I mostly play Orders, and the Crusader Breathern is so bloated I have no idea where I'd fit two of them; they're basically a direct downgrade to Tiger Soldiers (Same weapons, no mimetism, worse PH for combat jump). Combat Jump, especially on expensive PH 11 models, is in no way a suitable replacement. If these were 7 point irregulars in firmly down in the "Who cares" value band, it would be different. But spending an extra order on EVO support and 40+ points to roll a 70% chance to see if you can try to attack the enemy DZ perfectly encapsulates what's wrong with PanO; you're expected to pay more points for the same tools, or the same points for worse tools, except in a very narrow niche of artillery TAGs, where you can be as good as the AIs. Of course, Nomads get Combat Jump (+3) on their (cheaper) BSG Parachutist... remind me why were expected to believe there wasn't blatant desgin favoritism, again?
I think that Hellcats having a far better training at combat jump given they are a specialized unit from a nation that specializes in Zero G maneuvering skills is more than fair. I would argue that it is not the PH of the crusader that is, or could be, an issue but the question of what they are supposed to do, having EVO to ensure they land is not bad, but what you do after landing is the main issue.
You say that, tournament statistics, to my surprise, say otherwise... outside of Acontecimento and MO EVO Mulebots are 50% or more of the Mulebots selected..
If unit A is better at something than unit B just because the fluff says so isn't necessarily fair. In fact it has been proven time and time again that the opposite is generally the case. The fluff attributes of each faction are capricious, arbitrary, and anything but fair. They are there to provide personality and character to each faction in a way that does not necessarily translate into fair attributes at the game level.
Only that even with an EVO bot you can't ensure he lands, since he still only goes to PH14. That's far from a guarantee.
Yeah, sure, specialised in Zero G, alongside Medium Infantry, Hacking, REMs, advanced equipment, close combat, and genetic modification. Leave some for the rest of us, and definitely don't pretend +1BS with a corresponding WIP drop is equal to +3 or better on all of the above. (Except MI, who were forgotten halfway through N3!) You skip the EVO, and drop one at a time in order to clear a board edge to Parachute the rest more reliably. And you definitely don't use Crusader Brethren, they're way too pricy, Akalis are definitely preferred. It's certainly not as clean as just using an Impersonator or Superior Infiltrator, but I've found a Fusilier exactly where you need it is worth more than a TAG stuck in your DZ- especially if the enemy opted to null deploy with all their templates forward to stop an expected push from your DZ. Generally, I treat the playstyle as "Burst is King" for positioning. Mass Combat Jump can be ridiculously strong for the unopposed shots or soft targets you can attack, or you can whiff every Combat Jump- but if you rolled that badly trying to break out of your DZ with a heavy gunner, they'd be dead and your position would be just as bad anyway. That said, I can agree with it being more costly and complex than competitors' options. Especially given you have to take an expensive and vulnerable Hacker for objective play, even though with covering fire from another AD unit you can actually get a surprising amount combat of use out of that device it would be nice to have another option.
55% success rate is fine in my opinion, over infiltration has worse success rates and I so not see many people complaining for how unfair units with infiltration +X are. I need to point out that hellcats inhabit a sectorial were the only infiltrators are bandits and Morans, and fulfil a role similar to a proper infiltrating unit. This is why cross faction and cross sectorial comparison are always flawed, you always need to have a wider picture and understanding of what is been compared. And why it is always preferable to think in faction and in sectorial for solutions and problems and not what others have.
Cross-faction/sectorial comparisons aren't always flawed, they're simply a tool with pros and cons. Taking it out of context skews the data, but ignoring it makes people miss issues as well. TLB release rightfully raises a few question marks. Regarding jumps, people are almost always trying to reduce or completely remove the risk factor from their tactics. Since one can't do it with Combat Jump past activating EVO, the whole maneuver gets lumped into "not worth it" category. My personal opinion is that it depends, sometimes it is worth the risk and cost - including the cost to run EVO support - sometimes it isn't. Crusaders being slightly worse than Tigers as jump troops isn't the issue, no one says PanO has to be best in this regard. The question is whether they bring enough utility to the table to justify the risk, and for me the answer is: sometimes. Particularly MRifle+LFT, which is a nifty little toolbox. Sure, I often wished for it to be tweaked a little, but it's not bad. Bottom line is that sometimes taking a calculated risk - and I see a tactic with 70% success rate as one - is fully justified, and that Crusaders might need a rework together with many PanO units, but don't need a substantial boost. I also don't see the issue with Hellcats having a Combat Jump bonus (I'll leave the issues I do have with Nomads out of this). What I think is that there are more units in the game that would be justified to have a similar bonus.
My biggest issue with CJ and Akalis is how Kirpal lore wise is meant to be some kind of master of the combat jump and in game he is absolutely nothing special in that regard lol. I do think I'd be neat for Akalis to maybe get reworked to have a CC focus. Make use of those E/M CCWs. I almost would want Akalis to get the Toni Tik treatment where they get upgraded to the baseline of what Kirpal currently is (maybe with dogged?), and then maybe give Kirpal something like CJ +3 and some more spicy CC stats (+1B?).
Except, when you play a game, what the enemy has is how they can win. Preventing the opponent from winning is very nearly as important as fulfilling your own objectives, so must always be considered in the hypothetical. If the enemy has a strength, an area where they outperform your own options, you must either concede that area and make up for it in other areas, or trick the opponent into making a mistake. The popularity of various threats relative to your own counters drives army design almost as much as the scenario does. PanO is in the unfortunate position of having exactly one strength, and that strength is not universally applicable. Nomads are faster and have better board control, CA have superior mobility and trade performance, SP have better durability and close-in power. PanO shoots 5% more accurately at mid to long range. Should the enemy not be in mid to long range, or attacking from outside line of sight, PanO must correct this to win. Should this be impossible, or sufficiently inefficient that the enemy can outscore you, you are likely to lose. Your enemies are usually at least two of (faster, more durable, better at control, able to win active-turn gunfights), so you need to cover a lot of bases not to be outperformed in whatever secondary choices you have, too. In exchange for this daunting challenge the enemy is likely to present you with, your best shooting is exactly equal to a Grenz Sniper in a Core Fireteam, and your Line Troopers and Specialists that shouldn't see a BS Attack all game enjoy 110% accuracy compared to their opposition. The fact that our greatest statistical advantage over what an enemy can potentially bring is that Fusiliers are 10-50% more cost effective than other Line Troopers is not encouraging.
Heh, according to the @RobertShepherd and some representatives from the Australian meta, Vanilla PanO and NCA are A-tier this season. I am listening right now, but...it is hard to agree. http://forum.corvusbelli.com/threads/video-robert-shepherd-top-factions-2024.42773/#post-469283
Then they're a better unit, and they should cost more. That's the whole reason of having points in the first place. Anyway, if we're paying attention to fluff for justifications, then Nomads are an irregular force and should loose most of their good Lt. options, top end shooting, and so forth. Or is the current fluff that Nomads are just the specialist snowflakes and the best at everything ever? It's hard to tell these days. I don't have an issue with them having it; I have an issue with them having it for free. A combat jump unit essentially needs to hit that roll, and so getting a large MOD on it should have a significant impact on their cost, rather than none. And it's frustrating because these static mods only every seem to benefit some armies (CA, Nomads) and never others (PanO). No one complains because no one does it. Infiltration (+3) on usually mediocre Skirmisher PH just means you're back to a coinflip to make the attempt, and I'm not aware of any infiltrators cheap enough you'd want to risk that which also get the MOD. It's an entirely separate but very much relevant issue. The use case is probably that as long as one of them makes it to ground, you need to hope the enemy has a lynchpin hacker you can trade them for in order to enable the rest of your army to move. Or that you can flame a bunch of cheerleaders and circumstances don't conspire to kill you on the same order (ARO from another model further away). There are things they can do 55% of the time. They'd do them better with Mimetism (park in the enemy DZ on supressive fire, have much better odds of winning gunfights instead of having to trade your 28+ point unit with a template, etc), but that's true of every unit. Ah, yes. Clearly a unit that needs a handicap. But that's earmarking 2 of them just to hit a 90% chance of getting 1 right where you need it to be - that's like 50 points in Akalis, and still needs one more to drop in reliably. And you need to do all this while playing around the millions of templates many other armies will just have incidentally; that's not a great place for a 23 point model to be. Perhaps I worded my thesis poorly; to be clear, PanO isn't totally unable to project power behind walls in the enemy DZ, they're just really bad at it, for the faction that depends most on that ability due to bad hacking, bad midfield, and bad trades. So that means it's a problem in at least Military Orders, Varuna, and Svalarheima, and kind of NCA*. That's not great for the army overall. Vanilla is saved by Akalis at least keeping AVA 3 there. *The Aleph unit they get to fill the niche is a better parachutist than anything gets in faction, for fewer points, but it's still AVA 1 and only PH 11. I'm starting to see a trend here. That's their pick rate out of all mulebots, which are only in 30% of lists. Which I also find really shocking; I'd expect to see more mulebots as cheap orders, espically in MO which only gets 1 flashbot. But then, these stats don't have flashbots above a 70% use rate in any PanO sectorial, and down near 50% in some. With that datapoint I just don't know if I actually believe these numbers. They don't have a 70% success rate - they have a 70% chance of showing up to see if they succeed. A crusader Breathern or Akali will have much less than a 100% chance of success against an opponent who is prepared to deal with, for example, a Rysat*, who shows up 100% of the time for fewer points than any PanO combat jump + EVO bot. I'm noticing a really serious trend... Combined Army, Nomads, Aleph... is there any army that isn't better than PanO at this? Haqq has Impersonators, so they're fine, and Para-Commands have the same PH, slightly lower cost, and Mimetism, so Ariadna seems to be better as well.
This sounds right, but I belive it's also more complicated. If you make Hellcats more expensive, you might better account for cross faction balance of AD troops, but you'll also disrupt internal balance for their own faction, as they will become a relatively less attractive choice. Then you have the problem that you get better troops of a certain archetype, but are simultaneously dissuaded to include them in your lists, maybe even percieved as "bloated". With that in mind, I believe cutting a few points in places is fine to depict a faction's thematic strengths. Problem is that this concept is not always realized with the necessary consistency or care in Infinity because of how things actually play out on the table. Paracommandos vs. Akalis is a good example to illustrate this. Paracommandos' conceptual drawback is having only parachutist and not combat jump, worse weapons and lower BS. This is offset by Mim -3, because Ariadna thematically places heavy emphasis on camo to compensate for their lack in tech. What actually happens is that Mim -3 is better than +1BS in most situations, combat jump troops tend to use parachutist most of the time anyway because it is reliable, and that rifle + pistol + chain colt is not exactly worse than a combi rifle either, often even better due to the ability to force trades with a template. Paracommandos also have better WIP for their specialists, D-Charges for objectives and Zero-G, all of which are generally useful traits to have for an AD trooper. In the context of the game, the conceptual strengths of the Akalis don't translate into actual strength, while the conceptual drawbacks of the paracommando don't translate into actual drawbacks. I assume this is partly because Paracommandos have been overhauled for Kosmoflot, so this might be just a standard power creep thing, but there is definitely room for improvement in many other cases.
Given the increased proliferation of MSV and DTWs in the game Mimetism isn't as big a boon as it was a few years back. It's still very good in active turn, when/if you can pick your battles and avoid said counters, but the risk of it being a lost investment is not negligible. Regarding Crusaders' rate of success, I was talking precisely about ability to deliver them where needed, with the fact that they'd still have to succeed in subsequent firefight being an obvious conclusion for me. If one wants to use Combat Jump to acquire tactical surprise, there should be risk involved. Rasyats are beasts, though, no argument there. @Knauf, I strongly disagree that there should be point discounts to troops in factions' thematic areas of expertise. I believe that said expertise should be reflected in how optimised and effective such troops should be; for example YJ HIs, PanO TAGs, Nomad MIs should have little to no bloat on them, every stat and skill should be more than occasionally useful. Maybe some minimal bonuses might be acceptable, for example YJ HIs getting slightly improved Dodge range for free, but that's all. Regarding Hellcats, they have no competition within the sectorial, and the only one in vanilla is Meteor Zond. If you only want to use Parachutist, agreed, there are other choices. But if you want to use Combat Jump, particularly in CJC, they're the only troops to do it. And they're very attractive package right now, with scarcely any bloat, and they'd sttill be attractive if they were slightly more expensive.
I'm not familiar with CJC very much, so it might not apply to Hellcats. My point was a more general one, that points increases not only affect cross faction balance but also internal balance, and that you can fix one while hurting the other. That being said, after a cursory glance I'd probably take Carlota over Hellcats :P
This recent bent in the conversation has gone in a weird direction - the response to "panO is bad at projecting power against null deployed enemies" seems to be that one sectorial has combat jump troops who aren't that much worse than what every other army gets, and then people pretending that a strategy with a 55% chance of showing up isn't that bad, and that it's somehow equal to Impersonator units which just show up and get two orders of free movement from their State, or Parachutist (Dep. Zone), which also just shows up. Yes. There are Combat Jump units which exist in PanO. But Pan Oceania suffers from a fundamental contradiction between the fluff of being a high tech faction focused on mechs and remotes, and the gameplay niche of being extremely bad at hacking, and if PanO being bad at hacking is inviolate, this is a design problem which Airborne Deployment (or Impersonators) are well positioned to solve. Currently, the opposite is the case. In fact, since I have apparently been ambiguous in the past, I will be flat out here: Pan Oceania should have the best Combat Jump/Parachutist troops in the game. Rems will never be a suitable replacement for offensive Warbands as long as hacking is powerful and repeaters can easily cover the whole table The inclusion of suicidal warband troops is inconsistent with fluff Airborne Deployment, being dependent on air superiority that the alleged Hyperpower should be able to attain, meshes well with the high-tech nature of the faction The only lore-friendly alternative is adding artillery to the game. And as much as we all like to ship Jazz, Billie, and a 8" howitzer shell, that is a bad idea; restricting speculative fire grenades was a good idea, and Guided Missiles remain an issue. There might be a nice for internet-seeking missiles which only target non-EVO hackers, but I don't want to confuse the issue. Proposed changes: Re-work the Akalis and Crusader Brethren to actually be good units; limited profiles with Parachutist (Deployment Zone) would be one approach, another would be giving Combat Jump (+3) and Mimetism. Add good airborne deployment options to SWF and Varuna Give NCA an in-sectorial option to have good CJ troops, or increase the availability of Garudas Remove +3 from the Hellcats Remove (Deployment Zone) from Raysat and Polaris I feel like DTWs have proliferated more than MSV, and they don't really care about BS more than mimetism. The proliferation of DTWs and if they're a serious problem is something of a separate topic except they generally hurt panO's expensive shooters more than most; however for the very narrow niche where PanO is allowed to excel i.e. shooting at 16"-32", it's still the gold skill. More generally, for the type of unit in discussion (1W 20+ point infantry) templates are universally such a problem that your play patterns are primarily dictated around avoiding them. Mimetism is still insanely powerful for its cost anywhere it shows up, and you don't have to play a Tiger Solider differently from an Akali to preserve that value. Because Nomads and CA don't have enough of those? I understand the theory - and there might be some validity to it in Corregidor - but Vanilla Nomads are already spoiled for choice when it comes to attractive units to pick. They're the opposite side of the coin when it comes to not considering units in a vacuum - they already have a ton of other strong options for shooting, board control, cheap trade pieces, etc, so why should they get a random free advantage in airborne deployment on top of that? The way it's currently done in practice is with static MODS (I'm not sure if they have an offical name) - things like the Hellcat's Combat Jump (+3), or Kritza Borat's BS Attack (+1 Burst), the Observant Sigmatron getting +1 B on its rocket launcher, or the Intervenor's Trinity (-3). The other tool is Upgrade programs - things like Reverent Custodiers getting +1 B on Carbonite, Jazz & Billie getting Trinity with +1 damage on his hacking device, or Mary Problems getting +1 Burst on Oblivion and AP ammo on Trinity. The issue, obviously, is that these aren't used to highlight faction strengths, they're used mostly to: Improve Nomads profiles without increasing their cost Improve Combined Army profiles without increasing their cost (Yogurt sniper, Anathematic hacker, Charonid Hacker, Overdron weapons, Ikadron flamethrower) Make new close combat models immune to Natural Born Warrior So I think if this was actually done consistently, it would be less of a problem, but at the moment it's not. Agree with all of this - I don't really get the discussion around focusing on reliability as if that's somehow a bad thing, or abnormal. Especially in PanO, where you are forced to rely on risky FTF gunfights as plan A (there is no plan B) and so you need to look to minimize risk everywhere else. If we're taking the tournament stats as gospel, then the vaunted Akali Scattergun doesn't seem to be a great approach either - they show up in less than 20% of SAA lists with an average of 1.09 of them taken, and only 7% of vanilla lists. Probably because a strategy that only has a coinflip chance of maybe working is terrible, and every knows it. When the chips are down and you're trying to win games instead of talking on the internet, you don't load up on troops with a 55% chance to show up. You play a different army and take Speculo Killers.
Let me introduce you to MO. An army with few viable options and a huge host of less attractive choices. Maybe you come from Nomads where less attractive choices are few or non existent, but here they are an everyday thing. It's not the best place to be in as you might have guessed after almost 40 pages of rant on how bad this place is, but at least the minis are cool.
I play YJ and PanO myself, so I'm well aware. Never played anything Nomad, but Tunguska remains tempting since their last visual overhaul. I realize I might have worded my argument badly, because it was never about the Hellcat specifically but rather the idea that just increasing the cost of a troop might produce other problems in terms of faction-internal balance and a disconnect with the thematic side of things when your elite-level unit is not cost-effective to use in the context of your overall roster. You can see this to some extent in the Tiger Soldiers, who are premium AD troopers both in theme and cost, yet you don't see them hit the table very often at all because a) AD troops in general are not super popular and b) they are ~30 points you'd often want to spend elsewhere.
Tunguska, is the sectorial a PanOceania player would feel the most comfortable to play with, not sure on the last visual overhaul, as Tunguska did not exist as a sectorial before that.
