If your opponent is layering AROs, you pick some of the weaker ones off first. Kill the Fugazi, re-holo, then offer the Kamau the choice. Doesn't even need to be the Sepulchere picking off the weak guys that could be your longer range HMG slicing from your DZ or something else. The only time you can't do this is if your opponent has managed to set up a perfect vertical stack on his AROs, but in practice that's relatively rare to find. If you're crossing an opening in the middle of the table and you're finding 5 different things have LOF to it either your opponent is way over committing his ARO pieces to a single point and you should be exploiting that, or your table is probably too open. If your meta is blast heavy in ARO then yeah this won't work. Outside of the JSA players it's rare for me to see any linked blast weapons on ARO. Everyone's spamming FBs, MSRs, and TR bots.
I'm going to try to navigate the salt here, since I can tell a lot of this is hyperbole, but there's a few points I definitely disagree on. First, and I want to call this out first, I do have a pretty significant amount of experience playing against IA, and it's bad faith to make the argument "you must know nothing about the army" just because you disagree with me. To address some points specifically: 1) The Zhanshi Core and Zuyong core do operate differently on the table -- and you even call out many of the reasons yourself. The Zuyong link is much more likely to move around the table during the game. The Zuyong are dirt cheap HI that come at very affordable costs giving the link survivability, whereas Zhanshi die when you sneeze on them. The additional hacking defense from the Tinbot helps mitigate one of the most common threats when moving an HI link around. The types of loadouts you use to fill these two links out will be very different. 2) For mid and low cost units, you're going to have to give a more clear explanation of what you mean by each of those terms. To me, the Haidao is a mid-cost unit, and many Zuyong profiles also fall into that bucket. 3) IA's wildcard design makes reforming the link about different pieces much more viable as a strategy. The big difference is that the only linkables that don't mix and match in IA are Zuyong and Zhanshi. In MO, when you pick Hospitallers or Magisters+Teutons, you're locked into that HI choice. There are a number of units in MO that only get to slot into one or the other -- Black Friars into OS, De Fersen into KH. Joan gets locked into her own dumb fireteam that needs to be the first thing on the chopping block. Like hell, Shang Ji having core in IA is barely relevant since they're also Wildcard and the IA-exclusive Wildcard restrictions are gone. 4) We both know your line of reasoning about solo pieces is a bit of an Occam's Broom. MO's TAG options are better but in a faction with awful hackers, and the strong solo pieces of IA (Hac Tao, Mowang, Hulang) work as solo pieces much more cohesively with the rest of their army. You'll notice a bunch of people here (including several of those defending MO) are arguing that the HI link must be the core of MO, and people having issues are having them for deviating from that. 5) Trinitarians are very good, but they have some pronounced weak points -- very costly minelayer in an army that wants all the SWC, for example, and the lack of any hacking profiles. 6) That leads into one of the big differences between these armies that you only call out peripherally, but it's huge. MO is potentially the worst army at infowar in all of N4 among armies that are actually vulnerable to infowar (so discounting Ariadna, basically). There's a total of one KHD in the army -- the DZ-bound Santiago or his pricey combat jump brother -- and De Fersen has Trinity, which is tbh a bigger weakness than strength, as it was in N3, since you can still throw even the most modest camo KHD at him. Oh and pedantic point, I would call the MA changes a nerf to YJ as much as a buff to everyone else. MA4 units got a nerf, but to my knowledge, YJ doesn't have any of those? My tongue-in-cheek mic drop is that goddamn Shang Ji AP HMG with Tac Aware. Just quoting this for posterity, since it's maybe one of the most hilarious things ever uttered on these forums: Always placing below half of the classification table, with exception of Limited insertion where they place 5th, which is hilarious for an army designed to excel at that single crutch. You would expect it at least to be top 3.
You make a lot of good points, but I have a minor quibble with this particular assertion; MO actually have some extremely solid Hacking tools, albeit expensive ones. Peacemakers are an excellent Repeater platform, the Santiago KHD is still one of vanishingly few Hackers with its own Tinbot and therefore under Firewall protection on Turn 1 no matter what, and the KoJ Hacker is very difficult to kill with a KHD thanks to its high BTS. SWF's best KHD is the Locust, which is a very low bar to clear, and Dahshat still don't have any at all. MO is fairly low on the Hacking totem pole, but not really at the bottom, and it can lean into it as a skew choice in a way that some other armies can't.
Good call on Dahshat, you're correct about that. They may actually be the worst non-Ariadna infowar faction. Dahshat is one of the armies I am watching with the greatest level of curiosity in N4, since one of its biggest advantages (a pile of very cheap orders with huge utility on each one) is gone in N4. And the Santiago is very good! I would absolutely not question that anywhere. I think my issue with the Santiago is that you're either paying a huge price to put him in your link compared to the IA unit that does the same thing (15 points over the Haidao), or you're paying 40 points on top of your (already pricy) link to have the KHD you can drop on them from wherever. The Santiago KHD is a really good match for TAGs -- and especially MO's TAGs who are going to regularly find themselves in pretty unusual positions due to C+/Superjump. I think point-for-point the Nokken outperforms the Locust at hacking, but you're correct that SWF is also poor at infowar. I think the difference is that SWF is significantly less reliable on hackables to do basically all of the heavy lifting in most lists.
So we aren't ever supposed to use Montesa, Tikbalang, Sepulchre etc. because it's Knight core or nothing? I had forgotten how pointless discussing this Sectoral with you was.
That purely depends on how you view "support" which is a little subjective. You could have a list built around a Sergeant core and Trinitarians for midfield button pushing/hidden ARO but the center pieces for active turn fighting are a TAG and a Montessa. The LI outnumber your HI/TAGs but whether you consider them the backbone of the army is down to view.
I don't think that's actually the argument that @daboarder is making. TAGs aside, most of the more unique knights and non-knight pieces can be framed in utility they provide to the core -- the Montesa certainly has a lot that it adds in supporting a knight core, and we've already discussed at length that the CJ Santiago does a lot for the army. Sepulchre... jury's still out on that one, imo.
I still don't understand why the viability of one strategy erases the other... A buff to Light infantry in MO doesn't mean you're suddenly not allowed to take the crusade link anymore.
My first MO4 lists include HI Core and Montesa and/or CJ Santiago as flankers. Hell, you can pretty easily fit Tikbalang and Montesa to run alongside HI core now. The issues mostly stem from how restricted the base Core choice is.
One thing, I can't find a place for in MO is the knight of the holy sepulchre, He still needs a fix. Do he need to be a HI unit?
I agree. Even if he ends up being a secondary attack piece similar to the mowang he would still be more useful then he is now. Super expensive for a pretty lackluster profile in my opinion. I've played him a few times but often found that you could just fit more guns or better equipped orders into the list rather than an expensive holo knight with COC.
I disagree on the KotHS; he's good, though I really dislike how they nerfed his WIP. And - again - Holomask and Holoecho on S2 unit is a very, very useful thing to have, especially in an army which otherwise has little in way of misdirection. If he were to stay S2, I'd like him to get either upgunned, or turned into a command&control unit, with NCO, CoC, and better Lt options. If he's to be an S5... I'd like to see something akin to Hulkbuster, large armor but primed for CQB and CC, instead of the fire support unit SHI usually are.
Something AP (Spitfire or HMG), NCO, ARM 4 or more and some kind of mimetism and you got a nice Sepulchre. And if you make a FTO option with Tactical Awareness... But it seems that he is gonna be the replacement for the MO Tikbalang. A super HI with great firepower
So! I think I found a spot for the Knight of the holy Sepulchre, I came up with this list, I will try it out Zw9taWxpdGFyeS1vcmRlcnMBIIEsAQELABsBBAAAGwECAAAYAQYAABgBCgAAhfcBBAAAEQEBAAAYAQkAAB0BBAAADwEBAAAlAQEAAIXRAQQA https://infinitytheuniverse.com/arm...BBAAAEQEBAAAYAQkAAB0BBAAADwEBAAAlAQEAAIXRAQQA
It doesnt work... Early this year i was testing a Limited Insertion list for a satellite with Crusade Fireteam and after many Joan isolations by hackers, i decided to include a CoC Breaker Sepulcre, and not bad, but too many points for a HI im not gonna use.
