I've been saying this since the Hatamoto was first shown, with just one loadout and a skill censored. It's not a problem of nesting Vs denesting of skills/gear, it's a straight problem of the amount of skills and gear added to every new profile, in fact it was mentioned how the Hatamoto would, in N3 style of skill nesting, avoid three skills in the whole bible... To be fair, those are the easier skills... an order/stat with a minus applies to all FtF rolls to the enemy, with a plus to almost all rolls to the unit with it, and the measures point to extra dodge distance when successfull. Why are positives not always added? Blame the brilliant idea of the GangBomb (because flashbang was too easy to imagine, I suppose...), a skill that adds to the trooper's dodge... but only if FtF, and never against templates of any kind. So an exception to a general rule ("all positives are added to the troop's test") with two exceptions itself... It's called power creep. And they have, in effect at least, decided to use it to phase out old profiles so they can churn out new models of troops that are mostly the same role as the old ones but with more bells and whistles, so they can claim that the old profiles are no longer being used, so they can stop producing those old models without suffering the backlash from retiring an "outdated" (that is, no longer selling as well as they want it to) sectorial. It is quite depressing, but yes, most of the problems I have found in the game over the years come from badly written skills/gear that are needed to justify more entries in the Army, done to sell models otherwise unasked for while asked profiles get no model for years...
In fact i think it would be possible to keep the old names and add modifiers like now, Camouflage 0/-3/-6 grant marker state, surprise attack and the stated modifier, TO Camouflage 0/-3/-6 grant hidden deployment, surprise attack, marker state and modifier, hyperdinamics +X instead of Lv 1, Lv 2, and so on. You still have the possibility of give some troopers de-nested skills, like give only hidden deploy to someone and nothing else. Would not be perfect and cause to some bugs but profiles could have been much cleaner
Yeah exactly that. To bad it doesn't exist at all, if it would competent people like me could easily find it. /Sarcasm
Well, when you already created litteraly thousands of profiles, I guess you have to pile up skills to just make a new mini different than the previous ones. Otherwise, it'll just be a copy of something already existing, which is kind of boring. Or you have to multiply skills like crazy. Or to remove a lot of previous profiles to make room for the new ones.
I feel like there were logical things that were easy to remember as a package, and then were were things that required looking up the rules on the regular. Camo, from your example, was a logical and organic package which indeed was easy to understand - little to no need unpacking that, although I might prefer if Stealth was separate (and maybe even more prominently displayed in the profile the same way Hackable is - that part is important, IMO). Morat and Remote Presence, on the other hand, were fine as long as you met them often, but sometimes still required reading up on (not that many Morats in my community, you see). I appreciate unpacking these. And then again - there were skills that could do wildly different things based on the level, like Full Auto or Valor (Courage and No Wound Incapacitation were the same skill at different levels, remember that? Makes sense lore-wise, game design-wise - not so much). I am not particularly concerned with increase of text bloat - there's basically the same amount of info, it's just getting frontloaded to you instead of needing to go into the rules and see that there are two-three other rules packaged with what you see in the Army profile. Not necessary for experienced players, convenient for newbies. So at the end of the day, I see unpacking as a net positive - if not without faults. Oh, here's an idea: maybe we could have two display modes in the Army - a "beginner" mode would write out all the rules in the profile, and an "experienced" one, which would roll up often-used combos into shorthands. Would also make it easier to see gimmick units like Nadhir's "TO Camo without Camo" schtick. P.S.I also feel like screaming "Back in my days, we took our three pages of describing how units change formations from march column to line (with additional page-long section dedicated to cavalry specifically) and we LIKED 'em!" at the clouds. But I guess the baseline for what constitutes an overly complicated ruleset and what isn't are different for everyone.
