Completely agree here. The Santiago KHD has given me many a Hail Mary victory. Which I think is appropriate considering he’s mostly used in my Military Orders. The combat jump one has had incredible luck landing where he wants and causing chaos. Plus, it was fun converting one up with spare Akali/Crusader wings.
Exactly. And know that our competent (note the use of “competent”) hackers are still going to be above average shooters. Use them as specialists, go quantronic when the opportunity presents, and use the standard PMC strategy the rest of the time.
And I just showed you the very basic statistics. ALL PanO hackers are below statistical average of 13.46, there are none above statistical average. PanO has the worst collective hacking in the game. You can't argue with the math.
Its fine. Nomads and all other hacking factions only ever have 1 hacker. Just spend at least 40 points every game for MO to have a fighting chance at hacking a single target. Or spend almost as much as a tag to try to drop a killer hacker across the board.
That certainly applies with things like the Zulu Cobra! But that's more to do with her having a nice gun, surprise attack, FD and -3mim. I really rate it as a unit, it would still be a good backup shooter with BS12 or even 11, with that loadout. The Santiago and KoJ less so, as they have no modifiers and are lumped with combirifles, despite costing a lotttt of pts. As to the Santiago as a hacker-hunter, if you get turn 1 then it can certainly give it a go. But if you don't it will be a big juicy target for your opponent's top hackers to put in the dust before it can do anything; that's why I much prefer the Zulu or Hexa. So yeah, I don't think anyone would argue that an extra pip of BS isn't preferable to not having one. But I am suspicious of this idea that it somehow opens up some glorious tactical flexibility for them. Hacking is a high-risk side to the game that is asymmetrically dispersed across factions, and requires no LoS so it's hard to avoid that high-risk. It also rewards taking multiple hackers, something that soem factions are way better at than others. BS12 or even 13 isn't going to even these differences out, but it might - in one or two choice profles - give that hacker something else to do, in the absence of any primary targets (which are poorly defended enemy hackers, such as fusiliers, evo bots, etc). Your fusilier hacker's BS12 is going to mean nada in nearly every game it plays, for instance. None of this is to say that I haven't experimented with Pano hacking, i have and do. It's great fun to confound people's expectations! :D it's just preferable to have a second list where you can swerve the actual hacker factions should you draw them at an event, and that kind of tells you what you need to know in and of itself, in my opinion. CA, for example, will shut down Pano amateurs hard with minimal investment: heaven forbid they actually bring the Anathematic.
Yep. A lot of the theory crafting around the expensive hackers assumes that you go first and can have a go unmolested by anything else.
I guess what has been said several times already, don't try to outhack a hacking faction in their own game and try to use hacking in a way appropriate for the faction is something we all agree to. So I think because this goes in circles, I think its time to refocus on the actual question what hacking is to be expected from PanO, and then, how to achieve it?
Is there an award for least relevant statistical data ever used to evaluate something? WIP is probably the least important thing to look at when you want to evaluate how good something is at hacking. The difference between 1 WIP is only going to give you marginally more reliability, but doesn't fundamentally change how good of a game plan it is. You could remove 1-2 WIP from any of the best hackers in the game, and they'd still retain their title of best hackers.
Would you be able to elaborate on this? It doesn't make any sense to me because WIP is the attribute that you roll on to perform a hacking action, so it seems logically that the higher WIP your hacker has, the more likely you are to be successful. Once you start getting a difference of 2-3 WIP between participants in a hacking duel, which would come out to a 10-15% discrepancy, which I feel would start to really tilt the scale towards the higher WIP hacker on average, far more than a 5% difference between a WIP 14 vs. WIP 15 hacker. You wouldn't happen to have any calculations handy that you could show us, would you?
It’s purely a support role. You’re not going in looking or expecting to establish hacking dominance, but rather to have it on an “as-needed” bas. Hunt Hackers with bullets, and with KHDs as the situation presents itself. EVOs to protect your own troops, and using sometimes disregarded profiles (ORC TinBot) more frequently.
Raw WIP like raw BS is relatively unimportant once you start looking at mods, burst, and support. Lets take a PanO hacker. The Knight of Santiago because we've all been discussing it. It has WIP 13, but that doesn't make it able to fight another hacker. Instead what it brings is a 1-2 punch of Trinity for +3, and a Tinbot to give the opponent -3 for a net 6pt swing. Now, to make it a REALLY good hacker, much like a really good shooter, you have to have the ability to reach out and force that on your opponent. Alguacile hacker has that. It can sit behind a Tinbot -6 and nuke things through a repeater allowing it to punch far above it's weight in raw stats. It's why PanO isn't the best shooting faction in a lot of cases. Who cares if your have BS15 if the enemy is dropping that by 6, has full link bonuses, and is sitting on a base BS of 12. They are shooting at you with 12+3+3-3 for 15, you shoot back for BS15+3-3-6 for 9s. Good job high BS shooter. Really what you are looking for is a hacker with high BTS sitting behind a firewall doing whatever it wants, or a marker state hacker that can choose when to be vulnerable. It's why I like the MB Hacker so much. It brings a firewall, 2 wounds, and sits in a link. Burst is of course the great equalizer. But anyway, TL;DR: Stats are great, but all you care about are the numbers you will actually roll on, and modifiers count a hell of a lot more.
WIP is what you roll on, but Hacking as a whole relies a lot less on the roll than the other factors. How easy it is to setup your network. How much redundancy that network has. Which programs the trooper has. What other stat the trooper has the benefit it (ECM, Firewall, BTS). What other equipment the trooper that benefit it (Pitcher, Sync'ed, Wild Parrot, Deployable Repeater, Minelayer, etc.) The cost of the trooper for the package they bring. The actual roll is rarely the defining trait of what makes a good hacker, it might be 5% more likely to succeed at the actual roll, but the hacker that has the necessary support will be a lot more likely to even get a chance to roll. The hackers that are lower opportunity cost might get you twice as many chances since you can take more in your lists. Take CA for example, you can make a list with only Bit&Kiss + Dartok. Both are "below statistical average of 13.46", You could even say "My entire list is bellow the average ", but those 2 are still considered some of the best hackers in the game and having both would certainly make your list a terrifying hacking-focused list. And you know what? Even if they were WIP12, they would still be top tier. Their WIP is largely irrelevant to why they're good. If you could field a single WIP16 hacker that had no support, provided nothing special, didn't have any other applicable skill and wasn't cheap, it would see no play. The reason the top tiers hacker in the game are top tiers is not because of their WIP, it's because of their package. An Acontecimento Regular Hacker is a lot better than a default hacker that would have +1 WIP, but not bring anything relevant to your list. - - - - - Having more WIP is obviously better than having less WIP, but looking at WIP, and especially if you're "under the statistical average" to determine if a hacker is good, or if the faction's hacking is good is completely absurd.
So which of theses factors does PanO take advantage of, exactly? You are correct, hacking is much more than just WIP. However, PanO is generally disadvantaged in all of the associated fields (network redundancy, ease of setup, ECM, BTS, Pts); and entirely lacks any of the best tools (Pitchers, sync, upgraded programs). All of which compounds the issue of having no hacker above WIP13, and many with WIP12.
Does father-officer Gabriele de Fersen not count? He has WIP 14 > 13.46 Math is a great tool, I agree. But a lot of times, people ask the wrong questions and the results of maths are still to be put into context and have to interpreted correctly. For your interpretation of your maths results: Are you sure PanO has the worst collective hacking? Ariadna Vanilla has only three hackers, each with WIP 13 < 13.46 and do not own a single KHD. How do you weight missing KHDs in your result? Can you give the average hacker WIP for each faction? So we can get a complete picture? I am all for facts and I love math. But saying „you can‘t argue with the math“ is nonsense. Math is way more than calculating.
Sure, here are the average WIP among hacking units for each faction. PanO= 12.842 YJ= 13.444 Haqq= 14.091 Nomads= 13.458 CA= 13.682 Aleph= 14.000 O-12= 13.182 De Fersen does count, he was included in the calculations. I just forgot about him, since he is only available to Vanilla and MO. Ariadna does have worse hacking, of course; but being mostly immune to hacking themselves, I'm not sure how to take that into account for these purposes. I chose not to consider Tohaa for similar reasons. JSA also has notably poor hacking. The methods can be argued over, but I think these numbers do a decent job of demonstrating an underlying deficit.
Thank you for listing the averages. So Haqq is the best in „collective Hacking“, followed by Aleph. Some points behind in 3rd place is CA. Nomads are quiet average. you see this and think there is a deficit (yes, there is - but is it relevant?) I see it and my points of thought are: From PanO to Nomads, there is a difference in the average of ~0.6 From Nomads to Haqq, there is a difference of ~0.6 So if someone says, based on the average hacker WIP, that PanO has a deficit compared to the Nomads, then the Nomads have the same deficit compared to Haqq. But in this thread, PanO is compared mostly to Nomads and sometimes CA. Where is the Haqq supremacy? I think your idea of arguing over the numbers is a good way, but I think that the question you asked (what is the average WIP?) may not be a good one as it is lacking too much. As others have pointed out: It is a combination of things. The conclusion „my hackers are not the best (on whatever metric), so I do not include them in my list“ may deny you some options against other factions, where the difference is not as big. The question I would ask is: „With how many points/swc/slots/orders can I as faction A get a reliable, favorable matchup against faction X?“ Then iterate over all factions/sectorials for both A and X. Then you can make an analysis about „this faction has the least favorable matchups“, „that faction has to pay a lot if it wants to compete“ etc And there need to be a definition of „favorable matchup“. This should at least include several scenarios - at least more than „I attack the opponent through their repeater“ … and because this is so very complicated (see the sub-topic of table design, e.g.), answering this question is very, very hard. There is a lot of cherry-picking and over-simplyfication going on. While this is understandable, given the complex topic, this also leads to a lot of frustration and arguing. Are there informations about „how does the three most played Nomads lists look like (in ITS)“? (and same for other factions/sectorials). Then there could be at least an agreement about which lists our PanO hacker has to fight
PanO actually can field one of the game's densest Hacking networks due to the key role Repeater-carrying REMs play in the faction, letting you wall off enemy Hackables with your own Hacking presenceo. Problem is, it's a double-edged sword; you can't easily push these REMs into an enemy Hacking Area either, forcing you to put up some effort to win the Hacking game or at least make sure the objectives are in no man's land. This also exaggerates the real weakness of WIP 12 Hackables; you cannot Reset out of stacked Isolation and IMM-B without an Engineer's help no matter how many AROs you can take. An ORC that gets hit by a few Programs or an E\M hit is as good as dead. My personal expectation from my Hackers is simple: Defend my own units. Your much-harped-on minor BS improvement means that for the majority of my light infantry a Hacking Device acts primarily as a vulnerability that bypasses their own best defenses, so for any and all duties not related to Hacking I would gleefully take any other Specialist option available. Without efficient forward deployment and Pitcher options, offensive Hacking is mostly opportunistic because, again, just using the gun is usually better after you've spent all the Orders on movement. This leaves PanO's Hackers with three tasks only they can handle; Supportware, re-possessing TAGs and threatening over-extended Hacking Areas. Since PanO isn't given the tools to do the latter and generally synergises poorly with EVO devices, its Hacking works best to keep your TAGs under your control and wall out Hackables from your lines with cheap or Marker Hackers.
