N5 thread for people who don't play N4 much

I appreciate your effort on showing us your problems with N4. But as someone that played N4 from day 1 until today (I play mostly StarC & QK), I have a slightly different opinion on N4.

for 1. If you do not like tournament players - then do not play them. If your Meta just consists of tournament players, this will of course become difficult. But perhaps you are not the only one in your Meta that does not like playing against tournament crazys so you might be able to lure them into Infinity.
I had lots of fun playing a selfmade QK vs Steel Phalanx campaign against a friend for example. We shared the Blackwind box and he got more into Infinity than he was before.
And i do not think GW does make it easy to access WH as you need to invest lots of money into Rulebooks, Armybooks and Miniatures.

for 2. use proxies or convert your miniatures. Like you have to do in WHFB, WH40K, Mordheim and Necromunda.
For me, one of the most fun parts of palying Infinity is using profiles that I (and the others in my Meta) have rarely used before and see how they do.

for 3. Why?

for 4. I can understand why fireteam options need to be optimized. In my opinion there are too many wildcards and the boni for pure/mixed teams can be a little bit confusing .
But pre-built fireteams? With extra rules for them? Sorry but I think this is rubbish. You complain about too many rules for fire teams but wnat to replace them with even more rules? Right now it does not matter who I play against, fire team boni are always the same - and you want to exchange that for special rules for hundreds of pre-build fire teams? I do not share your fixation on playing cards, but you can print the current fire team boni easy on a playing card.

for 5. I thought in point 3 you wanted to get rid of sectorials and put them in Vanilla? And I think you did not fully grasp the concept of sectorials: the special sectorial rules you are referring to (in order to change how they play) IS the different unit choices and fireteams you can build compared to the other sectorials and vanilla. QK plays very different to Hassassins and Ramah, and in Vanilla Haqq, you can mix the play style of all three sectorials without getting the fire teams.

6. There is a soft order cap right now (max. 15 regular/Irregular orders plus whatever NCO, TacAwareness, Impetious Order, additional Lieutenant order your Faction might provide). In all N4 I have very very rarely seen the kind of order spam you describe - and that was only in games without any mission aka Firefight where you do not need Specialists and just Shooters with enough orders tu fuel them.

7. Yes, everything should not feel the same - but for me, right now, it does not feel the same. I need a different style of play if I play QK or StarCo or Dahshat or Hassassins or Druze or Haqq Vanilla.

8. I do struggle against Rambos with QK and StarCo (not with Hassassins, for example) - but in N4 I was never ever shot off the table in turn 1. For me, I adjusted my Lists to include some expendable roadblocks and try to hide my assets or build crossfire zones so the enmy Rambos has to spend lots of orders to manouvre, this limiting his impact. Does it work every time? No, but I am getting better at it. Another way to avoid Rambos etc. is to play the mission. There are few Missions that award points for pure model kills. Even if your opponent gets you in retreat in turn 1, you still have the opportunity to do an objective and win the game.

 

Thanks for the effort an making something constructive.

There are some points I agree with, but unfortunately I disagree with almost all of them.

1. fully agreed. Games killed themselves (specially video games) by wanting to overbalance things out, and draining all the fun out from it. I think CB does a great job at balancing game, making sure (almost) every matchup can be fair. That doesn’t some slight rebalancing would be needed to make some units more attractive (see next point)

2. Full disagree. The number of models is a plus, not a minus. If anything, CB should make sure there are no « non-picks », and there are too many of them imho.

3. lol no, that’s the best part of infinity.

4. Again no, VERY HARD NO. Mixing fireteam is a HUGE factor that will affect the game flow and strategy. A Core doesn’t necessarily need to be clean core. It must remain at the player discretion to define what the core should be doing, and what models it needs to have. Having prebuilt fireteams would destroy the strategy behind list building, not only from a competitive standpoint, but also would destroy all the fun from figuring out in the army app different lists.

5. I’m totally confused, I don’t get the point.

6. Here also I’m not sure I understand your point. There is a limit of AVA for troopers. Anyway the cheap order generators is something you rarely see in experienced games. A good list is a list with multitude of tools and having units that are able to contribute to something should the scenario arise. I don’t think I have often seen 5 combi rifle guys sitting at the back just to provide orders to a single unit. Some units might not be activated at all, but that only means you found something better to do with someone else. I think the 15 unit limits to be good.

7. Huh?? Even if you take PanO (the most barebones faction basically), playing VIRD, Winterfor, MO, provide with completely different experiences and game flow. It’s just not true that all factions feel the same. Not true at all.

8. Unless some VERY specific circumstances (like PanO that will have a lot of issues countering The BEAR! Or McMurrough), if you place yourself right, you can mitigate alpha strikes. It won’t always work, and sometimes there’s so much you can do to avoid getting blasted T1, but it’s definitely not a problem so big that it needs to be addressed.

If anything for this point, alpha strikes are possible when there’s a huge gap of skills/knowledge between the two players. And that can be addressed with sportsmanship and mentoring of the most junior player. Which every player should do (unless in a tournament. And even then, it would be welcome that the experienced player gives insight to the player on what he would have done to prevent being alpha striked).

Now, for me N4 is good. If I’m wanting anything from N5, it’s a redesign of some models to make sure you can build good lists with every single model, while having fun with them. Example? Yes you can field Jayths, and under some miraculous circumstances they might even perform well, but I think I’m pretty safe saying they are trash and completely overshadowed by other units in that sectorial that do the same job but better. Orcs? One of the most iconic unit of the game are close to being unplayable specially against pitcher backed heavy hacking sectorials.

Let N5 give the chance to field every single unit!

And I wouldn’t be against a nerf of the pitchers. I hate that weapon. It goes for me against the very nature of infinity which is that there should be a counter to everything. And unfortunately there aren’t good enough counters to a Dartok or Bit&Kiss spamming pitchers across the entire table, and killing with very high chances of success enemy hackers and isolating HI/Tags (maybe even worst). Oh yes. The counterpick is: don’t take hackers / HI. That’s no fun.

 

You're a little all over the place, but here's my take away from what you wrote:

A) You don't like competitive environments. Several points you made talk about disliking competitive players, list building optimization, fireteams making troopers more powerful, cheaper troops feeding more powerful troops for multiple activations, and getting hit with an alpha strike or early tabling. You also feel competitive players have or could have an undue influence on the game's development direction.

B) You think that profiles without available miniatures and an excess of profiles makes it hard to get back into the game (or for new players to pick up the game). This feeds into a perceived divide, where competitive players have found the apex profiles and everyone else is struggling to sift through everything to figure out what works.

Did I touch on everything?

To address A), the core of your complaints have been voiced elsewhere. Chiefly, some players dislike the aggressive alpha strike style of play, or that you can spend a whole turn just activating your most powerful guy. I think learning how to stifle both is part of the joy of the game, but I can also see how some would get frustrated by it. I also don't think that Infinity is getting unduly shaped by competitive player feedback. If anything, CB is very cautious about adopting feedback, and much of their transition from N3 to N4 was about making things less impenetrable for newer players.

To address B), Bostria did say they're planning to revise the way they announce and release miniatures to prevent profiles going for years without official minis. I'll be interested to see if N5 sees a lot of profiles taken out of vanilla factions and made sectorial only. There is an "Essentials" demarcation planned to replace Code One which might slim down available profiles to help get into (or back into) the game.

While I don't personally agree with your criticisms and suggestions, I think the core of what your saying is worth talking about as I have heard it said elsewhere.

 

In N3 Ikari Company had basically prebuilt fireteams. The Keisotsu core had to have exactly 3 Keisotsu, 1 Brawler and 1 Tanko. And the Wu Ming core was 4 Wu Ming and a Clipper.
This was very limiting and not that fun. The by far best change that was made to Ikari in N4 was making the fireteams more flexible so as someone who has actually played with prebuilt fireteams I highly disagree with it being the way to go.

 

With some afterthought, am I correct stating that your proposal is pointing toward a simplification of the game in order to attract / retain newer players via fundamental tweaks of the game rules and rosters?

If so, that’s what they did with CodeOne: keep the core game flow, but get rid of sectorials and fireteams, keep the model count much lower.

Why don’t you just start from there? It « fixes » most if not all of your concerns

 

It does feel a bit bloated.

I think it serves a purpose. Vanilla should serve as a baseline for an army, a jack-of-all trades for what the faction does, and the sectorial should let you lean into those strengths. It gives newcomers a good place to start, and a place for old timers to pull back and try something different with their army.

I've always been a bit iffy about the fireteam mechanic. But if nothing else, divorce it from sectorial-only. Feels like it's 90% of the reason people go into a sectorial.

I like this a lot. It'd be a very flexible way to differentiate the style and theme of a faction, to try out unique rules and abilities.

I get why they did it, but it did kneecap players who wanted to play a quantity-over-quality style, and robbed some factions of a defining characteristic. Increasing and decreasing the baseline cap in sectorial special rules would be a fair compromise, I think. Get back some of the flavour of fielding a swarm while keeping the model/order count (and turn length) reasonable.

The factions do feel a lot blander than when I first started. Everybody has everything, just with a small difference in the stat line. I can appreciate not wanting to create a situation where an army can be shut down because the player drew the worst possible matchup, but a lot of uniqueness was lost.

You got me thinking... In a real shootout between special forces and covert ops, you're not going to have a clear picture of everybody you're up against or their exact capabilities. By the nature of a tabletop game, most of that mystery is impossible. But I do like the idea of obfuscating army lists more, to thwart meta-gaming. More ways to spend points so as to disrupt the opponent's ability to math your secrets.

 

Average quality and consistency is the biggest problem this game has. For every batshit insane new Sectorial, there's a mediocre at best dead on arrival one.
Then you randomly get massive hit and miss changes to Sectorials/Factions with new editions that remain untouched for the whole next edition.

here's some random examples in no particular order:

- Achilles, the most standout single rambo in the entirety of Aleph got an AP Spitfire upgrade AND cheaper N3->N4 for no reason. Randomly axed from Aleph in N5. Problem solved /s

- Arguably blatantly OP N3 Mutts gets balanced in N4. Their kit gets split into 3 separate Profiles! Collateral damage: Haqqs eat the arbitraty 15 slot limitation as everyone else, can't even really field more than 2 Mutts if you wanted to and had the OP N3 ones. Also applies to cheap Irregulars in general across all Factions. Something a lot of Sectorials were reliant on to slow down or threaten rambo pieces instead of fielding hard ARO pieces.

- Still collateral damage of Mutts getting balanced - Jammer deservedly eats a huge nerf. Firewalls now work against it, Expendable (3) instead of unlimited. No more Burst bonus for Technical Weapons massively changes White Banner and the Tian Gou. Heckler Jammer and Zulu Cobra Profiles with Jammer in the 30 points range never sees a revision for the entirety of N4 and end up useless. Haven't really hear anyone even talk about WB in the entire edition, they just disappeared.

- N3 Varuna was forcing people to deal with a 1W Kamau Sniper ARO piece that could see through Smoke. Gutted in N4 by removing the ability to pure Link. Helots randomly go down from 2 Decoys to 1 Decoy, lose their ability to choose between Decoy and Limited Camo at deployment. And of course are irregular in one of the more Elite Factions with a 15 Slot limit. Varuna never sees a revision from initial release.

- Full Auto L2 and Fatality L2 get released at wildly nonsensical point costs. Last almost the remainder of the edition before getting removed before an edition change.

- Shasvasti were fully leaning on Fatality L2 Sheshkin and Dazers to be the menace they were on their release late N3, lost both in N4 and never got another look in N4.

- SWC weapons still cost a flat amount of points regardless of the platform. N3 had very limited Link options so Alguacile ML or Keisotsu HMG were relatively decent, since their ability to link for +1B +3BS could offset that. With N3 and N4 allowing steadily more and more powerful other troopers to link with more efficient fillers this stopped working almost immedeately. It's still wildly discouraged to take Linetroopers with SWC guns, when you could run a more efficient solo trooper with the same gun or put a HI or MI with better stats or MODs into the same link at vastly higher return on your investment.

- SWC as a mechanic is basically meaningless in N4. A lot of troops, especailly SWC weapons, got cut by 0.5 SWC each. Add the 15 slot limit and you basically can use the 6 SWC standard limit to figure out your list might not be built well if you would actually exceed it.

- 15 slot cap is very low impact for half the Factions (e.g. PanO - all Sectorials, Aleph - all Sectorials, CA - all Sectorials, O-12, Tohaa, Immortal Army) and puts "spammy" Factions that had the ability to spam as core part of their mechanical power at a big disadvantage (Ariadna - all Sectorials, Haqq - all Sectorials, ISS, JSA, Dashat, Druze).
40 Order CHA and 25 Order Haqq/Ariadna was certainly not great for balance either but this is just the other extreme and also not a good solution.

- Three MO reworks between N3 and N4 to still get an utterly frustrating to build lists with mid tier Sectorial with clear standout performers in a sea of mediocre (the Blackfriar Sniper, a worse Kamau/Karhu/Bagh Mari/Bolt, is still not allowed to join any links and doesn't have a reason to exist, but they made a HRL who can and gave it Sixt Sense).

- The big Link rework. Arbitrarily limiting Link options that are "too powerful to purelink". Riot Grrrl Pure Links with everything are okay. So are Volkolak + Rokot Pure Links. But Haidaos in a 150 point HI pure Link would be too good. The fun part is that doesn't even make or break their Sectorials.


There's so much more like the N3 Shock FAQs (how did that even happen?), N4 Crits, the state of Guided Missile Launchers, some Factions being able to ignore the Loss of LT minigame, while some have to live with completely obvious Lts, and so much more.
I'm very tired that easily half the Profiles in Sectorials and probably 75% in vanilla Factions are dead weight you wouldn't even use as Link filler, if the Link was viable to begin with.
It's sad that some things are so clearly over the top minmaxed by abusing a made up mythical pointformula. Or worse, there might not even be a formula to even have a reason why things don't pay for massive synergies in their kits.

Start of N3 things were looking bright. Massive improvement over N2. Problems, sure, but nothing unmanageable at a slow and steady pace. That's probably where it all went wrong, since any shred of energy went into making new Sectorials, NA2 armies, weird offshoot minigames and whatnot, instead of simply keeping the game on course, reworking the majority of Sectorials to update them for N3/N4 etc.
The rules got cleaned up. Massive improvements there, most things here completely positive with at worst, slight hickups. Balance wise we're still at a very wide disparity that all the updates failed to properly tackle and address for two whole editions.

 

I'm hopeful for N5

 

Preach Brother!

 

So very much this. I hope this energy will get redirected in N5.

 

Part of what makes profiles feel bloated is there's not much consistency to how a model looks vs it's stats.

There's big HI that look armored but then got arm3 NWI, there's HI with a lot of exposed muscle cables and then got super high armor. PH varies greatly across LI MI HI.

There's little meaning to models being labeled LI or HI when it comes to armor and PH and even who has NWI or goes down in one hit. I want to find some consistency to HI guys of one faction sharing the same power pack, but their stats could be anything.

Mimetism, camo state, they could have a cloak or not, they could have some distinct tech pattern to their armor or not.

The guy with his sword in the air might just be terrible in melee and is actually a shooting profile. Lately they've been making the EMP and EXP weapons look more menacing than a shock weapon so that's nice.

Like... it's fantastic that I can immediately tell a hacker by their arm screen, that thoughtfulness applied to other archtype defining rules would be nice.

 

Yes, because not all nations or units within the nation utilize the same level of technology, you would not expect Haqq and PanO share the same level of camouflage technology or tactics.

Not all soldiers have the same level of rigorous training and a fiber muscle suit can augment somebodies strength so much.

I will agree on some things more consistency would be nice, like swords and other CC weapons on primarily BS units.

 

Factions feeling "samey" is a problem - but that is not solely a "competitive play" problem. To a degree, this is inevitable in any universe that positions itself as "realistic" and does not implement some sort of narrative "time stop" - these factions exist in the same universe, they face the same challenges, so they will be implementing the same solutions. There is no real obstacle to hackerless or robotless factions developing their own tech, narratively speaking - so they did.

Actually, that's a great question - what's your position on profiles that exist solely for narrative purposes? Because a lot of profile bloat comes from units like this. For example, the basic paramedic-hacker-forward observer-heavy weapon profiles in Line units are there because a regular infantry unit would have all of these things - and Fireteams were initially a way to encourage taking them as such a unit...

P.S. Also, from the competitive game PoV - all these options do is fill a checkbox. If you absolutely need a hacker in Ariadna or a TAG in Hassassin sectorial - they exist. Why would you need them - that's a separate question. I would hardly call a Wardriver or a Shakush a "competitive choice" in their respective niches.

 

The existence of roughly the same tools alone doesn't make the sectorial feel overly similar. Take hackers; the ability of Ariadna sectorials to include a Wardriver - or, like FRRM - to hire Alguacil hacker, which they have access to since N2 - doesn't make them feel similar in that regard to factions who have wider hacker choice and actual Repeater nets. The real issue has two sides:

1) Overabundance of tools, especially in sectorials in which they make no thematic sense. Hassassins are a good example; back in N3 and earlier they were very much a glass cannon sectorial, bristling with light units loaded to the teeth with weapons and tools. Their only units with more staying power were Asawira and some Dogged units here and there. This tied well with Haqq always being masters when it came to Light Infantry. Introducing Shakush alone had both thematic and ITS sense, giving the faction durable HMG platform - until then Bahram long range fire support was provided by light units. But introduction of Sunduqbut, Bokhtar, and - to lesser extent - Ayyar made the sectorial very top-heavy, and able to rely on those heavy units in a similar way that other factions might.

2) The units themselves being very, very similar to each other. For all the flexibility provided by unnesting skills come N4, we've seen very little experimentation and creativity with it for the whole edition. There are several archetypes which CB feels the need to include in almost every army; "Specialised light hacker with Pitcher"; "MSV2 long range MI", "Standard HD Skirmisher", etc. These units are almost carbon copies of each other, with only cosmeting differences. I'd very much prefer if, instead of giving almost every army almost the same tool, CB would devise for them playstyles revolving around using different tools to achieve the same goals. A good example is how PanO/MO uses Teutons as warband analogs; they fit the same role, but have completely different set of strength and weaknesses, and their sectorial composition allows the player to use them completely differently from how one would use a standard Irregular warband screen. But for every unit like this there are two units like Black Friars, typical, boring MSV2 MI, with its only interesting loadout being the Multi Rifle one.

In short, I'd very much like CB to both start experimenting and to cut down on the number of copycat units. Rework them, push them into a different role, or make them work differently in their current one.

 

For Hassassins, with N4, they really needed those added top end expensive units. The limit to only 15 models limited how much asymmetrical trading they could do. In early N4, enough people played 4 Asawiras that CB decreased AVA to 3. So something needed to be added. The Sunduqbut also helped in that fit it so well with Daylami.

I am hopeful that N5 continues to improve Hassassins so their MI becomes more appealing.

 

Which is the main reason I really don't like that limit. Two full combat groups, 20 models, would be perfectly fine as baseline and would make for a wider design space. A lot of balance between elite and horde playstyles could be set by the basic rules - how criticals, Smoke, or templates work. Balancing it with lower troop limit feels artificial af and pushes more armies into the same playstyle out of necessity, exactly how you described it.

 

A lot of profiles in this game are not tough enough to really warrant ten elites vs twenty line troopers playstile, I feel. Mind, I am noob and I clipped N3 only barely on the way out. So I was reading silently into this theme with great interest.

Even in MO I feel like I NEED those 15 orders... Just because I will not have enough activations othervise, and I have plenty cheap-ish profiles and great skirmishers, but those skirmishers need order pools to do work. They often can not work on eight to ten order pools, because no smoke and one misstep means that your Dart can move to the farm upstate with all the haste that msv hrl can transfer to her.

I got plenty of ten orders heavy pain trains, and universally it falls short because, as you inevitably start to loose models, every lost order hurts not only in weight and quality of your lost piece, but in order pool for the rest of your army. Today, I am stretching myself rather thin, including a lot of light infantry to allow two heavy hitters to do a run at the enemy.

Is it intended? Is it not? I have no idea. But even 15 orders to MY faction (sorry I have a limited expirience) feels like I need to stretch myself over. And I do not have points or cheap enough quality profiles to do so.

Edit: I never truly expirienced 20 troopers in my life, and most of my gaming group play elite-ish forces. But, as I already wrote, it is extremely interesting to me to see the opinion of 15 trooper limit being a bad thing, and I am reading in general about it with interest.

 

A change from N3 to N4 that actually would have helped Limited Insertion (one Combat group lists for you new folks) had it been implemented better was the addition of things like Tactical Awareness, NCO, and extra LT order to the ruless. If it had been widely implemented on the more expensive units it would have given them greater order parity with large order lists than they'd enjoyed before. Plus keeping a LI lists immunity to stripping orders turn one really evens the playing field.

 

You have no idea with how much envy I look at Yu Jing's IA, where, it feels like, half of the heavy infantry have at least one Tac.Awareness profile.