I must admit I only now saw x visors on some units with pitchers. So yeah in 24 it's b2 on 15s :0 the only saving grace is that they might have to shoot it from above 24 on 12s and/or they might get normal roll aro. But it still looks like way too good odds.
Fair point about the pitchers. I wouldn’t say two 16 point hackers in a core team with the tinbot that you’re already bringing because it’s attached to the shang ji is designing my list on the concept. I would say it’s covering my bases for the occasional camouflaged or AD hacker that could otherwise be uncountered.
I’ve played several games against seasonal high ranking players via TTS in N4 and I am totally vouching for what @Triumph is saying here. Some factions will easily, trivially even, fuck your entire army over (or at least the key attack pieces) via “repeater pie-slicing”. Don’t make ever make the same mistake as I did in one of my first games of N4 and use the Shang Ji Lt. option (I was playing White Banner), and naively believe that BTS6 and a -6 Tinbot is worth any protection against hacking (Guilang Lt. is now the only Lt. I ever use in that faction as a result of that). These aren’t meme factions either, who’s only niches are hacking. These are S-tier cancer factions like Nomads, Corregidor and CA which is almost all I face (as well as Tohaa) in TTS, now that it is super easy to shift to a different faction/meta when physical model are no longer required.
I seem to remember bitching alot about Sun Tze (and Joan) being dead profiles for a similar reason during the spoiler lead up to N4.
Nope, he's absolute trash tier in N4. His two draws of Total Immunity and Strategos 3 got nerfed hard, and now he has a higher vulnerability to getting oblivioned and losing his LT perks. He was already arguably on the overcosted side of things in N3 and it just got worse in N4.
Leave him on your shelf. He's best as an off-field advisor. His current profile has no place on the tabletop.
So pitchers and hacking being what they are pushing shit into imbalanced territories and causing metagame issues aside, I've been back to the TR bot and REMs in general. There's been a bit of reevaluating going on over them locally, they'd been falling out of favour largely over either numerous soft or ZOC/Perimeter/DTW based ARO options, or linked ARO options but now they're making a bit of a come back. I've been exploring the idea of trying to work a recursion based list, from a warmahordes perspective it's essentially a list that's built to keep replenishing losses during the game. One of the main things that made order spam strong in N3 was dude spam generated alot of AROs that you had to deal with which caused significant order tax in beating all these AROs. The idea between putting some focus on recursion is you create dude spam without going over the 15 model limit, if you successfully heal 3 ARO models and put them back on ARO, you functionally brought 18 guys to the fight. If you heal the same three guys the next turn it's 21, and so on as your opponent needs to keep fighting the same assholes every turn which hopefully taxes his ever dwindling order supply. So I've basically been building a small combat group for IA that has 1 or 2 Husong, 2 Chaiyi, an Engineer of some type with a pair of Yao Zao, and maybe a Warcor if I only did 1 Husong. The goal of this group is basically to just spend its orders repairing shit each and every turn and try keep ARO pressure on the table. This functions better than in N3 because the REMs can prone, allowing the Yao Zao to hide and support easily, and when unconscious the REMs can be placed in positions they are hidden from further damage when prone before being healed and automatically going back to a standing position. It's fairly difficult to fully delete a REM in one order, and opponents can't easily spite kill them while unconscious to stop the Engineer from doing his job anymore. IA has some further synergy to offer in this build, they have two very competent character engineers that if nothing needs repairing are fully capable of spending orders to do meaningful things like place mines, repeaters, or even just shoot things. Additionally with a wild card Son Bae they have a very good argument to have guided fire in their lists, which makes pushing Chaiyi and repeaters into position to spotlight targets from a Daoying a very viable use of their group's order pool. I've been building lists that begin something like this GROUP 1 5 CHIEF JEONG K1 Combi Rifle, AP Mines, D-Charges / Pistol, CC Weapon. (0 | 29) HÙSÒNG Yaókòng Heavy Machine Gun / PARA CC Weapon(-3). (1 | 24) HÙSÒNG Yaókòng Heavy Machine Gun / PARA CC Weapon(-3). (1 | 24) CHAĪYÌ Yaókòng Flash Pulse / PARA CC Weapon(-3). (0 | 7) CHAĪYÌ Yaókòng Flash Pulse / PARA CC Weapon(-3). (0 | 7) YÁOZĂO PARA CC Weapon(-3). (0 | 3) YÁOZĂO PARA CC Weapon(-3). (0 | 3) This is the combat group that's more or less got the job of playing recursion and being annoying and soaking orders each turn. It's got room to flex too, you could pretty easily exchange Jeong for Kokram for example. Meanwhile the second group handles most of the fighting and has 13 orders to play with which is pretty respectable. GROUP 2 10 1 DĀOYĪNG (Lieutenant [+1 Order], Hacker, Hacking Device) Boarding Shotgun ( ) / Breaker Pistol, CC Weapon. (0 | 30) SHÀNG JÍ (Tactical Awareness) AP Heavy Machine Gun, Chain-colt ( | TinBot: Firewall [-6]) / Pistol, Shock CC Weapon. (1.5 | 49) LÉI GŌNG (Chain of Command) Submachine Gun, Nanopulser, Blitzen / Breaker Pistol, CC Weapon. (0 | 32) ZHANSHI (Paramedic) Combi Rifle ( | MediKit) / Pistol, CC Weapon. (0 | 13) ZHANSHI Combi Rifle / Pistol, CC Weapon. (0 | 11) ZHANSHI Combi Rifle / Pistol, CC Weapon. (0 | 11) ZHANSHI Combi Rifle / Pistol, CC Weapon. (0 | 11) PANGGULING (Deactivator, Repeater) ( ) / PARA CC Weapon(-3). (0 | 8) PANGGULING (Deactivator, Repeater) ( ) / PARA CC Weapon(-3). (0 | 8) SON-BAE Yaókòng Missile Launcher / PARA CC Weapon(-3). (1.5 | 16) 5 SWC | 286 Points Open in Infinity Army There's 14 points left to adjust the list so there's plenty of flex available. You could upgrade Zhanshi to hackers or other specialists, Pangos could turn into Rui Shi or Lu Duan, you could upgrade to an EVO hacker for some supportware on the Husong, Jeong could replace Lei Gong in group 2 then Kokram gets slotted into group 1 to put some NCO in there. Lots of options you could look into, if you really feel like cheese IA has AVA 3 Husong, drop a Zhanshi and you can make the BRRRRRRRRRT memes real.
If you've got the Haris spot free, you could have a Haris of Cheong+Zuyong+Panggo for relatively cheap. Cheong with Gizmokit is more reliable at repairing particularly Chaiyi than Cheong using Engineer without CT. Anyway, I'm running Onyx in the next TTS tourny simply because Hecaton said they're crap at hacking. I look forward to dishing out the Pitchers rather than having to eat them.
I think his point was more in the terms of hacking powerscale they're crapper than N3 rather than flat out crap per se. Which I can understand, they slid down in terms of hacking prowess both due to meta shifting heavily in favour of repeater networks which theirs has never been offensively particularly strong, and their hacking programs got noticeably worse. They had the best hacking programs in the game in N3, that's not true anymore and they understandably get fairly envious when looking at the improved hacking programs/platforms Bahram, Aleph, and Nomads are running around with. It'd be a similar situation if the Guijia made the Pan-O TAGs suddenly look like outdated tech when N4 rolled around, Pan-O players would be pissed and I wouldn't really blame them.
Not really. Yu Jing weren't ever voted the best TAG faction of N3 the way Nomads were consistently considered by forum consensus the best hacking faction of N3. It's more like a Combined player complaining that their TAGs are now worse because the Pan-O TAGs got a bigger effect out of N4 changes (which just like hacking is a truth with exceptions), which as a comparison falls flat because it is once again comparing Combined to the faction that is meant to have that particular area as their speciality. I'm not interested in bringing the thread back to that particular off topic, though, suffice to say in closing that I consider the Guijia to be one of best TAGs. Not the best, but absolutely top 25%. This is not enough to make it a "TAG faction", though, as this would require cheap and efficient lighter TAGs and specialist support which Yu Jing still struggles to employ effectively - even though Chung-Hee is a great boon.
Alright, say we lost all of our LT2 in N4, we'd be pretty shitty about that if the Daoying got demoted. It'd be a similar situation to that. CA did have arguably the two best hacking programs in the game, one being for raw power with Maestro, and the other Exile gave an unmatched hacking utility no other faction, even Nomads, could touch. They lost all of that, and upgrade programs they got as "replacements" are comparatively weak compared to other factions that they were arguably superior to before. I can totally understand why people are peeved over that. I also think that you are underestimating how much of a factor hacking was thematically for CA. They always had unique and better devices than the average chump, they are servants of an AI aspect, which doesn't get more uber hacking in terms of theme than that. In N4 that galaxy spanning AI apparently can't code a decent program some aliens on an rust bucket ship in some backwater galaxy crewed by a technologically inferior species can't write in their spare time. There's definitely some whiplash to find yourself there after having the two best programs plus your own unique hacking devices nobody else in the game got at your disposal.
We already know what happens when your faction gets redesigned, taking the schtick away from it, which didn't happen here. Those programs sucked from a design perspective and they're being overstated as to their effect. And no, LT2* isn't on the level of jankiness. It's more like imagine what'd happen for the top 33% performing ISS and Ariadna players if Tactical Window was made standard. Oh wait. That happened. And yes, he really did call them crap at hacking. In this thread even. * which, by the way, got added to Onyx But seriously. Can we get back to IA?
Look dude, you opened this can of worms and derailed my previous IA post not me. You wanna go offtopic then we're going all the way until my interest in the tangent is run. People don't call me an autistic retard for nothing. I don't know what's being said elsewhere, but the term used in this thread by @Hecaton was anemic. I agree with that, compared to how strong they used to be at hacking, they're definitely anemic compared to N3. So my take away from that is... we agree that the current state of hacking sucks for CA players then? On one hand you say Maestro sucks, presumably because you think it was too strong, completely decide that deleting fireteams with Exile wasn't a really useful tool to have, and then with the same breath decide that because they had programs that were removed for being too strong that being bumped several pegs down the hacking power scale didn't affect them at all? They got nerfed in an area that they had some unique aspects, which were deleted. Sure they didn't get kicked in the dick as hard as Ariadna but it's not a pissing contest, I still get why there's salt over it and I find it completely justified.
No. On both accounts. I made a comment on how to potentially enhance the aspect you were discussing and then made a snide comment about how I'd try my hand on being the toxic pitcher throwing asshole and you picked up the snide side comment only and ran the length of the pitch with it ignoring the main point. That's on you. On the second part, again, no absolutely not. As in you got basically everything backwards. It's funny because my meta is crawling with Combined players, but they all play a Shasvasti style, so I'm drawing on my experiences versus Dahshat/Nomad/Haqq players from my meta for how to relativize hacking strength, but so far Nourikas has been causing me problems when playing IA and has been responsible for preventing me from fielding TAG lists at least against vanilla CA players at least. Any deeper analysis on how I think this little trial is going and we'd better hop to the CA forums.
You didn't say anything in your first point that I disagreed with in relation to IA. There is nothing to discuss to there. It fits the archetype I presented, and it's another way of trying to achieve the same goal. Well put it this way, Nourkias is causing issues for you because he can reach out and say "hey, fuck that TAG". Last edition the same CA player could reach out and say "Hey, fuck your fireteam." In active, and in ARO. I can only assume you never played a sectorial into a repeater network put up by a CA player in N3 if you think Exile's power was as you put it, overstated. Either you had a KHD on hand to put the EVO bot down or you couldn't bring a link team within repeater range which made life difficult putting it mildly. Now maybe you think we probably couldn't have Exile with the current way N4's hacking plays. If you do, yeah I agree, we don't have the necessary hacking attack tools for low end factions to punch into a repeater network and deal with the problem (KHDs being as anemic as they are, that discussion again). On the other hand, as per Hecaton's complaints, nothing on the unique level or strength that is more N4 mechanically friendly was given in return to replace such a program. Making their EVO drones more like Scylla with attack programs and ECM would've been appropriate.
Yeah... getting an E Drone's hacking area real snug like close to N3 KHDs always was a big brain move. And Nourikas didn't have Total Control back then either... While I sympathies that having your super special status reduced probably feels like a nerf, on the plus side I've started seeing E Drones on the table now and Nourikas exists.
Nope. Not much. And when they were used the player didn't stick repeaters down everywhere ffor people's KHD to annihilate them through. (Not my KHD, mind you,they couldn't roll for shit, but it was enough that others could so the threat made these tactics uncommon enough for me) The state of the hacking game in N3 is why I think this is the result of some pretty heavily tinted rose goggles. Edit: it's very possible they were used extensively, but they never really caused me enough issue to note they were on the table.
