I've been out from game recently, but how come hacking became so powerful? Our country's FINALLY being vaccinated, and we're preparing to return to normal lives.
Yup. And as we discussed up thread, maybe the solution isn't to make head-butting a brick wall viable, but fixing the reason why you feel you need to head-butt the wall in the first place? Never gonna be true for hacking. Period. It's designed to be a bully against a specific type of units that can't fight back, and Reset not allowing re-positioning means it's free of "soft" consequences as well, with Pitchers solving the "issue" of a layered defence around the hackable assets. Doesn't mean the solution is to double down harder on the stuff that makes hacking un-fun, no? Notice who I'm responding to where you quote? "My Onyx can't skew hacking hard all over Nomads" is my main take away of Hecaton's balance discussion. It's very seldom a look on the entire game where, among others, Pan-O also need to (be able to) play the hacking game. Right now, my experience is that all factions can play the hacking game* as long as it's not against Nomads or Onyx or a particularly degenerate Hassassin player. I don't think it's a good idea to ruin that just because something else is causing issues - and especially not to make a new faction the main skew faction. * and that it is valuable even after the Guided Missile REM is gone
You can't ignore the apex predator hacker anymore (as it's the renamed AHD vs the ignorable KHD), and far fewer factions have a hacking platform capable of defending against or removing the offending hacker, and hacking as the Reactive player getting nerfed really hard. Basically it's easier for your opponent to reach out and attack your shit without needing to worry about ARO threats. Oblivion is also much stronger than N3 and is present to a much greater degree on the table compared to last edition.
Spotlight being an ARO, Spotlight not dissipating at end of Turn and then as a consequence Guided Missiles. (And to a lesser extent that Oblivion got AP ammo.)
There's the problem. You can't say hey, build this list but also you get utterly fucked if you run into these factions. That just encourages these other factions to leave the hacking game behind and seek alternatives, like spamming camo. That's bad for the game and bad for hacking. The point of making hacking more viable was to get more people to engage said apex factions in their spheres so they can make use of their niche in the same way that Pan-O has a high tech shooting edge but you also expect the Ariadnan player to engage directly with them not just sit there and make Dodge rolls, because that'd be a fucking boring game. If I am consistently compelled to go "oh boy here's NOMADS, time to drop my UNHACKABLE CAMO SPAM" because of how the meta is encouraging me to play. Congratulations, we fucked up everything N4 was trying to improve and we're playing N3 again. I cannot stress enough how encouraging this direction isn't good for anything. That's utterly wrong. Fireteams bully the shit out of my midfield specialists and straight up murder fuck them, but I'm still expected to be able to put other units on the table to engage and play the game with them so it's not just one side making save rolls. Right now you cannot reliably interact with defensively placed hackers for some factions beyond making saving rolls, or as you say for some factions they have options that aren't worth even looking at. They should have options for other models to engage and protect the units that are weak to hacking. You do not want hacking to be the one sided environment that it is in some circumstances right now. It makes for a boring game when only one player is getting to play offense. Or the reverse where the no hacking faction says fukkit and builds an unhackable list which makes the hacking player feel just as gimped and gives him N3 flashbacks. That wasn't in reference to your quote, that comment was just in general. I don't think it's a good thing to where I find myself saying to a new player "well the counter to hacking is not being able to build a balanced list, but doing something like spamming Camo." I'm encouraging them to combat shit by building a skew, it's a valid piece of advice and it works but I don't think it's healthy for the game or healthy for hacking. Burst 2 was the bigger buff.
Guess Tinbots are even more better than before? Looks like KHD's got a good nerf to their damage, I really shoulda run 2 zhanshi hackers with tinbot :O Now I get that 'spot and nuke' strategy thing seriously.
I just want to stress it's not about head butting a wall. The idea of expanding the role of hacking in N4 is to make it more useful so apex factions feel encouraged to build around it which helps solidify their identity. If you push other factions away from engaging them on their turf and encourage them to build hard counters then it has the opposite of the desired effect. The hacking apex factions still don't get to play their game if people are pushed towards meta gaming counters to them. The goal is to make the apex factions better at hacking but not in a way that straight up discourages or prevents opponents from trying to play their game, which is the situation we're unfortunately in right now. Granted this isn't an easy task but I think it's a necessary one to get right.
I find it interesting how people think Nomads have no vulnerability. Nomads's weakness lies in their lieutenants. They have no chain of command, and their lieutenants are always pretty obvious. They can never reliably use their LT order unless it is for cybermasking. It's pretty easy to decapitate a nomad player in turn 2 once they start to move the pieces out from the deployment zone.
You skipped the most important part of my post, but hey, if you don't want to deal with the reality that hacking has no ability to murder anything that doesn't have a Hacking Device if there's no Guided Missiles on the other side of the table, then that's on you. Spoiler: Anecdote The look of an opponent's face when it was the first N4 game and they had their McMurrough Spotlighted and told only a Reset takes it away, then to have it re-applied when they declared Reset inside my Repeater was one of true panic. It of course went a lot better for them when they ignored Spotlight and let McMurrough do his thing, 'cause hitting on 14 instead of 11 or dodging on 10 instead of 10 isn't a huge deal for the defender. Then again, it was satisfying in a wasteful way to kill McMurrough using Guided Missiles. Lots of Guided Missiles. Safer than attempting it using a HMG or Breaker Pistols at close range, safer that letting him have another turn, but still... McMurrough occupies a very limited design space of units where lobbing missiles is a huge waste of orders. Whether you're able to engage an Interventor using small arms hacking doesn't actually factor into anything when it comes to dealing with a Zero HD without Repeater support. Almost all factions (except that one that has Cosmosoldat) have KHD and KHD work well on a revealed Zero HD. In your active turn. Stop trying to make hacking become Dorito chugging stereotype level of passive aggressiveness, like seriously, an active trooper really needs to have an advantage. Having an opponent be good at something doesn't mean you need to drop it all together. We are not after skews here. What facing Nomads means is that you need to stop using hacking and other hackables as your first and best means of defence, scale it back to a level where it's not a big deal if you get overwhelmed. Nomads still pay for their hackers and their Repeaters so if you can render their multitude of hackers into an over-expenditure by bringing a limited number of hackables and hackers and focusing on LI/MI/SK/WB you've effectively gained an advantage. And yes, I'm aware that Guided Missiles makes Spotlight a death sentence. That's the part of my post you skipped, remember? Now, to be clear, I do not think someone playing the anti-hacking game has enough tools to deal with it, particularly since the tools to deal with it are not even remotely on the same level of investment, neither in terms of orders, AVA, nor points investment, but those tools don't have to be (and ideally shouldn't be) other hackers. Especially now that Ariadna are getting some hackables, those tools need to be something that's not other hackers.
There's a few factions out there with more severe limitations than Nomad factions have that also don't have this chain of command shenaniganery, but as Triumph wrote, that's not actually a factor in the discussion. Nomads mostly only feature here because they have the top dog units and a straight flush in all the abilities that enables them. It's where the issues are shown in their most destructive and un-fun form. There's a few examples where the same dynamics rears their face, where you can also find LTs with CoC or in Marker state.
That was the situation in N3, for the exact reason that the proposed "fix" for the current situation - which is what I'm arguing against. N4 has fixed the hacking game significantly to the point where I would argue that you don't need a hacker vs hacker war. The mere fact that hackable units got a small but significant price drop (somewhat larger for TAGs) means that the number of targets for the hacker factions has increased significantly because there is value in opting in to the hacking game now. This also means there is value to be gained by forcing an opponent to opt out. I do think we're very close to a stable point of hacking, but that the main thing getting in the way aren't Interventors or BTS 6 firewalled hackers, but rather Guided Missiles bloating the value of Spotlight.
This is going back to the list chicken thing. I've been there, I guarantee you it's not healthy for the game or hacking in the long run. Forcing an opponent to "opt out" isn't making them just opt out, it's making them form a hard counter for your ass. You get too many hard counters floating around suddenly your archetype (hacking in this case) becomes weak or bad and you can't play that archetype anymore or you feel compelled to play it alot less. Maybe you cook up a counter to their counter but whatever that's less important past this point. The point is we've devalued hacking again when we were trying to do the opposite. I didn't skip that, I assumed we were on the same page that even if you can't missile a TAG or HI to death bricking (or stealing them) with trivial ease and total impunity is a concern to your average player who puts 1 on the table it takes up a large chunk of his army between it and the support that exists to make it work. Having it totally fail to fire for any effect basically means they straight up lose. That's... more or less what I'm saying. You build a list that spams shit that isn't worth expending orders to fire missiles at, or is straight up impossible to target in an efficient number of orders, or hides all of its good shit under camo, you're just half assing building effective lists. So why would someone stop there as a competitively minded player? Why would they have any high value shit open for you to fuck up. That devalues hacking. That completely fucks up the route we were trying to take with N4 which was to make it good. If our solution is to take guided out of the mix that just makes it even worse. I'm still not taking the high value easy hackables to the table, I'm still going to leave the Su Jian at home and take the other much harder options to hack because I'm still playing around you fucking up my game by bricking them and I don't have defensive options to engage you with, and I mean engage. I don't mean make them invincible, I mean options that compel me to roll dice with your hackers rather than avoid you. You don't want the opposition to avoid hacking any more than if you enjoyed playing basketball you want your opponent to show up with a baseball bat and take you on by playing an entirely different game. That was the N3 problem for hacking, your opponent showed up to your basketball game with a baseball bat and you didn't get to play basket ball. To successfully expand hacking you need more factions to feel compelled to compete in it not counter or avoid it. I actually think it's the opposite, we want more hackers, we actually really want to expand the hacking game a bit it. Specifically mid tier and lower factions definitely stretching to Ariadna you bring Defensive Hackers back and actually make the device not shit this time and give it a purpose, they still have Wardrivers afterall why not actually give them a purpose. Make the Defensive Hacking device the ARO option of the hacking game. Doesn't even need to be necessarily lethal or particularly dangerous. A B3 Carbonite that can intercept comms attacks and make ARO rolls in lieu of units in their hacking zones, and make the skill give them total reaction and probably limit one model to declare using the skill per order. Maybe give them cybermask and fairy dust as well for supplementary programs.
That program already exists as Zero Pain, which at the moment cant intercede on behalf of other units, but it does impose a -3 and is b2 in active and aro. Unfortunately it only exists as an upgrade program and on very few platforms (Thamrys, wardriver and Zoe) are the only ones that comes to mind. If it could nullify the attack completely against all target providing it just rolls higher it could provide some interesting counter play in simply being an ablative body that takes a little effort to take down. but the wording to make it work would be a pain in the ass and does not really do a whole lot against the offensive use of enemy pitchers.
That's the point, it needs to intercede as a potentially cheap throwaway ARO unit to burn orders from your opponent, the same way a TR bot or a Warcor acts in ARO. You don't expect these things to hold out forever but you do expect them to burn a few orders and lessen your opponent's alpha strike. Essentially the device as a non lethal, non assfucking device, should be mildly cheaper than a current KHD. So 2pts instead of 3.
For what little my take (based on discussions here, theory and 0 N4 games actually played) matters, I'd rather see this but as part of a re-introduced Defensive Hacking Device. The problem with N3 was that KHDs made hacking worthless because you would just be straight up murdered by any WIP 13 scrub. The arguements in this thread for KHDs needing to be a threat to an Interventor are not convincing me because, unless you handle it extremely carefully, anything that can threaten an Interventor will flat out demolish other hackers and we're back to HSN3. But I do agree with the need to give more counterplay. Hence DHDs, which you CAN give to Tohaa and Ariadna. You don't necessarially need to murder the Interventor if you can stop her being useful without directly outhacking her. Of course smarter people than me would have to design and banace this as i) we can end up in a N2 situation where Interventors are useless because a high BTS hacker ...showed up and ii) they can't be so good that any hacker who isn't elite isn't useful, but a few shower thoughts on the matter: - Zero Pain is already in the game as an orphan program so it can be attached to DHDs easilly enough - Adding U-turn would be simple enough and gives defence against Guided without reducing it's threat too much. - As for other programmes, Nullifier as a means of cancelling statuses (not necessarially just targeted) within ZC would be easy enough to write and understand but keeping it to ZC will mean it doesn't just make offensive hacking irrelivant - you have to risk your Defenseive hacker or invest in repeaters and blow orders on using it. A ZC deactivator programme (named minesweeper for nostalgia's sake) would offer some universal utility so you're not wasting points if the opponent doesn't run much/any hackers. The other advantage of adding a new device rather than buffing KHDs to threaten Interventors/Asuras/Anathematics is that it can replace regular HDs on units that you are unlikely to ever use their hacking options (being a Nomad player the immediate examples are Rev Moiras and Securitate) and gives you a reason to run them. I will stress that I am not against the KHD getting better (ignoring the WIP or BTS penalties for going through firewalls wouldn't exactly break them), especially if DHDs were to be re-introduced and indeed they should be threats to e.g. Celestial Guard, Custodiers etc. just I feel the discussions around here are too much about making it possible for every faction to reliably kill an Interventor with little regard for the consequenecs to other hackers. Custodiers should have a reasonable chance of surviving too... EDIT: I see this idea was arrived at anyway while I was typing. The more I think on it, the more I dislike the idea of being able to interrupt enemy hacking because tht doesn't seem to be that much of an issue: the persistence and lingering impacts of being on the end of a successful hack are.
It turns out that the program with AP is good at dealing with high BTS threats? Oblivion is significantly worse at dealing with whole swathes of Hackers. It's only better at dealing with the Hackers that are defined by their BTS. Overall you're significantly better off using a KHD to fight Hackers in the active turn.
Is it list chicken? I don't agree. Seems like you'd like a level of granularity where your opponent's faction and list doesn't feature into the consideration what list you take. I don't agree this is a good design direction to take. There's several design philosophies for how to design your allotted two lists, and if one of your lists feature a lot of hackable units then your other should probably be one that's less vulnerable to it - and if that's not possible due to the design direction of the faction you should be rewarded for taking the risk. Anyway, what I'm trying to convey here is that you don't have to play list chicken. Taking a smaller reaction is valid. Infinity has a lot of grey zones and if you can manipulate those grey zones in game you don't have to replace one skew with another as a design philosophy. Same page, very different paragraph. I think tweaking is needed regarding this, not wholesale game system slaughter. Like I wrote, there's a bunch of ways to mitigate the situation that can also have other side effects such as making bricking a Su-Jian difficult (though if your opponent is exposing units enough to stop it from cautious moving, you may need to off the AROers using other means to clear the path, which is basically what the tactical game is all about). If deploying effective Repeaters is more difficult, the amount of lists where a Su-Jian works better in will increase or the amount of mid-field hackers to hunt using a Climb+ 8-2 MOV shotgun will increase. Can we have a serious suggestion for how to get defensive hackers to work that doesn't mean completely fucking the core mechanic that's Face to Face rolls up? Look, Face to Face rolls are the intimate competition between two units, it's not designed to be a threesome. The game owes its brutal nature to this fact, hacking or otherwise. Defensive Hacking Devices were killed off and for a good reason. There may still be design space for a device with a more defensive nature, but what's the point when Hacking Devices fill a similar role. Don't get me wrong, I'd love it if I didn't have to bring a completely defenceless REM to provide Fairy Dust, but what can be solved by making a huge sweeping system changes can also be solved by sticking a light shotgun or Contender on the EVO REMs and giving them Carbonite along with the same apparent price calibration that the E-Drones have. And all that said, Ariadna and Tohaa will keep sucking because Hacking is currently designed to suck for you if you can't focus hacking through (preferably deployable) repeaters. P.s. and they nerfed Grenade Launchers enough that Speculative Firing them on anything, but especially deployables like Repeaters, is beyond order-inefficient (unless you're in a Core targeting grouped low-PH units in which case the net effect is a buff...).
It's a question I asked back towards the end of N3 but given the craziness that is available within some sectorals mixed links would dropping the fireteam chart completely make the game any worse? I.e anything with fireteam core could instead be lobbed into a core link much like triad. Would this open up anything worse than is already available or does it narrow the gap between the armies with access to firepower such as that listed in the original post and those trundling around without it.
List chicken the eventual destination that we're headed in regards to list building. Yes, this would actually be better for the health of the game overall. Mission parameters and internal synergy having a greater effect on list building is desirable for the health of the game over building lists with a greater emphasis on dealing with your opponent's choices. Pushing players towards focusing on their opponent's list leads to functional gear checks during construction, i.e. can I get past a Kamau/Grenzer MSR, can I deal with or avoid my opponent's hackers etc. All contributing towards that list chicken business. Allowing the player to focus on building their list because this unit is good for this mission, or this unit supports this unit that I wanted to take, is better for the game. What I'm conveying is that you are being increasingly encouraged to pursue that path for maximum effect. That's been my findings so far after playing N4 consistently since it dropped the game is much easier when you are building around opponents rather than missions these days, and I used to definitely favour construction around missions and internal synergy. Now my lists have a heavy emphasis on meeting gear checks. I don't think that's a good thing and I certainly don't like it, but I'm forced to acknowledge it. In regards to my local meta my observations have been that N4 hasn't been an overall... positive. N4 is definitely straining on certain people and making them enjoy the game alot less, and the root cause seems to be they feel far less free during list construction and things feel more "solved". I don't think what we're discussing is entirely to blame in that aspect there's other shit like the Tactical Window business, but I don't think feeling compelled to build lists to answer various gear checks (not just hacking) has been a positive for them either. I am less concerned about these highly vulnerable units being stopped by hacking AROs, I find the biggest factor that is causing me to leave them to collect dust is that they are too hard to defend in my reactive turn and too easily picked on by opponents, which makes other units far more desirable to build my lists around. Like I said, fucking why bother with the headache of tiptoeing around with them when you can get similar or better performance out of other units that are harder for your opponent to exploit their vulnerable angles. I think you're just going to have to sack up and accept the fact that this is a necessity caused by hacking ignoring LOF and hacking zones being fuckin' trivial to place all over the table in N4. The first defence of Infinity is not being attacked. This means positioning, being out of LOF, and being behind the sacrificial ARO unit which will force the opponent to burn orders engaging with them first. Your important units win every F2F roll they never have to make. That's literally one of the most basic things in Infinity's strategy, make your opponent spend orders fighting the units you want him to fight not the ones he wants to fight. Hacking completely fucks that off, for certain factions at least. They can bypass all AROs to attack key units which fucks up game balance when you can ram tonnes of orders through a few units to make it happen. If you don't want lethal hacking AROs to keep repeater coverage in check because you couldn't handle N3 hacking, then you've got other options, but you're looking at stacking more MODs on shit which is harder to make work as it needs more tailoring between factions, I'm also not convinced trying to turn the F2F roll into an 80% both players shit the bed is the way to go either as that may well just be less interesting for everyone involved and just discourage hacking again if it often results in zero effect for the active player. I like tinbots, they're super effective, but I'm also leery of allowing them to spam up the game and making more MODs that stack with them. The other option that's relatively easy to implement is to allow players to pick up low cost ARO options to burn incoming orders early in the game and give them time to execute problem solving by attacking, but that requires you to get around the no LOF nature of hacking somehow, hence creating some kind of skill that allows models to switch AROs or whatever it takes in that regard.
