JSA's Close Combat Competition

That is a really deep read into what I wrote... I don't think I would call any of what I wrote "spin", and I certainly don't care about any perceived or real emotions you, I, or anyone else has in this conversation. I was pretty sure I did address most of your points though? Can you let me know where I was unclear or what points of yours I missed?

To your original argument, yes, there are pieces that outperform JSA in CC. But the solution to a problem that is good at CC is almost never to CC it, even in JSA. The reality of Ajax is that he's pretty likely to make it to the thing he wants to kill. So the solution is to make that hard for him. He's got Combi rangebands at best, so any orders your opponent needs to spend dealing with AROs are orders they aren't spending on Ajax. (Even the weakest ARO pieces still do their job here). Ajax is also slow for an N4 HI, and will be relying on either his innate tankiness or another piece's smoke to deliver himself. He's also larger than most things he will want to target, which gives you an advantage in terms of lines of sight if Ajax wants to run into CC with someone (coming in on a tight angle from around a corner is going to be more difficult for Ajax because of his base size).

But the reality is that you need to accept that much like a Fiday or Shinobu, if Ajax picks a target and decides he wants to kill it, it will very probably die. But on the flip side, put any linked B5 gun into Ajax from more than 8.5 inches away, and Ajax will also drop pretty quickly. The Kempei Shock MMR can do this just fine, and the MSV2 probably makes it come out about even to the Kempei/Domaru Spitfire per order. A linked Keisotsu and some basic Repeater coverage (your Chaiyi, Rui Shi, and Panguling) can also help slow him down, and the Lu Duan has a Deployable Repeater now.

Ajax is good, but he definitely isn't able to "tank an entire JSA list." There's a reason that Ajax's FD profile costs 1/6 of your list, but Musashi only costs 1/15th (or 1/12th) of it.

 

I think it's also worth noting that JSA being a "CC faction" doesn't mean that our best CC model has to be able to beat literally every other model in the game in a swordfight. We're good at CC as a faction because good CC skills are present on some very good cheap troops (Tanko, Chain Rifle Domaru, Musashi, Yojimbo), some premium troops who often have the tools to deliver themselves (Oniwaban and Kitsune, the better-armed Domaru profiles, Shikami, Saito), and even as a bit of an incidental on units that don't really want to go for CC but can mix it up pretty well if someone steps to them (O-Yoroi, Daiyōkai, Ninja, Kuroshi Rider). We were never promised that no one could possibly beat us in CC, and the list of models that reliably can is pretty damn small. Everyone who plays against JSA has to be ready for the fact that if you turn a close corner or try to get in shotgun range and aren't careful, your target might just dodge toward you can cut you in half with a big sword. That is what makes us a CC faction. We also have arguably the most easily-delivered CC unit in the game (Oniwaban/Kitsune). If you want a list that feels deadly in melee on the whole, this is the place.

Personally, I've always felt that Natural Born Warrior on human models is dumb, since the whole reason people learn martial arts is so that they can win hand-to-hand fights even when their opponent is bigger and/or stronger. On the other hand, part of being a martial artist is knowing when it's not safe or smart to fight someone up close and personal, and knowing that no one is unbeatable, no matter how well-trained they are. In any case, NBW is part of the game, and even if I don't like that it exists, it doesn't make Kitsune not a badass, and it definitely doesn't make us stop being the best place to find skilled CC models.

 

Great answer.

I'm also not a fan of the recent shakeups to CC, mainly how NBW+MA tends to mess up the CC power balance. But like a lot of people have said already, CC wasn't the best choice against CC anyway; that said, it still doesn't feel that great. It's less a balance issue for me, more of a flavor and feel problem.

I liked NBW in N3 since it generally felt like you were evening the odds and making the roll a tossup by denying the +3/-3, and the +1 burst. It felt like making the fight 'dirty', which was cool, useful, and fluffy. It was also easy to imagine; as if you're facing an expert boxer, but instead of squaring up, you unceremoniously throw a rock at him, spear tackle him while he's recovering, and start gouging at his eyes. It's making the fight more primal and scrappy.

Now, NBW+MA units are straight up better - which completely shatters this image in my head. NBW+MA units are now somehow able to prevent trained specialists from utilizing fancy techniques, but still apply their own. This isn't dirty boxing, this isn't biting and clawing, it's some kind of nullifier, and feels like a very gamey 'one-upsmanship' skill that makes both NBW and MA as skills feel incomplete by themselves: NBW only functions as a deterrent since it does nothing unless the target has MA; while MA can be hard countered by another skill, which never feels particularly great.

Again, the NBW+MA vs. MA balance isn't a big deal since you don't want to choose CC against other CC specialists most of the time, especially with your own orders; but it still feels bad when classically powerful, 'supposed to be the best' CC artists like Joan, Musashi, Achilles, Sheskiin, and Shinobu are now mathematically weaker in 1v1 than Massacre, Carmen, Ajax, and a bunch of other scrappy fighters who feel like they absolutely should be dangerous in CC, but not straight up better in a duel.

I would have vastly preferred it if MA and NBW had been designed as different flavors of CC instead of one just dumping on the other - for example, if MA generally focused on making CC less risky for the user and increasing consistency in winning the ftf roll, while NBW focused on CC becoming more risky, dangerous, and deadly for both involved.

I'm now completely in 'wish' territory though, so I'll wrap here. I think JSA is fine, N4 was kind to us and tac window barely affects us; there are more templates, but fewer throwaway units to face. The changes to Dodge gave all our warriors a greater and more flexible threat range, and our HI are among the cheapest and deadliest 2 wounds you could buy. I do wish we had better hacking support, but if we were too strong against hacking, our cheap assault HI would be legitimately overpowered. We have more fireteam flexibility than ever before, and our traditionally strong options remain very, very competitive.

And Shinobu will be fine, at least until CB decide to drop a TAG with MA+NBW.

 

Given the option I would've made Natural Born Warrior a movement based skill. Allow the unit to make an additional dodge movement after a successful CC attack.

A) It's way more interesting than just turning off Martial Arts, which is pretty fuckin boring and lazy tbh.

and

B) Lets you propogate the skill onto more profiles without worrying about fucking up the CC power level ecosystem.

 

Well said, I 100% agree.

 

Ajax, Musashi, Shinobu and such are certainly great, but i'm absolutely terrified of Noukias in CC. Don't think Ajax, even with berserk and explosive ammo, could take Noukias' burst 2 self healing E/M CCW down. Sadly, CA has the best close combatant in the game right now instead of the CC armies IMO.

 

No, sadly i'm not that mathematically gifted. Just, one explosive hit versus 2 E/M hits favors the latter. 3 (potentially 4 with a crit) dice of damage versus 4(potentially 6 from double crits) which has AP against BTS and also applies isolated and paralyzed if the big hammer man survives.

 

I think you've nailed it here -- one of JSA's most important strengths is the sheer number of CC threats in any given list. It's hard to make a list without taking at least 2-3 pieces with strong CC capability, because you're always going to have Yojimbo, you're almost always going to have at least one of the TO guys, and you're more likely than ever to include a Domaru of some type or the O-Yoroi now.

It's a craps shoot for either of these guys. Even in Nourkias' active turn, there's a pretty sizeable chance that Ajax crits and he doesn't, which Nourkias is highly unlikely to survive.

But putting these pieces against each other isn't probably the best way to make this judgement -- both of them are highly deadly against any target, especially heavy armor. Nourkias' energy-vampire setup is crazy strong against high-BTS pieces since he's DAM15 DA against BTS, and Ajax can just facetank anything while he runs at whatever it is he wants to kill with DAM18 EXP. Both of them have the same weakness though -- only being able to shoot 16 inches means they're relying on the rest of the list to deal with the more threatening AROs for them. They both have mobility skills (FD2 vs. Superjump/6-2) and they're both models you don't want to find around the corner from yourself.

 

Mostly large, nonhuman creatures that can overwhelm a skilled fighter through sheer strength and durability, and against whom the techniques taught to martial artists wouldn't really apply. Antipodes and transformed dogfaces, the new Polaris Bearpode, some remotes, TAGs, things like that where the fight is incredibly imbalanced due to physiology and comparative strength. Maybe some extremely large morats. So it would be even more rare than it already is, because to me, it doesn't make sense to put it on many of the kinds of models depicted in Infinity.

I'm basing that idea on my real-life experience; I've been a fencer for over 15 years, and practiced various other martial arts for over 10, though I'm not really an expert yet (I'm looking to shift more of my focus to martial arts once the pandemic is over, though, so hopefully it'll happen). That's actually what first drew me to JSA! I loved that they had the broadest emphasis on good close combat skills throughout much of their army; it felt like the army in Infinity where I would be most at home, other than the fact that I'm not Japanese (based on my ancestry and birthplace, I'd probably be part of the Svalarheima Winter Force, or maybe Ariadna, if I were an Infinity model). As I said in the post above, the whole reason martial arts exist IRL is so that you can learn a set of skills that will give you an edge against a human opponent whose body and/or fighting instincts would make them almost certain to win otherwise. For unarmed hand-to-hand combat, that only works so much; unless you're really good, a big and strong enough person can try to just bear hug you, and that does work sometimes. Pretty much all Infinity models have hand weapons, though, and those make size and strength matter a lot less than skill.

Take Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson, for example: he played the Mountain on Game of Thrones, and took the World's Strongest Man title in 2018. He may or may not have martial arts training beyond stage combat (I don't know anything about his life other than the two facts I just mentioned), but for the sake of this post, let's assume he doesn't. He is a very, very big boy, and tremendously strong. In a fist fight, he probably beats me, even if he's untrained, and even if I were better at fighting than I currently am. Probably even if I were much better. I'm slightly below average height and weight for a man, so there's an extent to which he could leverage his strength and bulk to simply overpower me, and there really isn't a whole lot I could do about that. On the other hand, he's still human, and is still subject to the limitations of a human body, which my martial arts training is designed to exploit. If we each have a sword, though, things start to look much better for me (again, assuming Mr. Björnsson doesn't have practical sword training of his own), since there's no amount for muscle that makes you immune to getting stabbed, and I know a fair bit about how people fight with swords and where to put the sword to hurt someone. He'd still have a reach advantage, but a huge part of swordfighting is learning to mitigate that. And as my fencing coach always used to say, swordfighting isn't about strength and speed nearly as much as it's about distance and timing, and my training allows me to manipulate those better than an untrained (or less-trained) opponent can. Armed or not, my training still gives me a better chance to win against him than I would have without any training. Björnsson certainly can't just shut off my training, even if he might overcome it. Despite his physical prowess, I don't think he'd have anything like Natural Born Warrior.

Now imagine a new duel scenario, but this time, instead of Björnsson, my opponent is an actual bear--let's say a Kodiak brown bear, because I'm from Alaska originally. If I'm unarmed, I can't really do much of anything in this fight. My grappling training relies on the way human limbs move, and even if I knew how to apply that to a bear, it would likely be able to break my hold because its raw strength so much greater than mine (greater even than Björnsson's, by quite a bit). If I have a sword, I can do more harm, but I still don't know the best places to attack; all animals are weak at the eyes, but that's a small, well-defended target (brown bears have particularly small eyes proportionally to the rest of their bodies), and I don't really have other options that will end the fight or even make it significantly harder for the bear to fight me. Also, bears are fast--much faster than a lot of people assume--and it's going to be pretty hard for me to get a clean hit before it just rushes me down and eats me. It's not impossible for me to win against the bear, even unarmed, but it's pretty unlikely, and my martial arts training isn't really doing much to help me in this fight. My general understanding of how to move and strike in a fight still probably helps a bit--which would be reflected in my CC and PH scores if I were an Infinity model--but my specialized training isn't going to make me all that much better at harming the bear or preventing it from harming me the way it would with a human. With enough time and effort (and injuries), humans could develop the Way of Fighting a Bear in Close Quarters martial art, but to my knowledge, no such art exists, and even if it did, it wouldn't be taught to soldiers, because their job isn't to fight bears up close. And if such an art did exist, ranged combat guns would still be a much better way to fight bears, because the human body isn't optimized to go toe-to-toe with a bear up close, no matter how good your training is. So I could realistically see the bear having Natural Born Warrior.

That's ultimately my main issue with Natural Born Warrior: It shuts down Martial Arts in a way that doesn't feel reasonable from my real-world standpoint, at least on the models that currently have it (though of course my personal real-world experience is hardly the be-all, end-all on martial arts). Thematically, what is Ajax actually doing to make Musashi's Martial Arts not work against him? He may be jacked as hell, but he's still a human, and martial arts are designed to make it easier to fight humans, even if they're bigger than you. And why is it that when Ajax fights Gunnar Lundmark, neither of them can use their Martial Arts? What does that look like, exactly? If they both have the enhanced physical and/or mental capabilities necessary to completely ignore Musashi's superior training, shouldn't they still be able to use their skills on each other?

I agree with 100% of your post, so I'll just focus on this bit. I love it thematically, but there's one problem: what you're describing here is basically Berserk, a skill that already exists. And that's why I kinda hate Natural Born Warrior in its current form. It feels like they wanted it to exist for game reasons, because for some reason good CC models needed something to worry about other than Berserk, shotguns, template weapons, and the Explode skill (I'm not sure exactly why, since it's not like CC is king in this game), but what is it supposed to actually be? It feels like it doesn't represent anything, and on top of that, its role is redundant and it isn't very interesting on the table the way those other CC counters are.

 

Is it too late to change my answer, I want this now.

 

He's an artificially created consciousness inhabiting one of the most technologically advanced cyborg armatures the Human Sphere ever created. Ajax was never human as we understand it today.

 

I think there's a Russian developed close combat martial arts for fighting bears specifically. It's basically a huge-ass gun that's so inaccurate that it's not good for anything but shooting bears/boars at point blank and to compensate for personal bodily inadequacies. I think in actuality it was made to make the Desert Eagle look puny and not for any practical purposes. Name escapes my 1-minute Google Fu, though...

Was it Ajax and Achilles that were made to literally be TAGs in human-size? Achilles being the latest prototype of that project? That said, Mushashi isn't human, either, no?

 

Achilles was built to be a TAG in human form, yes. Ajax was a prototype that didn't quite have the processing power that Aleph was looking for.

Musashi is also a recreation, but he's much lower in power as he was built for the arena combat game of Aristeia!, not live combat.

 

You made my day.

 

Good stuff, that's the essence of what I was getting at. I have some experience in martial arts and sword fighting as well, though maybe not quite as much as you - most of my thoughts are based on reading military history and following mixed martial arts.

What you said about anti-personnel skills and instincts sounds spot-on to me. If you're a good striker, you know which areas to cover and expect angles from, and where to throw out jabs and counters to have the best chance at catching an opponent looking to get in. Same thing with grappling, everything from wrestling to jiujitsu have to do with leveraging a human sized opponent with human mass, centers of gravity, and biomechanics. All those instincts would be invalidated against a bear. You'd still have the trained reflexes and know how to throw your hip into hooks to maximize impact, but again, you've been training to hit human jaw, at human height, or hyperextend a human arm while trapping and leveraging their torso under your legs. Good luck trying to adjust those instincts on the fly to try and catch an open bear-jaw blitzing in at groin height, or trying to guillotine choke a Taigha creature. So yes, NBW would make perfect sense in these cases.

Another note to make here is that I'm also sliiiightly peeved at the D-charges change. While it's great that many more units have legitimate CC anti-tag options now, it's more than a bit disruptive in terms of narrative and image for me. An explosive charge that you hold in your hand is not an effective melee weapon: you can't parry or block, and most importantly, they don't offer any kind of range advantage. If you gave me a sword, as basic as my training was, it would absolutely be a disadvantage to take away my opponent's sword, give him a ball of putty instead, and tell them that they win if they somehow manage to stick it onto my body while I have an extra 3 feet of lethal reach.

Swordfighting and fencing is pretty damn fast. The moment anyone flinches or even changes their expressions, fencers are trained to move, shift, intercept an attack vector or go for a quick slice or stab at the wrist or eyes - or, simply place their weapon in the way of the opponent's intended path so they skewer themselves. It's physics; if both combatants move equally fast, the one with the reach advantage simply has less distance to travel. Additionally, in both unarmed and weapon combat, a huge part of a fight is figuring out the opponent: throwing out jabs, measuring distance, figuring out timing, reading reactions, intentions, and habits. Good luck doing that when all you can throw out is your actual fleshy arm. Instead of two sword tips clashing and withdrawing, you'll have a bloody stump instead. Hell, imagine trying to stick a ball of putty on someone defending themselves in close quarters with a pistol.

From a gameplay perspective - while I'm happy that the change makes certain factions' CC specialists more deadly, it also feels a bit cheap. Musashi and Oyama used to feel special because of their AP+EXP CC, since they're basically swinging huge missiles at this point; and while I have no complaints about either of these guys in N4 (they got more than enough to make up for it), it's still a little annoying seeing a bunch of other units achieve a comparable level of lethality just because they're swinging around some attachable explosives. This balance issue matters a lot less to me than the narrative/imagination problem, however.

But yeah, a minor gripe with N4. Every time a MA+NBW unit with D-charges turns Shinobu or Musashi into a bloody mist, I'll have to actively suppress myself and try and ignore what happened, since I simply won't be able to justify what happened with my own reasoning. A real pity, since a huge part of the appeal of Infinity to me has always been the cinematic and dramatic qualities of engagements, and enjoying watching those awesome moments play out on the table, and in my head.

I didn't actually have any specific mechanics in mind when I wrote this, but I agree it does sound like Berserk from what I wrote. My main point was that I thought it would be interesting if MA and NBW were both CC skills that increased a unit's CC effectiveness, but focused on different aspects. Just off the top of my head - very simply put, maybe MA could focus on burst and defensive mods, and NBW could focus on damage and offensive mods. I'm aware this kind of split is what the MA table in N3 was, and it won't ever happen since CB is more focused on de-nesting skills and making things more simple - which is a path that I generally agree with.

But yeah, I'm just a CC enthusiast that wishes more thought was put into N4's close combat instead of oversimplifying and applying rules without adequate thought put into what repercussions they would have to CC specialist profiles. I find it very difficult to believe that anyone in CB actually thinks that Carmen should beat Joan, Musashi, or Achilles in a 1v1 duel. Here's to hoping for some tweaks.

 

It's an abstraction. There is no inherent difference to a trained swordsman fighting with a knife against a trained swordsman fighting with a naginato. The range advantage isn't there. As such, the difference between fighting with a knife and fighting with a D-charge isn't all that great, if the D-charge gets stuck to any part of your body that part of your body will likely be forfeit just as much as if the knife gets stuck inside your body that part of your body now has a knife in it... come think of it, I find the knife less realistic, but that's a majority of the CCWs in this game now.

It's even possible that future-hand-wave the D-charge is a shaped explosion device capable of being detonated while held causing a direction heat-lance that harms anything in front of it while causing manageable recoil to the user. Just aim it in the direction of what you want to die and make sure you're within 40-50cm.

D-Charges are expended 100% of the time they are used, even when they miss, after all.

As a small side note I think there's a character in Aristeia that has a dirty-fighting move that literally depicts Mushashi's fancy sword fighting stance being foiled.

 

Probably Mr. Deapool, fancy martial arts not being any use against him is pretty much canon after all.