Not really a question but I got steamroller by Andromeda in 2 orders in Looting and sabotaging. I failed all 6 armour rolls from her doggy delivered D-charges. She deployed in a building so I only had eyes on her with a Zero Sniper through a window. She is really scary these days
It's a good example of why Tournament Organizers have to be thoughtful about the missions they select, and avoid missions like L&S where certain units/sectorials have a huge advantage.
"It looks like you're about to select Looting and Sabotaging as a scenario in your event. Did you mean to select Mindwipe instead?" (...in before people complaining about Mindwipe)
The problem is that Looting & Sabotaging has persisted through multiple tournament cycles where it should have been pruned out.
I mean it's got the same problems, it was designed for N3 and needs an overhaul for N4. Personally I'll be adjusting stuff before I put it in any scenario packets.
Andromeda succeeding at infiltrating roll is going to cause issues just like a Speculo or Fiday successfully realising they don't necessarily need to risk it with a WIP roll, because it's usually possible to set them up to strike at key units with impunity, regardless of the mission. I think it's more important to discuss how the mission causes problems for armies without adequate tools to deal with the mission and whether the armies should be designed to compensate or whether the missions should be designed to have less favouritism. IMO at this point the missions with destructible objects are so skewed that adding anti-materiel to Monofilament is also a valid balancing method.
It's for that reason that Tournament Organizers need to solve the issue themselves. It's a much more direct way of solving problems like this one. Waiting until the next ITS season and hoping a mission gets dropped from the lineup is an indirect way of solving the issue, particularly when we start running into rule interactions that heavily favor a handful of units/armies.
If your TO is even interested in taking game balance into their own hands rather than picking missions based on narrative flavour or what sounds fun, they've got two paths; either restricting their choices or correcting the mission as they see fit with the latter leading to CB getting wrong data from tournament reports.
Probably anyone that decides to go to the length of writing their own or fixing existing missions will document it for posterity.
Yes, but who's posterity? Their local gaming group? The commonly used cylindrical archive? The data that they've used the mission will reach CB and CB will get the impression that the mission is played and enjoyed as CB wrote the mission, because I don't think there's any way to report an ITS tournament to CB with "AC2, ranged weapon damage enabled" or "Extras: Spec-Ops (Bioimmunity banned)"
I mean CB changed the ITS narrative packs from locking missions last season after feedback on the forums that we were just goobering up their stats, so provided it's posted here as feedback they'll at least be made aware of what's going on.
Still boggles my mind how L&S, a mission that discourages playing several Sectorials by being part of a tournament lineup, is still in ITS, while Frostbyte, a better version of most kill missions we have now, went the way of the Dodo. Also Infiltration/Deployment rolls surviving N4. You can build lists that dice their whole plan on the very first dice roll each game. At 70-80% odds that is statistically speaking unreliable in a 3 round tournament. Nontheless if you win the gamble, you get a massive advantage to hinge your game on, with barely any Skill required.
