And you're flat out wrong. Threatening HI / TAG / REM, layering repeater over midfield so that people have to take different route to avoid even spotlights is all very simple and powerful benefits for the extremely low opportunity cost. In my experience, it's nearly always going to give you more than what you invested for it. If having a hacking presence was not valuable, this entire thread wouldn't exist, the other factions would not be using it. I haven't mentioned anything that you just mentioned.
It seems like the conversation is really trying to divert to "Nomads are the best hacking faction" rather than "Why don't my pan-O opponents use hacking?" at every possible opportunities. Nomads are the best faction at hacking by design. Of course they're better than PanO at it, but I don't get why people think PanO are especially bad at hacking when they actually have some pretty standout tools to benefit hacking (Peacemaker being the best example).
True, but only the TTS community claims the meta has been (at least somewhat) solved, while physical tournaments continue to produce unexpected results.
That is my understanding PanO remotes passively advance a repeater network simply by doing what they are designed to do move forward and shoot the opposition, and PanO hackers are not bad, other factions do not have the flexibility of PanO remotes to advance their repeater network.
If anyone thinks theyve "solved" a game with billions of possible permutations Id pay to see their credentials.
In a game that has so many rock-paper-scissor element to it, a solve meta is kinda silly. If your meta is stale with an archetype dominating, you can build more counter to it in your list. There is also more than enough skew rogue lists that can really throw off an established meta.
I suspect it has more to do with the faction's vulnerabilities than its strengths. Disclaimer that I'm primarily speaking from my own experience plus what I can glean from other forum users' posts, of course. PanO is a high-tech faction leaning heavily on REMs, HI and TAGs to complement its lighter forces (which hate piece trading; they're all a good few points more than their peers in other factions thanks to the price of their BS Attack tools), but lacks serious ability to defend them when Hacking gets involved. Their optimisation into shooting and deliberate weakness to Hacking (low WIP, variable BTS, weaker Tinbots) pronounces these vulnerabilities even further, as any Comms Attack bypasses the defenses that make them so expensive in the first place. This forces any player using most PanO units to be extra careful around Repeaters, a fair tradeoff for enhanced BS Attack performance in theory. The reason top-end Hacking in particular is a pain for PanO forces is that it can't really be dealt with by shooting, can easily get around cover, and can impair you when you're spending your own Orders without any chance of hitting back in many cases, leading to a slow and frustrating play experience where it feels like your positioning doesn't matter and half your army is useless. PanO also lacks fast alpha-strike options like Impersonators or top-quality AD (the Echo Bravo is the best we have there) or mobile midfielders (SWF has decent ones, rest of PanO doesn't) to turn the tables and prey on the Nomad backfield weakness, disrupting their synergies and breaking down the chain of command like many other armies can do. This particular combination means that a PanO player is forced onto the back foot in this matchup, playing a very slow and methodical objective-based game with an army that doesn't play that style particularly well. It's worth mentioning that this problem isn't unique to PanO; I've seen complaints from Yu Jing and to a lesser extent Ariadna players about how oppressive Hacking of this style can be. Yu Jing is hit hard because many of its most enjoyable units are Hackable HI and they don't have access to top-tier Hacking or alpha-strike pieces (though they're decent at both, Yu Jing is nothing if not adaptable), Ariadna less so because they already excel at piece trading and objective play, but do get locked out of other list archetypes as a result of the Spotlight/GML threat (and this happens even against the likes of PanO thanks to Peacemakers). However, I don't see many complaints from other factions' players and Nomads aren't a top competitive force, leading me to hypothesise that the current issue mostly relates to the interplay of a force designed to rely on Hackables and a faction designed to be able to easily dominate Hacking, without the Hackable side having satisfying means to play around this shortcoming.
What about constant indirect attacks and insults? Mao is showing more disregard for people in this conversation, he's just less honest about how he presents it. Every time someone says "this thing is not designed correctly" he's here calling people who say those things stupid and immature, and you don't do a thing about it, because he agrees with you.
I think seeing the tables would be more telling. But I'm guessing we're not going to see them, as I predicted earlier.
That's a lot of words to say you're disregarding the TTS community. Also, the use of TTS to figure out your opponent's list issue is older than people on TTS; there were a lot of people who said it was wrong to look at the army app during play, basically, but the community has generally rejected them (except for a few TOs in the US Southwest). The same things that work on TTS work in play; people run the same degenerate hacking setups irl with basically the same effectiveness. If you play the "local meta" card then there can never be any assessments about balance made about the game, ever. That must be wrong, so you're left with a need to actually justify your position. That's not what I was saying. Are there rooftops with lips to where you can put a Moran prone on a rooftop and it's safe? Sometimes? Never? Let's see some pictures. If the design team gave certain units abilities which are game-breaking under some terrain conditions, they should outline what those terrain conditions are so that players can avoid building tables that way. The fact that they failed to do so is a failure even if they know what those terrain conditions *are*, and I doubt that. Go back and read the thread. Because they have lots of unhackable pieces that can advance into the midfield and do the mission, oftentimes under the cover of smoke grenades or camouflage. A dog-warrior type unit can go get a Moran because it can use smoke to get to it, super jump up to it and blast it. A TAG basically can not, due to not having any way to get within 8" without getting hacked. A few people assumed that, and their assumptions would be wrong. There are also people who didn't assume it but are insisting it's true because they can insult people and generally be a shitbag as long as they're agreeing with you in defending CB.
Nah. Did you see Lobo's performance at Battle by the Beach? Scored 48/50 possible victory points with that "solved" Nomad list. He was the only one playing it, as far as I know. The only thing keeping lists like that in check is that people find them unsporting to play (not shitting on Lobo, he came to win and that was intended by the TO).
And that's why everyone, if they can, doesn't do the mission with HI/TAG/REMs. PanO oftentimes doesn't have that option. It's valuable if you can project it forward and beat enemy hackers. If you can't, it's a waste of points.
And it's not applicable to shooting because shooting doesn't work the same way as hacking (it's leagues more interactive) and the gap between shooting factions is much smaller than the gap between their hacking capabilities. The analogy fails. One of the big reasons is that hacking doesn't have rangebands; you can't outmaneuever an enemy hacker with clever positioning the same way you can, say, get close to a sniper and blast them. I shouldn't have to say this; if anyone's played Infinity and knows how hacking and shooting work this should be obvious. But I guess I have to act like you meant that question seriously instead of in bad faith...
I have never been worried by a Peacemaker getting close to anything hackable of mine. Why? Because half that shit has repeaters, so I just hack it when it gets close. If it stops just outside? I shoot it from beyond 8", or shoot a repeater at it and isolate it.
Sure, and that element of design had both bad intentions and bad methods. Which is a pity, because there are loads better ways to express the kind of tech-savviness of the Nomads without doing that.
If nobody is using HI/TAG/REM, then it doesn't matter than PanO hacking is not good (even if it is good). If people are using HI/TAG/REM, then having a hacking network is valuable, because to effectively use their units they need to first deal with your hacking area. And while they're dealing with that part of your list, they're not dealing with the pieces that make up your main gameplan. Hacking for PanO is less than 10% of your list as an investment and serves at worst as ablative protection / waste of orders to protect the rest, and at best a good area denial tool. If you're shooting the Peacemaker out of 8", they're not positioning properly. Or you used a lot of orders to outmaneuver it, which is great. If you're shooting a repeater and isolating it, then it's just good for the PanO player, that's such a poor play and a waste of orders for such little impact. If you're not getting close, it means the Peacemaker is also not positioned properly or it did its job at denying you from the area it's in. If the Peacemaker did bad here, the issue here is not the Peacemaker or the PanO hacking, it's the PanO player playing poorly.
I think a much more intersting discussion is not about "Is PanO hacking good?" (and especially not "Why is Nomads better at hacking than PanO"), but rather "How can we benefit from hacking as PanO?" Many players have had their games improved by adding hacking to their list, my main PanO opponent has significantly improved his game with the addition of hacking to his list, I've had great success with hacking in my PanO lists and many other also. Adding hacking to PanO can give beneficial result. I've even laid out how even in the worst matchups, it's not a big deal. And Nomads, while popular, aren't a big enough part of the meta that taking out hacking should be a thing imo. And it would be interesting to see what other players do to actually get benefit out of it. PanO has a lot of faction-unique tools for hacking. Idk how whining about balance (and especially Nomad lol) is in any way productive to any conversation. It should probably just go in a suggestion channel and stop poluting nearly every threads on the forum where people are trying to have constructive discussions. Whining doesn't provide anything, it's out of our control and it just derails threads that would otherwise be interesting. The balance is as is it, finding how to make the most of it is what makes strategic games interesting. And thinking that a miniature game that takes like 2-3 hours to play where the active player play like once or twice a week is going to be solved is completely dellusional. Online games where people play millions of games a day get solved way faster, and people still come up with rogue off-meta strategies that shake up metas in many of them. So thinking you can't shake up the meta in a niche miniature game is so close minded.
On one hand I cannot disagree with Hecaton, because the Winning lists on the Cyber Baltica also is a so called "solved" Nomad list (meaning: contains Jazz, more hackers, morans, GML, Heckler /w Fast Panda and so on) BUT I expect someone scoring 48/50 VP like Lobo did to be a very high skilled player with a good eye for the game. By the winner of the Cyber Baltica, Weran, I know from experience, to be an outstanding player. Boiling it down to "he won, because he played this list" seems a little bit far fetched and also belittles the named players abilities. The combination of units in the list may have benefit his success, but it is more a single cog in the gear. I don´t expect Hecaton to mean it that way, but I felt the need to verbalise that. In addition to that: the second place at the Cyber Baltic was a Yu jing Player without any of the above mentioned tricks in his lists. (The third place, to be fair, played GML and hacking again. It would be hypocritical not to mention) Also I feel the need to point out that on a Tournament with 34 Players just 2 of them had access to the scary monster which is Jazz, so the situation is not as dire as it seem to be pictured in this thread =)
