The Montessa is in VIRD for its anti-materiel capability in ITS. I'm glad it's there, though I'm not a particular fan of either the unit's rules or its presence in Varuna.
MO doesn't really occupy a lot of designspace these days. Pretty much all their HI and their TAG is MODless dudes with moderate CC of some sort, decent BS and raw stats. The Montesa's Mimetism is pretty standard for shooty Bikes to offset their lack of cover and not a MO special thing either, he's just a HI Bike without much in the way of special stuff. Order Sergeants don't have much in the way of inspiring unique Profiles, HRLs aren't exactly the first choice you take on LI if the offer includes MLs and HMGs. Crusaders are pretty boring as far as AD troops are concerned and most Knights suffer pretty severely from the 'yet another Spitfire with a tweak' problem. Apart from Magisters their most unique contribution to PanO is the Black Friar MR and that guy isn't really all that much of a gamechanger either. Their best recent addition are Dart (not a PanO troop) and Santiago Wildcards (which I've never seen show up outside of MO). If anything I'd ask for less restrictions on MO and Sval seems to be the place where we could actually get that. Knights, heavy TAGs, Nisses, normal AVA Rems, new troops and the Fusilier Lt/Order monkeys to make it all work together. Some people like MO, so let them have it. I'd like to see how a different approach to make Knights work with other PanO tools turn out.
for Sval, cheap order fuel that can contest lanes would really help Knights work functionally on the table. One of the challenges in MO is that the Order Sergeant Core team isn't particularly cheap, and isn't particularly good at fire superiority that could clear the way for Solo, Duo, or Haris knight teams. If Sval can run cheap troops and REMs with a decent AVA (none of that AVA1 limit) it would allow Knights to operate much more effectively. Nisse are certainly good for contesting rangebands, and would be a great tool for supporting aggressive close-quarter MO HI.
Then what the hell is the point of having anything non-MO in Svalarheima if we're effectively just making MO mk2? This is why I hate MO showing up in these Sectorials. It's not something that could be thematically interesting, such as lone knights lending aid to the PanO forces. It boils down to numbercrunching and other things that are why I say the knights screw up the PanO design space.
Because there will probably other ways to run Sval that aren't dependent on knights. Being able to get a close-quarter Haris up the table is a really valuable ITS tool. It's good for a huge pile of different scenarios. It generates options for objective room missions, capture-and-hold missions, zone/quadrant control missions, and oddballs like Looting & Sabotage. But it isn't something that players should need to utilize. I don't like MO, but I'd rather that a new Sectorial have a broad range of tools. A Haris of 2-Wound guys with Shotguns and DA CCWs can be really valuable. Successfully integrating MO units into a non-MO force will make it better, because MO units actually cover some gaps where the rest of PanO is pretty weak. Ask a VIRD player how they play Looting & Sabotage or Capture and Protect, and you'll see what I mean.
Except for the Australian Possum, which seems to have been swapped at birth with the US one. Can't explain it otherwise. Anyone else getting a twitchy eye thinking too hard about having Drop Bears and Krazy Koalas in the game at the same time?
"So you designed a super expensive, totally enclosed suit of battle armour?" "Yessir." "But didn't put a heater in it?" "Nossir." "And your solution is....?" "Mittens, sir. And tactical earmuffs." Anyhoo, i got all excited and jumped the gun:
That's a really bad reason. Should probably just fix the scenario in question (Looting & Sabotaging).
That's a very poor thematic decision if that's the case. It might be a good marketing one, if not-Space Marines sell (and I suppose they do). Fundamentally, the handwaving away of Hinduism in the Indian population as well as the presence of Islam in SEA comes off as poorly informed and Christian-centric. It makes PanO a fundamentally uninteresting faction to me. The central thesis of the setting is imagining a future in which the geopolitical relevance of the US, Canada, EU, and Russia is severely curtailed, and PanO suddenly being full of European Christians leaves me scratching my head. Where did they all come from? The Euro-Christian inhabitants of PanO's original component nations would have been vastly outnumbered by Southeast Asians.
Why are we ignoring the huge number of Christians in the Philippines and South America? A goodly chunk of whom are Catholic? We also only have the military side of the picture from the Wargame. There are Sikh, Hindu, and Muslim lobbyist groups in PanO with equal societal influence and resurrection control, but they don't have their own military regiments like the Neochurch does (aside from the Akals)
Or the Bagh Maris, plus the descent of the Zulu Cobras from both Indian and Australian special operations forces. Beyond that, it’s what CB picked for the culture of their game, and how they chose to bring the cultures together. People can disagree on how successful it is, but that’s the way it is.
At the time that NeoTerra was colonized, I believe only the Philippines were part of PanO. Moreover, in the context of religious groups in PanO, people of Latin American heritage are de-emphasized in favor of white Europeans. This is news to me. Where are you getting this information from? The sourcebooks that I read basically said that all of the Southeast Asian Muslims converted to Christianity (and then quietly went about not having children, based on the demographic portrayals of PanO).
These are cultural indicators, not religious ones. Well, there seems to have been a shift towards a portrayal of PanO as being majority European as opposed to, well, "Oceanic" at some point. If you look at early PanO named characters, you've got Rao, Macayena, Singh, Bipandra, and Angus, which seem to represent the breadth of PanO's demographic diversity well (plus who doesn't love Australians named Angus?). Then you fast-forward to VIRD and you've got Patsy and Gaia as the representatives.
This thread actually inspired me to get around to a model ive had for quite some time.... My favorite Nisse sculpt!