Thoughts on Major Lunah, MSV1, Triangulated fire and smoke

Tends to be a total waste of time. Targets that it matters against such as TR bots you can already -12 them with mimetism, cover, range, and surprise attack which is the cap. Other hard targets such as fireteams don't give a shit because of sixth sense so you're only hurting yourself with the -3 MOD.

 

It's generally speaking not a very common tactic because you don't generally gain much benefit from it compared to a regular shot. The fact that Triangulated Fire is an Entire Order skill makes it impractical even for the units who could benefit from it.

In Lunah's (and particularly Teucer's) case, the weapon she uses has very generous rangebands meaning you don't usually shoot at very punitive MODs even when shooting through smoke. As such, setting up to use Triangulated Fire is quite difficult - mostly because you'll spend a short skill setting up and then a short skill shooting anyway which typically leaves the target you were going to Triangulated Fire on Dead.

The best case scenario for Lunah is that she's shooting something that's in cover and has Mimetism-6. Effectively she can either shoot regularly at B2 with effective BS 9 or she can spend a couple of extra orders setting up B2 with effective BS 9 and the opponent gets Smoke MODs.

This is literally an ability that you only use if the situation is handed to you, if your opponent does the setup for you.
This, by the way, is basically true for anyone who has Sensor. The fact that it is an Entire Order Skill is what kills it as a tactic even for units with less generous range bands.

 

BS10, she got buffed to BS13 base in N4. Not that that changes anything about this.

 

I can see a few situations were it might be worth the trouble to set-it up, like if you want to kill a TR bot but can't outrange it or if you somehow end-up in front of a mimetic -6 dude in suppressive fire, but overall 2 shots on 10 will often be a bit too low for comfort.

 

Sensor in N4 was reduced to Short Skill, you can now move+sensor.

 

https://infinitythewiki.com/Triangulated_Fire
Granted, it's no longer nestled with Sensor, but most units with Sensor and a gun have this skill as well.
Sensor was also a short skill in previous edition(s)

 

Oh, I misread your sentences. By the first one I quoted, i thought you were going for a change of subject. Now talking about how Sensor is similarly handicapped (needs the opponent to setup). And then next sentence I thought by "it" you meant the new subject, Sensor, is a bad tactic as it is Entire Order. As you talk about range bands, it should have been obvious to me you were talking about Triangulated. I'll blame lack of coffee ;)

I used it so few times i didn't remember it was already a short in past editions :)

 

Oh yeah, that's fair enough. I was a bit unclear mentioning the wrong skill. (On that topic, I do think Sensor works within expectations at the moment. It's not a counter to camouflage, but it's also not priced as a counter to it. Instead it provides a localised benefit to the unit with the skill. It's just that the primary and secondary benefits are kinda flipped...)

 

Apart from Triangulated Fire being not very useful, I take her in most of my Vanilla lists that are designed for tournaments, because she is the best counter for Ariadna beasts and MacMurder.

 

It's worth discussing a couple of tricks to set up the shot here. One is placing Lunah as a reserves choice, or simply deploying second. Then you can just pop smoke on Lunah with your first order and triangulated fire with your second order. Used this way, it's a very reliable way to remove flash pulse bots, warcors, TR bots etc. Even in good range you can -12 a TR bot this way, so it's worth remembering.

Secondly, a big improvement for Triangulated Fire is the way active turn dodge movement is resolved now. If you're approaching a corner you would need another order to move & fire around anyway, you can sometimes safely do a move & dodge to peek around at the enemy without risking an ARO. You're then set up to do a triangulated fire full order without having wasted any orders on setup. If your dodge fails, at least you're in position to do a move and shoot anyway.

The saddest thing about the trick is it doesn't really confer any bonus shooting against models with sixth sense, and quite regularly you want to murder a link team ARO piece. In that scenario you're much better off doing a coordinated order than mucking around with triangulated fire.

 

That's a lot of setup and some reliance on a low PH to succeed the move, though. Plus, if your opponent sets up a TR bot so you can shoot it from the DZ, that's them playing into your hand quite hard - which granted is something inexperienced players do.

I honestly felt like they'd found a decently good balance for how Marksmanship LX worked. As is now, neither Lunah nor Teucer pays much, if anything, for Triangulated Fire, but considering how little they gain from it the decision to keep such a situational ability on these units when more impactful abilities were cut is somewhat surprising. Would be less bad if they had Sensor as well.

 

Teucer's Marksmanship LX was the original ranged CC attack before Guard.

 

I think it would be pretty rare to use sensor on Lunah, apart from maybe the boost to discovering things.

Marksmanship LX wasn't too bad, but it was still a bit of a mess figuring out when it be worthwhile and when it wasn't. I think it's fair to have treated it as a rule too niche to exist.

The dodge setup isn't flawless, but it is a definite improvement on N3 where there was almost no means of sticking your nose around a wall to set up for a full order shoot. In a situation where you have to clear a corner 4-6" away you may as well try it, because either way you'd spend a second order to move and shoot at the corner. Similar dodge-setup is useful to keep in mind for Shaolin & Intuitive attacks, discover->shoot full orders etc.

 

The boost to Discover was what I was getting at.

The last iteration of Marksmanship LX was almost always the way to shoot IF you could spend an Entire Order on it and IF the opponent was in cover since it fully ignored cover.

Of course, Triangulated Fire wouldn't be a bad ability now if you could still use it to avoid hitting your own troopers when shooting into a melee.

 

Yeah, losing the ability to shoot into melee reliably is rough. That was certainly my most frequent use of triangulated fire in N3. At least it will always be situationally useful against people who think putting Mimetism (-6) troops out to ARO is a good idea.

MMLX ignoring cover was great, but forfeiting a second shot wasn't *always* worth it. It was a lot better than the previous MMLX where the margin seemed to be 1-2% better or worse if you used it in some edge cases, but you could rarely figure it out without the dice calculator.

 

With 20:20 hindsight, they should've just given Lunah sixth sense. That'd be a great ability for a unique sniper character and makes msv1 a beast for shooting through smoke.

 

Provided the target was in cover I can't think of a single situation where using Marksmanship LX wasn't superior to firing normally if the option was open to you. It was trading 1B for +9BS and +3 DMG, that outweighs one dice.

Even without cover being a factor usually +6BS out values +1B.

 

Cover not being a factor is a pretty huge caveat and it did come up, particularly if you could get a bead on an impetuous troop. Two 16s are clearly better than one shot on 19.

I can think of a couple of other factors that might have come into play:

1) You have two targets you want to split burst on.
2) You need to inflict 3-4 wounds to drop a target and you're using your surprise attack. This could apply to a dog-soldier for instance, as you couldn't kill it in one shot and wouldn't see through smoke in N3 if it managed to beat you in a smoke grenade dice off. (Obviously, that example is impetuous as well...)

The LX version that ignored cover was definitely far better than the previous version.

 

It may be that I am a bit of newbie but with Lunah last week I had a difficult time shooting a linked Mobile Brigada with rocket launcher. I was at net -6 after range band and cover nullified themselves and he was just at -9 when i had surprise and then only -6 after that . Did I do it wrong? I would assume I would have been better of triangulated firing?