I agree hacking is a rather flat system (at least in the case of hacking vs hacking and active turn hacking), but I think tinkering with it risks upsetting a very precarious balance. Oblivion needs to be as absurdly strong as it is right now to provide a consistent way to defend against strong multi-wound attackers (TAGs, HI like your Asawira, Cenobites and Tuetons), many of which happen to be hackable. It's not a coincidence that some of the most complained and talked about attack pieces in the game are those that have tools to ignore or bypass hacking (stuff like Bears, Sphinx, Nourkias, SP heroes). I'm also not sure if changing around damage/burst/ammo types on different hackers will really create interesting distinctions between them. They'll all still play the same as each other, but some will be more effective and others will be less effective. Personally, I'd love to see a ground up rework of hacking, but it'd def be a thing for N5, and I'm not really sure how I'd approach it. One idea that might help would be to disentangle hacking defense from BTS, and spin hacking defense off into a separate stat. I think that'd help make things a lot cleaner and easier to balance. I also kinda think it's funny to talk about TB as an especially hacking resilient sectorial when most of the discussion I've seen talks about hacking as it's big weakness. You won't be isolating or immobilizing the Prime, but tinbot -3 doesn't shut out GML. It's options to move through and/or clear a repeater network are expensive and limited (Hippo, Nimrods, I guess Hellblazers if it's not a 6S network). On the note of Alke, I have never seen her on the table even once, and almost never see her talked about. My view is that people tend to go for Eudoros for NCO access in SP (and also because Eudoros is cracked af in general). Thorakitai cores and especially pure cores also seem to be fairly rare as well.
Overhauls aside, there's low hanging fruit that's fairly clearly need of adjustment in N4. 1) Carbonite is fucking worthless and needs to be buffed to a significant degree. 2) High value hackers hiding behind a firewall don't have a predator. KHDs should have a program that is built in such a way where they're better at fighting high BTS targets hiding behind firewalls, but less efficient than Trinity at hunting unshielded standalone targets. Eudoros is great, but there's no reason a player can't get value out of having multiple NCO pieces on the table when they're extremely likely to have more than 1 fireteam on the table. It widens their options in prosecuting a turn.
Generally, I think N4 Hacking is in a decent state. Hacking is strong and so the hackable characteristic gives a significant points discount. Due to that discount and the critical changes, N4 TAGs and HI are much more viable (even powerful). IMO, the concern is GML as a lot of players do find it fun. I think if guided is tweaked, we will be in a good shape I also agree with @Triumph 's proposed hacking changes. Carbonite being tweaked and adding burst 1 KHD program that ignores firewalls would be nice. That could punish too aggressive repeater networks.
I'd add Firewall breaking functionality to EVO, as a Supportware program. On one hand it would be more powerful, working with other hacking programs; on the other hand it'd require taking EVO, activating in advance, would take up a Supportware slot, and eliminating EVO would eliminate the ability from the table. It'd also make EVO both a more valuable choice and target.
Something like that makes a ton of sense imo. It'd also be nice if EVO hackers got the ability to have a supportware program enabled before turn 1 - it'd make them better picks in general, since you can have their defensive abilities up and running for when you need them most - when you are going second on the first turn.
I don't know if that's a great idea because it buffs everything in a blanket way. You make problem programs like Oblivion just a bigger problem, which adversely affects units that aren't necessarily a problem right now. There is a very specific problem unit archetype that needs a predator, and that's high end hackers. You want a solution that specifically targets them without also beating down on every other hackable target in the game at the same time (ORCs for example aren't in need of a meta change that makes their life worse, they're not a problem unit whereas BTS6+ hackers that sit behind firewalls are the ones that need reigning in).
N4 was not really simplified. Skills were removed (some, specially some of the most niche ones), and the rest de-nested. This by itself gives a feel of complication at first sight that is not really there. The main problem for N4 is the skill salad the new units tend to get in order to be "different" and "more attractive" than old units, specially if paired with models that are not up to the general taste others are. Cheaper is not always better, else there would be no sense to the Quality/Cost relation. Truth is, you can't bring everything to all games, and Alke is just a specialist operative with a Hero's WP. If you want her order and a specialist... well, a basic thorakite with FO slapped on is WP13 and costs 13pts, so you get two regular orders instead of one, two bodies instead of one, and sure, they don't have NCO, but they are compensating it anyways with the extra order. NCO as a skill has diminishing returns (compensated with how casualties give back the lost value), extra orders don't (and no, you are not really going to run into a "too much troops in the list" problem with ASS, unless you deliberately go for it, something all factions can do). Somehow I prefer to have Hyppolita delivered in the same fireteam as Eudoros, so she travels with Acmon and Pandora, too good a team not to assemble in most scenarios. Also, what does Alke provide to Hyppolita's fireteam? an NCO? Just add a makhe with Breaker Combi or Shock Marksman rifle (since Hyppolita already has a breaker) and a basic thora for a thora fireteam with Dactyl + makhe + Hyppolita, since Hyppolita is a wildcard too, and the Thorakitai fireteam can take up to 2 dactyls, 1 makhe and 1 acmon... The problem with ASS is too much skills compressed in too few profiles (heroes) to justify keeping their costs at the 40pts barrier. If the heroes were somewhat cheaper and lost some skills (that went to other troops), and some heroes got another profile with a different weapon (for example Phoenix going for a MULTI rifle) more variation would be possible, but as it is, ASS starts with a hero team and then you build the fireteams around them (which, to be fair, has always been the intended idea for the sectorial, I think. The failure is that you can't really have 3 effective fireteams of 4 members no matter what you do). I'm not happy with the EVO having suck all the supportware from the basic hackers (that were removed, to leave only the assault and killer ones, and the plus), it seems to have served only to remove the supportware from most lists, needing the extra rules on some ITS scenarios to make people bring the EVO (free exfil, extra order...). My first change would be that any hacking state would apply a -3 to reset (cumulative up the usual threshold of 12) instead of some applying -3, others -9; the second would be to go back in the supportware, so it is available to all non-KHD, but with the caveat that you can only have 1 supportware active in the table, no matter how many hackers you carry, and the EVO would go back to being a general hacker, but with a supportware already active at the game's start, and the classic Zero Pain; I feel that represents enough of its increased processing capabilities. Finally, the repeater networks would need a huge trimming, or the return of the old Nullifier (only for all factions), so crossing a place filled with repeaters is not either an expensive venture in orders, or an infernal gauntlet in which the repeaters are all out of LoS.
I'm certainly not married to the idea that all Supportware needs to be on the EVO, but I do think that it's a natural place for many toolbox hacking abilities. Other hackers are more specialised; EVO is support. It's true, that many people don't value the support it brings at the moment, and this should be a part of any future hacking changes. As for Nullifier, I fully agree. I suggested it to be a hacking program working similarly to White Noise, but disabling hacking, comms, and technical weapons within template area.
Personally, since the discussion has gone that way again, I prefer the solution everything else has, denesting everything. Make hacker a skill, probably (EVO), (Killer), be subdivisions and make all programs like every other weapon and list them individually in the profile, making individual customization of units.
Depends how you want to build your list and the mission that you're playing into, not every mission favours an eggs in one basket approach and scoring necessitates a staggered approach, objective room missions that do sequential scoring for example. Shoving two of your big hitters plus high value support in the scoring area turn one can come back to bite you in the ass if your opponent is capable of mounting a sufficient counter attack to take the room. Win the battle, lose the war. Placing the majority of your value into one fireteam is a choice, and it can have drawbacks versus different opponents. Some armies are better than others at putting pressure on teams like this. This isn't a bad thing, it's just pros and cons. There is value in building a list wider rather than tall as it can make the list harder to pressure by an alpha strike or let you attack more aggressively with a point piece like Hippolyta when you don't have to worry as much about a potential counter attack, as you won't lost as many pieces in return for it. Yes, cheaper is not always better nowhere have I said that. What it is though is good. Having cheaper NCO options available is a good thing for an army to have as it gives them options with building their list. Alke is a solidly priced NCO option that fits into any fireteam as a choice similar to how Sulyong as an option vastly improved the primary fireteam for White Banner by opening up their build choices to not always require 40+ point Bixie to use the LT order. It's actually dependent on your opponent, If you have only 1 NCO choice in the list you increase the value your opponent gets out of targeting it early in the game. Running only Eudoros? Opponent gets rewarded for sniping him early with a GML or something because not only do the get the value out of removing him as a threat, they're degrading the value of your LT order for the rest of the game. It's a problem I run into with IA sometimes as IA doesn't as easily have access to multiple NCO because they're all kind of expensive, so my opponent taking the effort to snipe Krit in some fashion can mean I functionally just lost the value of 3 orders per turn.
Kind of agree with Triumph on Supportware to pierce firewalls. The game currently do not really have a problem caused by Fairy Dust or Tinbots. If the solution to improve the utility of EVO Remotes is to sacrifice the units and sectorials that are sort of relying on these, then that is not a solution. You don't need to wreck these factions/units to make EVO good; there are armed EVO hackers that aren't horribly expensive, and N3 had some pretty strong EVO supportware that didn't get out of hand. Hell, if everyone had Wardrivers (Ariadna already does, and CA has something similar), you could redesign the baggage REM hackers to be something more exciting. I don't, however, think there are any hackers that are a problem. It's mostly that they can operate at 150% efficiency by staying in their DZ that causes issues with them. The remarkable thing is that, for years, no one has said that an infiltrating hacker is too good. With that said, however, both TLB and SP are said to be kept in line by hacking (read: spotlight into guided missiles), so maybe the issue with factions that rely on hackables (OSS, IA, Ikari, and a few others) is that they need a balance pass to get in line with TLB and SP more so than firewalls being the issue. Hell, it's possible that the idea of pitchers and pandas being limited to only a few factions needs to be scrapped. I know, I almost hate myself for writing that. I just hope they buff Deactivators slightly at the same time to allow counter-play. No LOF should do it. Maybe, just maybe, the repeater firewall needs to apply to friendlies as well as enemies as a "latency" debuff.
One, in my opinion EVO absolutely needs a reason to be fielded. It needs to be a viable choice. As I see it now, it is not. Whether being a Firewall-counter would do that, I don't know. Two, I see Firewall as an effective equivalent to Mimetism, except applied for Hacking. In that case, a Firewall Breaker might be not a program, but a skill/equipment, and available to specific Hackers - the way MSV is. This in turn allows it to be leveled (negating -3, -6 or even -9 effective Firewall), at he same time having no effect on targets without Firewall modifier. That's just a thought, whether it is a sound idea or not would need some discussion. Also, of course & by nature, it wouldn't really work for an EVO. Three, there are vast differences in how various armies are able to build up their Repeater networks - with build-in Repeaters, Deployable Repeaters, Pitchers and FastPandas. Having a Forward Deployed Repeater is potentialy pretty handy when blunting an alphastrike that has to go through its ZoC, lack of these makes it a non-strategy. Four, I believe we shouldn't concentrate on narrow counters to a specific skill / piece of equipment. With 10-15 models on table per side, and sectorial (to speak nothing of vanilla) rosters being way, way bigger, a player can't expect to be able to predict what exactly will be in their opponent's list. Let's don't fall into the problem we get with Biovisor: is is a totally situational piece of kit. If your opponent doesn't field any Impersonators or Holoprojectors, it is totally useless, and these exact abilities aren't all that common...
Very army dependent. Yu Jing for example can get value out of it with the Liu Xing dropping on 17s (20 on Firefight) which is exceptional for an airborne piece. Same for factions like Nomads or Torchlight who can field interesting attack based REMs. The new Stormbot makes a fairly aggravating ARO piece for its cost if its sitting in a fireteam and throwing out shots on 17s while having multiple wounds and being relatively simple to repair and continuously act as a roadblock. But for others like Pan-O and Haqq it largely may as well not exist.
I personally pretty much fail to see its utility, even when I'm playing StarCo or Corregidor.: I need to put into my list a specific attack REM. Or a Combat Jumper. I need to spend a slot in my list (granted, 15pts & 0,5 SWC are less of a concern for me). I need to expend an Order to give my drone / Combat Jumper a specific boost. I can have one such boost active at a time. I have to yet try it on a REM in a Fireteam, but on a solo REM, that's quite a lot of a hassle. Also if the REM goes down, the EVO becomes effectively an Order generator that can do nothing else - it doesn't have any weapon to even defend itself (and no, I don't reall using Baggage, like, ever, since N3 at least: once it could become relevant, it is too far from models it could resupply, or those models are already dead, or the Orders are too short to spend them on resupplying). EVO - as of now -is a narrow specializaton of a list for me, and the cost of such specialization is ingoring any other stuff one could be putting into their list. Granted, that could be just me. And I play Limited Insertion games these days pretty exclusively - which makes every slot in a Combat Group precious. It was very, very different in N2 days, where a. we used to play with no Group limit (seeing 20+ models per side wasn't uncommon in my meta), and b. a number of EVO abilites worked automatically, without the need of Order expediture. So, I'm really curious about ways of fixing the EVO Bot.
When they're in fireteams the value of REMs goes up, you're more likely to have support on hand to bring them back up and it's less likely an opponent can run them down and make them stay dead without killing most of your fireteam at which point if that happens having an EVO hacker isn't exactly the biggest issue you're facing right then and there. Specifically for CJC if you're choosing to run a Vostok to attack with as a fireteam pointman, depending on what you're fighting adding Marksmanship to push it to hitting on 16s instead of 13s can net you gains of 10-15% success rate of inflicting a wound every order you shoot. It's a very significant bump in efficiency and value for potentially 1 order at the start of the game.
When even "forcing" the issue of "bring EVO or no Supportware" seems not enough to make people use the EVO, I'd say another approach is needed, instead of artifically increasing the EVO's value with extraneous (read: ITS mission dependant) rules. I Remember the fluff was that the EVO were hacking-devoted platforms with extra bells and whistles that allowed a really remote-dwelling hacker to provide battlefield dominance. As it is now, it merely provides some support and that's it :/ The problem with that is the enormous size of the hacker's skill list then. At this rate, we will be using datacards like the british... only ours would be filled with an endless stream of skills and gear. There will be 2 fireteams, so you can mix & match. I prefer to have a "pure" one for Phoenix, however, specially since Machaon gets the bonus to his Eclipse grenades too (it's a BS attack, despite using PH), and points need to be saved somewhere, the idea in that Eudoros + Hyppolita + Acmon + Pandora is to keep Eudoros up and running for objective cap/movement, while using Hyppolita as a discount Achilles (which, to be fair, both her and Eudoros are... but he hits somewhat softer, while getting better utility). And concentrating stuff is inevitable with premium factions, specially since you won't ever be truly able to deal with specialists spam anyways, just to mitigate the difference. Only, for +5pts we have the Makhe, with MSV1, mimetism -3, NCO, +3 to BTS, same BS, -Frenzy, -Religious, +inmunne to shock (somehow, Alke is not), +Courage... Sure, they lose 360º Visor, but that means they go into a 4-troop fireteam, which considering how many gotchas there are out there, getting the sixth sense is great anyways. Plus, a Makhe is able to shoot through smoke, making it the only linkable MSV in Steel Phalanx, which further promotes placing them inside a 4-troop fireteam, since if the enemy returns fire, the malus of the smoke dissapears... If we were prior to the netrod nerf, Alke would have something to say (plus 1 regular order), but nowadays that 5pts difference by itself nets only servant bots for the doctor/engineers... So, sure, Alke gives options. Subpar as they may be. It can be seen both ways. I prefer to take into account that there is only ONE Lt order, so paying for 2-3 NCOs doesn't give me extra orders, just more flexibility and redundancy. And regardless of how many NCOs you bring in the list, Eudoros is one of the top targets, because of how much sheer utility in a good fighter chassis he brings to the table. Proxy Mk2 lost that to an extent when the Hidden Deployment was removed (and they can't downgrade themselves to Mim-3, so no chance of fudging the line with who is the naga or not... and the sniper will want to be reaaaaaly back). I agree the problem are the pitchers and repeaters, you don't want to add a hacker to an assault fireteam, unless that fireteam carries HI and Tinbots anyways... or at least a hacker that is also a HI inside the HI fireteam, with Fairy Dust. Corvus is aware of the problem too, else they would not have gone out of their way to up most of Torchlight's HI BTS to 6+... This should be printed in BIG letters and plasted on Corvus' office walls and ceiling. There are too many threat vectors nowadays, and it is impossible to even bring a single counter to most of them, not to talk about redundancy or being able to do anything but try to counter. Most of the time, the only option is to take the lumps and trust Dodge or Reset... until you start going downhill (lost Sixth Sense, maluses to Reset, etc...). Same can be said for the Apsaras or the other RemRacers, sadly. The worst part is that the Apsaras was a core part of OSS, and nowadays OSS is... dakini core with Devas or impure, forget Yadus... and the Apsaras doesn't even count as a Dakini... In the end, the TR bots are the best option there... :(
Nothing wrong with spending extra points to get some value out of the Makhe, but you don't always need or want that extra utility, sometimes saving that 4 points you can go "well actually probably never even going to need a guy to shoot through smoke really, I'd rather have a Warcor or upgrade something else. Also as I keep point out and you keep ignoring, Alke is a wildcard she can be placed in more fireteams than the Makhe can. If you're playing Hippo Dactyl/Thorakitai Haris you can't potentially either put a Makhe in there or would MSV1 be particularly useful given the only smoke being put out by that team is Eclipse. I mean if your argument is points are tighter, that just lends more credence to taking Alke over a Makhai. Yeah, that's exactly my point. If you have Eudoros and he gets picked off because as we both agree, he's a high priority target, if he was your only NCO option your LT order is now degraded in value. If you have a backup NCO you can continue to get value out of it. There is value in opting to put more NCO options on the table to better insulate your list against order degredation. Having relatively cheap options to put more NCO on the table is a worthwhile option for sectorials to have available to them. I disagree on that entirely as an IA player, you just need to be prepared to play different lists that flex different strengths. ASS can absolutely do the same thing and have effective lists that don't over concentrate on a single fireteam.
I think they are, but I don't think TLB having BTS 6+ almost across the board is why I think they are aware. Beasthunters, Nightshades and Hippolyta (Silverstar) are the reason I think they are aware of it. Unhackable units that slot in exactly where a hackable unit is weakest. On top of this they also have access to very cheap CoC (also not hackable) to mitigate GML (a tactic CB has said they don't see as a problem). They've definitely learned lessons from IA's design failings. In fact, having BTS 6+, but only Tinbot -3, means TLB's hackable parts of their fireteams are slightly more vulnerable to hacking than IA or Bakunin counterparts. 5 percent point better save versus Oblivion makes a difference, but not as much as more than 15 percent point slide in likelihood of even having to make the save. BTS 6+ mainly sells the idea that these are well-funded and expensive units (not points-expensive, but credits expensive).
