Not against larger order counts per se (think they should be balanced with lower order counts, and that's been ongoing). I really like this as an ITS mission idea though.
I missed your post, and I have to say that I love that scenario idea. After all, Infinity is abot Black Ops, so leaving corpses shoudn't be a good idea.
Thanks! A friend of mine ran a second edition campaign years ago that had some fun rules to represent the Cold War nature of infinity conflict. There were mission points as usual, but also public relations points that affected the ongoing campaign. The first person to fire a shot in a mission lost a PR point for looking like the aggressor, forbidden weapons would lose you a PR point if their use was caught on security camera, but of course you could hack the security cameras before the end of the game to erase footage. It made a fun puzzle.
My fantasy is for CB to get really creative with how many and what kind of orders units generate. I mentioned this in the first thread but I'll put it here again because that one got locked super fast. Imagine a world where units can be worth multiple orders but also take up additional spots in the combat group. Your li and mi are worth 1 order and one slot, your 40ish point hi are now 2 orders and 2 slots each and your tags and super heavies are worth 3 or maybe even 4. This does a bunch of stuff: - flattens the action economy by removing the link between more bods and more actions. - enables elite lists like everyone wants. - enable better diversity of tag lists, because now you can take some decent support options and still hit 10 orders. - gets everyone to the most fun number of actions of 12-16. And to go further, here are some examples of the sorts of things I'd love to see with regards to using the design space of the variety of orders we have access to. * Warbands that ONLY have an impetuous order, no regular or irregular. * Units that are worth multiple irregular orders or a mix of regular and irregular. * Expensive s7 'data hub' type units that are functionally destructible terrain but offer a bunch of regular orders. Basically amped up netrods. Plus probably more things I'm not considering yet. For me the regular/irregular order thing is such an interesting part of the game but players try to make it as irrelevant as possible at the list building step. Id love to see it used more, especially on low tech factions.
Well, as a former Headquarters trooper (my last posting was at Squadron, where we were in charge of 6 submarines), Headquarters is usually where you put the troops not competent enough to be in a combat unit. Yes, ARM and BTS are valued a lot more than their game impact indicates. For the love of all that is holy, THIS!!! Any chance you could get ahold of those rules and share them on the forums?
Another suggestion i would make is that the missions be balanced so every faction has the potential to score 10 pts. Currently, there are a few missions where this can't happen ( looking at you, Deadly Dance and Show of Force). Now for this specific issue, i would suggest allowing every faction that can't field a TAG to either field 1 Anaconda (or if thats too strong, create a new Merc TAG that is weaker, or maybe 1 Gecko) or give select units an ability that allows them to be considered a TAG for scoring purposes only. There might be more missions that deprive factions of the potential to score 10 pts. ,. but I would have to search the mission list.
CHANGE FULL AUTO TO MAKE SUPPRESSING FIRE A SHORT MOVEMENT SKILL FOR THE USER, DELETE ALL OTHER FUNCTIONS
It's not ITS (yet), but one of the DF missions denies 3 points to any faction that doesn't have HI specialists... which is extra painful because SEF is one of those factions without HI specialists.
I'm going to chime in on something thats been mentioned, because the more people bringing it up the more likely it will be heard. BRING BETTER BALANCE BETWEEN LIMITED INSERTION AND LARGER ORDER COUNTS I love the 'bodycount' suggestions from earlier ITT, but would make it more prevalent than just in one mission. It would legitimately make sense for every mission to have a bodycount/OP element where the player with the least casualties gets a bonus or vice versa. Limited Insertion being simply 'immune to strategic command token use' isn't good enough. Give it an active bonus. I have two possible suggestions for this; LI lists to generate a free order. Its As I found when I added NCO to my Military Orders, the difference between 10 and 11 orders is nuts. LI lists to get a substantial bonus on objective rolls. Expensive elite units just don't scale at scoring. Your 40pt HI specialist is probably at best +1 WIP over some 10pt chump. Combine that with how crippling it is to spend *another* 10% of your turn on rolling again if you fail and you'll see why LI lists don't appear when there are button pushing missions. Thats been my go-to solution for fixing order spam, sure it has lots of hidden consequences but consequences be damned! "How much more" is a really good question. I tried adding different points values to units to see when cheerleader chumps and more elite units, such as a Zanshi vs a Bao Trooper, might become alternative cheerleader options. IE if you want the basic guy you take a Zanshi, but for a few points more your cheerleader gets MSV utility. The answer was adding quite a huge amount. At +16 points I started considering if I would take a 27 point Zanshi vs a 39pt Bao, and it was around then that the consideration became "three of one or two of the other". Something like that would work if the points value of the game went up to try and keep the model count the same, but I think the answer is more about reducing gear costs in addition to the 'chassis cost'.
Please remove JSA and IA, as such errors by design should not happen in N4 anymore. Greetings a former JSA and IA Player now O-12. And fix the cheap Warbands. Thanks a lot.
JSA: https://forum.corvusbelli.com/threads/reinventing-jsa-some-thoughts.34291/ IA: IA, I'm just too lazy to write a complete essay about IA's failure, but look at the forum.
I hope you're joking, because removing entire armies is not a good way to fix any mechanical design issues they may have.
IA is a massive victim over the quality vs quantity balance of this game. There is a stupid notion that the cheapest garbage should be able to delete the most expensive unit if "used right" and that's some kind of player skill indicator. But being used right just means getting lucky with the 4 inch spacing and throwing smoke on 16s. Being crazy, being suicidal, being brave and reckless should not make a soldier more common. If this is to be fixed, impetuous discount has to go. With it, extreme impetuous can go too.
Smoke generally has too much of an impact on the game. The extent that they determine engagements is so strong that every soldier should be carrying MSV2 and smoke. What kind of idiot builds a TAG or heavy infantry helmet WITHOUT MSV2. It should be ubiquitous in a setting with resurrection level technology and cloaking. It's a pair of goggles, they can't fit it in TAG?
The number one thing is streamlining and proper editing of the rules. Right now the rules will use the exact same words and phrases to mean different things in different parts of the rules, and the rules are not laid out in a good manner. It's the biggest obstacle to me getting more people into the game, which otherwise has so many good ideas in it.
A lot of the people who've been playing forever tend to favor warband units because they were so ubiquitous early in the game. They feel like a very strange kind of unit to be in a small strike force; some religious crazy who's not even in the military seems like a strange fit for the kind of situations Infinity is supposed to model. The fact that new factions like Tohaa and O-12 still get "warband" units makes it seem like a gameplay artifact more than anything else. Yup, right now Fury (Frenzy, Impetuous, Extremely Impetuous) is too powerful an ability on cheap units.
