The Church is just too ingrained... and thinking of MO, is there anything it doesn't have? LI, MI, AD, S5, S6 TAG, S7 TAG, Motorcycle... so much fun!
I'd argue it'd be better for MO but not the setting- MO is very clearly meant to feature squads of brave knights charging up the battlefield to Smite Evil, and they're stuck in the faction with hard rules against good Hacking, midfielders and the big CC enabler, LoS blockers. N4's making the playing field a little more even on two of those fronts, but dodging the PanO weaknesses would be a big help for the Knights. It might also finally open some design space for a PanO melee specialist who can work on Sunday. It would also be very unfluffy, and would need to be handled with great care to prevent an Uprising-scale outrage from fans.
I disagree where it comes to hacking; it's not a faction thing, Acon is very versatile in this regard. We do struggle with Repeater coverage, and MO hacking is subpar, but this could be resolved easily. Also, they could get some Eclipse smoke for greater ease of maneuvering.
PanO does have a little bit of Eclipse, and I think more of that and/or Nimbus could really help knights close the distance to strike.
I think we could see a proliferation of Dodge (+") in MO, especially since now you get the Active Turn MOV from a Dodge, and see that as a means of closing.
I feel it in my bones... the KotHS will be a generic big boi, and even worse, will be better in vanilla than in Military Orders due to lacking any sectorial specific advantages and having worse access to orders and hacking support. I want to be bullish on MO, and as long as magisters (and Joan) are cool I generally am, but with this guy, I just have a bad feeling. Would be super awkward if CB were to release the profiles and prove me wrong. Really hope that doesn't happen. I'd look quite the fool in fact. >_> <_< Edit: They still haven't done it =(
Literally the only reason they and Qapu-Khalqi are stuck in full-on factions instead of having been designed like this from the outset is that they only had 'Mercenaries' before. Non-Aligned Armies is the perfect place for both of those factions to get moved to. We now have a bunch of 'deniable' groups in there(Foreign Company, White Company, Druze, etc), a whole faction(JSA), and a big chunk of another faction(Spiral Corps)--why not put Military Orders in there? The setting doesn't even need to change drastically. Blahblahblah, Knights are operating more independently of the PanOceanian command structure, blahblahblah.
Yea, apparently my idea to give Regions dodge of 20 wasn't welcomed that warmly.... (the idea itself, not exact number of effective PH dodge).
It's honestly about time more Profiles and entire troops disappear from Vanilla and appear in Sectorials only. I.e. get more TAGs some Sectorial only Profiles like the Varuna Zapper. Trinitaries seem like a good candidate. Sure we can SWC tax stuff to hell and back for Vanilla, but this is more about adding things for Sectorial variety than making sure it bloats up Vanilla.
Admiral made a very valid point: here in my circle people are like "Damn, MO is dead with N4"... but just, why? HI were never that strong with the new crit and immunity rules, hacking gonna be less a problem (imho), and we get fancy new toys and profiles incoming. Plus even if we got a nerf on some units (Magisters, Sepulchre), some others are getting huge buffs (Seraph, KoJ). I'm pretty excited to take out MO in N4, can't wait to get the army update and my book to update mine and test it on the field!
After seeing several new HI, like Sujian, Evaders, Domarus as well as leaked new Orc and Hospitalers I'm somewhat uncertain if that can be the final Santiago. 360 Visors got cheaper rather than more expensive, CC23, PH13 and ARM4 should all lead to a point reduction as well, yet that's the same as N3. Colour me surprised if that one is correct.
Ditto the Magisters, which haven't changed yet. Hopefully both just don't have their discounts applied yet.
I think those leaks are a mixture of modified and unmodified stuff, there are multiple errors and omissions (Spitfire Lt for 0 SWC? I don't think so), and we don't know what got further refined between putting it in beta Army and tomorrow's launch. But I guess most of us share this opinion. Combat Jump Santiago (note the absence of Parachutist) is an interesting idea, which wouldn't see much use in tournament play. But if we're talking AD I'm more interesting if Crusaders and Akalis will be remade to not be an almost exact copies.
for what it's worth those profiles look pretty complete. piecing through them all im pretty miffed about the sepulchre not changing. other than that the crusader still remains terrible along with konstantinos and defersen. Teutons i think theres a bit more of an argument for now. As of right now i still think LT options are going to be a big issue.