What do you think: Will they make the leap to W2 at some point? Does the initial concept of pseudo HI still hold up in N4 or does it need to be changed?
Not an IA perspective, but Evaders are just fantastic. I don't think 1W NWI Shock Immune is much worse than 2W. With the new order limits I find myself using Doctors and Engineers to recover a lot less.
I don't see the need. I mean the entire army aside from the basic line troops has effective 2w and all of the important poster boys are true HI 2w patriots. I think for the most part you get the 1w NWI for the things that need to be slightly cheaper for the army to function. I.E. the zenchas are effectively HI bois that threw a trench coat on and called it camo, which is hilarious imo and I love it. The Haidao are all rounders to shore up hacking and aro weaknesses the army has and in lore are zero-g lightweight naval bois so kinda makes sense they aren't fitted with the true combat heavy armor. It'd be neat to see everything go to 2w and honestly it would be cool to have an elite Zhanshi variant that's like 1w NWI but not shock immune similar to how USARF grunts are outfitted with more armor. But honestly I don't see that happening.
I feel like the Evaders were a big FU to the Haidao. They are the same but better. The same with the Sombra and the Zhencha. I think the Zhencha at least looks cooler. I don't mind the 1W+NWI on forward troops I'm not likely to doctor, but I hate it on the Haidao. There's a big difference between 2 wounds and unconscious and 2 wounds and dead. The medic or doctor can be right next to him and can't do anything. It's like he's hit by "Super-Shock" weapons. But no I doubt they will let IA have true 2W anytime soon.
I might be completely off here, but to me this whole concept does look somewhat like a failsafe mechanism for later stages of the game when IA will be in need of a buff/overhaul. Once they are significantly outclassed like ISS is now, they have an inbuilt buff ready to go.
I don't see it. Given how CB assigns points value, there is little to be gained from removing the L from LHI (Lightweight HI). The biggest thing they can do to make WB and IA more competitive on a systematic level at the moment is remove the additional penalty that HI with Forward Deployment or Infiltration suffer. Dropping the Zhencha and FDing Hulang profiles by maybe up to 5 and the Daofei by 9 or 10 would be significant in terms of diversifying the sectorials. On a sectorial design level they had their chance to make Haidao the staple HI but made them special forces (special like the Korean segway riot police, not as in "black ops") without anything to make them special on all but one profile. I wouldn't mind seeing an LHI that's skimping on stuff enough to clock in at about 18 with a combi be the designated fireteam base (BS 12 and no D-charges), but they'd have to come up with a better split between them, Zuyong and Shang-Ji 'cause Zuyong are the middle child atm. However, here we'd be talking about a redesign of the sectorial as a whole, though, which I find is a bit of a big ask atm considering the sectorial isn't in a terrible spot, so...
The other thing that's worth pointing out is that it's often better to have an NWI trooper in an overextended position on the table than a model with a true unconscious state. Zhencha and Liu Xing benefit from this, as they have shock immunity and a solid two wounds of fight in them and then don't leave an unconscious body in the enemy table half to give away classified objectives. Predator, In Extremis Recovery, Datascan, Nanoespionage, Telemetry, Coup De Grace and a few more are trivially easy for your opponent to score if you leave a corpse right on their doorstep.
Evaders aren't really a good example here. They game the point system to the point where it'd be cheating if anyone but CB wrote it.
They more than game the system, they straight up have an extra discount not related to their NW:I cheats. Either the Evaders are hand adjusted to be undercosted, or the Haidao is overcosted. Given the Haidao got the 4pt N4 reduction for HI I'm thinking it's Nomads are cheating with Evaders. If you take the 1pt mines off the Evader engineer profile with the BSG it drops to 25pts, exact same cost as the combi Engineer Haidao (and BSGs and Combis are the same cost in N4 with BSGs going up a point). The Evader then trades 3 CC for: +1 PH +3 BTS Climbing+ Specialist Operative There's absolutely no fucking way 3 CC equates to that, Evaders are probably cheating their cost by 3-5 points. Why? Maybe it's blatant favouritism or maybe CB just cocked up the points cost. Who knows.
Haidao also has a breaker pistol. In my guessing Evaders have 4 pts of stuff over a haidao, which has to be explained by cc18 and the breaker pistol. Breaker pistols I suspect are really expensive given that they kept the chain rifle, smoke grenade ghazi at 5 pts by give them one.
I did the math several times already in different topics. Either Evaders are undercosted or Haidao are too expensive for about 2-3 points. Either way giving Haidao BTS3 and 360 visor (which is on almost every Naval themed unit) without raising Haidao cost would make this fair. I still dont get why units that operate in space have no BTS, FFS solar radiation is a thing...
No, Breaker pistols cost pretty much nothing. You can see this on the ABH profiles, the SMG profile is 3pts cheaper than the Combi profile (which is normally +4 points). The Akrylate and the Pistol make the 1pt difference, and if you look at Dozers you can see the Akrylate-Kanone is a 1pt increase there. Breaker pistols are under a point in value if not being totally free..
On the contrary. In IA it's very easy to have paramedics, who are now very good at getting troopers back on their feet, in your fireteams so recovering troops has become a LOT less order intensive. Almost all my IA fireteam include a zuyong/zhanshi paramedic, and its effectiveness is one of the thing that sometimes keeps me from adding a haidao/hulang to my fireteam in favor of another zuyong/shang-ji (that and speed. Gotta go fast, for the Empire!). It creates an interesting balance where more exotic tools are both slower and brittle, whereas more basic units come with better resilience, speed, and sometimes a tac aware order.
Evaders and Haidao are internally consistent, but they are not externally consistent with each other. I'm suspecting a few base archetypes and if you reconstruct the units from those archetypes the prices checks out. I think the Evaders are built up from a Nomad MI as the base while Haidao are deconstructed from an actual HI. I think there's legacy going on with how MI used to have discounts for being slow, basically, and that's now benefitting Evaders quite a bunch. In either case, I can't find anything about Evaders when I examined them that is straight up cheating, they just start off from a better archetype to arrive at a similar conclusion from. From what I can tell Breaker Pistols (regardless of how many) costs 0 points and regardless of what faction they has them. I think the same is true for all non-Assault Pistols, but I'm not entirely certain when it comes to Multi Pistols and TAGs have a special TAG price gouging on nearly everything. But it's really obvious that Breakers don't cost anything once you start deconstructing.
I was talking about Evader with my buddy today and he was trying to say "well the Evaders serve a totally different roll" I really don't like Holistic BS. They make expensive HI teams cheaper and less expensive teams better. "But well the MSV Sniper". Yeah he's great. And that's as far as it really goes. Every single on is a specialist, three different options of ENG, they can form a core or haris on their own, they don't need someone else to carry a tinbot for them. And don't get me started on Sombra. Oh wait I already started..... ARM3 and BTS6, NIW but somehow not a Heavy and not hackable. Ok ok enough salt! Gonna have a heart attack!
Well, the idea of them being a 'totally different role' only holds weight if you consider the Haidao's role exclusively to be that of an MSV2 sniper, with all the other profiles being worthless filler... which may as well be the case, but doesn't exactly help make the Evaders look fair. Moreover, the Evaders other main difference in roll from the Haidao is that they also consolidate the roles of the Zuyong and combat engineers alongside, in addition to also being cheaper for it. Evaders are simply optimized to the point of unfairness with pretty much every other unit that's worth comparing them to. There are Evaders, and then there's everything else. You can't make a proper comparison with them because they're simply not playing by the same rules. Nomads play a different game.
Now that's high grade sodium lol. I'm trying not to get that way. I take solace in that at least Zhencha look better than Sombra and no one uses them when you can have a Bandit or Moran do the same thing for much cheaper. Evaders... well you wont see them in missions that need to kill specialists... I guess. Think positive.
Try thinking of it more positively, once you remove the expectation of fairness from the equation regarding Nomads and comparisons from other factions (and, rather, comparing them to other factions entirely), there's less salt to mine. There are Nomads (and, perhaps, Combined Army to a slightly lesser extent), and then there are other factions. They play compatible games, but they are different games with different rules, things are easier this way. CB designs them to a different set of standards, so suck it up and move on, avoid worrying about that standard.
