No. It still treats Posthumans as 1 combat-group trooper. You write the requirement that killing a Pupnik gets you nothing but killing the Chimera gets you 1 kill. So it'd actually buff them: because you only lose the Posthuman after the Netrod dies.
Thinking through this produces some really interesting implications. I conceptually like these kinds of missions, but execution is fifty-fifty. A great example of this is Hunting Party or to a lesser extent Firefight. Conceptually, I think hunting party is actually a really cool mission in what it does -- in a 5 round tournament of specialist-focused missions, having one or two missions that make it harder to lists with tons of specialists to win can make for tough decisions when listbuilding that produce more variety in approaches. I don't think either of those missions does it perfectly (not least because of the weird allocation of Adhesive weapons in HP, for example) but I think a mission that scores by model count killed rather than points or something else does have potential to do the same. It would be nice to have more ways to mix up stale listbuilding meta due to considerations like these.
I'm not convinced either the enforcement in way of Tactical Window is a good approach, nor do I think changing ITS missions will be able to accomplish anything. Rebalancing needs to be done on the unit level either by altering prices so that spamming orders becomes (very) slightly harder or targeting WIP. Currently the average WIP is around 14, almost regardless what segments you look at. You have WIP 13 models that costs 90 points and you've got WIP 14 models that costs almost as low as 10. This is not true for PH and for BS the models with less than 13 above 40 points are very rare. Only BTS have the asynchronous distribution, but BTS isn't as important and has greater variation. So if the WIP of cheap models goes down and scales similar to BS we might see a decrease in order spam more as a soft cap. (Naturally, declaring specialist skills to do things other than pushing buttons would probably need positive MODs so they remain useful)
I agree somewhat. I think rebalancing needs to be done at the profile level. I don't actually think you need to scale WIP by price as +/- 5/10% on the odds of a single roll isn't particularly significant. The issue is Rerolls more than anything else: WIP12 + Rerolls due to extra orders trumps WIP15 every day. Something like "all HI and MI specialists get +1 burst on WIP rolls to push buttons" would be a far better option than playing with WIP. All that being said, I do really like the idea of a mission in ITS that scores Body Count.
Oh, I don't mean by price, but I mean in very broad strokes you'd see price having an impact on WIP. Much like both BS, PH and BTS, but not slavishly so, we'd still see some outliers - Zhanshi, Hunzakut, Moderators and Fusiliers should probably be in the WIP 9 to 12 range much like their BS while f.ex. Securitate could be an outlier and retain very high WIP. I can also see how certain skills get changed drastically to accommodate this; FO being a DTW style weapon with Marked state being cancelled if the Marking model breaks LOF (or gets out of Hacking Area in case of Spotlight) or if marking model goes UNC, while Doctor and Engineer being automatic success but becoming Entire Order skills I do agree that Body Count sounds like an interesting mission!
One issue with the higher than desirable viability with hordes (and it really is a multi-faceted issue) is also how difficult it is to design weapons or ammo types that can punish their weaker and more numerous profiles disproportionately. Shock ammunition isn't really a threat, since these guys are made to be disposable in the first place. Wasting orders trying to doctor them is counter intuitive to what makes them good. At least counters Dogged, which can be found on some of the worst offenders, although with most of the offending troopers being there to die in the first place, it still disproportionately affects single wound mid-to-premium operators with one wound or V:Dogged/NWI (CB seems to recognize this as a potential problem, and is tossing out shock immunity like it was candy these days, but this just ends up causing problems, especially for the value of HI troopers...) AP, E/M, DA, and pretty much every other ammo type is made to punish elite troopers. If armour wasn't so over costed and under performing (outside of extreme values), this might be less of an issue, but unfortunately that's another problem in the greater scheme of things that needs solving. I wouldn't mind seeing multi weapons, which are already pretty overcosted as it is anyway, get some sort of new ammo type that hits harder against low ARM targets. In general though, I'd like to see a game that encourages a meta where competitively viable lists hover around the 10~14 regular order count range.
*Eyes up 6 point PH14 warbands* I think a better approach is for different factions to be focused on different size of forces. I have no issue with Ariadna and Haqq bringing 20 troopers, it's what those factions are designed to do, but it shouldn't be the best option for all factions.
Every Vanilla faction can get up to PH13 for 14 points or less, most Sectorials can get something with decent PH at a fairly low cost. Considering that PH ranges tend to go from 10-14, FD WIP is 12-15, it's as easy to get high PH into most lists as it is high WIP. Ironically PanO sectorials are the main people with either high WIP or PH available for cheap. You're bang on the money for BS, but then that's a stat with more applications that can easily get multiple dice so it makes sense that they're more careful with it.
BS has fewer exceptions in the lower range, true, but the over-arching trend for PH as well is not that almost all units have PH of 13+ with a few rare exceptions. Instead the general trend for PH is to broadly speaking scale from 10 on most standard cheerleader. That is what my post is about, while the exact number of deviating units is a bit irrelevant. So in the context of where spammed armies are thriving and elite armies/lists made to be 10-11 orders are struggling - maybe a strongly contributing factor is that both the army with 10 orders and the army with 20 orders tend to have 65% chance of succeeding at flipping an objective? And that's not even taking into account that the 10 order armies are also naturally struggling with covering a larger area and more objectives as well as struggling with fitting enough variety of specialists among their bodies to get to those double WIP+3 rolls. So the conceit is typically that an elite army is slightly better at doing things, while a spammed army will have more tries to do the same job. In Infinity the former isn't the case when it comes to accomplishing the missions, but the latter is. It's a bit specific to specialists, but on a much smaller scale it also affects which units are likely to remain ARO pieces when you need them to be ARO pieces. Over on the Yu Jing forums, people are complaining that the Yan Huo 56 point dedicated ARO missile platform has a tendency to duck for cover at the slightest provocation (this isn't something that couldn't be fixed with NWI that units with similar weapons, size and cost tend to have, but Valour should perhaps not be handed out as freely as unsolicited religious pamphlets).
that is exactly the reason for this rather strange looking secondary objective. Using a lot of models is an advantage in Infinity, and I think sometimes the players have to feel the burn of it also delivering a disadvantage. Trading is a very usual and effective tactic in Infinity. I believe there should be something, at least every now and then, that makes us respect the lives of our soldiers. As for tactical window, I never use more than 15 orders anyway and do not take huge order lists to a tournament. I am simply too slow for this and do not enjoy to play in hasty ways. In about 6 years of playing Infinity, I have not met anyone yet who moves 20 models in 15 minutes. The last game I played I had 15 orders and my opponent 18. He is a very experienced player, but his first turn took an hour. He gave up after Round 2 having lost his important models and we both felt we have too many things to do that afternoon to continue this game which would still drag on even though he pretty much lost it. I'd suggest for N4 to reduce the maximum amount of combat groups to 2. Yes, some people even play more. The way the game is designed, some factions need to be able to play with many models, but more than 2 combat groups is playing shenanigans. It is unfair that players with many orders steal the time at tournaments, and maybe the chess clock is a good answer. I am not so happy with those German rules because ARO can take some time as well. I guess I wouldn't really enjoy playing Infinity with an hour on the clock. I would just feel rushed and not enjoy the atmosphere of the game at all. But everybody should play as they like. With chess clocks, i rather stick to chess where I move one model and press the clock. You'd be surprised how often it happens even then that players forget to press the clock. In Infinity, with all this stuff on the table, I recon it would happen all the time. I also don't understand why you don't get AROs after your time has run out. Not very fair to the player who starts the game.
As soon as N4 launches the N5 crew should be trying to find a way to separate order generation from troops just showing up.
I wouldn't hold out hope for rebalancing of cheap spammable units as that's more product to shift. Plus, I get the feeling sectorial identity is in a lot of cases made through 1-2 units that break the power curve and may as well be mandatory, hence you have lists that start with say 4 ghazi, or a boatload of cheap camo for vanilla ariadna etc etc. If CB had wanted to rejig points they could have done so already before. Given that we had a couple more books since N3 dropped with point changes and sectorial revisions, I wouldn't hold out hope for it.
The thing is that Infinity is a much different game from something like most other tabletop games, where you typically build towards and around static lists. Infinity instead has you building to meet the needs of any specific mission. Your army isn't any given singular list, but a selection given from the entire faction at large. Because of this, it's not really in CB's best financial interest to have a select few troopers dominating list composition, but rather a constant rotation of various viable options. Having a large amount of models on the table isn't necessary when they can present you with a lot of tempting options that you'll want to have available to use. But if the meta for a faction becomes stale to the point of discouraging the use of various options, the dead weight just wont be worth buying anyway.
Why tac window is a bad idea as an ITS standard? Aleph vs USARF The aleph player doesn't suffer any alterations to his list, he has plenty of elite profiles an net roads to generate cheap orders. The USARF player has to change his list loosing his only advantage, a high amount of orders. Why USARF has those orders? Because the faction was designed to use multiple cheap dudes with regular rifles to accomplish the same feats as an elite profile with less orders. The "elite" USARF troops were never designed to be the center piece of the army but support assets to the cheap dudes with rifles. So the USARF player plays with an unbalanced list with some extra "elite" troops against aleph, he is obliterated or has a difficult time overall, now the aleph player loves tac window and the USARF player will consider abandoning the faction or the game. There are plenty of examples like this one.
Probably unpopular opinion, but way more troops should be Irregular, simple as that. Especially the cheapest stuff. Being a Regular Order should be sth like being a Veteran. You bring a 15 Order list, cool, but only 7-8 out of those are Regular. You need to actually USE the models you bring. Cheerleaders suck about as much as any other non-interactive part of the game. The fact that people bring 15+ model lists and then play with just three or four and then some AROs irks me to no end.
But... this is what actually makes Infinity different from most other tabletop wargames. Now, I'm not trying to argue that the FtF and ARO mechanics couldn't keep the game unique without the Order mechanic, but it's something to consider. That said, an easy way to limit Rambos without making more units irregular is to limit combat groups to 8. Hell, do that and then "Tac Window" could be a limit of 2 combat groups.
As much as I find that suggestion really interesting. You'd need to re-price 'mobility' skills with an 8 orders per group max. Things like AD, Infiltration, Impersonation, 6" Moves and Superjump become a lot stronger comparatively if you can't push 10 orders through a 4" Move rambo. Equally, Tactical Awareness, LT2, Inspiring Leadership and other abilities that grant additional orders or similar become disproportionately stronger. Particularly things like LT2 + NCO that allows you to be 8/8 + 2 orders that can be shifted between groups. This represents +25% flexible additional orders rather than the +20% at present. Those sort of second order effects would need to be balanced for. (Aside, I think AD naturally balances itself because it represents the a 12.5% order hole in a CG as opposed to the 10% order hole). You also have options to pair this with relatively intuitive 'soft' bonuses / penalties that result in a normal list size sitting at 9-16 troops (for example, 1CG = +1 Command Token, not affected by the Strategic Use of the Command Tokens which nullifies two Orders from the Order Pool. 2CG = 4 Command Tokens, can have 2 orders stripped. Each CG>2 = -1/addnl CG Command Tokens, gets stripped +1/addnl CG orders by Strategic use of Command Tokens). At the moment it's awkward to do things like this because the 'normal' size of lists sits within the range covered by 2 CGs (12-15). Personally I'd prefer this sort of systematic approach to the bandaids that I think LI and TW represent.
I'm not about getting rid of the order mechanic, just make the Irregular somethin common, not a rare exception. Paying for Regular versatility should be a thing. B locked to some Irregular Cores that agin a lot because they all can lead turn by turn and move together should also be a thing.
