Even more reason to go for broke if you plan to Alpha Strike, or stay using Eclipse smoke to move your specialist and score... Eudoros is such a beast, with this, but so are the Makaul, Kriigel & Taqeul in a Triad with a specialist... CA is capped to the Rasyat (Morat), Nomads to the Chimera (Bakunin), O12 to Hyppolita (vanilla only!), and I think YJ, PanO, Haqq & Ariadna have no White Noise source, making them unable to bet on this if faced with vanilla Aleph or SP, because Agema... And forcing the opponent to go first may mean provoking said Alpha... in the end, besides dice and al the usual, being able to deploy effectively will become a premium skill in the players, and table setting will become more complicated :S
Not nay-saying reinforcements as a whole, I was very much looking forward to it but I'm just very unhappy with implementation of the Commlink skill, particularly in NA2.
Yeah it basically adds nothing to the mechanic. You have to have one, but it's on a profile you wouldn't take. It's arbitrarily more expensive to take, but works perfectly well even when dead, so there's no play/counterplay to the skill.
It is an (optionally) automatic extra order to the reinforcements group if one can keep them alive till they come.
It's not 'optional'. You HAVE to take a commlink trooper to have reinforcements, despite the fact reinforcements is already a game mode of its own. Commlink troopers are a 20 point tax to play a mode that, admitedly, sounds quite fun to play. It feels a bit... Uninspired, that every commlink trooper is a baseline model costing around 20 points and 0.5 SWC. This locks listbuilding quite a lot. Same thing with reinforcements always being 100 points no matter the size of the game. Also feels bizarrely restrictive. There is a lot to like about Reinforcements, but these two points, in my opinion, keep it from being something I'd enjoy playing often. Every once in a while? Sure. But I feel like this is a novelty that will be forgotten thanks to how clunky it feels.
Another issue I have with Commlink is that its cost isn't variable. I believe there should be a pricing difference between standard, +1, and +2 versions Anyway - basically we get additional 40 pts/0.5 SWC to play with, but have to split them between groups in potentially unefficient way. This can go either way, fun factor-wise, might be cool, might not be, devil's in the details. I'll reserve my judgement on that until I'll actually play a few times with this mode. I'm in a bit of a hiatus in N4, might be a good moment to get back into the fray.
From my pov as a Haqq player (Vanilla, HB and former QK), I am still not sure that the Haqq REF profiles add anything worth taking into my lists while having to give up f.e. 50pts plus additional 21pts for a Comlink Ghulam.
Which makes it worse, since you're removing an order from a group that's been cut down by at least 40% of points values.
I saw list where the commlink is by himself in 2nd group (after all, assuming a standards commlink+1 you play with 16 trooper list) allows to have a full group where the exile of a commlink is not making thing worse. Also such lone commlink can mask a 2nd group AD/HD that will switch to main group on t2.
I agree. It’s really weird to put a symmetrical tax on this unit. Both sides have to use it, both sides get to move it into the new group if they want and they’re alive. As another poster said, it’s just making the standard game 240/100 instead of the 250/100 it claims to be. Did cb see something in play testing that made 250 more unbalanced than 240 and this was the solution?
If you could play optional reinforcements (X vs X-50 + 100), the commlink tax seems like a way of balancing reinforcement vs non-reinforcement lists. If reinforcement is more powerful, increase the tax, if less powerful, reduce the tax. I'd like to play some games and try it out, this whole thing is a public beta, after all.
It definitely feels like a wasted opportunity when there are troopers that could actually be pretty interesting with Commlink. Sun Tze 2.0 (unfortunately, 1.0 is just too bad to be relevant) with commlink would actually be really cool, for example. There are ways to take the concept and make it interesting.
I sincerely think that this whole Commlink mode was originally designed not as a game mode, but as part of the normal main game of Infinity. Where a player could play a list with Commlink and another player a list without Commlink, and that would explain the Commlink extra tax cost in points and SWC. I have the my personal impression that Commlink originally just allowed you to have a variable % of your list points as extra and part of the reinforcement group. That would explain why some reinforcements have options that are impossible to be built on a limit of 100 points. Like the double Haris of Haquislam reinforcement, or the double Bronze AVA, or the YJ impossible to be built on 100 points limit core. If you could decide how much points to allocate in Reinforcements, or that it growed the bigger your list were, it would explain those unable to be built options. But then CB either got wary that there would be a backlash on players feeling “forced” to play with Commlink to stay competitive, and therefore “forced” to purchase the new reinforcement boxes. Or realised that in their current iteration of Commlink rules were not balanced enough to be released as part of the main game. Either way they already had investment time and resources into Commlink rules and reinforcement models, and decided to give it a go as an alternate separate optional game mode with a trimmed down “bare bones” version. And if it was well received by players, they may iterate on it and maybe one day be fully integrated with the main game. The problem here is that being so much of bare bones, and so trimmed down, they’re risking players have a mild to bad reaction to it. And be not interested on this game mode after giving some tries. And that would be like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Like when a movie has a bare minimum marketing campaign, and a great product has a bad box office income. As opposed by ‘meh’ movies with an over-extensive marketing campaign, and end being a hit at the box office. In this case the “marketing campaign” is the actual rules and profiles balances in reinforcements. And the “product” are the incredible and beautiful sculpted miniatures in those reinforcement boxes.
