So we are in agreement that Kusanagi, a Nomad model, is roughly the equivalent of one of PanO's better shooters, yes? Good, I'm glad we could both come to the conclusion that Nomads have shooters on par with PanO. I could but it would be difficult with the site I am using; it was never properly updated for N4 so I have to jury-rig some stuff. I can assure you that the mods being used were legitimate; I double-checked them several times. The site in question: http://inf-dice.ghostlords.com/n4/inf-dice.pl
Oh, sure, but what unit in Military Orders gets something like Mimitism -3, and MSV2, with maybe even an Infiltration profile... Also if you are in a knight shootout with Kusanagi, the correct thing to do is to send one of those knights over to chop her head off. This game is more than just the rooftop shootout scene from The Naked Gun 2 1/2.
So according to the dice calculator a nisse sniper shooting Kusanagi has 54.62% chases of wouding her and 26.65% killing her while only having 9.91% chance of getting one wound and 0.72% chance of dying, gets worse when it is an HMG at 72.52% of one wound and 48.17% killing her with only 5.63% getting unconscious and 0.65% dying. the Best Kusanagi does is 43.57 sending the Nisse unconscious and 14,39% killing it while receiving 16.88% one wound and 4.86% dying. I think my comment stands, we proved active turn advantage is valuable and she will have trouble facing one.
Chop her head off, burn her with a disposable flamer robot, template her to death, but the scenario was that a non character unit specifically a Nisse would be a better shooter than her giving her trouble.
Did all those shooting comparisons assume that a spitfire model is in their good range band versus an MSR model? This is not always easy to do, and if it goes sideways, you gambled and lost more (orders, position) than just shooting with a HMG from DZ. It is especially not easy to do if said model is tagging a 5 man link along, and... If you find yourself in a situation when a spitfire pointman in a fiveman shoots at your sniper from his good rangeband, and it didn't take a lot of orders to set up, then I think the correct description of the situation is "you got outplayed". And even if that happens the Nomad player has a rather fragile and a very expensive link exposed in a midfield, just to take out the sniper. Which may or may not be his tactical plan but it's entirely missing the opportunity cost of having an option to not do that. Opportunity cost is also a relevant thing when considering that Kusanagi is ava1 and a decent Lt option, so taking her with a plan to send her midfield into the biggest opponent aros has some... slight disadvantages. Infinity is a lot more than percentage outcomes in an FtF simulator.
It's pretty easy to do when you have access to HD+ and repeaters in the midfield...hell, if that Nisse isn't linked it's just dead.
I've already shown and discussed that math, but it bears repeating that the Nisse needs to deal 2 wounds to Kusanagi before she is removed as a threat/obstacle, while Kusanagi only needs to deal 1. Nomads also has far, far better doctors in the case that either take only a single wound, though Kusanagi does have a 30% chance to fail her Guts roll and remain standing to receive further damage while the Nisse can simply choose to go prone (or is force to via Unconscious). As for your comment standing, I'm going to choose to believe you meant this comment: Where you implied that Kusanagi vs. a Nisse is down to situations and volume of dice; or in other words, that they are roughly equivalent. They do, but that's because Active Player more often than not gets to decide Range; I'm also not going to leave Kusanagi out on ARO duty on firelanes that outrange her, especially ones with an MSV2 Sniper ready to pop her head. Oh definitely; in a real-world scenario Kusanagi wouldn't even be shooting at the Nisse. Either the Custodier in her Fireteam would drop a White Noise or a friendly Uberfall would drop an Eclipse Grenade and she'd just ignore it completely. And I certainly wouldn't be leaving the 41 Point Spitfire out on ARO duty; that'd be the HRL Cenobite's job, but neither of them would be holding that lane vs. an MSV2 Sniper.
In a real world scenario who knows what will happen? dice are dice and opponents, tables and lists are variables you cannot control. What I said is PanO is better at shooting, it is better at shooting, and even in marginal as favorable as it can be the "best example" performs roughly equal to a basic dedicated shooting unit. I play with units that have volumes of dice, high BS and mimetism -6 and I know that simple MSV destroy their entire advantage and then come on equal terms, worse if the MSV wearers have mimetism themselves.
But the active player does not decide the range for free, and if the main shooter is ava1 spitfire in 5 man link you have all the options in the world, to make him burn orders before he gets into the good range of your main aro. I never said anything about aro duty. Just the fact that you pushed your long-range-cleaner into a midfield is a liability. Unless you moved her back, in which case you burned a lot of orders to smoke a sniper. You just look at numbers to say she's good at a thing, but actually she would be rather bad (not optimal) at actually doing the thing.
While the Nomad player gets White Noise, warbands, repeater nets, Eclipse and normal smoke and a hundred more toys on top of that Szalamandra while the PanO player gets... I dunno... Auxilias? So excuse me if I think that amazing +1 BS is not balancing things. You don't seem to realize the point, which is Nomads are good at EVERYTHING while still being the best at Hacking, which is arguably their thing, while the peasant factions (no CA, Nomads or Haqq) many time are not even the best at "their things" while being mediocre at the rest
Listen, PS has outright said that even if CB made a blatant mistake he thinks it'd be wrong to bring it up. It's not really worth the time to argue with him on topics like that.
Fun Fact: Kusanagi isn't even the best shooter in Vanilla Nomads, it's the HMG Intruder. Which, at MSV2, BS13, Mim-3, happens to be the exact same statline as a Nisse, but it also tacks on Surprise Attack -3! And an MSV2, Mim-3 unit is far from a "basic dedicated shooting unit," especially when said unit in question sees almost 0 play. A more apt "basic dedicated shooting unit" for PanO would be the Karhu, who you quietly and conveniently dropped from your arguments entirely when I pointed out it loses to Kusanagi hard. I mentioned ARO duty because my first sentence mentioned that the active player decides Range; she's not going to be shot at by a Nisse Sniper outside 24" because you're never going to put her there. Also, Kusanagi is not a Long-Range-Cleaner. She's got a Spitire, an 8-24" weapon. HMGs and Sniper Rifles are Long Range units, Kusanagi is solidly midrange. Also also, she's in a faction with access to Smoke, White Noise, and Eclipse all on affordable and commonly-taken models. She doesn't take fights unless she wants to.
By having greater average BS on more if not all units, more profiles optimized for shooting and mitigating shooting disadvantages.
She can also just dodge on a 12 instead of shoot. She's got nwi so she can fail a save and still be okay. She compares very favorably over much of the faction still. So we can shift away from Kusanagi and look around at other sectorials. Vostok exists in all sectorials and exerts a lot of shooting pressure. It can also pick any fight it wants with near universal access to white noise. Intruder is as strong as a nisse in terms of raw shooting with a camo state to boot. Moira hmg is equivalent in a sense to bagh mari trading 3 points of mimetsim for msv1. Riotgirls may only be bs 13, but they all pack msv1 which pano has 1 msv HI in the Aquila who costs significantly more and has his own restrictions in place in terms of how he can link. Orphans pack msv2 and mimetism on a 26 point profile which makes them exceedingly efficient and competent shots. Kriza borak sits with mimetism and burst 5. All of these pieces are good at shooting. Many compete with what pano has to offer, does so at a bargain or have an edge. The biggest issue is when PanO gets outshot for less because efficiency is key. It doesn't matter if you cost 60 points for the best shooting in the game if someone can replicate your results for half the cost. The nisse isn't even that impressive anymore as his gimmick has become more widespread and his link sucks. Now nomads can field either a camo version or more or a budget shooter version. O-12 got it replicated as well.. When nomads get mission creep, it gets harder for me to operate my pano against them. I dont have a dozen other tools to fall back on because of strick design limits. My newest tools boiled down to shoot harder and climb+. The salzy has significantly improved support over a dragoes. Sure you can reroll on wip 12 by spending precious command tokens or just have a better baseline engineer of wip 15. The command token argument is very flawed as that disregards their broader usefulness than just trying to salvage a bad wip specialist to do his job. Gizmokits are not the end all be all of engineering. Theyre to try to salvage a desperate situation you don't want to be in in the first place. Hacking defense is a large part of tag survivability as its one of the best vectors to attack most tags. 14 to 15 bs is not so great an obstacle to overcome in light of all of this and is fairly marginal. We're talking about 1 die facing on an already good skill rating.
Who cares if the cheerleader has a better gun? Its not engaging unless things have gone bad or if its trying to hold off an attack. You know whats better than a bs12 fusilier? 7 point flashbot.
I was about to mention the Intruder, funny that they have the same performance as active shooters, who would have thought (with slight advantage if Intruder is in camo stage), I do not know why you brought up Karhu or link teams you said vanilla I set a scenario giving a unit that sees play and is in vanilla list and is roughly the same point cost, there are many scenarios, kamau is half her cost, though only the sniper version has MSV, is she a good shooter? she is, is she the best Nomads have to offer? no, does her existence make the entire PanO faction to be on equal levels with the Nomads? no. She is a good shooter in a faction with a versatile toolkit, PanO is full of good shooters geared up to shoot good or cheap, and that is what makes PanO the best shooting faction.
