This is why Haqqislam is so great; you can make a great infowar list and befuddle opponents with techno-sorcery. When they wise up, you simply take a great unhackable list and laugh as their plans disintegrate!!
The way to ‘fix’ hacking is less about the hacking rules and more about making it relevant in the missions. Current ITS rules undervalues the nomination of specialists, and as a consequence Hackers are fairly inconsequential. The KHD is popular, as it is a specialist, that gives access to cheap cheerleaders, and is powerful if opportunity arises at no SWC cost. The HD(+) is popular, as it is a force multiplier. The rest are pretty much irrelevant to the game. So as hacking is fairly irrelevant, there is little point in having so many flavors of devices. They only serve to make hacking even less relevant, when their use is circumstantial. My ‘solution’ is to have two devices. An offensive and a support device, capable of running the same programs with different bonuses. Then add objectives/terrain, that are dependent on hackers, so as to make them inherent to the game, rather than an added layer. ‘Quality’ of hackers would be a function of the support their army gives them; WIP and the choice of remotes - Heck, remotes could just have dual stat charts (with support hacker on table and without). I’d say, this would be way more streamlined and give it that Gibson’esque cyberwar flavor.
I think @regelridderen is meaning that the type of specialist isn't that important as long as its a specialist. If that's what he's meaning then I'd agree. It would be good to see all specialists have more significance in terms of their specialty than the occasional +3 to a roll.
Overall, that bolded sentence is where I'd like the game to be. Agreed. I'd like having a variety of specialists to actually be important, not just "OK, I will grab a KHD and an FO to push buttons on the cheap."
The way to make a specialist be more important is to make the source of the specialist skill more important. I really don't agree that Hacking is in a place where +5/0.5 is a bad investment on an AHD versus lists that rely on hackable units, and I certainly do not agree that +3/0 for a KHD is a poor investment what-so-ever. The +1 FO investment can be dubious sometimes, but it does come with a Flash Pulse which is good, but a Paramedic is nearly always a waste of points because it doesn't come with anything extra. Not so with Hackers. If you have such an opinion regarding hackers, then maybe, just maybe, the problem is that Heavy Infantry and TAGs are not incentivised enough - meaning your hackers are operating in a target-poor environment. Still doesn't change that Hacking Devices in general need a bit more effect versus armies that doesn't use REM, HI or TAGs for their aggressive troops, but for every single other army, I'd like to see Hackable trait offer a bigger discount and then see how opinions change with regards to AHD. (And for something completely different: i.e. a random musing / completely bonkers idea) If the hacking device provided a grade which determined the DAM and special ammo of the programs loaded into them, you could have a Civilian Assault Hacking Device which was loaded with Lockpicker, Blackout, Spotlight, Gotcha!, and Overlord and a Military Assault Hacking Device which had the same programs but where the Civilian device was DAM 13, the Military device is DAM 15 DT across the board. Benefits of this would be that you could simulate quality and quantity separately. Some Nomads (among others) are described as having fairly improvised devices which would have advanced programs running at low power while Yu Jing would have high quality devices connected to the Yan Jing running fairly simple programs at high power (and of course Aleph and EI running cutting edge programs on cutting edge devices) This while also not equating a user's personal skill to the quality of the gear they are using, allowing a particularly skilled mercenary to have an improvised device using black market programs, but making up for it with personal high skill (i.e. WIP).
Which is hilarious (in itself). Lack of hacking should be a drawback/weakness not a strong advantage in this game ;/
Unless they play MO, IA, Onyx or OSS. The kind of thing you'd take a hacker list against. Also people seem to forget that main use for hackers is pretty much unlocking/buffing Remotes, which are hackable themselves. If your opponent brings nothing hackable then it means they can't shut your Tsyklon/Bulleteer/Rui Shi/TR Remote (no one said you can't use them offensively) with hacking either.
That is the way of low tech army. And it is often far better than proper hacking. And it's why KHD are so popular. Why spending orders to incapacitate something, when you can shot/smash/kill in other less expensive ways?
Hacking suffers from what combat has as an issue, too many charts (CC has like what 5-6 different martial arts tables, from guard, beserk, protheon) that its a pain to ever even remember half of them Half the hacking attacks never get used people just math out the best one (which is normally always the upgrade so not even on normal charts) for me I would -buff AHD -KHD gets SWC cost -combine white and defence hacking device (who even really uses white) -cut half the attack programs down to 2 core attacks (a defensive and an offensive on basic devices, or 2 attack or 2 defends for KHD and DHD) HD+ gives buffed versions removing this gives more room to unique supportware, maybe AHD can add breaker ammo to a REM, defence can add tinbots to people -if you want more uniqueness instead of adding more attack profiles add ammo options, so "im using a "Cracker" KHD this adds breaker to my normal 2 profiles" or "im using a "shielded" defensive hacking device, works similar to cover giving a -3 to wip and +3 to my BTS on top of counterstrikes normal stats" Keep same basic profiles just an ammo type adjustment that goes over the basic stats as a way to represent upgraded hacking devices. The issue in current infinity is there are far too many tables and profiles that never get used, partly because there are either just too many or people just get handed out upgrades that are just better than the others so why use them. This extends as said to combat, Guard should just be physical stat buff, 6th sense and a martial arts level, instead it gets a separate table that no one remembers and is just worse than martial arts for most part My personal set up would be HD- basic supportware, a combi style meh hacking and defence attack (fairy dust, the REM buffs) AHD- 1 support ware giving breaker to a remote, an anti HI, anti Tag, spotlight, blackout KHD- its bonus to go through repeaters, 2 hacker only attacks (1 for fighting basic dudes and 1 that cuts BTS) DHD- 1 supportware that adds tinbots to fight against KHD and AHD, 2 defence attacks HD+- normal hacking device with improved stats on their attacks, but mostly getting white noise and cybermask EVO- an amalgamation of the others with a few extra supportwares Upgrades "Cracker" - adds breaker "improved"- adds +1 burst "Script kiddy"- can hold 1 extra support ware a turn "Shielded"- inbuilt tinbot
Hackers are primarily included in my list to score classifieds and cap objectives. Secondary use is controlling my opponent. (They can even control lists that aren’t predominantly HI etc). They only buff rems if I’m building a list skewed towards that concept, or both things happen to exist in my list for some other reason.
Agreed. People about crap themselves when I break out the Samurai 7 list (DoTanko Pain Train plus an O-Yoroi, Yojimbo, Keisotsu hacker, Doc and Engineer). They have a hard time dealing with that much heavy metal unless they go hacking heavy. That's a pretty cool idea! And it would likely let us reduce the number of hacking programs to a more sane level. Totally agree.
Again with this, the costing of the KHD is fine. If a KHD picks up an SWC cost it will need to pick up more generalist programs to compensate for the cost. It's everything else that needs adjusting, AHD needs to lose some points but maintain the SWC cost, normal HD could probably stand to lose it's SWC cost(due to being fairly ubiquitous/standard issue), same goes for DHD/WHD(due to a super narrow focus like the KHD). Additionally making the KHD cost SWC fucks with the hacking ecosystem in not a good way and negatively effects the viability HI/TAG lists. the former due to trying to protect friendly hackers becomes harder to the point of screw it I'm just going to apply rifle to face or just not bother. In regards to the latter given the high swc cost of HI and tag centric lists would make fitting a KHD extremely awkward and make it so you wouldn't be able to run enough (if any) to effectively protect it and you'd be back to a game state where one or two AHDs and a well placed repeater or two can trivially shut down and entire army with little to no risk. If youre worried about KHD's breaking some kind of balance remember Tinbots(Which we really should see more of) and EVOs do force mods against them that they can't ignore, a significant amount tend to be in the midfield, so pretty deep in your repeater net if you've set one up so if they twitch you can just dogpile the poor bastard and fry is brain.
