O-12 is up. It’s a vanilla faction with...some good stuff. I feel like they’re very in line with PanO with slightly lower BS, really good wip, and two awesome war bands. I’m excited to see the Bureau Aegis sectorial (at least, I think that’s what it will be based on what we’ve seen so far). The mix of mad traps and adhesive everywhere has the potential to be really good for shutting down those aggressive pieces like Tariq, Sheeskiin, and McMurder pretty solidly. Their TO guys are amazing!
For me the whole army falls squarely between PanO and Aleph, when it comes to things like BS, tech level, toy access... In fact it's my main gripe about the faction. It doesn't seem to do anything really new, like Aleph or Tohaa did when they were first introduced. But I'm slowly warming up to them.
I think that's where they're at, at the moment. Faction looks to be powerful and competitive, but to @Stiopa 's point, aside from dtw glue, they don't offer anything new. Palette swapping profiles is an inevitability as the number of factions increases, both the intentional kind (some version of 10-12 point line cheerleader, infiltrating marker state profile, basic HI profile, S5 HI profile, MBT, dogged WB, standard rems and doc/eng etc) and the unintentional stuff (e.g. epsilon/nisse/knauf, i assume), but I think O12 goes a step even further than that and nothing really feels unique to me. If you look at the most recent sectorial stuff, a lot of contained at least some measure of novelty, good or bad. O12 just feels solid, relatively well optimized and competitive, but nothing in it sings, at least to me. Absolutely there are gonna be folks out there who look at the traits I just mentioned, and that's what they're looking for when being drawn to a faction, and that's cool too.