That would be true in the case Nomads had stayed true to their initial conception: a faction based on asymmetrical warfare lacking in toughness and firepower. The moment Gutier went full retard by overdoing with his response to the petition of the Nomad community for a bit more of reliable firepower, that's not a valid statement anymore. The fact that Nomads is one of the four factions (the others being PanO, YuJing and NA2) whose sectorials can reliably and efficiently run HI fireteams is just wrong. Nomads were never meant to excel in the HI field, actually, in words of Bostria many years ago "their HIs would be never be at the level of PanO and YJ", when their only HI was the Mobile Brigada "they would only get a few more". Yet here they are with as many HIs as Haqqislam, the two best fireteams of HI in the game with a very high Availability that allows them to build full cores and a HI with one of the most broken rules in the game at current. Furthermore their sectorials happen to play more frequently HI fireteams than PanO or YuJing because of how stupidly optimized and flexible they are. If you check Bakunin lists you'll find a Riot core 50% of the times and a Riot Haris 80% of the times, same happens for Tunguska with Hollownerds and Corregidor brings a mixed core with Brigada almost always. In PanO you'll only find a Core or Haris of HI in a regular way in MO lists and in the case of YuJing in Invincible while ISS occasionally sees a core of WuMing (because funny thing is they can't build a haris in spite of being a sectorial of the supposed faction with expertise in HI ). And I haven't counted StarCo despite it's clear they're the 4th Nomad sectorial. So sorry but no, the level of heavy military weaponry Nomads can show in their lists has been growing out of control since Humand Sphere 3N to the point they rival that of two clearly heavy military hiper-potencies, which is ridiculous. Therefore I stand on my point: Nomads already have too many tricks under their sleeve in addition to a huge heavy firepower that rivals that of PanO and YJ. For that reason Nomads don't deserve to get more stuff, actually they need to suffer a nerf in N4; specially in the part concerning their gameplay with HIs. And regarding the dreaded jammer, at current only three factions have access to it, so "they haven't been spread everywhere". And let's hope N4 brings the nerf this device deserves.
Might be your opinion, but I myself mostly play Nomads without any HI at all. And as long as there is not a single HI with BS 14 I wouldn't call Nomads a HI Faction. So .. Nomads need Gimmicks . And from all Nomads only Vanilla is considered ... above midfield. The sectorials are hardly overpowered. Tunguska could use a little boost and the Impersonation profile could be limited to Tunguska.
@Janzerker you know, maybe Bostria was just wrong when he said that.. it seriously wouldn't be the first time. Rather than basing your expectations for an entire faction on an CB employee's statement who isn't in charge of game design, perhaps consider that you're the one who's wrong about where Nomads "should" be. I mean you're right that Nomads don't need any more tricks at this point, they are clearly one of the most powerful factions, but jeze man... the hate is worthy of Disney villains. Actively calling for general nerfs on a faction's access to, or effectiveness of, an entire troop type is severe. I have to disagree about Jammers in general too, especially in TJC. They are really not OP in that faction with WIP 13 on 23 point units, and serve mostly to fool players into thinking the more effective Hecklers are Jammers while under camo. Yes they can be good, but OP? Hell no, not at all like they are on Mutts. The problem is less with the weapon and more with the platform.
Completely agree with the Nomad HI hate. Somehow we became a HI faction. It annoys me that our MI links are so suboptimal compared to our HI links and that Kriza distort the faction incredibly because of how effective they are. I like the way they went with MB. The combined Tsyklon + MB core absolutely feels like a Nomad solution. Grrls as BS12 Phys 14 would have been interesting if it had been accompanied by changes that made Observance Fireteams better/cheaper. I was really hoping Hollowmen would be quasi MI (STR1 with 2 levels of UNC). Would have been very cheap for the capabilities (~22pts for the Combi version with no other changes) and could easily have been integrated into a mixed Grenzer / Hollowmen "Dragnet" Fireteam. But would have felt like Nomad HI: not top tier but interesting. As it is Hollowmen and Kriza are so dominant in TJC that the rest of the faction is necessarily limited as a result. I don't think that means that Nomads should necessarily get less tricks though. I think it means that our HI should be reviewed in N4. A Limited Impersonation Spec Ops would fit Dragnet and Holo is something that would be really useful for Tunguska (either adding 'bodies' to a T1 defence or hiding the Interventor/Puppetmaster). So either of these would fit Tunguska. But.... Nomads also doesn't need these tricks. You can make similar things happen with existing Nomad tricks (Sup Infil + Limited Camo or a Crazy Koala profile).
Severe, but warranted. Nomads have REMs on par with or better than PanO, HI that point-for-point outshoots Yu Jing, top-tier hacking, excellent Warbands, cheap Camo Specialists and no issues with Order supply. Only their TAGs are below top tier as a whole. Something has to give, and nerfing three units to cut the top-end non-TAG firepower and match stated goals is the probably the easiest way to do this. On topic, I already hate Decapitation enough, how about we don't give even more people Impersonation? With a detective I'd expect Sensor and FO, maybe Veteran L2 instead of the base Securitate Veteran L1.
Which ones? Reaktions and Stemplers? Excluding the named ones (and I will admit that Pi-well and Billie are BS good), because you can't get any of them in Tunguska. I love Nomad REMs but they're good because of synergies not because they're top tier. CA, PanO and YJ all have better REMs. Tsyklons and Lunokhods are overcosted due to ARM, Meteors take between 2 and 3 SWC to make work and no Nomad faction gets 3 x Transductors (hello ASA and NCA). For a REM faction, playing into that strength without a VERY good idea of what you're doing can be a trap. Look at the recent discussion of Tunguskan links: other than the Stempler FTO (included primarily as a discount on the link) none of the proposed lists had traditional* REMs other than Transductors. * Puppets were included, but I really don't think of them as REMs. But I will admit that they're good. This BTW is kinda my point: I'd prefer to see Nomad REMs strengthened and our HI de-emphasized than what we have now. Playing into those old-school archetypes (Nomads = MI + REMs + Hackers) more would re-emphasize interfaction flavour.
I think that what they did for corregidor, making the tsyklon count as mobile brigada for fireteam should be applied to all the sectorials. It seems like the most nomad way of buffing remotes.
It works for Corregidor, but I honestly think Tsyklons count as Wildcats and, make Wildcats the basis of the mixed Fireteam would have been MUCH more interesting. IE. Special Core: up to 2 Mobile Brigada and up 3 Wildcats. Special Core: up to 3 Alguicils and up to 2 Wildcats. With the 3 (!!!!) Wildcards in CJC that would still allow funky MB Fireteams but it would have emphasized the centrality of 'cats to CJC (it would have also made a marked difference from the PanO ORC + Fusi cores). For Tunguska I'd simply expand on the role of the Stempler: up to 1 Stempler (either profile) as a Wildcard would work for Tunguska. Would make the various Haris options a lot more viable. Which would almost certainly not push the top end performance of the faction but would make more builds viable (Stempler + Interventor LT + 3 Grenzers). Bakunin is odd because there's 3 distinct sub-factions, and none really scream 'I need REMs added'. Wildcards in Bakunin probably won't work because that'll simply buff Grrls. How you handle REMs really turns on how you update the faction as a whole.
I actually was counting the named ones as Vanilla is the real Nomad problem faction for balancing; most of its Sectorials have their own strengths and weaknesses that leave them fairly balanced with each other (exception Tunguska) while the lack of reliance on links for most of the Nomad tricky business results in Vanilla having basically all weaknesses covered. Pi-Well, Puppets and Billie stand out for their low price and resilience, but Lunokhods are easily worth a mention for their extreme close-up power on both offense and defense. Wide access to Climbing Plus is also a real boon on cluttered boards or when the enemy is hiding on rooftops, though I will admit it can be situational unlike the general power of the Q-Drone, Bulleteer or Rui Shi. It can be a little trickier to work with than those mentioned but REMs are still, as you put it, a strength of the Nomads. I couldn't agree more with following the old archetypes, it would certainly make the game a bit less samey. On that topic, Kovac getting Strategic Deployment might be nice. Starting MI a little further forward and more flexibility with Securitate or Stempler Repeater placement doesn't seem like it would be a bad thing at all. What rock have you been living under, the most Nomad way of buffing remotes is clearly "LT order, Assisted Fire on Pi-Well." Jokes aside, Hacking being more reliably useful against low-tech enemy armies would go a long way in helping Nomad REMs, since they're built to be the unrivalled best Hacking Area spreaders in the game in order to support and be supported by the Nomads' elite Hacker offerings. Programs that can debuff or displace opponents Aristeia!-style would turn every Nomad bot into a serious threat to the enemy's plan, if not units, which seems to be just the Nomad style.
Might be me, but the times I played Nomads HI (Hollow Man Core, Solo Kriza, even Kriza Haris) I never felt they were overpowered (or even particulary powerfull). Could be because I played them against PanO HI. Playing against a Hi-ARM-BS-15 HI is not much different than against a Kriza with BS13 and additional -3 Mod from Full-Auto. The BS15-HI always felt like One-Man-Link-Teams. And moving around a Hollow Man+Stempler-Team is ... annoying at best. I won't argue on that point, because I don't play the Nomads HI often enough, but that's the feel from my limited experience. Neither Hollow Man nor Kriza felt overpowered. Kriza is strong, sure, but not game distorting. With the rest of your post I agree. A boost to MI would be nice, cause that's my playstyle of Nomads ... MI, Skirmisher, Hacker. I haven't got REM to work for me either. Our Special REM are nice on paper, but I haven't got them to work yet. And they sure are no Auto-Take like a Bulleteer, which is f*cking good for the Points. So yeah, a Limited Impersonation Spec Ops would be really useful for Tunguska.
I have been playing TJC exclusively for almost 9 months now. I'm a Johnny come lately to Nomads, and TJC is the only Sectorial I play. So take what I say from that perspective, I have little experience with Bakunin or Corregidor other than playing against them occasionally. I run TJC all the time without a Kriza or Hollow Men. I'd say those units only show up in about a little more than half of my lists. I take one Grenzer more frequently than I take either of the HI. The Kriza is a fantastic unit, but it's not Mary Sue. It throws a ton of dice when it's in active turn and loses a lot of it's potential in the reactive. The Hollow Men are stupid efficiently costed but have obvious weaknesses that every faction's low cost units or warbands can exploit. I'm surprised to see so many players feeling that Nomads is an HI faction now, and are upset by that perception. I don't agree with that perception, and I am not upset with the current state of HI in Nomads. It doesn't bother me that they have some top tier HI selections. I mean, I get the old faction archetypes argument, but they haven't been exclusive for entire troop types for a long time now and hanging on to them in that fashion seems anachronistic to me. They are still there, but they have been watered down by creating unique, powerful, and fun units that break the old archetypes in factions that traditionally didn't have that type of unit. Take for instance the archetype that Nomads is/was the "REM" faction. That was a way I remember hearing them described anyways. One can argue that the Peacemaker and Bulleteer in PanO are better than anything that Nomads can field. Aleph has the Rudras, and while not particularly popular from what I can tell, it is a proper murderbot with 2 structure to back it up. CA has the Q-drone and E-drone, etc. I see no problem with a those REMs in those factions. They are fun to play and typically have something that makes them unique and fitting for the faction they are in. That's how I feel about the good HI in Nomads. IMO they don't eclipse the other units, nor are they objectively better than HI from PanO. Aleph or Yu Jing. To me the Kriza is to HI what the Bulleteer is to REMs. Yes it's damn good, but it's unique and it fits the faction. Personally I feel that the core of the issue is MI costing. Tell me if I'm wrong, because I clearly don't understand the Nomad HI hate. If N4 manages to find the right cost formula for MI and we see a general drop in those costs to better reflect how they play on the table, would that settle the perceived imbalance of HI in Nomads? Anyways, I know we are derailing this conversation off of the Dire Foe, but I find this discussion fascinating. Also I'd like to apologize to @Janzerker I didn't mean to come off as confrontational in my earlier post as it reads to me now. So yeah... Kovac... I'm pretty sure we're all wish-listing ourselves into inevitable disappointment, but a holo or limited impersonation spec ops would be sexy as hell especially with sixth sense. Yeah, that's totally going to happen... and when it doesn't and she's released with a stun pistol and regular pistol with a bio-visor 1 and climbing+ we can all cry into our beers.
Maybe. My primary issue isn't that our HI are too strong relative to other factions, it's that they completely overshadow a lot of our MI choices. Any update to the pricing structure of MI is, IMO, likely to be accompanied by a similar (but different) change to HI. So I think more is required: I think the CJC changes are an example of how not to do this, and was a reaction to the fact a vocal minority complained about the MB core (which wasn't great, but wasn't supposed to be a faction feature) but were less vocal about role of Wildcats in the faction (which wasn't an optimal way to play CJC despite being a faction feature). A secondary issue is how good our HI Fireteams are. We have 2 /3 of the strongest HI Fireteams in the game. This means you don't really feel like you need to leave Nomads to experience top tier HI cores. I do think that Kriza are too cheap for what you get. But like anything in Infinity that's not perfect and you can play successfully without the most optimal tools. But there's a reason the "apply Kriza" memes resonated.
I buried the lead: my point is that changes to MI won't be in isolation. Elite single wound troopers are hard to do well because they're inherently weak: you pay a lot for a fragile unit. So it's possible that in N4 they'll continue to be squeezed out from above because of changes to HI. This means that it's more than just a mechanical change, you also need to look at how you design the units. For example, a key issue with many links is "filler" profiles. One of the ways of fixing this is mixed links (cheap filler), but another way is by ensuring that each profile (in a link) isn't just there to make up room and is as efficient as possible in that role. This is the Bolt solution: 'filler' profiles are cheap and/or provide key capabilities to the Fireteam. But compare Grenzers or Wildcats. You end up with a mass of expensive Combi+LFTs and little in the way of diversity (in the Wildcats case this is added to by the fact that you probably need to put your Lt in the Fireteam, and the Lt profile is a 'nothing' profile). It's also the Riot Grrl and Hollowman solution. Both of those Fireteams don't suffer from a 'meh and expensive' filler issue.
maybe we will get lucky and both nwi, and dogged get changed so they don't need shock anymore and they get rid of shock. Would be a big improvement to the glass cannon medium infantry class if they didnt die right away and could be doctored back up.
I have certainly noticed now that I started up Phalanx again that a majority of attacks have shock these days. Phalanx is largely made up of elite non-heavies. Very few NWI have activated, mostly only against DTW.
Red Furies and SMGs are the biggest culprits. They seem to be everywhere these days. I'd like to see SMG split into AP SMGs and Shock SMGs (the odd Breaker or whatever SMG would also be cool). This doesn't interfere with their design purpose (cheap close ranged weapons that hit harder than expected due to ammo type), but would make them less universally useful. Red Furies are probably harder: they're a deliberate design tool to give SWC cheap B4 weapons to a lot of factions. One of the suggestions I've heard (@Hachiman Taro came up with it) is give all MI free Shock Immunity as a trade off for the 4-2 Move. For troops that already have it (or Bio), you'd use it as an offset against their cost. I'm not sure that's a good idea, but it would be something.
