N4 ARO game theory

If your opponent is an idiot and deploys her up front with no support so you can murder her, sure that sounds very feasible. If they have more than 2 brain cells to rub together she will be hiding very, very, far back behind a mess of mines and other AROs ready to utilise the repeater network that is going to go up on his turn. Mary doesn't need to leave her DZ to inflict her presence on the table and really doesn't want to. The further up she is the more likely her PH10 nerd ass finds grenades or warbands being thrown at it, or against a hacking competent opponent, having a Pitcher thrown at her.

That last item is specifically important to the discussion, even though you keep trying to forcibly take it out of context because you can't read worth a damn. Some factions don't have pitchers, and they're the ones that are overall considerably weaker at hacking, and they're the ones that are most in the position of finding their basic KHD platforms not worth taking over alternatives. Specifically for Yu Jing, where this discussion was originally being had, while the Ninja KHD will probably perform admirably when placed in against an opponent of equal footing such as a Pan-O it will instantly become a liability over its other very good profiles when tasked with fighting a superior infowar opponent.

Which brought up the discussion of why take them in Yu Jing? The goal in N4 is to remove the repeater network and the opponent's ability to spread the net. An unhackable profile is better at that, and seeking non hackable solutions will generally give you a more well rounded list that plays better into more opponents. Now if you know who you're playing against you can list tailor to specifics, but normally I give advice based on the opponents being unknown as that would be standard in a tournament environment.

To go back to the topic of AROs, specifically what was being discussed in the other thread was the Tian Gou KHD profile and its decline in ability and value in shell games with a burst 1 Trinity ARO being significantly less threatening than Redrum was to the point where some enemies will find it totally ignorable, particularly hackers backed up by doctors. KHDs are very much an active turn piece now. Their lethality in ARO, particularly trying to fend off being attacked under a repeater, is quantifiably bad and puts the link it's trying to defend at risk of non compatible AROs.

In N4 the concept of I will place my hacker in this link to defend the link from enemy hackers has faded. Now we lean more towards I will place my hacker in this link so the link will defend the hacker.

 

Painting TJC as having a weak ARO game is misinformed at best. They have solid hard ARO options, and there's no need to throw Mary forward to be in a position to get picked off when you have access to FD core linked REMs with their built in repeaters. Their midfield presence is fine too. It might not be as spammy as dropping cheap Morans or Zeros, but Hecklers are solid and Spektrs are quality investments, particularly the FO profile. Overlapping lateral Flash Pulse hits are fucking pain in the ass to deal with when they pop out while you're trying to deal with Hecklers. I use the new Ninja profiles in the same role, lateral TO Flashpulses on ARO are great surprise moneyshot.

These hackers still exist but the solution to them is just running them down and killing them conventionally. There's no need to invest a unit in a faction that has little support for it and match up dependent becomes a huge liability and unable to function aggressively. The solution to a HD Zero running around the midfield has generally been throw a monk or a Guilang at it for Yu Jing anyway the whole time because you have to dig them out of camo first regardless. I know you're going to try argue that KHDs are more order efficient, except they're not at all when you specifically are advocating using them in conjunction with sensor bots.

The Tinbot alone causes enough issues. If their hacker is strong enough to threaten through the tinbot odds are they either split burst or just straight outright ignore the trinity and just tank it, especially if they're packing a doctor because they straight up know it can't remove them from the table. The problem with the "defensive" KHD is it straight up makes the rest of the link each shit on normal rolls or breaks the link every time it wants to activate Trinity.

Things would be alot less problematic if CB would fix the asinine rules interaction of being unable to use different hacking attacks in ARO.

You act like I'm not playing with hackers for Yu Jing, I am. Regular (read Assault) hacking devices are great and I've been getting solid mileage out of them. KHDs though? Well the Ninja we've already covered, the Tian Gou is over costed with bloatware and was designed for N3, the Kanren is better served not having one and the madtrap profile is so much better. With their lethality falling through the floor it's not worth the drawback of becoming hackable for any of these units over their non hackable profiles. Oh, and the Hac Tao had its KHD profile deleted in N4.

The Haidao is still worth taking, but only in IA, and because it suffers less from adding a hacking device given it's already vulnerable to hacking.

 

I know it's a bit out of topic, but @Teslarod how did KB and HM took a hit? Their links seems pretty more punchy than before

 

I think if the both of you can tone down the hostility towards each others you can have a really interesting and meaningful conversation about tactical applications and unit priority. I think you are playing different games because hacking does become very different depending on which faction you play and how willing you are to play with hacking.

Seriously, I'm reading both ends of this conversation and agreeing with both of you on most things you write.

(I'm personally of the current opinion that the investment in making Killer Hackers work is a bit too high for the factions I play, except maybe ISS or JSA (for their ability to bring the killer hackers to the correct spot), but I'm willing to see how the hacking scene evolves locally before I set anything in stone)

 

I am playing around with the sombra killer hacker in nomads. Feels like it's a good additional part of its toolset currently, but I am playing them quite aggressively

Sent from my SM-G965F using Tapatalk

 

Yes, that would be why there's a thread that I made complaining about Haqqislam infringing on Pan-O design space in this very same sub forum. That is clearly a Yu Jing fueled conspiracy, would you also like to tell me your thoughts on QAnon?

You literally suggested it yourself that if you put your hackers back in safety that TJC will be overrun. You will sit in your DZ and wait to die were your words.

"Hacking is the other mess to hide behind with very few things able to project that aside from putting Hackerman himself up the field to be annoying close and personal.
You're unlikely to get away with waiting it out sitting in your DZ and wait for your turn and throw out some Pitchers.
Given TJC has a hard time fielding a midfield presence (and arguably being the worst Nomad Sectorial) sure go ahead sit in your DZ and wait to die... or mabye screen Mary with a Jammer and use her F 4" ODD C+ kit."

They literally gained the ability to see through smoke for the first time and got their first MSV2 option. That's far more than simply making a linked sniper better.

That I'll give you. Tables that feature excessive difficult to access vertical terrain would make KHDs more valuable. On the other hand, I also think people that are building tables with excessive difficult to access vertical terrain are probably making poorly balanced tables and should aim to make C+ a luxury not a necessity, given some sectorials have neither C+ or super jump creating tables where models can hide with objectives and shit with relative impunity probably isn't the best of ideas.

Specifically Kanren in conjunction with the other unit types? Because their hacking profiles don't come with the Madtraps. You use the Kanren to supply the FD Madtrap, then either the Ninja or the Guilang (or Zencha or Daofei) to Oblivion and then either way good chance you brick whatever expensive unit you just set up on one way or another, if the Madtrap sticks it also opens up the option for an Oblivion on normal rolls because it disables resets. The Madtraps also majorly increase the melee threat of the Kanren's monofilament making it much easier for them to run up to targets while forcing shitty ARO decisions.

Yes, they fail at their role of an ambush unit within the link now and they're carrying expensive dump gear like the 360 visor. Before surprise Redrums gave anybody pause to rush headfirst at White Banner links before feeling them out, now not so much because Trinity is super anemic in ARO.

You're missing the point again. If you get to the position where you can butcher the Tinbot and the link housing the problem hacker with conventional firepower (which we both agree is entirely plausible why you randomly think I disagree I don't know), then numbnuts the KHD Ninja was nothing but a liability in the matchup. So numbnuts the KHD Ninja probably shouldn't be in your list if you don't need help removing exposed isolated skirmisher hackers, and if he's not capable of engaging hard linked targets and needs someone else to murder them with guns instead, he should probably put the KHD away and pick up the FO unit because otherwise he's going to be looking for another job.

Some people are super concerned over losing the ability to stick the -3 on MSV units. I don't agree with that view point personally. They do come out slightly worse against MSV than before but not by much because of the increased burst while against anything that lacks MSV (so alot of shit) they get nothing but better. They're also able to stack Mimetism with SF now so that's another improvement.

Hollowmen have super jump, they're 6-2 jumpers but it's still worse than N3 strictly speaking.

 

Sure, I need a bit more elaboration first so I can put it together. What do you feel like is the pressing issue that's going to cause a turn 1 collapse? What specifically needs attention in defense in your mind. With the demand of Mary being pushed forwards what are you specifically worried about being run face first into by a HI link or a TAG?

I'm not going to debate the nuances of which sectorial did the best because honestly we'd spend another 100 pages on that. Between now being able to see through smoke, Tunguska also received considerable options in link expansion going from 0 wildcards to 6, and their hacker pool benefiting heavily from the meta shift I don't think it's fair to consider them left in the dust by the other two sectorials.

So my local meta has actually had a fairly interesting journey in experimentation with terrain, and we've had a pretty big variety in styles ranging from jungle to urban, to corridor tables that used the N3 scenery rules so you could bash your way through the walls. On a tangent, I hope the scenery rules come back in a living rules packet @Koni they were fun.

When we first started out we gravitated very heavily towards vertically tall tables. We had a couple of collections that very heavily featured the Knights of Dice range and if you're familiar with them you'll know that their Easy District range, particularly the early designs, were large footprint tall buildings. So originally our meta was largely dominated by big urban buildings that were roughly 8"-12" tall.

The discussion that came out of that was that the buildings were creating too many sniper towers, even if you created shorter firelanes the diagonal LoF from the ground to the rooftops was making it very hard for Rifles, Shotguns, and other CQB weapons to function because they were struggling to deal with the increased distance from the diagonal rangeband combined with most units were hiding on top of giant buildings there was little to fight at ground level. This was before Marksman rifles were a thing so the game was very much turning into either you had a SWC weapon or your model had a shit of a time moving up the table even with smoke options.

So we came up with the solution of trying to create an artificial jungle canopy, essentially a large amount of scatter terrain that was small and thin at the bottom but spread out at the top. Things like large overhead billboards, big chinese archways, radar domes etc. The LGS owner actually helped us out and designed and cut several terrain pieces for us on a laser cutter. That partially worked, it split the game into two main engagements the ground fight and the roof fight.

The problem we ran into was that these 8"-12" buildings were just too fucking tall. Even though they all had ladders and access ways generally speaking once the initial infiltrating/FD skirmishers finished fighting over roof tops which ever models won tended to then own their roof for the rest of the game. It took the ground fighting units too many orders to finish their battle clearing the way, doing objectives, and then also finding time to get to the ladders/stairs and get all the way up, kill the camo prick, then get back down. You'd be lucky to have the orders to clear more than one roof a game in turn 2 or 3. Essentially the Z axis was too big and was sapping too much movement to deal with. Our Ariadnan table actually came about partially because that player was sick of the problems the extreme vertical tables caused in game play and decided he'd try something towards the opposite extreme to see how it felt.

Over time our urban tables have reduced in height. It's generally settled that game plays better with the majority of terrain models can hide on top of staying between 3"-6", as well as relatively flat tables play equally fine. That's not to say you mixing in taller pieces instantly causes issues, as long as you stop them from turning into cancerous sniper nests and they're in the minority they're fine. Two camo markers camping two noticeably taller buildings is better to play around than 8 camo markers camping 8 equally overly tall buildings for example, something like the latter is just too much vertical movement for a 3 turn game, even more so with decreased orders in N4.

As for why we make sure the vast majority of vertical terrain is either entirely inaccessible to camping on, or has ladder/stair access that's because of gear checks. Too many gear checks cause complications with list building, and Infinity's missions and mechanics already demand several gear checks, adding more through the terrain is inadvisable to good game play. It's something the player who crafted our jungle table was very mindful of. He took care to make sure he made just enough to impact players without entirely fucking them if they lacked a terrain skill.

Super Jump and C+ should be approached the same way. You want some tables to offer just enough verticality so that these skills offer the luxury of having different routes to traverse. What you don't want to do is make tables that are tedious to deal with various people sitting on top of rooftops without these skills and forcibly demand their inclusion. That both causes issues building lists and is relatively unfair to factions that have very little access to those skills, or in the case of some like Ikari, no access at all.

Yeah it's not great dude, it's either more expensive in Zhanshi links for no real benefit, again, focus on removing repeaters not trying to build lists that get screwed when they fight superior hacking forces, or you're stuffing a specialist into a Jujak/Shang Ji link that costs almost as much as another full blooded HI.

Yeah that's not great. Your opponent puts his repeater down on your link, activates his hacker with a MOV order. Either you try to fight back with a shitty trinity ARO and probably achieve nothing, or you do nothing and just watch you shit get hacked. If you do the latter, you might as well had a real jammer instead of a shitty KHD that isn't strong enough to punch its way through tough targets and is in a faction that doesn't offer enough support for order efficient offensive hacking to control the table.

Incidentally I watched Bahram and VIRD actually get into a hacking war tonight which included the VIRD player scoring a disgustingly good guided Missile hit off a spotlight on the Bahram player. Both players agreed at the end Trinity was fucking useless in ARO at defending their shit from enemy hackers and largely regretted their KHDs not just being more HDs.

Yeah I played them through N3. What ended up happening is most opponents didn't give a shit about them because they weren't dangerous enough and just ran the nearest shit skirmisher into straight LoF and shot them. I had better results having non hackable kanren pretending to be various kanren hackers because they at least attracted hackers to waste their time fucking around with a non hackable target.

As far at madtraps go right now I don't deploy them at the start of the game unless I am very very worried about getting run over or having unexpected guests AD on me. In N4 the madtraps are way too good offensively to waste them getting wasted by some shit warband or skirmisher in ARO on turn 1 unless I am very scared of a particular opponent. I'm finding the hidden AROs Yu Jing is packing right now is slowing people down alot, surprise HRLs have not been fun for people as have Ninjas popping up near people and stabbing them.

That's honestly nice for a change I haven't been able to play like this since Uprising.

 

Yes actually, building maps that rise in the center then lower to towards the DZs. The local concept of an urban hill actually evolved from that, an example of which you actually linked one in my picture. I think I linked an Aperture Science mining facility somewhere too where the owner was going for a similar effect although it's had some teething issues with accessibility for larger models. Sometimes make it larger or smaller or move it around to keep things fresh.

The hill provides a very similar function but is more interesting to fight over than simply putting really fat tall buildings towards the middle because you get a better multi layered fighting aspect with more units using it simultaneously that can also interact with the rest of the map more easily. The all tall buildings in the middle kinda got old when they just became "Ok, time to go over the top of this ladder into whatever heavy flamethrower, mines, and TO bullshit is waiting for me on the top of this roof and fight it all at once while having my dick hanging in the breeze." Either you won control of the building with the attack or you had to ready the next poor trooper to get hurled into the meat grinder at the top of the 3 story building.

It's also alot more ITS objective friendly which is a big plus.

I think I know why, but I'll check first and ask for an elaboration on that. That said the particular picture you linked was specifically set up for Transmission Matrix, nobody was putting a TAG down that game so bear that in mind.

Although it'd be simplest to put the put the onus squarely on the TO's shoulders to do their very best in preventing god awful tables getting set up at events I know it's real struggle for larger satellites when they're relying on community loaned terrain to cover tables to maintain quality. I get a bunch of messages with the worst offenders every time a con photo dump goes up online.

That said if at a community level everyone takes a greater interest in curating their own terrain sets this becomes far less of an issue. We were actually supposed to have a competition this year for building terrain that got pushed back because of covid.

The ones walking into a damage -3 WIP DAM11 ARO because they were all hacking offensively through repeaters. Nobody directly hacked each other the entire game, every attack came through a repeater either pitched, deployable, or off a remote and they were thoroughly unimpressed with the result. None of the KHDs on either side scored any kills, and wound up just getting bricked and killed conventionally. As for the guided missile, nothing relevant to the discussion really, just the Bahram player got caught off guard by a Croc revealing himself with repeaters when he thought the opponent had none left after killing the REMs upfield. Cost the Croc his life but he got a repeater down that punished the shit out Bahram for being lax. Not really relevant but funny as shit.

For Vanilla? No, not worth the AVA1 Kanren slot over the Madtraps. And you can keep posting awful tables if you want but my advice is stop playing on awful tables and if their terrain is that bad help the TO out and get him some more terrain. I dropped $300 last month to supply the LGS with more terrain to replace broken stuff (fuck inconsiderate DnD and 40k people btw) and most of the other guys have been really good about stepping up and making sure we have plenty of terrain in the community, if you guys are struggling that much maybe you should all get together and discuss the situation and what you can all do to fix it.

Mostly unnecessary for Vanilla, granted it's possible I could feel differently for ISS but I haven't gone into the deep end with them yet in N4 and I'm not 100% on their ARO situation yet as the Dakinis now linking have definitely changed things up a bit.

Alright that one's on me I wrote that like shit. I meant the hidden AROs from the Hundun, and the Ninja popping up and stabbing them on the following turn if they were overly aggressive and tried to take control of the midfield without sufficient overlapping AROs to protect them. I am finding players slowing down and considering where the stabby assholes might be. It's not as good as the sheer abject terror Kitsune inspired but I'll take it.

 

HD generally is good mitigation to this tactic:

Tysklons Moves, you do nothing, Tsyklon Fires Repeaters, you do nothing.
Jazz activates and Moves, you reveal your HD ML or HD MSR and engage the Tsyklon.
> This forces the Nomad player to break Jazz out of the link prior to hacking and then reform the link afterwards. Doable but inefficient.

HD KHDs also work well into this. Because the likely area that your opponent wants to cover with Repeaters is known. So you can relatively seemlessly deploy a Hexa KHD in a position that it'll be able to get AROs. In particular vs factions that are likely to rely more on Marker state or AD Hackers than linked HDs, you're likely to be able to exploit this for Normal rolls.

Marker state + Stealth HI are already serious contenders in a strong Hacking meta. Marker state is still, by-far, the best Hacking defence.

I'd probably look at a cheap(ish) linkable Tinbot to augment the Fusi Fireteam if it's that much of an issue. This would turn even Fusi HDs into credible anti-Spotlight AROs.

 

Most players I know would only expose the Tsyklon on its Move Short Skill, returning to Total Cover with any remaining MOV. I'd try to hit it on that skill to stop it dropping Pitchers in the first place; not exactly great odds but the payoff for success is huge for a very Hackable faction like NCA. That, or hope the CJC player was cheap and has Jazz put down her own Pitchers, which will give even a Hexa a fair chance at ripping the heart out of their Hacking game.

 

You might need to get your eyes checked. All of them literally have a second layer of tilesets that are just slightly shorter than a TAG placed on the table somewhere that stretches across the halfway line. In the case of one picture, a 2 foot square part of the table is covered by it. Each tile on the table is 1 foot square.

I also think you are getting confused as to which way the first photo you linked was being played. There are no towers in either DZ, the picture is taken from the perspective of my DZ while I'm setting up, the road with the car is the left corner of my DZ.

I'm not really sure what you're talking about. Those buildings are big enough that if you want to flank the tag you need to push into the deployment zone to get at them.

The concern I currently have is with TAGs being able to stand on top of other buildings with cover to get unnaturally tall and potentially start firing down at stuff with greater elevation than intended. It's been an issue on a couple of table set ups and we're adjusting things in case it gets out of hand. Specifically I need to add more items like the triangular signs from wildfire, things that can be used to increase building height without allowing things to stand on them.

You fail to see the point as usual. The HD might have similar odds but it has a greater spread of targets, rather than just having a KHD that becomes either outcompeted in trying to remove problem hackers if you are factionally weaker at hacking, or straight useless if nobody brought a hacker. The HD has a range of functions which is primarily what's making it more attractive that selecting anemic KHDs that are a potential liability to your list.

Probably because there are better sources of firewalls than REMs, although nomads do have a pretty attractive option with the Meteor at the moment. I'd be pretty surprised if Nomads were running their REMs up for the most part though given their depth of access to Pitchers, same for Bahram.

Aleph and Shas have a comparative lack of repeaters, but that's what makes them slide down the scale of relative hacking prowess. They're not top tier hacking factions that are going to make your standard KHD investment utter garbage.

I am aware, I have a thread in the rules forum to confirm that already. It's nice but it really doesn't make me value the KHD any higher over the madtrap profiles.

 

Guys just

PM each other

 

Like I am not saying shut up or anything

Just that essentially this is a personal conversation not a broader community discussion at this point

Which is fine! But just that PMs would maybe be better

Anyway I'm not your mum do what you like