Nah, people in real life don't act like I slapped their wife when I say that I think CB balanced something poorly.
So the Fusilier core exploits a number of factors within my local meta - 1. the Fusilier ML is not a high enough points/value investment to leverage Pitcher/Guided Use. While still being capable of punishing TAGs should they look to engage him. The moment he rolls in to the 13 -15 bracket the opposing HI/TAG user is panicking because most of them at 13 - 14 BS. While still being so cheap at 15 pts that if he goes down on the first exchange the cost is not a back breaking one. Anything put into him is effort not diverted onto everything else. 2. The Fusilier Hacker for a time was also not a cost effective use of orders to also run a Pitcher against. It's 15 pts. 4 -5 orders attempting to kill a fusilier and he's already paid his points back from diverting the opponent from either completely the mission or going after other stuff. While also providing an opportunity to re-possess my TAG in the event the opponent goes for that play. a Possessed Squalo is BS 12 Wip11. A Fugazi inside 8" of it with the Blade Op nearby mitigates the Bricking play and a Hacker diving over the top can either ruin an Opponents attempts to spend their orders with my TAG by recovering it for free prior to a COMD token being spent The Sierra is there purely to tarpit. Chuck a cheeky engineer roll and get him back up again. Force them to spend orders bypassing or engaging. Both of these elements provide a long range screen for my TAG to hide behind if I'm going second and fall back to to force an over investment of orders. Shona is kept in the bank as a mid field clearance piece especially as pieces move into the midfield she also acts as a DZ sweeper in support of the Auxbots. I throw the Auxbots in to tie up some CC piece where if they CC I flame if they dodge I'll just CC or even just body block and Shona comes in and cleans it all up as a containment piece. Better her than my TAG. I sent her into CC with Raoul with the support of an Auxbot to get that B2. As pieces are left in the midfield her order efficiency is increased and the battle line has broken up enough to allow penetration through using stealth and SuperJump then dodging around corners. Now my lists are typically Squalo Mk NCO + Blade Engineer: 95pts for 5 orders inside 2 units a gunman and a specialist and a recovery piece has been amazing. Vanilla PanO was experiencing this but now NCA can too. Especially with a BS13 Stealth SMG. Dump the duo if a pitcher has been dumped nearby. Open up with the Blade's tacawareness order clear the pitcher > Reform the duo if required or able to and continue on with your game plan. If the Blade gets targeted just clear it as he's moving back to proximity to the TAG. The pair then get moved together with the Squalo's NCO and Tacawareness and you haven't even touched your regular orders yet. Fusilier Core with a Blocker Hacker - investing in 6 pts to get the kit of the Blocker and a wp13 bts 3 hacker compared to the Wip12 and bts 0 of the fusilier hacker. 2 x fugazi and 2x Auxilia FO - That is the basic frame of my list now. Everything is mission dependent. Chuck in a cheeky Bolt haris what have you. But yes the Auxilia provide a close support screen typically that 0 - 16" range band. The Fugazi support the flanks. Shona clears out midfield targets that guns can't get. I've also been known to pop out the Crabbot to take a cheeky attempt at an objective before pulling back. Drop the Squalo inside 2" of the Objective jump the crabbot out move 2" move back 2" push button rembark on the next order. If i fail that's fine it was only 1 order if i succeed excellent I have an objective claimed. Now with the Blade paired up I swing the Blade into touch with the Objective will withdrawing behind the screen and get it to push a button with minimal loss of momentum
Interesting, I tend to take two Fusilier hackers for TAG security, I find that two basic hackers with a repeater around the TAG tends to have it back from been stollen within the first order spend, Squalo and Blade is a really nice Duo, I am planning to try the same with Bulleteers. The missile launchers range is a bit restrictive, though undoubtedly devastating, I am trying to get better at using it, I relied too much on MSR versatility.
I started with the MSR definitely - Leaning into N4 the MSRs range bands were ideal to respond to an evolving meta shift. I had prompting from individuals within my Meta - Take the ML. The Sniper doesn't scare me. I would take the Sniper he would repeatedly run a Marut to prove a point until I shifted to the ML. Since then the ML has in response - Killed Andromeda in ARO inside his and her flat range bands 3 dice on 9's v 2 dice on 9's, Knauf in ARO, a Zeta in ARO. Purely from getting up in that high range band of shooting and punishing that failure with 3 saves off the one hit. I would now just send the ML into I'll shoot everytime even against a Zerat inside 16" where I'm B2 on 6's. You just need one missile to connect and it removes issues. If he dies then cool. It's a matter of I lose 15 pts and 1.5 swc compared to you lose far more than that.
I used them as well, in mid-N3 before they were updated- my usual opponent ran Dart, so their kit actually earned its cost. These days, I've run them as solo pieces, Cores and in a Haris, and they've always done well- even had a CoC Bolt take down a Marut one-on-one, once. The big Core makes amazing bait for your Hidden Deployment units to work with, in particular. This matches a lot of my observations, usually people won't try and Pitcher a Fusilier thanks to their tiny cost. Probably the big difference I'm seeing is that local players in my meta almost never go for Possession- they'll dump a Repeater somewhere I can't conveniently shoot it, then Oblivion key gunners and Specialists in my own turn as I try to move. This makes my secondary Unhackable gunners into a key list consideration, as it flips the Order cost of Hacking on its head if the opponent is landing Hacks in my turn and forcing me to move up my Engineer to heal with a second (or more, thanks WIP12) Order. You can probably handle that with Shona, at least, but I tend to overspend in key areas due to my abysmal luck- I favour durable elites or at least a second unit to do the job, and never bring a lone Character for an important list role. I'd much rather have a decent Killer Hacker or two than a secondary gun team though. I've always hated playing Fireteams as active attack pieces and a big part of what initially attracted me to NCA in N3 was the excellent Hexa KHD, with the spare AVA to also bring the sniper, alongside a plethora of high-AVA REMs to network into a big blob of soft control to guard my DZ from infiltrators and act as a safe retreat point for my Guards HI and Bulleteer. The loss of that playstyle with N4 is a big factor in me pulling away from Infinity to the degree that I have.
As a mild aside, one of the things I miss from N2 is 1SWC Fusi ML… a twin ML Core was lots of fun to have on over watch.
Yes, Warbands and trash models are very useful. It's a shame that the only semblance of those in sectorials is a pittance of hackables. Anyway if the larger point is that you need to have camouflage on a key piece to be "good", I can see myself agreeing to that. I have no idea what those tools are. Hackable Auxbots that start at 14 points a slot? You pay the same points per model as most warbands to become hackable, have no smoke, no impetuous move, and no templates on half the "warbands". In exchange for having a flamerthrower instead of a chain rifle (which is nice). And having a regular order, which is good if you weren't planning on using the warband That isn't to say Auxilia are bad (they're not, escort sergents are), but they're filling one function of a warband in one sectorial. In Military Orders, you get Teutons, who are great. So great, in fact, that they arguably miss the expandability aspect of warbands - they're essential to the order economy of the army. The recurring trend is that you pay more for part of a warband functionality plus an extra. If the unit is used, that extra is good, but it's usually "shoots (well?) outside template range", which overlaps with the (alleged) core strength of the faction. That's vanilla HIs categorically. If an HI isn't loaded up with powerful MODS and/or useful skills/gear, but also isn't a stripped-down profile with impetuous, smgs/templates weapons, or similar price cheats, it's usually a bad unit for the price. Yes, Climbing+ the wall next to him and just hope you pass all the reset rolls required. Yes, the standard parapets on the CB papercard terrain are terrible design. CA doesn't deserve a pass here, Dartoks are a crime. Zero points for no doctor is also a option, and probably a better one than paying for an infirmer who requires very specific conditions and probably one or more command tokens to actually provide any value. Regular shooting AROs, sure, but that doesn't do anything to impeede hacking AROs, which are better than shooting AROs in general. Any number of lists can easily bring good pitchers that can easily size control of midifed on the first turn, with infiltrators and minelayers with repeaters, and other T0 coverage methods. That's where PanO starts to falter, generally. Shona in the repeater-clearing role is probably the best you’re likely to see, and she's still 27 points for the privilege, since NWI means she doesn't trade into the Libertos mine (and she can usually dodge it) or the first template to hit her, and she has Climbing Plus to deal with i.e. Morons prone on rooftops. But there's only the one of her and she has no built-in efficiency, so moving to clear the repeaters eats a lot of orders. At AVA 1 you can run into akward situations when your main guns are locked down by repeater coverage, so they can't clear an ARO without getting bricked, and so she has to just roll the die on a dodge and hope. Which is an issue because she's not a trash unit and you need to keep her alive to deal with the next repeater. All this sort of ties back to the second big-picture problem (outside of hacking) - you need to include a 27 point Shona or a 33 point Dart or whatever to deal with a 21 point Dartok or a 20 point Bit & Kiss. Nothing in PanO can ever be done efficiently, everything is a trade down. It's not unwinnable by any means, give how much player skill and d20 rolls can vary, but it's also extremely frustrating to go back to PanO after trying Vanilla Combined, which gets equal or better gunfighters while having much easiler list building and also being better at everything else. List building in PanO is an exercise in exclusion - what am I leaving myself weak aginst. Whereas vanilla combined list building is including everything and then deciding if you want a Better TR bot, or some more bubble rap, or a extra specialist, or maybe a mix.
Sometimes just being a doctor, and a non-hackeable one, and being there and move up the table along the main gun of the haris is just the value you need. To be exactly one order away for a quick patch up with re-roll is priceless. Or to push a button with a non-wip 12 specialist who is also not-hackable. The infermerier could be more efficiently costed by not having CC20, not having monofilament and not having 3 points of armor? Definetly. But in the end of the day he is your non-hackable, reliable, linkable, 'decent enough' shooting doctor for those pano sectorials such as SWF who doesn't have any other non-hackable doctor.
Sure, but the point I’m trying to make is that even if other factions have barebones HI (and not a lot have HI as barebones as the Orcs), they still are capable of fielding a somewhat correct hacking framework that allows to get rid of such hackers.
While I like some details, the monofilament CCW that is for medical reasons of all things (rapid cube extraction in battlefield/ hazardous conditions), I will agree Infirmarers would benefit from been costed similar to Curators. True.
Come on man, are you serious? again the fluff screwing Pano in an area where no other army is harmed even though that fluff may be applicable to everyone. Again another case where CB forces compliance with the fluff for Pano in something totally useless in which Pano is clearly undermined but which is not going to be enforced for any other army? This may justifiably be applicable for Cube Jaegers, but enforcing it for a Pano unit that has bloat in every stat except the ones that matter and not enforcing it for anyone else seems like another terrible CB design decision to me. Not to mention that the Cube Jaeger is a mercenary unit and that its profile is ancient and from a time when fluff-based design decisions were applied in a much less arbitrary way. Let's take the most competent doctors in the game, Haqq's. Why don't any of their doctors have a mono CC weapon if it's so effective at recovering cubes? Technically from a fluff perspective it makes perfect sense that they would have it.
Ariadna and Haqq still run short on Cubes, Tohaa still only link in 3s. Yu Jing are still the worst at just about everything, but can do it all. Frankly this is only a problem in Nomads (who have seen their scope creep by a lot in the last few years) and the AIs, who never actually had design limitations beyond fairly elite units, which led to the gap being narrowed in N4 by the ever-present Tactical Window. I actually even outright praise CB for their work on O12 most of the time, the profiles are optimised but they are not versatile or flexible at all. Use an O12 unit for the wrong job and it trades down across the board. The issue here is that in the case of PanO specifically (as well as YJ to a lesser extent), the "elite" factions match our strong point, but we don't have anything to make up for that deficiency- playing wide just doesn't work very well in Infinity without mobility tools to make up for the chance of losing a unit in a key position; look at the best-designed Haqq and Ariadna lists for how that playstyle functions when used properly. Otherwise you need overwhelming firepower in more places than the enemy expected, like a double-TAG list, which PanO tends to have trouble with as most of our TAGs cost a fortune. Can't recover their Cube if they don't have one. I think only RTF and some of QK's elites got them.
Which by the way I do not understand at all why the following Hassassin units DO have a cube: Hassassin Govads Hassassin Ragiks Hassassin Nadhir Hassassin Husam Yasbir When all the Hassassin lore theme is that they avoid use any kind of cube to reveal their secrets after their demise so the whole Hassassin sect plans, structure and schemes remain in the shadows. As the body and mind can keep a secret, but the cube is hackeable. Specially Husam Yasbir, who was a Fiday and is the only person privy to the Old Man’s true identity... this man should never ever be let out of Alamut with a cube Lore and thematically speaking only the Hassassin Shujae should be Hassassin with a cube. They're the 'external talent' recruit into the sect with the offer of cube resurrection. And therefore it is presumable that most of the sect secrets are not revealed to them.
I was thinking about Infirmarers back when I played PanO, and came to appreciate the ability to add a doc into every link I might field, even at 25 pts. It's just that having a unit that is deliberately designed as at best half-competent in any type of combat while paying for both halves of that competency is not a recipe for a unit that is fun to use.
I would argue that the fireteam compositions of when Infirmarers were introduced and now are two entirely different beasts, and while the current one is by far superior, there are units that were designed for the old system.
LI Ghulam Naffatun Khawarij Najjarun Tarik Mansuri Odalisque Hafza Husam Yasbir Leila Sharif Mukhtar Nahab Namurr Nadhir Rahman Rouhani Korsan MI Govad Zhayedan Djanbazan Ragik Saladin Sekban Hakim Yara Haddad HI Asawira Azra'il Al Fasid Hortlak Burkut SK Tuareg Al Hawwa Shujae I think the number of cubes is more than enough to assume that they do have cubes in general.
RTF generally has cubes, I think no cubes is more of an Assassins thing. However, RTF is probably the better representation of the Haqq regular army as opposed to a weird cult off on the side. However, not having cubes (but having the best doctors) strikes me as a sort of minimally-relevant way to have the fluff interact with crunch, as opposed to being arbitrarily locked out of a whole cateogry of units. I think that comes down to having better tools to deal with hacking than their vanilla HI being more desirable. Sometimes a specific pushed profile breaks through, but how often do you see someone take a basic Shang Ji because they're just so excited for a 36 point multi-rifle with two wounds? They'll take the TacAware Tinbot (-6) APHMG guy, but I've never seen anyone run a 5-man IA pain train. It's basically the same story with the generic HI that most factions have. If they've got good link options, you might see one SWC guy in a Harris with a cheap filler. The Mobile Brigada is sort of the best-case scenario, where you maybe want a multiwound SWC, and there's not a massively more compelling mimetic HI/Tag, and the Vostok sacrifices burst to get mimetism (-6), so it's not an automatic trump (but does have C+), so there's not an automatic better choice. Hospitallers are the Ur-Example of where this unit type just falls apart, since they can't link with Cossiers for a cheap Burst bonus, so you're left having to evalute the unit on its own merits. And given how sqeezed for points MO is, it's not a recipe for success, either. You can make a case for it because there's no cheaper unhackable specialist who's specifically a doctor for cheaper. But the price delta over the Curator/Machinist means you are cutting a mulebot of flashbot to pay for the bloat on the Infirmer. And given how stressed for points MO is, I don't really think anyone is actually making sacrifices for the niche case that often. Put another way, how often are you actually going to cut a Trinitarian or a Teuton to bring an Infirmirmer? Bingo. And I need to keep saying this, because people complain we talk about Nomads then don't engage on the actual problems with PanO, but both of thosr armies project power behind walls in the enemy DZ vastly better than PanO does at all. A Fiday starts right outside the enemy deployment zone, and has 16 inches of totally safe movement with its ablative impersonator state. Mirage-5 is very expenive, but it drops directly into the enemy deployment zone. Regular bears are cheap, fast, and climb. You can move them directly through hacking zones, and if you're planning on trading them or making use of smoke and CC attacks you may not even care that much about taking a Spotlight. Total Immunity and 5 armor certinly means you aren't that worried about guided missiles. So this compounds the fact that PanO depends on less expendable units that typically incur more risk than other armies, but you generally need to spend a larger number of orders from your generally smaller pool to get them there. This isn't unrelated to the problems with hacking, since behind walls in the enemy deployment zone is where most hackers live. And sure, people are going to call this bad table design, but I've never seen a board where hiding S2 prone models isn't relatively trivial. Moreover, a board where cheerleaders are exposed to midfield shooting is probably even worse, because it becomes much easier for an alpha strike to ruin the enemy order pool. If CB printed a PanO character with Parachutist (Deployment zone) - or more likely, gave PanO access to a Nomad character with that skill - he'd be an auto-include in every sectorial with the option if the profile was at all reasonably priced otherwise.
Nobody uses EVO this edition, just Combat Jump three Akalis. It's expensive, but you will clean out basically any of PanO's nastier matchups by hitting the squishy bits they normally hide behind their better midfield defenses. If I wasn't a devoted NCA specialist I'd be doing it myself, and the same trick with (more expensive) Tiger Soldiers is a cornerstone of my more rarely-used Yu Jing lists.
