What does YJ NEED?

I mean, I don't see a reason why they should be disposable.

 

If you have to place multiple ghazi in the same area it forces an over concentration of forces. That allows the attacking player to start threatening multiple Ghazi at the same time, or to bypass them and go around.

Previously the big issue was 4 of them spread out could functionally wall off the entire table making them unreasonable to both circumvent as well as attack.

 

The design logic behind that profile told me that someone on the team wasn't interested in a balanced or fun game.

 

Have you visited the Baltics lately? My meta and the Baltic meta is overlapping atm and the Baltic meta is rough. Bears and spotlight everywhere

 

Despite playing for a couple years now I've yet to run into anyone who seriously hacked. Sure, a spotlight or two here and there with missles (thanks WB 5 man core of only HI, you keep surviving these attempts), but no one goes for my HI with hacking. I play in the PNW, been to multiple tourneys, and only have fought Nomads like twice and neither of them hacked. The dude I fight the most primarily plays Ariadna and in a similar play fashion he also does Haqq, so so far my infinity experience has been very light on hacking from my opponents.

 

I think the local meta will dictate the frequency and fierceness of the hacking environment, as long as the repeater network is timid or non existent and the enemy hackers are few the hacking will be limited, when there is an extended network coverage and enouph hackers the hacking will be fierce.

 

How many hackers they have and pass a tinbot defense?

 

Tinbots don't guarantee defense. They just slow them down. Without the ability to actually fight back or remove oneself from the hacking area, all the tinbot does is make the opposing hacker have to think about how badly they really need to have your chosen model isolated/immobilized. If it is worth their while to do so to that particular target, you should expect them to be able to do it.

The tinbot is still doing its job here, and making yourself too frustrating to deal with can often help to discourage attacks entirely, but with the lack of risk, the incentives for pushing against those odds on important targets can often be too high.

 

Sounds like you're playing N4.

If your opponents have figured out how to put hackers into fireteams or how to force non-movement skill declarations, even Stealth won't work. The Baltic meta is rife with this tactic and generally speaking from what I've been told all the non-Ariadnan factions (ironically enough) have had to embrace camouflage as the only realistic way to be competitive.

Outside of niche ranged support roles, I'd suggest you leave Shangers, Zuyong, Jujaks, Haidao, Hsien, Cranes, etc on the shelf when you want to make try hard lists. Focus on Hac Tao, Daofei, Bounty Hunters, Guilang, and the assorted expendable units.

 

Three plus hackers would do the trick some dice will inevitably pass through.

As of N3 was not far far worse and yet somehow N4 is the problem.

 

KHDs being able to effectively attack any Hacker even in ARO with good positioning, albeit with some risk if attacking a larger Repeater network or a particularly elite Hacker, made N3 far better in this regard in my opinion. If I recall, the need to have everything under Marker in N3 had more to do with the plentiful Warbands being able to efficiently out-trade practically anything else with the larger Order pools.

 

KHD made assault hackers (and to some extend all other hackers) almost obsolete so the side with the best killer hackers was the one who could utilize their assault hackers, sixth sense forcing the commitment of both orders before the hacker needed to choose what to do (in conjunction with reset been an option only when the model was attacked) made hacking undefendable, N3 hacking had serous issues, but we learned to deal with them.

 

Yep that's pretty much it. Said the meta was gonna turn into that at the start of N4. Factions that can't compete in the hacking sphere have to build into denial, which ironically undoes CB's attempts to make infowar interaction more common in N4.

 

Yes. N4 hacking is worse for HI.

Late N3 hacking you could often run HI uncontested because projecting your hacking area too much tended to get your assault hackers killed.
Our best player at the time ran vanilla Haqq and consistently locked the board down with three hackers and three muttas.

Early N3 hacking we can look at pure statistics;
+ hacking programs were weaker
+ tinbots stronger
+ spotlight pointless
- isolation harsher.

I know some metas felt HI was completely unviable back then, but my own meta was too young for us to have things figured out by that time, so the fact that our strongest player at the time ran MO pain trains and considered the game "solved" is anecdotal.

 

That's true, however Yu-jing has a few toys that will quickly make your opponent realize their mistake if they've not considered hacking a wise investment.

All it takes is a few game of su-jian abuse to make any faction turn wannabe-nomads

 

I've made the point before, the issue with AHDs was less the design or balance of Hacking and more the fact that the devices kept getting slapped onto meathead MI/HI units designed for direct shooting instead of Hacking, which values a completely different set of capabilities. It turned the device into a liability, which is still true if the unit in question wasn't a HI to begin with. I played extensively in mid to late N3, in both tournament and casual environments and with NCA, Yu Jing, MRRF and Bakunin, and I can tell you my AHDs won me a lot of games with all those factions except MRRF- because I took them on well-designed troopers, used appropriate Repeater coverage and reveal timing, and backed them up with an EVO for rerolls if the list needed it. Sixth Sense was a little problematic, but I still find that more fun than the current environment of getting debuffed into uselessness without any way to fight back if you don't play one of a handful of factions.