There's been a lot of discussion about how much threat KHD should have on high BTS hackers behind firewalls. Ultimately, I believe it should be down to the feel of the interaction (understandably highly subjective). The interaction with low BTS hackers and isolated hackers seems spot on. The issue seems to be with high BTS hackers behind firewalls that are effectively immune to KHD. This plays into other issues, namely the spotlight+GML/Oblivion ease of certain lists already mentioned. The lack of fear of KHD means there is no disincentive from placing as many repeaters as possible. This, I believe, is poor game design as there's no tactical trade-off or risk to the strategy. There's no meaningful decision being made. Now, KHD shouldn't be able to trivially ARO a super hacker to death. It should, however, present enough of a threat in its active that the super hacker player must pause and worry about exposing it. This can be achieved by AP ammo on a KHD program. Another option I've thought of but not fully explored the ramifications of is giving KHD a permanent firewall making them less vulnerable to other hackers without raising their lethality. Both options have the same effect of creating meaningful choices rather than no-brainer decisions.
A bit late with a reply, but the EW concepts in Infinity are sadly underdeveloped. Jammers ought to have had the targeted state automatically applied to them. The no LoF required element of jammers was at odds with the rest of the game mechanics IMO.
I dunno, how it was before where your own repeaters were a liability was the poor game design. There's nothing wrong with my own resources being a benefit to me. I think it's wrong headed to think otherwise. An interesting decision, sure, a trade off sure. Something that's gonna get at all reliably turned against me? That's a dead game element because it won't get used. And then Nomads have to be shooty to keep up.
I do find this insistent dog-piling on Nomads pretty off though. Nomads are pretty decent in N4, but they aren't the top dogs in a world with cheap Core linked BS13, Mimetism, MSV1 +1 Burst Wildcard Climbing+ Feuerbachs, Andromeda, crazy efficient JSA HI fireteams, and Jotums and Avatars that got buffed five ways from Christmas AND point dropped in N4 etc etc etc. I find commentary like this on the forums suffers from being fuelled by a few peoples absolute conviction in their own presumptions, rather than actual gameplay experience or data. And often the on the table experience is radically different. We've had quite a few tournaments in quite a competitive meta (including last years world no1 ranked player). Nomad haven't dominated any of them.
This. A key difference between N3 and N4 is that it's also far more expensive to remove Repeaters due to the size change and the lower number of orders. That's where I'd focus. Balancing the effort required to place Repeaters with the effort required to remove Repeaters. An Interventor without a Repeater net is just an expensive LI LT.
If I had to pick out a problem faction, balance-wise, it would be CA Vanilla no question. They have access to everything everyone else does and more, with the sole exceptions of Nomad Hacking and Haqq medicine, and their lack of cheap orders has been addressed completely by Tac Window, Warband beasts, command skills and especially REMs. The dogpiling in this thread comes from just how hard some Nomad flavours tend to throw Hacking off balance, effectively removing it as an option for other factions that invest heavily (represented here by Onyx mostly, though Bakunin, CA and the ALEPHs apply too) and leaving others with so few approaches as to spoil fun (some of the mid-tech Sectorials, Ariadna when Guided is included). Despite all the little advantages they have you can still play a pretty standard and enjoyable game against Combined, but if I saw Corregidor across the table at the moment given my love of Hackable-heavy NCA and Bakunin I'd be seriously tempted to forfeit the round just to salvage my evening, and I consider that more problematic than a minor competitive imbalance. Against fancy links and TAGs I've got Coordinated Orders and soft defense, against superpowered DZ invaders I can trade Auxbots or Morlocks. Against the list archetypes discussed in this thread, my NCA is down to very questionable methods like over-infiltrating Locusts (already a situational piece that you just don't want in some scenarios) while even Bakunin has to get creative with any list not featuring Bran Do Castro. Meanwhile, factions with good assassins can exploit the Nomad weakness against direct play trivially as others have pointed out. TLDR; I'm mad because while Tunguska and Corregidor may not be unbalanced in competitive play, they do keep otherwise fun lists out of the mix thanks to the gear check required to properly fight them.
Agreed that it's a difficult balance as everything is interlinked and Nomads become the easy target. Equally the ease of access through N3 repeaters was poor game design. However, the rest of the comment is disingenuous and hyperbolic. Nothing I suggested was a direct nerf to repeaters or the protections they provide. They're still a positive asset and no one is "reliably turning them against you [me]" from my suggestions using a normal KHD. Also, comparing the change I suggested to N3 is completely erroneous because I never suggested a return to that state and there's been a vast raft of changes that altered the balance away from the N3 KHD dominance. Unfortunately, I think the conversation has reached saturation point where every argument for and against has been made and, as has been pointed out by others, it's more about subjective perceptions on what the correct level of hacking dominance should be. My personal observations from playing and list building both against and with hacking dominant factions is that there are a few issues that stem from a tiny imbalance that certain good hackers can consistently, competently, and confidently leverage with minimal risk and investment. I think a reduction in repeater efficacy (indirectly through slightly increased KHD threat) is the way to go but who knows. I'm going to try a houserule of AP on KHD for the next few games I play and I'll report back the anecdotal impact this had if anyone's interested.
These two posts seem to me to be saying the same thing: Combat ineffective guys being able to punch up against superior units IS giving yourself an unfair advantage. My opinion is that largely the current hacking meta achieves that. However, there's 3 basic issues that have been raised so far. 1. Spotlight is too efficiently leveraged into Guided, making "punching up" boring and non-interactive. 2. Widespread Repeaters paired with high BTS Hackers are disproportionately difficult to deal with. 3. The balance between programs lacks nuance, basically making it that Oblivion is a good program and Carbonite is a bad program. For 1, two directions have been suggested: Nerf Guided or Nerf Spotlight. Nerfing Spotlight significantly undermines the ability of nerds to punch up vs not-HI/TAGs - it's why I really don't like that response and much prefer toning down Guided. ARO Spotlight into an active BS Attack should be a good play for dealing with something you can't fight natively. For 2, people are either saying that Repeaters should be less difficult to remove or that high BTS Hackers should be easier to kill with KHDs. I strongly disagree that making fragile 1W high BTS Hackers easier to kill is the right response here. I think it's MUCH more interesting to make removing Repeaters easier: this allows Repeaters to function well in the active turn and act as an order tax in the Reactive without basically deliberately nerfing a single troop type. It's also more widely applicable: widespread Repeater nets are almost as much a problem from factions with Low-Medium BTS Hackers as they are from Vanilla Nomads and TJC. For instance, BJC's Hacking threat is also considered powerful but it's entirely based on BTS3 or less Hackers. The fragile 1W top tier High BTS Hackers are not the issue, the lack of effective tools for dealing with Repeaters is. For 3, that's a harder problem. I am partial to adding more programs that have different effects and scaling the likelihood of a hit causing the effect to the impact of the State that's imposed. That's one of the head scratching things about Carbonite vs Oblivion: I think ISO is a more powerful effect than IMM (mostly because of the -9 vs -3 to Reset), but ISO is MUCH easier to apply. Total Control is actually pretty decently designed: POS is the strongest possible effect and the weakest Hacking program. I don't think 3 is necessary for Hacking to be interesting and viable though: it's more a nice to have in a matured design. It is important to remember that Hackers don't kill people and - absent Guided - their effects aren't directly existential problems. This element - that Hacking is an enabling or disruptive gameplay element - should be preserved. // Re: Jammers. Honestly I agree Intuitive Attack on them is dull. Otherwise though I think - in the N4 incarnation - they're almost interesting but severely hampered by Disposable. Swapping Intuitive Attack for removing Disposable could be an alternative approach. It would also open up Jammers as a counter for Repeaters.
I was just thinking wow how refreshing and surprising to read a thoughtful response that actually engaged with the point I made and was thinking about how I would respond in kind - then I got to the bit where you accused me of being dishonest. Stopped reading there. Forums gonna forum I guess. Have a good one.
The problem is that developing a piece like a TAG exposes it to meaningful threats. That's not true for hackers of a certain tier hiding behind repeater nets.
They also aren't an existential threat to anything: so why should they be exposed to an existential threat themselves? The issue is the trivially hiding behind Repeater nets: 2 x Moderator HD + Grrl Tinbot is just as bad in that situation and they're basic Hackers.
Being isolated is a functional kill against anything hackable without Veteran, and of course you can just straight control TAGs. That's without getting into Guided. The second situation you described isn't as bad because they have less BTS, and thus Trinity becomes more viable.
Are you saying that the hackers aren't existential threats to other units? I don't agree with that at all. TAGs are fucking terrified of them and I have an entire subset of HI I don't play anymore because they're more trouble than they're worth using over hack immune/resistant HI profiles. The transition for my meta in N4 was the TAGs immediately came out in force and everyone had a great time with them. I especially enjoyed the Guijia changes. Then the hacking dropped into gear and pretty soon all the TAGs besides the usual suspects became huge liabilities, kept getting stolen/bricked from across the table, and pretty soon stopped getting used again. My Guijia hasn't been out of the bag since November. Feels exactly like N3 except I'm not blaming the Guijia for being shit anymore I actually think it's a pretty decent profile just the metagame utterly fucks it over.
I get the general point you are making, and I get that the control style of play is something some people don't like (esp once you add guided in) but I'm not sure if it's worse than deploy speculo next to my obvious It, welcome to LOL. It might be or we might be just used to the stuff we are more used to. It's certainly not a foolproof play anyway (Which I think you acknowledge). I say this as a player who plays Bakunin a fair bit (one of the factions you mentioned as harmed by it). In fact I prefer BJC to CJC this edition so far. Not saying there's no smoke to the fire. Also think it becomes overblown pretty fast online. Thanks for your thoughtful response though, I did learn from and appreciate it.
That was a problem when it was combined with Strategos, but that was nerfed for a reason also. In N4 you shouldn't be losing your obvious LT to an impersonator. If you have an obvious LT and you're playing into CA going second, the LT is the last guy to go down. Away from the Speculo if there was one. If you're going first and your opponent deploys too aggressively you can just kill it instead.
I mean sure nice theory. But aren't we talking about hackers in fireteam being the problem? In which case your opponent has a fair idea where it is going when the rest of the fireteam goes down. I agree in general that there are mitigation strategies (That's Playing The Game (TM)). But then there are also mitigation strategies to the things people are complaining about like there aren't in this thread. That's my point I guess.
What about, hackers in b2b with an enemy repeater can apply AP when hacking through it? Or a rule similar to that. They stick a USB into a socket on the repeater and fuck with you. Makes sense to me with all my amazing real life infowar experience. It's a sort of middle ground approach between "be invulnerable" and "give KHD insta-kill powers that ignore your hacking defense stat" Re; comments ITT, repeaters being subverted is by far the most interesting thing about them. Would be super disappointed if that was removed. Do you mean Jammers should apply targeted, or do jamming devices create so much signal that they should automatically be in the targeted state? Second one sounds cool. First one.... good god
