I am pretty sure, that CB will make Yu Jing struggle a bit and let it look like if they were weak, but then the release of IA happens and they show the Sphere what the State empire can do when it unleashes their HI supremacy.
This year's player output will be skewed to hell and back. Fluff-wise Nomads and Haqq aren't even close enough to second position so a more interesting question is how they'll spin it when Yu Jing performs like Norway in this year's campaign. Two very populous planets and one of two factions large enough to ferry their own troops and assets between planets, yet with very low participation from players (nearly none if the strike from Spanish forums actually gets organized enough). It's like a world war 2 game and Russia sends a frigate and a couple of spetznaz to the western front. How do you spin that? NPCs? Design a conflict that Yu Jing can can opt out of? (Yeah, they were busy quashing the remaining JSA sympathizers and didn't have time to help out against CA this time around, have fun)
More or less, having a starter box helps in spades... but Nomads and Haqquislam are all about numbers, Limited Insertion missions could hurt Haqquislam more than the Nomads.
On a different note, With the rebellion done and quality of life upgrading for the liberated JSA population it's ... wait... hah, still no Cubes for Keisotsu peons!
Numbers Nomads ain't got :) I'm talking planets, mate. Hard rocks with naturally regenerating atmospheres. Birds, bees, booze that basically grow on trees. Actual trees, not just VR replacements.
As far as the leaked snipets go, YJ did indeed crush the uprising, and the only territories controlled by the JSA right now are the Japan Islands on Earth.
They could add a multiplicator to the YJ results, if the playerbase is too skewed to accurately represent their in-lore supremacy. Make every victory count 1.5x or whatever makes the outcome reasonably close.
True, but those things were supposedly removed from the final results last time around. It will acutally be interesting to see how much this affects the participation.
I was talking about player numbers, sorry then XD. I'd say that Yu Jing and PanO have the bigger numbers when it comes to population, with Haqquislam being the third (not as much people in space as Nomads, but with a planet), then Nomads (not only on the big ships, or even the small ones, but also in detached units working all around as engineers and grunt workers) and Ariadna (mostly stuck on Dawn...). Which is not only not a surprise, but logical. Yu Jing cannot allow the rebel forces to stay on the capital planet, and would be forced to concentrate their forces there at all costs... so the Japanese must have decided to fight a battle they can have some hope of winning on the long run, thus Japan where YJ can't simply drop tungsten bars from orbit and watch the decimation without nuclear fallout. As far as I know, on Wotan CB/BoW applied some sort of compensation for the number of players per faction, the same way CB is applying one on the ITS challenge atm.
Undoubtely, the numbers would be much bigger otherwise, and Aleph wouldn't be better placed than Ariadna XD
Do we have that officially confirmed? Because I think Aleph is showing up a lot in tournaments now, at least in my area, so the relatively high results on Aleph make sense. In fact, I think the 300 point boxes were excellent ways in to Tohaa and Steel Phalanx and really boosted those factions. The Corregidor box hasn't been having the same effect, but maybe partly because so many people already played Nomads.
Can I just throw a random complaint out there? :3 I've come to terms with the split and everything. Games need to go forward, it's all good. What I do find extremely shitty though is that they released the new Shikami just before this, and advertised it as a Yu Jing unit. So I bought it, had it commision painted, and now it's a 60$ investment that I'll only get to use if I buy a JSA army to go with it. I mean, at the point when they released the shikami they KNEW it'd not be with yu jing for long, so I find that a really really shitty marketing strategy - "Hey Yu Jing players, look at this brand new model you're getting" *buys it* "PSYCHE It's not actually for you LOL" Okay, now that I've got that out of my system. Has anyone got any idea how many points the spec op miniature is? Basically wondering how many points the new box will contain all in all and if my JSA support pack + shikami will be enough to make an okay-ish 300p army or if I should get something else.
Unless something changes it uses the spec op rules which are based on Keisotsu so it'll be 9 points but you can only use it if the tournament organizer allows them.
Hellois has said that they are taking player population into account when applying the numbers to the ITS Challenge in the ITS challenge threads, can't remember if it was on the spanish or english one, but there is an answer to my request of seeing the raw numbers after the challenge ends where he agrees if he has time.
Cool, thanks =) I've looked through the rulebook but can't find anything about spec-ops though, do you know where I can find the rules for them?
The full rules are in Campaign: Paradiso, but you can get most of the idea by clicking the Specops button in Army (hint: it's at the top of the Army List, not in the profiles chart.)
