Telling emotionally and financially invested people to "calm down" when they are airing grievances about the subject of their investment. Always works out well.
Both of those are great to hear, thank you, HellLois. The more transparency from the team we get like this, the better we will understand the intentions and the better informed will the community feel about the direction the game is going to take further down the road. I appreciate it.
IMO, metas have shifted to these kinds of troop types for the simple reason they can take chain rifles to the face.
BS Attack + Move denying Direct Templates is a problem for four reasons that I can see: Counterintuitive - It's not clear to many people how the BS Attack + Move order works and why it's a problem. It's not clear to many what the consequences are. It feels strange, and I've had it result in "feels bad" situations in games I've played. Using moves that the opponent doesn't understand and aren't immediately clear in the rules puts people off playing! Clearly not a good thing. It robs players of agency - Simply put it takes options away from the reactive player. This game is built around AROs being consequential. Making them inconsequential doesn't seem to be in the spirit of the game. Further incentivises the active turn - Active turn is very powerful (who knew!). At the moment AROs are rough because there are lots of big heavy infantry around and TAGs. AROs are suffering a bit (in my view). Another issue which erodes AROs (being able to avoid templates) further adds to this. Exceptional - Most things are checked at resolution, not declaration. So why aren't templates checked at resolution too? It's weird that a template can't be declared because it's not immediately valid. Some potential solutions: You have to move then attack, you cannot attack then move. This works because it stops the ARO bait happening in the first place. Templates don't have to hit their target at declaration, they're checked at resolution. This works because it allows the ARO player to declare the template, which becomes legal if the opponent walks into it later. Bonus points because it brings templates in line with how other things work [check at resolution]. You can't declare a BS Attack from a point you haven't moved to yet. The BS Attack + Move bait depends on you declaring a shot from a position you haven't occupied yet, because you haven't moved yet. If you can only declare shots from a position you've already stood in then this can't happen.
Main one. Infinity is hundred of pages of rules as is. Some of them being this level of unintuitive, exceptional and abstract is bad for explaining the game. "You can declare to shoot a target behind a wall, in case you will get to see him" was weird enough. But weirdness with a weird unituitive exception? I don't like this direction of continuous ugly fixes. The good thing is, that in a casual playgroup (like mine) you can pretty much ignore all this.
Well yeah, no kidding. Like I said there's an over abundance of DTWs because CB keeps sticking them randomly on too many profiles. Too many scissors running around means people find paper bad and start picking up rocks. I played this on the weekend GROUP 1 5 3 6 KUANG SHI Chain Rifle / Pistol, CC Weapon. (0 | 5) KUANG SHI Chain Rifle / Pistol, CC Weapon. (0 | 5) KUANG SHI Chain Rifle / Pistol, CC Weapon. (0 | 5) CELESTIAL GUARD Monitor Combi Rifle, Smoke Grenade Launcher / CC Weapon, Pistol. (0.5 | 13) MECH-ENGINEER Combi Rifle, D-Charges / Pistol, CC Weapon. (0 | 15) SHAOLIN Chain Rifle, Smoke Grenades / Pistol, Shock CC Weapon. (0 | 5) SHAOLIN Chain Rifle, Smoke Grenades / Pistol, Shock CC Weapon. (0 | 5) SHAOLIN Chain Rifle, Smoke Grenades / Pistol, Shock CC Weapon. (0 | 5) GROUP 2 7 2 SHÀNG JÍ (Tactical Awareness) AP Heavy Machine Gun, Chain-colt ( | TinBot: Firewall [-6]) / Pistol, Shock CC Weapon. (1.5 | 49) SHÀNG JÍ (Tactical Awareness) AP Heavy Machine Gun, Chain-colt ( | TinBot: Firewall [-6]) / Pistol, Shock CC Weapon. (1.5 | 49) DĀOYĪNG (Lieutenant [+1 Order], Hacker, Hacking Device) Boarding Shotgun ( ) / Breaker Pistol, CC Weapon. (0 | 30) SON-BAE Yaókòng Missile Launcher / PARA CC Weapon(-3). (1.5 | 16) GŬILÁNG (Hacker, Hacking Device) Combi Rifle, Shock Mines ( ) / Pistol, CC Weapon. (0.5 | 30) GŬILÁNG (Minelayer) Boarding Shotgun, Shock Mines ( | Deployable Repeater) / Pistol, CC Weapon. (0.5 | 27) KOKRAM (Forward Deployment [+8"], Minelayer) Heavy Shotgun, E/Mitter, E/M Mines ( | Deployable Repeater) / Heavy Pistol(+1B), CC Weapon. (0 | 41) 6 SWC | 300 Points Open in Infinity Army 11 models have DTWs and only half of them are warbands. Why am I spamming a disposable warband screen? Because I'm a Vanilla player, I can't offer a meaningful hard ARO defense that won't just get dickrolled by a 12 order Cutter. My best option is to tuck in and try defend myself with no long hard ARO. The entire ecosystem is fucked and needs addressing. Half measures like this bad hackjob of a patch are just going to make the game less intuitive and not actually fix shit.
There is a problem inherent with meeting requirements at resolution that is constantly making new problems. Even this fix of putting down templates that aren't touching the target and checking them later makes them weak in this situation: The purple trooper declares BS Attack on the target behind the wall. Where do you put your Chain Rifle? The purple trooper goes the other direction. If on the other hand you fire a non-template weapon you face-to-face as normal. This does not seem like it's intended. If you checked all requirements at declaration instead of resolution, there are just a couple of edge cases where problems are created and it's much more intuitive to play. Those edge cases could have their own fix without this fundamental ruling creating even more problems.
As a small aside, the active trooper has to specify where they shoot from when they declare the skill. So if Beige places a template touching where Purple said they'd shoot from, then Purple moves the other way around the situation is no different than Purple declaring Idle and then Move to bait out a response. In fact, they will have foiled themself simply by denying themself the ability to Dodge+Move which in that situation would be superior.
How? If the target is in total cover and cannot be seen how can you declare a bs attack against it? I suppose you could speculatively fire and lob a grenade but otherwise you cannot declare a bs attack as it states on page 46 and has been included in the FAQ that “if the target is in total cover, the attacker may not perform a bs attack with weapons, special skills, or equipment, that requires LoF.” You’d have to move then shoot.
This isn't even about being 1W, it's about being able to trade damage. Any rambo that reaches your DZ and that would otherwise have very great FtF odds are kept in check by DTW being able to eventually stem the bleeding. (Impersonatora being a very good example of that). Once the opponent reaches an area where they can get a shot per order, if all they can do is a FtF, the active turn is incredibly far ahead. It merely becomes a numbers game, and ARO isn't the place to win FtF. If you have a bunch of DTW, you can mitigate those runs, but without them, it would be a nightmare.
You can with the last FAQ. They removed the "declaration" point in the total cover rule (so you check the requirements at the resolution)
I'm fine with this tbh and it's probably only a corner case. I never liked the idea of 1 model starting straight at a wall and covering 2 corners.
Edit: found where the statement was removed. I’m not sure it removes the inability to shoot though. Purple is still unable to see the target so isn’t the skill unusable? On page 8 of the FAQ where it defines the order expenditure purple would effectively be declaring an idle as if they declare shoot then move, at the resolution stage where you check the declared skills meet their requirements the first skill (shoot) would be null so purple would just end up moving while your opponent would likely aro dodge or idle themselves. Or it’d just go as @Mahtamori said above.
So going by the "intention" we've been given above, doesn't this still open up abuse for sync peripherals? Ie if an escort sergeant and his auxbot declare bs attack behind a wall against a target that doesn't have a DTW, the reactive trooper may only choose 1 target for ARO, so now I can just move whoever isn't targeted for a free normal roll. And if the reactive trooper declares dodge then I'm still getting the burst 3 combi on (likely) 15's to oppose it. Feels like while this closes the cc bait its opening some other problems, but only against troopers without templates who historically are more vulnerable in ARO's anyway. Further examples include a Chimera declaring bs attack against a non-DTW enemy and then 2nd short just moving all 3 pupniks into cc with the target if the the Chimera is targeted by ARO.
@HellLois Easy fix though... "Short movement skills can only be declared as the first skill of an order, or the second skill of an order if the first one was also a short movement skill" Make it strict like this for declaration : Outside of crazy rules exploits and abuses and being very unintuitive, being able to declare BS Attack before Short has barely any in-game use. This resolves nearly all of the rules headaches of the past year and a half. This makes it so there is no more baiting, no more pre-emptive shot, no more denying agency, no more unintuitive declaration, no more declaring stuff that doesn't already meet requirements. And it makes teaching the game to other people not feel like a chore. "Yeah, you want to declare your shot from a spot you're not currently in, rather than moving there first, because this denies your opponent doing some other stuff. It's unintuitive, but that's the best way to go about it!" Imo, pre-emptive skill declaration don't bring anything interesting in the game. They're more complicated, but don't actually add complexity to the strategic decision. They simply let you edge against players who don't have a good grasp of the rules.
Potentially this could be an edge case. It doesn't work for a Puppet Bots because you have to choose the spearhead. Also for Uberfall Kommando, the Chimaera is more likely to declare an idle as first short skill to force a reactive trooper to dodge in response and then more round the corner with the second short skill, thereby denying a template ARO anyway.
This has always been the cleanest solution; make the only Short Skills you can pick for the first one be Idle, Move, and Discover. Or Jump/Climb with Super-Jump/Climbing+. This stops newbies from doing stuff like declaring shoot then walking out of cover and gets rid of a whole *suite* of headache-inducing rules interactions.
