What do you feel is the current game balance?

Personally I can't hear it anymore.
Yes, Tohaa are easier to play, cause the forgive more mistakes.
But all people only complain about the Symbiomates.
That they are lacking high BS 14+ values due to only 3 man Fireteam: Doesn't interest anybody.
That the have no buffable REM's: Doesn't matter.
They they die like flies when the Symbiomate is gone: Who cares?
That there armor values are terrible bad and don't exist on their second wound without Symbiont Armor: So what?
That you can take of a Symbiont Armor with a crit and the Symbiomate is wasted: Isn't seen.

You have to adapt your playstyle against them, cause you can't play the game with decimating the Order Pool of Tohaa that easy, that's true.
If you don't play the mission and only try to kill your opponent, then, and only then, Tohaa is a nightmare opponent.

In my opinion, Makaul are far more stronger in Tohaa then the Symbiomate. Link team filler who are so incredible good are rare.

People complain always about things outside their comfort zone, like Symbiomates, Muttawi'ah etc.

Yes, all of them are challenging, but they are all beatable.

It's not the army, it's you! is the truth of infinity. Yes, some faction are easier to play, but a better player will usually always beat you.

 

Of all the new sectorials, I think Invincible Army is potentially very strong in tournaments. It's trivial to have 13-14 orders in a single combat group (even if those profiles didn't have TacAwareness, you'd still take the Tinbot and HMG troops, so of course you take the TacA versions), and you can't lose two orders due to a Command Token because you're a single combat group.

Yes, there are some major vulnerabilities in IA (everything is hackable!), but orders are still key.

 

Also, Tohaa doesn't have access to Sixth Sense (except the Kawaii Sentinels), so we are vulnerable to camo troopers and their surprise attacks (specially when they carry teamplate weapons).

 

Sry, pronouncing in forums would be a good thing

I didn't take your statement personal and it wasn't ment as an direct answer to your post.It was an answer to the general complainings about Tohaa.

One day I was overrun by a double PanO Tag list, what frustrated me, cause my opponent played it cause he knew I can't hack his TAGs. After the game, I thought about all my mistakes I have done, cause I had a chance to win this match, if I had played better.
And Tohaa is a easy to play faction, cause your faults aren't usually as punishing as in other armies

Therefore

 

On the overall balance on a faction-to-faction level I feel like infinity is in a pretty good place, even the factions mainly considered below average can do great in tournaments, for example our playgroup tested out a format of team tournaments, and a team with morat-onyx-vanilla took a second place if I remember correctly, and the new update for morats might not be very exciting, but brings a lot of new tools and possibilities to the faction, we even have a pretty good shasvastii player locally, and things like tohaa or neoterra might be a bit stronger than average, but still the skill of a player is far mor impactiful than the faction.

On the in-faction balance I can only say a bunch of things about vanilla CA, since I have the most play experiense with them. In short - it feels like it's design space is "take a basic type of unit, slap some questionably useful things on it, crank the price up to eleven and call it a day" I am of course exadurating, but this was basically my main problem with vanilla CA for all the time I played it.

Without a doubt there is a fair share of great units, but basically there is VERY little things that made it into my lists:
Charontid HMG Lt
Anathematics Hacker Lt
Avatar
Sphinx, though I had little succsess with it
Over and Xeodrones were pretty allright combined with an EI aspect in LI lists
R-drones, Ikadrones and Imetrons are just a nobrainer if you want to play anything more than a 10 order lists, since our line infantry is anything but a proper cheerleaders for their points
Daturazi with chain rifle - the best of the 14 points orders we have, they just give you too much to not take those, always took at least one, 2 to 3 regullarly, and sometimes all 4 of them.
then we have two of our best SWC investments - Q-drone and Noctifer ML, basically best ARO and one of the best attack pieces we have for vanilla CA, so those got to the point of being almost an autoinclude in every list for me.
for my 3rd year of playing CA I got myself a couple of old Pretas, and boy oh boy they were so great, being able to have a super mobile dogged chain rifle when about all of your army can't efficiently trade with enemy units is a godsend, with some clever Daturazi placement you can set up a nice smokescreen for those and after aro threats are dealt with running them to deal with infiltrators or to bring some template weapons into enemy deployment was very-very good.
Then there is a shotgun Kurgat, which was also almost always in my lists - since most models with W have dogged/NWI and Kurgat is 6 points cheaper than Dr.worm
B&K were a great addition to bring CA back to a good hacking faction, and having a synchronised bot for aro is useful.

And then we have just a loooooot of things ranging from somewhat useful HMG Maakrep or Rodok, to just almost absurdly priced camo infiltrators. Oh, and Speculo never really worked for me, the best thing she did was being a distraction carnifex for my opponents.

As a detailed example of too much buck for your bang type of units - Shrouded/Malignos, they basically pay a whole bunch of poits over any other camo infiltrator for BS12 instead of 11 on Shrouded which is useful, and for combination of Shasvastii and Automedkit, which are both only marginally useful, and ONLY useful when things on the table already gone very wrong.

So main problem for me was - a bunch of units that are so good for their price that they erased the competition with other similiar roles, a Big_Scary_Thing of your choosing, and a bunch of order generators/supports which are also don't have any competition, and then there is almost no place for some unconventional units.

And a funny bit about external balance - I recently switched to OSS and enjoying my NWI+nanopulser on Dasyus instead of Shas+Automedkit on Malignos. Though it i just my personal preference, and does not illustrate the whole picture.

 

Hell if I know.
I think the game has best factions but I also think they change based on missions.
I think most factions have a "this is bullshoot" troops and that is it's own form of balance.

There are only a few factions that I just don't look at when list building.

 

I think my issues with balance are more related to how some rules work or in my opinion conflict with the spirit of infinity to engage both players and provide choices. The list you posted has 6 Makauls all of which carry eclipse smoke grenades which can almost completely shutdown interactivity. In this army's active turn they might not have extremely powerful attack pieces but they should be able to avoid all defenses besides mines. This can can allow them to perform objectives and move into a better position to attack with a very limited response from the reactive player which is frustrating. Defensively if a Makaul succeeds he might be able to prevent any kind of follow up against his team besides mines, intuitive attacks and CC. Because of triads they get much more millage out of their smoke grenades. I don't think they are the only problem in the game it's just that I've been disliking how smoke makes the game less interactive and nobody does it better then Makauls like in the list you posted.

 

This. I said it on a different thread as well. They’re gonna be strong.

 

Spoiler: Responses to other comments here, truncating for readability

Lacking in BS over 14 doesn't really matter -- the Sukeul exists, and plenty of vanilla factions get away with it.

They certainly don't "die like flies" when Symbiomates go away - Tohaa still take more wounds per point than any other faction and have consistently higher burst in ARO than any other faction. Tohaa is insanely tanky. Armor values mean very little in this game, Tohaa are better in that they pay consistently less for armor and instead get cheap wounds. And finally, any reasoning based on crits is ridiculous -- we might as well boil the whole game down to "crit more and you'll win." It's not productive to argue along those lines.

As someone playing the "least PanO" sectorial of PanO, I hate this line of reasoning. Why should I be punished for doing what my faction does best? Nomad players don't have to avoid pushing buttons in order to win games, I shouldn't have to avoid shooting people.

Think about it this way -- for 42/1 a Tohaa player can guarantee they burn at least 4 of your orders. How many ARO pieces in the entire game are that cost efficient? A linked Sukeul can tank at least 6 wounds, and in most matchups he will have won once by then. It's insane. Sure "you can crit," but it's not like he has to decide before the roll whether or not to use it -- Symbiomates are the only piece of equipment in the game that fundamentally alter the order resolution sequence. It's bad design, and the designers should feel bad for having it in their game.

Everything being hackable isn't a huge issue, the Tac Sense Zuyong packs his own Tinbot and the Haidao KHD exists. In general you probably have to pick a guy off before hacking becomes viable. but going for the straight hack seems wildly inefficient for most hackers.

For the question at hand, I think external balance between factions is pretty good with a couple of exceptions. I think the solution that CB has been making about the general issues with balance between sectorials and vanilla has been pretty good all around (increased link team flexibility), and I think its very telling that the sectorial and vanilla that tend to perform the best (Tohaa/ISS) have lots of flexible link team options. I think moving forward, CB should continue to put stricter AVA restrictions on Vanilla, the way they have with VIRD units in Vanilla PanO, for example. It's very telling IMO that Mutts are considered on the "very broken" end of the spectrum and are AVA4 in both vanilla and Hassassins (and I think most players saying AVA2 in Vanilla would be a positive change for balance.)

I think internal balance on the other hand is totally whack in a lot of sectorials. In JSA, for example, Saito got specialist operative. This was fine in Druze, since he was the only CC specialist and TO unit, and Druze didn't have other high-value specialists to compete with him. In JSA, on the other hand, he now competes very directly with Ninjas. It's a good change altogether, since it makes him more versatile in a sectorial that was really lacking versatility, but it makes you really need a good reason to take a Ninja over specialist Saito. The HI in the faction have the same issue -- it's very hard to justify the Domaru/Tanko link over a list with an Oniwaban + Saito + a bunch of other stuff for the same price. (I expect this will be a point of controversy, but I think most ITS heavyweights will agree with me on that point.)

Next look at internal balance in Aleph. Look at what a Dasyu costs versus a Proxy Mk2. Even considering the 10 points more you have to take for the Proxy FO, the MK2 is still cheaper for a higher BS and higher WIP unit. Proxies really fuck up balance internally, because you're *always* going to take them, and even internal balance within the proxies is bad -- when did you last see Mk3 or Mk4 on a table, or the Mk5 w/ MMLX?

CA has this problem as bad as anyone else, to the point where if anyone wants to play vanilla, I ask them if they are taking an aspect, and if not, I ask them why they aren't just playing Onyx and being happier. @Erbent hit on a lot of the issues already, but I would like to second that one especially big issue is the lack of decently playable lt in a faction that seems to have the primary benefit of being fairly unaffected by loss of lt.

In general, I think the "it's not your army, it's you" is incredibly reductionist and is used to deflect from serious issues that do currently exist in the game .

 

Cause you don't play the mission!
Infinity is nowadays a mission base game. Sorry, but if you don't like the misdions, play another game.

On average I lose one Symbiont Armor/Symbiomate per game due to a crit. Perhaps I'm unlucky, but for me it is a serious weakness.

 

How many do you take? A full four of them? Because I would contend that any unit where you include max AVA by default is probably poorly balanced against other choices.

 

Then what am I supposed to do with my +1 BS I'm paying for?

By your logic, the BS advantage I pay for across my troops is more a penalty due to how much it costs given I can't take full advantage of it -- and that's poor design. Or alternatively, the missions penalize me for taking full advantage of my troops' abilities, which is flat out poor design.

Its like if CB just decided that if you play nomads for a certain mission, you automatically lose two OP. Do you think that would be fair?
Infinity is a game about options. Wholesale deciding that the most playable option for a given army shouldn't be used for an arbitrary reason is ridiculous.

I like missions, but if you've ever played PanO, you would know that the best way PanO is shooting first and pushing later. Just because your faction of choice has great specialists doesn't mean we all do, and just because you want to play boring missions that penalize human interaction like Tic-Tac-Toe and Comms Center doesn't mean the rest of us want to play your eurogame with you.

 

Kaeltar with 2 symbiomates, CoC (so specialist) and being a triad filler for 21 pts 0.5 swc. I think I would use two of them in most of my lists if I played Tohaa.

 

If you play Nomads, is it fair that you can't hack Ariadna or Tohaa?
You know that this can happen, therefore you have to build a list, where you only can play your strength.
If you only have your steam hammer choices, where you can get TO-/Camo infiltrator it's your personal fault.
Stop complaining and adapt your playstyle.
Tohaa stops steam hammer from working properly, what is good for the overall meta. Cause why should you play something else, when you can take the easy way with brute force.

 

2 for my defensive Triad and 2 for my attack pieces.
But I take in Nomads always HMG Intruder + smoke and/or HMG Kriza and in Onyx the HMG Q-Drone and/or the ML Noctiver, cause this are auto includes.
My Mutts didn't arrive till now, so I didn't play Hassasins till now.
And if I will play OSS in the Future, I will take the Dakini link.
In vanilla Ariadna, I will always play the two allowed Chasseurs too.

And only to say, that using max ava is a sign for inbalace is a bad joke when ava is 2.

 

I don't think that any Sectoral or Army is any stronger than any other, really, or at least they can all beat each other with skill, experience with one's troops etc being the real factor, and I'd consider that to basically mean that Infinity is very balanced.

There are some things that are egariously good, and some Sectorals and Armies that are not particularly interesting or varied to play, but almost all of the game's imbalance is internal, why would I take this profile when there's this profile etc. Even then a lot of the time if you do take the so called "worse option" it'll do great. Like the Moira AHD in Vanilla, where people say "why would I take that?" and that's fair, but I took one once just to see what happened and hey, ODD MI (forward deployment!) Assault Hacker with a MULTI Rifle, turns out to be pretty useful in firefights, locking down heavy troops, grabbing objectives etc.

 

Mission can be accomplished differently, and each faction has a preferable way of doing the mission. There is tohaa triad camping the objective, what can I do as pano player? The only available option is to shoot at them.

Back to the topic I would say that there are roughly 3 tiers of armies. Gaps between them are not that big, however low tier armies give no option to do a mistake.
Top armies: ISS, Tohaa, Vanilla ariadna, Invicible Army(not sure about objective missions), Vanilla nomads, Varuna
Worst armies: Morats, Tunguska, Druze, MO, maybe FRRM(never seen them)