It's funny. But I think this is bad for literally all the reasons why I thought it was bad to remove them. That takes real talent. On the other hand: Tohaa get screwed the most by this. So overall it seems entirely fair and reasonable.
I'm a big fan of Xi. In a link with perimeter weapons, he's decently hard to kill (or at least sucks up extra orders to be killed). Nice choice there. Tariq is maybe OP, but meh it's one dude.
I remember seeing Fatality L2 and being like "This is shitty, but at least some Symbiomates will get ignored." The trend with Tariq is continuing, I guess.
Looks like a bit of a weird bonus but I like it, basically like a Datatracker Order as well as an LT order for these characters? I wonder if it works out whether we'll see that be something extending to all ITS Datatrackers. That'd be cool tbh, and promote the use of non-linked, tough, non-marker troops AKA Heavy Infantry and such.
Also I am not quite sure where this idea that Tarik is obscenely OP is coming from. He's a BS 13 Spitfire that has a slightly higher chance to crit, is fast and can jump. That's good! But he's also big, pretty easy to kill if you catch him on the Active turn, and doesn't deal well with anything that has firefight mods. You pretty easily can kill an unsupported Tarik with such horrifying OP troops as... a Croc Man or Spektr with a Combi-Rifle...
Very ad-hoc choice of troopers "needing" a bonus. Tarik is now a double miss. First removing him antagonised one group, now buffing him antagonises the other. Don't really know what else to say.
You mean skew it harder for those who field very difficult to kill Datatrackers like Shikami, TAGs, Achilles or Su-Jian? There's a sign in the zoo that says "Please don't feed Achilles" You're downplaying him so much that I'd dread to hear your take on Achilles. Nothing in the game sustains continued pressure in reactive turn, but Tarik is absolutely up there among the most cost-ineffective units to attack in this game. It's mostly about the comparison to the other units that got the bonus, though, where Tarik and Kusanagi are both very useful as Datatrackers regardless of this bonus while the others barely makes a blip.
Definitely seems a bit odd in the balance... Tarik is a unit that can make use of Orders and can be Datatracker, so an extra one is quite good, while Voronin can't do either so that extra order has nowhere to go. Not that doing little narrative twists and rules experiments is inherently an awful thing, but even if it doesn't make any unit completely broken this makes it evident that there wasn't much thought put in about balance or gameplay impact, and that seems strange for something being implemented in the Infinity Tournament System.
Tarik is good but also 50+ points so I'd expect him to be good. He's just not so good that him having 1 extra order is anything to get worked up about, which is true about pretty much anything in the game. That Datatracker system would encourage people to take powerful, expensive Datatrackers, which is clearly CB continuing their trend of trying to push away from camo and order spam and towards smaller more balanced/elite lists, something I think they have been doing well. But if I'm honest the main reason I'm positive about this news is because I'm fucking sick to death of this forum being full of people whinging about inconsequential shit all the fucking time. Like I mean, most of the threads in this sub-forum are some form of "CB HAVE RUINED IT AGAIN" and it's just tiresome. You can be critical! People are allowed to do that! I have done that myself! But there is such a thing as blowing stuff out of proportion and this is a good example of exactly that.
Ironclad and giving TAGs the ability to be specialists again is nicely in the same vein, along with LI and protecting single Combat Group lists.
How DARE you make even the slightest intimation that CB have NOT totally ruined it! It’s an article of faith around here, you know?
@Wolf you're being ironic about it, but if you dig through the old forums you'll probably find someone posting something very similar, but the other way around. These forums have had ups and downs, but a constant is that equally people are bad at posting nuanced crticism, people are bad at reading their interests get criticised. What varies is which side (so to speak) is most audible.
It's not that CB has ruined it, it's that this decision shows that CB, or whoever is making the decisions for ITS, isn't thinking of "how can I make this fun and balanced." Instead they're just throwing darts at a board while blindfolded and drunk. That isn't the right way to treat their flagship product, and it doesn't inspire confidence as a fan when a cursory understanding of game theory and design gives you a better understanding than the people actually driving the thing.
The are absolutely thinking "how can we make this fun and balanced," you just don't agree with their assessment or conclusion. As it happens, I thought Backd00r was poorly implemented and communicated. I saw comments showing that CB were taking note of feedback in this very forum. I don't have any particular problem with this next stage, and I certainly don't have any overall problem with the direction that CB are going. Other people are allowed to disagree, but it's the constant whinging which does my head in.
I disagree. They have other priorities than those two things; it's not that they're shooting for those goals and failing, they're shooting for other goals and hoping that fun and balance just happen. Uprising/JSA showed that. I'll continue to criticize when I think CB makes a misstep. I'll compliment them when they do things well (the new Tunguska models, for example). The issue is that they never say "taking feedback into account, we're not going to do x" because the founder's syndrome is too strong over there, I think.
Remind us, again, of the name of your highly successful miniatures and gaming company and your flagship product?
Games Workshop proved you don't have to make a fun or balanced game to be successful as a miniature/gaming company. I'm talking about that, not about CB's success as a company. Or do you think GW is beyond criticism as well?
This is always an incredibly weak argument and the go to for people unwilling to look critically at their beloved companies.
Let’s see... trust the judgment of and decisions made by a company that produces a product I rather enjoy, or the hyperbolic criticisms of anonymous forumites, who (absent any proof to the contrary) haven’t a leg to stand on with their repeated insistence that they could do better... yeah, I’ll stick to the path I’m on, rather than take every fulano, melano and zulano who prattle on about knowing better seriously. If you and @Hecaton, et al, truly believe you know and can do better than CB, by all means do it. However, you and yours repeated assertions you can do better are no more than bright colors on the wind unless you step on the sand and do it.
