARO pieces. Warbands are now a tradeoff, since the slot they occupy needs to be considered vs just how friggin great they are. Bringing 4 of them severly cuts into your Order pool for other things. Let's aso take a moment to say good bye to the staple Warcor while we're at it.
I'd like to suggest to have this restriction built into new Army as a toggle: Limited Insertion/Tactical Window/Unrestricted
Being honest though, how often competent 3+ CG lists are seen? From the top of my head, I can barely think of anyone besides Scotts who can do this without gimping themselves in a few areas, and I have seen maybe one person who thinks they aren't on the weaker side of Infinity as an army in general.
It's highly terrain-dependent, but REM-dense ISS lists can get well into the 3rd group and still be decent, but you need lots of areas in your DZ to hide their wide bases behind.
Was keeping it realistic then, 15 is better (and a huge shakeup for the meta - nice), but imagine the shitstorm on here from anyone who likes to run 2+ full combat groups if you had flat out asked for it. And the other side.... people asking for Limited Insertion as default, which would have been straight up terrible. I've mostly seen 20 & 1-3 extra mooks like Warcors and Warbands in group 3. Plenty of Factions can do that other than Scots, Vanilla Haqq, Ariadna. The main issue remains that it's impossible to balance the game and tables for 10 Order Lists and for 20+ Order lists at the same time. I'd still maintain that 10 Order lists remain inferior to 15 Order lists due to 1/3 worse action economy and inability to stomach linear attrition, but at least it's less of a gap than before.
I'm not even after 20+ spam lists I could crank up. I will miss the ability to run silly stuff like this below, or simply competent 16-18 Order lists I used to run before :|
Really didn't like that a somewhat functional "elite army" was limited to 3-5 troops that "do something" and was just running Order Monkeys otherwise. Fueling Achilles, Posthumans and Dart with 17 Orders was just better than cutting down the second group in favor of adding a Yadu NCO in there. Now the Yadu NCO actually expands rather than reduces your Order pool. Together with the 5 missing slots and the cheaper HI/TAGs you're looking at 50+ Orders for a lot of lists to redistribute into another big guy or utility upgrades.
OTOH, there really were armies that had mostly mediocre profiles, but could field more of them and the ones that had punchier if not over the top dudes could just fuel them with basic guys who weren't just cheerleaders, but at least semi-competent rifles. Like the Kazaks, IMO - or USARF.
Thing is that Camo Spam always has loads of baseline competent gunfighters. A BS11 Linetrooper isn't going to perform great most of the time given that he has to cross from the DZ and lacks MODs. A Zero or Chasseur is still inexpensive, much better at picking/avoiding engagements and ofc a straight up better gunner with Suprsrise Shot and Mimetism most of the time. Alleviates the problem to run more guns when the Specialists and utlity pieces can pick up the slack anyway.
They should have just gotten rid of Martial Arts. As it was with N3, it slows down CC and all it does is contribute modifiers. At this point they should have just boosted the CC scores and used their robust tag system to give the MA L5 guys "CC (+1B"). And then natural Born Warrior could have stayed a skill with an effect like "if the enemy has over 20CC, any attack against this troop has the CC set to 20".
This is basically what I suggested, Martial Arts should not be leveled skill, it should just give +1B in CC. This is enough to make a difference between "brawler" type of units that are just good in CC like Irmandihno, and true CC specialists like samurai and ninjas. And it is super simple in addition to being very effective. But CB likes charts for some reason.
then you have to change the +1B description to make work on reactive turn, and change all of the profiles that got +1B on their weapons to not allow them to use in ARO. Or make a new rule to make that MA5 +1B in reactive
The entire manual determination of game states and results of declared actions you're unable to affect at that point - in general - slows the game down considerably. As well as the general issue of which charts are just an individual case - rule referencing. Infinity should just become a video game to handily avoid all that.
True, I overlooked this. It would be a better retention of what that extra brust does: MA becomes +1 burst in ARO as well as active turn, NBW stops MA and reduces CCs above 20. All in all, MA's continued existence doesn't ruin the game or anything; flat bonuses to specific stats are just not very meaningful uses of the cognitive load that an extra rule/lookup table introduces. CC is only so common, and martial arts/NBW are also only so common within CC combat. The two clashing is thus extremely unlikely, but you always have to incorporate MA when you get into CC.
How does it slow down CC any more than range bands slow down BS attacks? Is a single chart (now even integrated into army!) really too much for people to keep track of?
