Holy cow! That's exactly the streamlining I was wishing for! Count me excited, I have now preordered N4!
From what I remember with the stream: Tournaments will be tactical window. Coordinated hacking is allowed, but has to use the same program. Every unit that has two stat lines, Tohaa symbiont armor, ratniks, SuJian, Dog-warriors, etc. will now be just one rule, Transformation(X), where the X can be a specific trigger, i.e. (W) for taking a wound, or (Auto) for a unit that can switch back and forth between the two modes. Fireteams will not be in the book, but published in the pdf, as they want to reserve the ability to revisit them later in N4 While every unit is being updated to N4, some of the sectorials will be revisited for fireteam balance and combinations throughout N4 SP and QK are going to go out of production at some point.
Smoke now emanates vertically from the template rather than from the blast focus, so a trooper on a balcony cannot be in smoke from a lower level.
So how do you release a new edition of a game without one of the core rules because you want to "revisit them in the future"? Isn't revisiting the problematic rules the exact point of a new edition?
Allowing people to test them in actual tournament everywhere for some time and then adjust is very reasonable
Actually makes me wonder why they're bothering with paper rulebook anymore... Just a thought, I mean.
Oh for god's sake. If they'd said "here are the fireteam rules, we will not revisit them," you'd have complained about that instead.
You can honestly ask that as far back as N1/N2 A book is a nice thing to have, but is essentially a vanity product. They already stopped putting unit profiles in the books back in Uprising. They could probably switch to doing books that are 100% fluff (Uprising was pretty close tbh.)
I missed some of the stream. Did they clarify if impact templates have to be centered on the target model?
They did dodge the question partially. We don't quite know how exactly it works, e.g. do you save on ARM versus Breaker ammo and does e.g. Karakuri save with BTS versus EXP ammo?
Regarding fire team rules, I guess they need more time to test potential changes, leaving them out of the book was a wise move IMO.
Ammo and saving attribute seem to be different things now, so I suppose even when TI turns ammo to Normal you still use the save attribute used by the weapon
And also stops some Weapon Traits like Continuous Damage. They still need to be centered, unless using Speculative Attack. Yes, ammunition and Saving Roll Attribute were separated in CodeOne.
Circular templates always have the blast focus on the floor/bottom edge of Silhouette, even if the target is behind a low wall.