IIRC he had shared the wrong list on facebook , but he actually played legal ones. It was related to a shang-ji haris team.
My recollection was exactly that, the initial lists had one issue but the actual lists were disclosed by the LVO TOs and they were legal (and quite interesting).
That is what is bugging me most. CB stated they want to simplify profiles for the ease of reading while also slapping a sorta incidental rules-interaction (NWI + SI) from N3 on a lot of troops to counter their self-inflicted abundance of shock ammunition. It's just not very elegant and clunky game design. Now they for some reason commited to adding two rules (that btw arent self-explanatory from just the profile) to a huge number of units. Probably as lots of others pointed out to cheat their own point formula. If they really wanted to give MI a bigger toolset while still differentiating them in cost from HI there would've been options. Why not give LI 1 wound, MI 2 wounds and HI 3 wounds while rebalancing the weapon dmg accordingly? Not only would you reduce the amount of skills written on a lot of profiles, it would also open up easier differentiation between weapons and unit types. Maybe mini-TAGs have 4 wounds (structure) and the big ones 5? Like Wuji wrote - we already have much more than 3 wound types with the 1.9 from NWI+SI, NWi on multi-wound troops etc. I do like more variety but the way it is done I can't help but wonder if there wouldn't have been better solutions.
Ok, those combat group splits in list 2 are pretty cool. What was the mission pack for LVO? I also really like that SML TJC list from the top 5.
The problem is people dont agree about the value of various, stats, skills and equipment. The likelihood that any of us as players are fully being objective is slim. Everyone has favorite ways of playing this game, I prefer CC which puts me at a disadvantage for enjoying many sectorials and units to their fullest potential and intent. Each unit you see has an identity, lines get blurred by other units, sure, but those options come at opportunity costs. Their are still hard lines drawn for designating each of the Unit Class Types. Hi in general is Better stats across the board and staying power. MI is skills and equipment with some stats. Warbands are high CC, decent PH and often smoke grenades. Etc etc. Sure some units get a little blurry but, CB needs design space too, other wise you'll really be looking at true carbon copies from sectorial to sectorial. The most important thing though is the game is better balanced from what I can see. From Tac Window, to MOV changes, from Crit change to unit costs. The game is better balanced. It's what we wanted most, more than any individual units optimization, the value of things in the game have changed to better reflect their true worth.
You make a lot of good points, but there simply aren't such hard lines anymore. I'd go so far as to say that with the Zhencha being vulnerable to Shock in IA the last hard feature of a HI left the game. When I started, if you weren't playing Ariadna the HI label meant 2W and Hackable, for Ariadna it meant it wouldn't die to Shock and was more resilient than usual thanks to some skill or exceptional ARM. Now it means you can do Classifieds that call for Heavy Infantry, and it *might* be more durable and have better stats than your other units. MI's been fuzzy for years and should have died with the speed change, since LI units are getting just as many skills these days and MI are no slower and usually just as well armoured. Maybe it would have persuaded CB to focus on REMs for Nomads, as some have wanted for the faction. On that topic, Vostok. It's a two wound, heavily-armoured Bulleteer with the MKwhatever profile, and the game's fastest Albedo with a Burst 5 main gun on another. Whoever keeps banging on about Nomads not getting anything because they don't complain can shut up now; I play PanO and ALEPH and this is still the most ridiculously powerful REM I can field. A Vostok Red Fury and a Spektr Sniper or a team of Moirae working together should be able to clear anything in the game without Sixth Sense before even accounting for Supportware. Makes me really curious what they have in store for PanO, because that combo beats out almost everything PanO can field in N3 short of a Swiss Guard or the freakin' Kamau! Still not enough for me to consider picking the Bakunin back up as a main though. Can't make a list I like without REM spam, buying heaps more Skirmishers, weird punk stuff, or miniatures I can't display where my mother can see them (stupid sexy pantsless Moirae).
From memory they hate Nomads so thankfully I doubt they will ever show up here. Depends if some bright spark thinks being able to replace them with a REM is still a good idea because if they do then that Idea is getting spaced, this goes double for the EVAder fireteam options. Though I expect EVAders to essentially be CJC's Jujak as filler for a MB team.
I think they were first designed to link on their own for the new space rules. They might also have mixed links but I suspect that was their starting concept.
Oh I fully agree with everything you said though I feel like I didn't express my point too well. I'm not arguing that you could approach the balancing and streamlining of N4 in a multitude of different ways or that it is hard to satisfy everyone. What I wanted to get across is the fact that I would like CB to trace those "problems" in the game design back further. I'm of the impression that some of the solutions they landed on for N4 might be more like temporary patches. Some of them actually tackling the symptoms instead of the actual cause. The fact that so many units are now either made much tougher MI or a tiny bit less tough HI for a multitude of reasons for me is a clear symptom for not enough scalability in the underlying concept of wounds/structure points. The basic attributes should be there to provide a rock-solid foundation for more intricate rules building on them. It shouldn't be necessary to game their own system while at the same time overcrowding it with the loop-hole rules. Let's see what the full picture of N4 will tell us. I'm very excited overall and remain firmly optimistic despite all the doomsayers on this forum. I even like the new WIldcats (though that might be in part because I have an inkling of what they wanna do with them).
All I'm reading is you have Peter Tingle hahaha jk, but yeah, new wildcats look good and I hope they can Haris in Vanilla
I think the core problem, which they aren't addressing in N4, is that a second wound is worth way more than four points. It needs to be more like eight. Wounds being undercosted was fine when a second wound was largely locked away behind overpaying for 4-5 armor, but that started to unravel beginning with Tohaa. The efficiency advantage of grabbing the second wound without having to shell out for 3-5 armor more than offset the gimped stats if your symbiont broke. I think the Zhayedan is the best example of this - he pays 3pts for an automedikit when they gave the Namurr NWI for the same price. Wound costs are The Broken Thing in Infinity and I'm not sure why they chose not to address it for the new edition.
AutoMediKits cost 4pt in N3, not 3pt. Also, how are you isolating the cost of NWI in the Namurr? I found there were way too many other variable-cost Skills like Total Immunity to work out what they paid for NWI.
I'd be quite happy if the MB got 6-2 and nothing else, like the Orcs in Code One. Yu Jing seems to be getting a whole lot of 6-2, so our "discount" pseudo HI will be just that, "discount". Wounds have costed ~6 (Symbiont Armour, dies to flame and weakens profile) to ~10 (true extra Wound with the extra rules including Viral death resistance) and in general that hasn't changed that we can see since the Tohaa were released.
Ah yeah, seems to be four. That just makes it worse. As for NWI that's a number I've generalized out from other profiles, but I'd lay the Namurr out like this: Regular Order: 1pt CC18: 2pt BS12: 2pt WIP14: 2pt ARM2: 2pt BTS3: 1pt Hyperdynamics 2: 2pts Total Immunity: 8pts Specialist Operative: 1pt Climbing Plus: 1pt NWI: 3pts Spitfire: 14pts E/Marat: 2pts D-Charges: 1pt Heavy Pistol: 1pt E/M CCW: 1pt something like that I'm really just fishing, I agree there are too many confounding variables. The low cost of wounds stares you straight in the face though when you compare say a Moblot with a Zuyong
An unhackable profile from an effectively abandoned Sectorial against a faction with an HI discount is no real basis for comparison. Infinity point profiles are not just straight-up point additions. Some things are given for free or discounted to certain profiles, often things that have a low possibility of use, eg a CCW on a unit with shitty MOV and CC.