Sorry to be more off-topic but out of 152 armies, only 37 were Vanilla. Not counting Tohaa and NA2. I think that tells you something.
What do you mean? The Link teams? I'd say the Wildcards can make for some fun flexible teams but it also make sit more complicated!
Yeah. I think it's much better to have fewer exceptions to the rules. Options and variety are nice, but I think they are currently going overboard. When you can have links that don't even have the actual unit in there...that's gone too far. The various characters counting as whichever troop type. Or various units acting as Wildcards is okay. I just think it's too many right now.
Given that we're, what, two weeks out from a large number of Sectorials getting updated or released? That's not surprising. Generic armies also only make up 8 out of the 36 factions listed, so 37 out of 131 non-NA2 armies is higher than expected - if it was an even split there would only have been 29 generic armies. EDIT P.S. Apologies for carrying on the off-topic, although it's not very off-topic.
7 if you have it General (Vanilla) vs. "Armies that have Fireteams" Tohaa wouldn't count as General. I just think the Fireteams in general, but now the new teams with wildcard, have made it even harder for General armies to compete. The variety of General is not as much of an issue. Especially for some sectorals. They have everything they need to get the jobs done and more. I wills say though that I was a bit effected by the Uprising and losing a lot of variety with Yu Jing. They didn’t help matter by making the new troops only AVA1 to General YJ. As far as Fireteam restrictions, it can make it very interesting and fun. In Ikari, the the restrictions are pretty tough. You Must have the right combination of troops and can't reform if you loose it. You must plan accordingly. Dahshat however can't make new teams almost on the fly due to the Wildcards. Especially Bounty Hunters able to jump in.
Higher? That's less Vanilla vs. Armies with Fireteams. Rumble was about 3 to 1. I'm curious as to how those General armies did in comparison too.
7/35 possible armies do not have Fireteam access 37/152 armies going to be a rumble do not have Fireteam access. Doing some rough maths 7/35 = 28/140 7/35 = 35/175 So there a higher proportion of non-Fireteam present at Rumble than there are non-Fireteam armies in the game.
Maybe I'm just thinking Black and white. Vanilla & "Forces with Fireteams" period. It might be equal as a percentage of forces but I only see less and less Vanilla being played but fireteams are too good to pass up.
I can only write about the parts of Infinity that interest me. Non-sectorial Aleph has Post Humans and a TAG. (And probably other stuff. I'm still putting the Operation models together...). Non-sectorial Combined Army has Sepsitor, an the primary El constructs. Tohaa are in a weird place where Tohaa is a non-sectorial with the benefits of a sectorial (triads). So what factors would make someone with Tohaa models play Spiral Corps vs. non-sectorial? It seems to be a complicated trade off between profiles that probably overshadows one fireteam getting slightly better benefits. One of the things that's been mentioned in seminars and/or by Bostria is that the Combined Army "disjointed collective" look was believed to be a negative concerning sales. Extrapolating from that, the sectorials probably often combine two factors: 1. They're the more recent shiny new toy. 2. As a subset of the factions models, sectorials have a more cohesive overall concept. I mean, think about the Tohaa Spiral Corps and the Combined Army Shasvastii. The marketing focus is on the sectorials. (And then there's the NA2 stuff where if you happen to like a certain concept, it's sectorial or nothing.) That's likely to produce a bias the attendance figures. Disclaimer: For all I know, some day CB's going to get to a point where they change the rules so that non-Tohaa non-sectorial forces don't spend command tokens to perform coordinated orders. Or someday there will be enough sectorials that non-sectorial play will be discontinued. Or they'll choose some other way of implementing the Impending Squad Based Apocalypse before the Inevitable Combined Army Victory.
This is pretty much the route Privateer Press has gone with Warmachine and Hordes. The themes (sectorials) have so many benefits that you are basically shooting yourself in the foot if you aren't playing within them as they offer free models, deployment benefits, extra rules and such. The rational being they can playtest and release these themes (sectorials) in discrete modules.
The way PP did it took all the creativity out of list building though, whereas in Infinity you can still do interesting or off the wall stuff within a sectorial.
This is the big one for me. That being said, I still really dislike Onyx, and any time I make a list in it I wish I were playing Vanilla or MAF instead, so I don't usually bother.
Onyx is strange. It's such a big mix of different units that it partially feels like vanilla inside vanilla. I would have prefered a more pure sectorial over Onyx, either EI or Sygmaa.
If it weren't for the fact that Umbra are of questionable utility it'd be great; regardless, it's good. You get a crazy amount of bots and two good core fireteams. If people just don't feel it they don't feel it, however.
I’m not going to pretend to defend sectorial design, but presumably there’s a design concept behind the decision that Onyx gets the new Grief Operators. Even if it is “space soup”. :)
