Sure! It’s built around a couple of HI big guns in a Zhanshi link and accompanied by an active shooting and toolbox Haris, with a couple of additional specialist/problem solver troops, and everything starts in the DZ. I associate that kind of list in YJ with IA primarily, since it’s sort of a brute force approach. WB on the other hand has access to lots of camo and midfielders...none of which appear here. No guilang, hundun, daofei, or long ya were harmed in the making of this list.
After finally getting a couple of games in on TTS, I have a few thoughts. Double up on zhanshi hackers in a core team with a tinbot -6. With a repeater net, this mitigates the advantage of the high burst of trinity pretty significantly. I also like putting a Haidao khd in a haris with a tinbot, but that’s only if I’m playing with a haris and a core team. Bringing at least two or three remotes with repeaters is essential, to make it more difficult for your opponent to pick off one hacker at a time. A core team I’ve been really enjoying is: Shang Ji AP hmg Haidao MSR Krit (multi rifle) or Tai Sheng (breaker) for close ranged AP Two Zhanshi hackers I’ll also bring a zhanshi paramedic as an extra body when something goes down. A Zhuyong paramedic in the haris is another option, as I think paramedics for the generally high physique IA are fantastic when linked. Those hackers can slow down a lot of alpha strikes. If it’s an HI, TAG, or Rem, then your opponent has to deal with your hackers first. Even something that isn’t hackable will have a harder time attacking it you’ve hit it with spotlight every time it tries to leverage an angle on your models. Another thing that I’ve found really strong is the forward deployed Krit. Having the option of an E/M mine or a deployable repeater is a fantastic way to direct an opponent away from a potential attack avenue. Krit obviously doesn’t have a marker state, which can make him incredibly vulnerable, but he can also be tough to dislodge with good stats, two wounds, and arm 3.
Not even weaker factions. Onyx (which had top-tier hacking in N3) is decidedly anemic in this regard now, because we don't have high-BTS hackers, we don't have additional modifiers to FtF rolls on our hacking programs, we don't have Firewalls more than -3, and we don't have AP on programs. At least IA gets the -6 Tinbot.
The Daoying hacker is not half bad either as far as defensive hacking is concerned. IA can also easily afford to throw all the cheap remotes in a second group just to pump-up the number of repeaters on the board if needs be, especially now that there's no incentive to stick to one combat group anymore, which is something a lot of factions can't really do because they need that 2nd group to do its part.
But Onyx has very good Killer Hackers. Bit is amazing by herself with all the repeaters, pitcher, Kiss and she gets Oblivion on top of KHD/Trinity. Kerr-Nau with all the stats, skills, plasma weapon and White noise upgrade on KHD is super usefull toolkit. Samaritan with HD+Trinity, Nourikas with KHD+Better total control.
They do not have the ability to stack mods like Scylla or the Interventor. Bit has BTS 6, but Kerr-Nau is only BTS 3. Onyx/CA hackers used to be insanely destructive in e-war but that's been taken away without things being given back. Other factions' top tier hackers usually have something to compensate.
Well I never said Onyx is the best hacking faction. You just mentioned some of the absolutely best hacking units in the entire game. Being worse than these guys isnt a big deal becaouse virtually everybody else is. I just dont get how can you complain about having tools like Bit or Kerr-nau, and on a YJ subforum for that matter. We dont have even a single Pitcher. Or HD+. Or any Upgrade program. And our cheapest 3+BTS hacker is 29 point KHD with 13 wip.
It used to be up there. If you're saying "I agree with the depowering of OCF's hacking game" that's one thing. I was agreeing with @Triumph that the gulf between optimized hackers and unoptimized hackers is too wide now, and that it seems to have been handed out based on self-insert named characters rather than which factions, gameplay wise, are supposed to have good offensive hacking.
I have yet to play against the best hacking factions in n4, but I played some games against my friends Onyx and I really had to work hard against these hackers. I can only imagine how opressive playing against aleph or nomads could be, but with covid situation who knows when I'll get the chance to check.
That’s the dumbest comparison I’ve seen of why the old KHD was so toxic. MSV2 did not invalidate Smoke Warbands to the point where people stopped taking them in their lists, because the carrying smoke grenades actually made it actively easier to kill them. Almost all AHD units in the game were considered meme units that were actively detrimental to your lists, exclusively because of the KHD. Now go make the same statement about smoke vs MSV2 and you’d be laughed out if the room.
The comparison is fine, the issues that the AHD faced did not stem from having a properly implemented predator. It was a defined counter unit to expensive high value targets when the meta heavily favoured, cheap, non hackable spam. N4 does not favour this and more or less railroads people towards sticking units that are countered by the AHD into lists. It was close to functionally useless against non hackable armies. N4 has also fixed this with the changes surrounding spotlight. It was arguably overcosted, N4 dropped the cost by a couple of points. There were alot of already borderline questionable units like the Locust and Zerats packing it, it needed to be more broadly available on units that could utilise it properly. Much like CC, the second you put it under a marker state it got way better. I used it alot with Guilangs, and I frequently saw it used to effect with Al'Hawwa in both Haqq and NA2, as well as the Mk2 Proxy. CC wanted marker states as a delivery system, AHDs used it as a way to protect themselves from predators. N4 was the chance to give them more and new ways to defend themselves without functionally removing their predator unit. We could've done lots of new and cool shit, like creating a hacking equivalent of Albedo, or handing out the brand new mimeticless versions of limited camo or Hidden Deployment as defensive tools. Instead we got everything dumbed the fuck down and a hacking ecosystem that is fuck awful and will have rampant balance issues moving forwards once most places in the world can actually meet and play again. You can implement all those fixes and you would still have a useful hacking device despite having units designed to kill them. The biggest issues that the N3 AHD faced had fucking nothing to do with a KHD just people are dumb and latched onto hurr durr my hacker get killed by KHD so me sad now. Really the biggest issue the AHD faced in being useful is people were busy spamming 20 order unhackable warband garbage onto the table, it was more a metagame problem than an internal hacking balance problem.
I would have liked to see AHDs have a B2 reactive program that immobilized hackable targets, would have been a decent defense and made the AHD roadblock vs. hackable targets powerful.
I'm sure that taking a game feature whose primary strength lies in stacking AROs and making it better in ARO is a good way to solve things. Can we get back to invincible army now?
From what I can see at this point, the way to do hacking defensively now is to get a repeater network and make sure that multiple hackers have access to it. Having one of those hackers (or more) with sixth sense via a fireteam or natively to break stealth is a boon as well. With access to r drones and ikadrons, along with a tinbot, Onyx is middling to good at hacking at this point. Forcing active hackers to contend with 2-4 responses that have firewall bonuses creates exchanges that are order inefficient and risky for the active player. That’s the best situation you can create for defense in infinity. A risky situation that may cost your opponent more than they are able to get out of it. Sure, Onyx is lacking forward deployed repeaters to expand that range, but so are 80% of other armies as well. Their deployment zone repeater coverage is fantastic though. IA has to do this well because their army is almost entirely hackable. It is one of the few armies, with the tinbot -6, that can actually defend against hacking somewhat reliably without bringing a solid hacking network of their own.
You should probably note that none of this shit works against top end hacking factions. They put a pitcher on the target(s) they wanna nuke and then have at it and your defensive repeater coverage to threaten AROs means absolutely two bits of fuck all. In the case of a faction like Nomads or Druze they can easily put a Pitcher in your DZ from their DZ. In N3 this was a double edged sword, because you were giving a repeater to factions that didn't have access to repeaters access to fry your otherwise high value hackers from their end of the table. With significant KHD threats largely gone now though it's a pretty brain dead obvious move to spam the table with repeaters as much as possible.
First you have to land the roll for the pitcher, then you have to get past a tinbot. In a game with only 15 orders per turn, you might spend 5-6 to isolate one model.
Do the math, the Pitcher shots are uncontested and benefit from link bonuses, they're extremely likely to land. Yeah the tinbot helps you not get screwed but that doesn't change any part of the fact that attempting to stack AROs through a defensive repeater network is actually more or less fucking useless against high end hacking factions because their offensive repeater projection ignores your attempts to stack AROs. Whether or not you have a tinbot (spoilers, you probably should have one anyway) doesn't change any of this. Defensively stacking hacking AROs through repeaters only works against factions that don't hack very well. Total waste of time against the big boys.
Ummm, landing pitcher from DZ to DZ by average guy is not so easy, even with link bonuses. And if you don't wanna do it with speculative you are very likely to eat aro. Not to mention pitcher is disposable 2 so 2 fails and you are out (either end of fun or entire order wasted to reload). On top of that reset alongside tinbot gives you decent chances. It may really take half of your orders to isolate1 guy using linked interventor.
Nomads and Druze land Pitchers at 24" on 15s in their links, and at max range of 40" on 12s. If you think those are bad odds I don't know what to say to you. Honestly I laugh a little bit when I remember CB actually nerfed pitchers to a max range of 40" instead of 48" in N4, like that actually has any impact on the balance levels at all. I play into Bahram and my opponent is happy to roll B2 on 9s uncontested to fire shit around the table with his Barid to start hacking fights. Two dice on 9s when it's a normal roll is 69.75% to land the shot. Having to deal with a pitcher in my DZ at the start of the game is not uncommon for me. More the point is your efforts to defend yourself are more or less a waste of time given how hacking is actually approached. Think about how factions approach hacking in N4, they push repeaters up the table and hack through those. We mainly use Dep Reps with the Guilang and Kokram for example, or push Cheong's repeater in IA into range of stuff and then hack through that. I've hacked alot of things with my Daoying, but that model never leaves the DZ. Designing a list to stack hacking AROs is only going to affect someone who brought some kind of lone unsupported hacker, to which I'd ask you do you really feel the need to design a list to work against that or do you think you could probably just beat such an unsupported hacker with just your hacker and a tinbot?
