Tactical Window homogenising armies

And we still have biotechvore for some stupid reason a long with Highly classified and strictly worse highly classified.

 

CB staff confirmed, in a recent White Noise episode, that ITS12 will feature more of a blend of Kill + Objectives compared to ITS11. They mentioned that this is a new edition, N4 already does a good job of shaking up the meta, and CB doesn't need to use ITS as a meta shakeup.

 

But we also heard from Hellois that Frostbyte is not coming back because... Gutier thinks it's not a mission for ITS, he considers it a narrative mission for campaigns and so doesn't allow CB to put it into ITS or something to that effect.

Bonkers.

 

so... more kill? because that has been told by CB every year, and what we got is a more shoty-shoty kill-kill meta

 

Are you sure? Helois has previously said one of the design goals of seasons 10 and 11 was to be more combat-oriented, not more specialist-oriented.

 

not so sure. Maybe not in the last two years, but the ITS has been changing little by little to a shotty meta during all N3, is not something from this last years, and I remember seeing B in some video talking about wanting more hard oriented missions, be it to button pushing or killing, and some oriented to a mix, but the button pushing got to be more of a mix in the end, but it might be an old video

 

The Good missions:
- Firefight (Kill), probably the best kill mission, this mission induces chaos with low bias.
-Frontline (Dominate), the zones are big and there's a clear risk-reward calculation. Points secrecy and order of operations still needs to be clarified.
-Quadrant Control (Dominate), while having a bunch of domination missions gets boring because they look alike, this one has scoring each round which creates urgency and reduces last-order score reversal.
-Unmasking (Buttons), I do not count killing HVT as a "kill mission", you push buttons and then you act on the result, the mission is always dynamic and both players have agency due to HVT deployment and while you can create a single point by clustering HVT this can also become a huge drawback.


The mediocre missions:
-Annihilation (Kill), it is the kind of mission you introduce people to wargaming with.
-Countermeasures (Random), you have agency over the randomness, but classified objectives score unevenly and HVTs can be clustered.
-Decapitation (Kill), a slightly more interesting Annihilation.
-Hunting Party (Kill), this is a good candidate for a good mission, only problem is how uneven this gets with overly defensive LTs and that some armies are basically immune to some of the scoring conditions.
-Looting and Sabotaging (Kill), this is not quite a kill mission and with N4 almost all armies have several good options for destroying an AC2. It's still a single scoring point which is never good.
-Power Pack (Dominate/Activate), while the deployment zones alone makes this a good mission, the mission suffers from last-order score reversal which does drag it down.
-Supplies (Dominate), basically a capture the flags where the flags are in the middle. It gets ranked up simply because it doesn't naturally favour the second player, even if the games tends to get somewhat uneven.
-Supremacy (Dominate), this is Safe Area with a quirk that you can destroy the consoles and the progressive scoring of Quadrant Control.
-The Armoury (Dominate), I always found this mission to produce interesting results, particularly if there's furniture inside the armoury. The one thing I'd alter is that specialists wouldn't be forced to open all doors.

The bad missions:
-Biotechvore (Kill), simply for the fact that it punishes factions unevenly and punishes vanilla hard.
Capture and Protect (Movement), a single point to score on and you need to get across the board and back.
-Safe Area (Dominate), while the mission itself isn't terrible, Quadrant Control is better and does the same job. Since Supremacy exists and is more interesting, this mission can safely be removed.
-Show of Force (Kill/Dominate), not only does this mission suffer from last-order score reversal, but it also heavily rewards playing with TAGs which we still have sectorial(s) incapable of fielding.

Terrible mission, please remove three seasons ago:
-Highly Classified (Random), some factions can luck into having a perfect list regardless of which cards are drawn, other factions will get screwed over, and it always means you'll be down one list for the other missions of the tournament.
-Transmission Matrix (Dominate), we already have plenty of domination missions and this one comes with free repeaters for everyone - may the army with the least REM/HI/TAGs win!

Missions from other seasons:
-Frostbite (Kill/Dominate), please alter and then bring back! This seemed to favour HI/MI/TAGs, but in reality the ability to create kill zones enough to kill the enemy force completely was limited. The one thing I'd alter is to add points scoring to pushing buttons as dominating the central zone did lead to this mission being somewhat prone to last-order score reversal.
-Comms Center (Buttons), please alter and then bring back! This is a 9-buttons pushing mission with large amounts of classifieds and far too many Classifieds as well as hunt of specialists. There's also a large bonus for controlling more consoles which has a tendency to not only make for last-order score reversal, but also tends to make minor victories in tight games far too uncommon. The mission premise isn't bad, but it needs some serious fixing.
-Tic-Tac-Toe (Buttons), leave this to history, please. This is a 9-buttons pushing mission which tends to play out the same way all the time, you score a line closest and then fight about flipping your opponent's line on their side.
-Engineering Deck (Buttons/Dominate), please alter and bring back! This is a combination of button pushing and Armoury. There's a stupid amount of points in controlling more consoles and an unnecessarily large exclusion zone, but the premise is fairly good.

ITS in general:
Last order reversal is a problem that has plagued ITS for quite some time. It is when the player going second is capable of being in a losing situation, but still be in a position where they can spend a single order, flip an objective and score a lot of points because of it.
Close games are never closely scored because of how scoring tends to work. Most mission scoring have a huge bonus to controlling more zones or more objectives, etc. It is perfectly possible to score a decisive victory in score simply by scoring specific objectives with what is essentially secondary objectives being there only for tournament placement purposes.
The cute bonuses. I'm thinking of Liaison Officer, Xenotechs, the defunct Journalist extra, etc. They can be made workable, but... Xenotech was just an order hog because the placement requirement was trivial, Liaison Officer prevents marker state that many FOs need to do their job, and the Concilium Convention requires you to bring your AVA 1 miniature that's 3 pts into range of a non-null enemy.
Xenotech mechanic could be salvaged by having the Xenotech be partisan and requiring the placement to be made in the opponent's half and possibly allow the Xenotech to disable opponent's beacon.
Liaison Officer mechanic is basically an overly restrictive Datatracker and bonus points in excess of the basic 10 should probably be avoided.
The journalist thing probably needs a bit of an overhaul of what warcors do and are in the game world. Partisan correspondents at least as available as Doctors could be a thing and "photographing" concilium crimes and heroic deeds could then be implemented into mission design.

Counter-measures? I like counter-measures, you have agency over the randomness in it, you can make decisions during list building to forgo e.g. Doctor (in case your faction's Doctors are garbage like they are in quite a few factions) without risking having a bricked list. Still not as good as 20x20 because the Classified Objectives Deck is poorly designed to be used as anything but tiny bonus points.

 

What agency? unless you count ripping through the majority of the deck as agency sure. Unless you are playing the red deck the mission is almost always swingy as fuck coming up with a game plan at the beginning of the game is virtually impossible, hell even trying to formulate one during your opponent's turn is just wasted energy. Honestly, having a 1 per player veto when the 4 cards come down in HC will give you more agency and a less janky mission.
It requires you to have literally every option in the list which results in some soupy abomination that cant achieve anything or leave you with the tools to deal with anything, unlike Highly classified where you can spread the niche specialists across both lists and allow for more balanced list design, lending to a bricked list that's better off staying in the bag while you and your opponent play ship captain crew to decide the round.
Fuck exclusion zones, they are just plain awful for everyone involved. They are the jankiest shotgun to the kneecap scenario balancing tool, that do nothing but gut factions that rely on defense in depth strategies as well as limits what can be taken and excludes other interesting models for the mission, it also like that wonderfully written mission biotechvore HEAVILY incentivizes the use of fireteams so you can drag around every specialist you can get your hands on so you can meaningfully react to what ever random bullshit requires you to now dance on a roof in your opponent's DZ. But at least BTV has the common decency to let you roll to try and get further up the board.

I'd rather play Highly Classified, or any of the other bad/terrible missions any day of the week.

I understand that HC has significant issues especially for certain factions, but the janktastic dumpster fire CM cranks that to eleven. And those Issues can be rectified with a few tweaks to the mission, such as allowing for a one card veto and redraw per player in initiative order, and if infiltration is a problem just bolt confused deployment onto at least then there's some player choice and agency.

As for the 20x20 missions, providing its rolled prior to list construction they are much better than either of these missions.

 

Still looks to me like you're describing Highly Classified simply because Countermeasures changes through the objectives deck fast enough that even a 1 per player veto in HC is not enough to get even remotely close enough to be playable. I think HC can only be played if main cards are agreed upon in advance to list building, or if everyone involved is barely sober enough to handle the miniatures.

Agreed. Limited exclusion zones that are actually relevant to the scenario such as circular template centered on each objective is much better. Failing that they might as well slap a large point increase on the forward deploying skills considering how many missions need these zones -.-;;

A crap, I was thinking of TACOS. TACOS is basically CM, but almost all missions can be accomplished by any trooper (specific specialists get bonuses), you've got several different mission objectives that can't be placed too close to each other, and missions are a lot more varied, it's not all "get specialist X into HVT ZOC/BTB and roll WIP". 20x20 is an improved HC.

 

I love this mission in theory, however I find that the terrain at tournaments tends to not suit it well as there is often the good old ring of death and little to no scatter leaving you out in the open.

I dont understand why we need 3 variants of this mission in the packet, and like you said QC is just vastly superior.

As much as I enjoy playing this mission and have had some hilarious games, and it allowing for guided strats to be useful in N3 to punish those that didnt bring hackers, It should not under any circumstance be allowed anywhere near a tournament.

This mission, like funmasking, have my favourite style of mission design where you have the two distinct stages and a few things you need to balance, pity the chances of seeing it again in ITS are low if the white noise interview is anything to go off, but it's great as a wildcard mission for a TO to resurrect for a mission packet.

I really miss this one, it is one of the few missions where the "I can be tabled but still win scenario" line rings true (as opposed to being a myth), and it has always provided a fun and interesting puzzle to be solved that isn't just apply linked HMG to face and profit.

Restrict the EZ to just the objective room and a small band around it and this mission gets much better.

Probably the best designed mission currently, and one of the few times where EZ isn't awful.

 

It also looks like you just described CM. Throw them both in a blender and see what happens.

 

I really like Highly Classified for casual games.
Its awful in a tournament but its given a friend and I some of our most entertaining games in a casual setting.

 

I hear you. I listed Biotechvore as a bad mission even though I enjoy playing it as much as I like making lists for it; which is to say quite a lot. Still a bad mission for an ITS compendium as it shouldn't have a place in tournament because of the uneven playing field it creates.

 

One reason why meta was (reportedly) switching from buttons to shooting could be that almost all missions were solvable with "half-dead army can't press buttons efficiently" philosophy.

To an extent it was already alludes to ITT, though.

 

thanks for that statement! I am happy to read people still like 20x20.

I think the best way to play 20x20 is to agree on a primary mission before list building and then roll for the secondary one.