Figured this is sufficiently important to have separate. I know it's been asked in a thread, but it's kind of buried atm. Question. Are you allowed to declare attack ARO on troopers that do not generate nor grant AROs? Examples below. One A Custodier, Cee, has a repeater net spread in front of them. The Guarda De Assalto, Gee, is trying to move through it. Gee's REM is inside the hacking area of Cee and being a peripheral is forced to activate when Gee does. Gee declares a Cautious Move. Since the REM can not Cautious Move, it declares Idle and grants Cee a Hacking ARO. Cee wants to target Gee with Oblivion, but Gee doesn't grant AROs due to using Cautious Movement outside of LOF and outside ZoC. Is it enough that the REM grants an ARO for Cee to attack Gee despite Gee not generating AROs? Two Cee is in a new encounter, this time coming up against Crane Agent Ay. Ay has help in the form of a cadre of Celestial Guards. Ay and his merry gang activates and they move up behind Cee, Ay is moving stealthily while the gang causes a ruckus. This gives Cee an ARO. Instead of Dodging, declaring Reset or targeting one of the gang with Spotlight, Cee wants to use a more powerful Hacking attack on Ay whom is not granting Cee any AROs. Can Ay use Stealth while his gang can not and will attacking Cee validate Cee's Oblivion declaration on Ay?
I'm sorry to be a bother but could you make a locked thread or a post somewhere of the questions that you know are in faq queue or you are waiting for an answer for provisional answers. This way we don't keep asking questions that you are already looking into and also helps the crowd know that important stuff is being looked at when there is a bit of silence.
My preference for this - and how I would play it right now - is you can declare the ARO (as "a player’s Models and Markers can react each time the opponent activates one of his Troopers with an Order) but the ARO is only valid if the Cautious Move fails or Stealth is broken. IE Cautious Move should be read as" Allows the Trooper to move up to the first value of his MOV Attribute, generating no [valid] enemy AROs in the process." Stealth should en read as" If the user declares a Short Movement Skill or Cautious Movement within the Zone of Control of one or more enemies and stays outside their LoF, he does not grant [valid] AROs to those enemies. This permits the ARO to be declared but it would be found invalid at Step 5. This - to me - greatly improves the Stealth + Non-Stealth group activation: it is neither played like early N3 (where Stealth effectively did nothing in that situation) or late N3 (where the Stealthed trooper could force a target to react vs the non-Stealthed trooper). Rather you end up with a situation where a target trooper can validly ARO against a Stealthed trooper *but only if their second Short Skill breaks Stealth* and to do so they need to forfeit their opportunity to ARO against the Non-Stealth trooper.
So apparently we have an interim answer until the FAQ arrives: So Stealth + Non-Stealth shenanigans are back on the menu boys. For the record I *really* hate that answer, I much prefer Stealth preventing AROs from being valid. I think the answer IJW provided results in MUCH worse gameplay.
Still unanswered is: if a non-Stealth trooper activates, granting me an ARO, can I then declare that ARO against a Stealth trooper that has also activated (losing it as invalid if the Stealth trooper doesn't declare a non-stealthy skill for its second short skill). So I'm not sure if we know yet whether those shenanigans will work. What we do know now is that if the only active trooper is using Stealth, then AROs can't be declared at all.
The only reason why the Stealth trick works in N4 is the N3 FAQ reinventing the Stealth rule and introducing completely different wording and meaning to make it legal. N3->N4 Stealth wasn't changed. What was changed is the ARO declaration now explicitly allows to use available AROs against any active Trooper (plural here is new), which bypasses the Stealth rule. Stealth itself does not prevent any targeting, only AROs getting generated to begin with. Without the FAQ preventing targeting you can be as sneaky as you want, if the guiy next to you is making noise he'll blow your chances. I don't expect a change here though.
A lot of that depends on how the FAQ resolves "prevents generating an ARO" if it follows the reasoning @ijw expressed and it ends up as "can't declare AROs [against the Trooper using Stealth]" - which I think is what IJW was getting at - then forcing Reset through Repeaters is trivially easy (the CC uses seem to have reduced though, with a significantly lower incidence of Stealth). Either way the issue is very much alive, which is why I much prefer "prevents generating a [valid] ARO" as it makes Stealth + Non-Stealth issues moot. It's with noting, as someone else reminded me, that @ijw was discussing an entirely different issue to which this was a tangential question so it's possible this is less of an authoritative answer than I initially presented it as.
Reviving this thread. This FAQ entry is a bit weird: If several Troopers are activated at once (for example a Coordinated Order or a Fireteam) and one of them uses Stealth while outside a reactive Trooper's ZoC or Hacking Area, can the Trooper that used Stealth be chosen as the target of AROs? Yes, but the ARO will only be considered valid if the Stealth user performs a Skill that allows AROs I'm not quite sure I follow what this is trying to answer, it does seem to hint that you may declare AROs versus Stealth troopers that are part of a coordinated order, but this only answers whether that is possible outside the ZoC/Hacking Area. The problem is inside hacking area. Will the ARO still be invalidated if the Stealth trooper doesn't perform a skill that allows AROs? E.g. A Haris of Samaritan Hacker and two Xeodrons declares Move while outside LOF of all enemy Hackers. Mary Problems declares Trinity, targeting the Samaritan. The Haris declares another Move On measuring, the Samaritan was in Hacking Area during both Move Skill declarations. Is the Trinity declaration valid? If and only if the above Trinity declaration is invalid: What if the Xeodron team leader had declared BS Attack with the second Short Skill?
Huh, yeah that's weird. If the trooper was outside the ZoC and hacking area (and LoF), then the ARO would always be invalid, whether or not the target had stealth and regardless of its second skill declaration. Seems like the most likely explanation is a typo in the FAQ, and it meant to say "uses Stealth while inside a reactive Trooper's ZoC or Hacking Area."
Oh gawd I missed that part of the new N4 FAQ, that's suggesting Stealth does things Stealth doesn't do again.... which is prevention from Targeting. Stealth prevents generating AROs, the rule does nothing afterwards. Literally. Could we maybe fix Stealth, to actually do what it apparently is supposed to do instead of writing FAQs that serve as novelty rules?
Well, the reciprocal LOF entry apparently makes a lot of sense for someone who's played historical wargames (which I haven't), so it's possible that "granting" ARO and allowing targeting of AROs may be the same may also be intended to be synonymous even though it may not appear so if we don't have the same common knowledge.
Ugh, I overlooked that too. Outside/inside really does look like a typo, or else this FAQ answer is complete nonsense.
Oh wait, what it’s saying is that Stealth works against hacking that’s using a repeater instead of the hacker’s own zone of control. It’s answering a completely different question. Edit: never mind, there were multiple stealth-related FAQs
huh... yeah you're right. I guess that then begs the question: can we, then, extrapolate that to inside ZoC to the same effect? Wait, I don't think so. The "or" between ZoC and HA makes it rather confusing. I don't know anymore... what is life?!