It's called the "kazak avalanche". But also camo spam and ruthless aggression should be hallmarks of the ariadnan faction. Balancing a video game is a different job than balancing the game on the table, and at some point something has to be left out, and every faction needs to be given a hat. These are generalisations and individual units may break the mold, but my suggestions are: Ariadna: units using simple but effective solutions, which are immune to hacking and sepsistor, but without the flashy hacking tools and newest tech, no cube resurrection etc. Aleph: units that are more elite in general, but Jack of all trades, master of none. PanO: medium to long range units that are less effective in close quarters. Yujing: short to medium range units, which are less effective at long range. Haqqislam: effective but not great at all ranges, gets some flashy stuff but can be hacked etc. Nomads: lots of random outcome abilities, hacking and shenanigans. Tohaa: lots of bonuses that come from triad links, ablative armour, pheromone abilities etc. Combined army: scary good but overly specialised units, and the ability to sepsistorise and steal units with cubes. Mercs: specialist units but limited access to cheap and plentiful units. O12: selection of units from every(human) faction, but with the chance of animosity between units causing support skills to fail.
I think I'd rather have a large scale, real time, game like c&c that could show us the stuff in the universe that won't fit in the tabletop game, since an X-com style game would be really close to what the tabletop game does already...
I would be all in on a X-com style game. None of this easy mode "Enemy Unknown" stuff. Get back to "UFO Defense" style, multi squad, unforgiving slaughter fest, or even something like Microsoft Close Combat. Now how many of you actually remember that one? The problem I have is I haven't played a RTS that I actually liked in the last 10 years.
The sectorials would actually be really hard to do. I mean, in general terms, Military Orders is about like playing Yu Jing's CC-capabilities with PanO units. JSA would actually be the easiest sectorial to implement, I think, as it pushes YJ's stated advantages (good in CC, not so good at long range) to an even greater extent. Ariadna and Nomad sectorials would be the easiest, same core gameplay with different unit mix.
