Dunno varies from person to person I guess. As for myself I find "hey I played a couple games with a friend and that has the same weight as your entire chain of arguments" to be quite annoying to deal with. For me that would be rude if I would assume the people doing that had ill intentions. To raise awareness might as well bring it up - putting anecdotal experience to counter an argument is quite rude. It's also unlikely to receive a cheery and positive response. The person who put his effort and thoughts into making arguments that are generally applicable and work in context with other arguments to elaborate a general conclusion based on that will have a hard time to give a damn about how the dice fell on your table. Also keep in mind that people just operate on different levels of expectations. Some people don't mind anything as long as they get pretty models to paint and play the game as an afterthought. Some people just want an airtight ruleset and as close to perfectly balanced Factions as possible. For example: if you like to play casually, might wanna refrain from joining a discussion about if the new Tohaa HI being WIP 12 takes optimization too far.
Not to throw fuel on the fire but consider: 1) Your experiences/arguments are also based on the games you've played with your friend/meta 2) You're assuming that anyone that disagrees with you is lacking your level of experience without just cause 3) Mathfinity and practice are not quite the same and stuff that seems poor via a chain of arguments in practice can perform differently. Vacuum arguments tend not to capture the myriad of smaller things that can make a unit shine in a real game. And the terror of randomness. Feel free to disregard my thoughts on this all of this as I have zero experience playing MO and have only seen them played. And while they haven't taken tournaments in any of the 3 metas I've been part of during my last 4 years of moving around, the players at least seem to have quite a lot of fun. I just wanted to highlight what I would consider to be some somewhat self-serving thought processes.
http://infinitythewiki.com/en/Natural_Born_Warrior "Troopers with any Level of Natural Born Warrior automatically have the Surprise Attack, Stealth and V: Courage Special Skills." So while hackable, he does have stealth.
For what it's worth, I played a fair amount of games with new MO in my local club, then ended up 3rd in a 14 players tournament (Major win against Invincible Army on Unmasking, Draw against 20+ orders Ariadna on Power Pack, Draw against Nomads on Capture & Protect - mainly because of lack of time). In no way did I feel limited in my game and most importantly, I had a lot of fun playing MO, which wasn't the case before. I do agree that new MO has a lot of faults, but it's a fun and very playable faction, at least in standard tournaments. And despite all these flaws, the true strength of the Military Orders remains the forgiving 2 Wounds...
I honestly don't find the new MO any more flawed than JSA. You'll have similar success/failure with either sectorial.
There is nothging forgiving in having 2W. It's just a small insurance against "combi/pistol crit ARO".
New players seem to do a bit better with the extra wounds of an HI force. So I'll have to disagree strongly with this from personal experience.
Forgiving can be when you make mistakes. ARO crits "just happen" there's nothing you can do about it (unless you like a Tarik can just crit better ^^).
Ah but there is something you can do about it. Have another wound because your HI. :P Theres nothing like the feeling of getting crit, surviving, and killing that "lucky" bastard anyway.
Yes. But "forgiving" is used when you make mistakes. Eating a "ARO Crit" is not a mistake. In this I would say that Magister links are "forgiving" because 90% of time they are just able to dodge on 17s (on top of ARM 3 and 2W), and this might carry you through enemy's active turn. "simple" 2nd would rarely do that (unless you only take 1 at a time and be able to duck behind total cover).
1) Nope you are quite right about that. 2&3) Hear you on the difficulty to factor the terror of randomness in a discussion, really do. Which is why the "couple games played" argument doesn't sit well with me. In essence it's just tiresome to have the following style of argument. I). You take a look at stuff and notice something you find concerning. II). You make your point, throw in some references, compare Profiles with simlar ones, take a look at the bigger picture and run the numbers if the dice calculator can help you. It's never quite as clean as you'd like as this is a complex game. III). Someone shows up to tell you he is right and you are wrong because he played two games. So whenever that scheme fits effort invested starts to dwindle. It's impossible to find the motivation to do that every time when your best case you can hope for is the other guy gracefully granting you a agree to disagree. The average guy on the internet who just based his entire point of view on the premise of "I played two games in my basement and I liked it" will not put in the effort to take a proper look at the counterargument. He himself has brought nothing to the discussion you could come around on or refute. But he will also keep rearing his head and demands that his oppinion is as valid as yours because you haven't. So you're stuck in a situation you can't win unless you want to spell it out for him. In which case he'll obviously takes it personal and that's that. With absolutely no offense to @Minos - this appeared while I'm tiping this: It does have exactly one actual argument, the forgiving 2 wounds. Which isn't exactly a hallmark of MO as there is only so much HI or multiwound models you can run and effective Wounds are much higher on Warbands or Symbio Armour troops. Other than that it's unfortunatley exactly what I summed up above. "Hey guys I got a win and two draws, MO is fine". 14 players local tournament, not even 3 major victories and first place. The problem is I'd expect someone able to fo 5-0 with MO in a 40 player tournament to end up confirming that the result was mostly luck or opponents making misplays, instead of MO being a good Sectorial. That's how I feel about my Aleph, it's a good faction. Won 5 games with it in a 40 player tournament and took home a first place. Track record is 16-2-1 with them. That's partially because I spent a lot of time to get good at this. But a big factor here is that Alpeh is a very strong Faction from my point of view. It's also my most common opponent next to Tohaa so I know them inside out from every angle. Out of these 5 games I screwed one up really bad. No dice involved, purely bad decisionmaking. But Aleph being Aleph it turned out you can screw up against a weaker Sectorial and still win, even if it gets decent dice. No one is really to blame, tabletop players generally are more laid back and just wanna have fun, nothing wrong with that. Glad you like MO guys. But we all could have gotten something better. You might still play it and have fun with that, but to me it just means I feel forced to move to greener pastuers and play something with less of a handicap to actually have fun. All that weird and clunky stuff dragging MO down now is just impossible to ignore or talk away. The Factions I consider the best ones fit together like a charm. You build a list and at some point things click together and you're satisfied. You get the feeling that the list is complete. Each and every single MO list seems to force a lot of terrible choices and leaves you with holes everywhere, it's not like I haven't tried over and over. It's also not as if I have a claim to understand every Sectorial right off the bat, JSA for instance took quite a while to figure out. MO however isn't that different than before, but just that much worse off at the same time. Yeah someone else pointed that out last page. Thankfully that didn't end up biting me in the ass in a game against Spector, so thanks again guys.
That definition is just your own. Forgiving to us means your able to handle when the dice are against you. Both your own and your opponent's so surviving crits counts as "forgiving". By forgiving we just mean its easier to handle for players.
Heh. Semantics. 2W are "forvigin" combis ARO CRITS (and occasional chainrifle) 2W are not "forgiving" bad plays, mistakes, genious plans of enemy.
Happy to hear more players are having fun with new MO :) @Teslarod, sorry that all I could offer for now was an anecdotal argument. I'm fully for having a discussion backed by some thoughts, I simply don't have the time now for more in-depth analysis, but will get back with one later today. Hopefully then we will be able to talk like equals.
MO is bottom tier. I think we all get that. Every game has its bottom tier armies/characters. You have to accept that, hope they patch the problems, and then take them or leave Them. At the same time, watching a high level but low tier player continue to fight the uphill battle and come out on top scores real points in the hero book. The real frustrating part is that Infinity is a fairly sizeable investment, and getting the joy sucked out of your $300 army sucks. I think MO should just pack their bags and head for Svarlarheima. We already know that they have a large presence from the Military Order. Svarlarheima can be the new and improved MO + a collection of other great shooters such as the Nisses. That’s what I think CB should do.
@Teslarod - a sound and reasoned argument in your reply. But its worth remembering that changing the average forum posters mind isn't going to bring the changes you seek to your favourite faction. I used to think it was purely based on CB's internal balance testing but now thanks to the series of videos that Bostria's done, we also know that they look at unit sales and to an unknown extent, tournament performance (assuming people bothered to upload their lists). The important part I think is the unit sales. People enjoy the look of space knights. People will buy space knights anyway and figure out for themselves later if they're good/bad... MO balance changes are likely to be way low on CB's to do list :( So being frustrated at not being able to 'win' the argument or change the forum randoms mind sadly isn't going to bring you much peace anyway...
If what a friend of mine reported to me is right, MO finished with 3rd place at the EIC, the Satellite at Majorque with 100 players. It was 400 pts and SoF though, so I think this will be dismissed fast.
Well, basicly that were hopes of many people (me included) and previous seemed "interesting" and good value. And then full changes came and list building in MO is "completly new experience"...