The only way its hard to get to them is if you play with alot of buildings that don't have roof access. From my experience, that's not very common. They literally just go up there and shoot them. The Kitsune comparison is because you've made a model that is about as useless in a firefight as Kitsune, yet also wants to get into CC as much as Kitsune. You asked if the profile is optimised, it isn't. It's an overbloated shitshow that can't do anything right. It can't win fights in shooting so paying for all the extra guns is a waste, and it doesn't have the tools to reliably reach CC. It wouldn't matter if it was cheap, but you've made it cost a premium. Your entire premise relies on it being able to hide and not get attacked. This isn't going to work against an opponent that isn't garbage, they're just going to either cover his approach with AROs it will struggle to get past (such as MSV or hacking oriented AROs) or they're just going to run it down and murder it because it's very very weak in the reactive turn. Either way you have a 40pt liability that doesn't actually contribute anything of value. I'm sorry Wuji you've got some ok ideas in this thread but I can tell you with certainty this one is garbage.
Ask yourself what do you want this unit to do? Right now you've said "I want it to do backflips and run up walls" congratulations it does these two things... and nothing else particularly useful. You need to find it a job to do. Right now the Hulang is ok at clearing objective rooms. It's reasonably adept at that, taking fights at close range with mimetism is useful and it doesn't get hampered by too many long range firefights in that kind of mission. I used one last week to clear a bunch of Teutons out of an armoury. To do this kind of job it's crutching on Mimetism, if you take that off it its odds plummet on winning F2F shootouts. Is his job now to throw smoke and run in there and stab them in CC? Well he's only CC22 and MA2, exactly the same as these Teutons. He's evenly matched and it's a literally a crap shoot of who can roll higher on 1 dice, so that's awful. Not to mention if the unit is relatively crap at shooting and your design for them is to focus on CC, why are you stacking all of these extra guns on it?
You keep disrespecting me by misquoting me. We're done. And again B4 SMG or Multirifle from cover at a troop with no cover cause mobility affords that. Just stop already. It's not these tactics dont work or that Huang would add smoke for MSV long range firefights through smoke, it's that you don't like my idea. You already have something else in mind. I bet you would run them 3 times in a little at home test. I like the idea of setting up the table with scenarios at home to hammer out tactics like billiards trickshots. Put them on the table as I've described, bring MSV, smoke n clear a path then clean up with with them. Try it or not, idc dude. Even if CB sees my ideas and decide they wanna run with it, it ain't gonna hit the table till likely the next HS book, just like how it took them to change Morats and movement on HI and MI.
I mean yeah, you've generally shown that you don't have a clear idea about what makes a useful profile.
Those tactics certainly won't work in IA, you just can't support the unit well enough against its counters. It could be a possibility in Haqq which has much better midfield presence and Hacking to cover an exposed unit up that far. If I had to pick something out to make the Hulang worth it, it would be a Motorcycle- lets them dart out from safety in the DZ and return by reactive, providing a hit-and-run alternative to slow advances with links or Zhencha/Liu Xing aggressive skirmishing.
Alright look man, I say one thing, you you either half repeat back to me saying it wont work if boring the other half and now you're literally quoting me telling you you're misquoting me and you dont even address. So, you're not even paying attention to what's being said. You've got a filter going with everything you're reading and you're picking things to talk about in a vacuum which misrepresents what I'm saying. The fact that I've pointed it out repeatedly and you keep harping away at it as if you didnt hear me is retarded. You'll now say you've read and understood everything I've said but it's too late dude, you had your chances to fully address what I was saying but you wanted something else entirely. I told you that's fine but you're so obsessed with trying to get me to agree with you that I'm wrong it's insane. Let it go.
You mean you would swap out the mim for a bikes? I imagine a bunch of people including the guy above will be upset with you because mimetism is end all be all compared to mobility... And yeah, I would have let this thread go if not for someone trying to bash my suggestion, the fuckin thing has wild card, gonna tell me it cant work... But, already I admitted IA as a whole needs work, when I actually looked at the Haidao being a hackable HI hacker with no BTS I realized CB somehow was obsessed with a concept at the expense of it's own execution.
I apologize, I thought I was responding to the other guy, but still, your response for being the first time responding to this thread was out of the blue. And it makes 0 sense for you to quote what I said to him about him misquoting me only for you to not address it. Hint you're not supposed to, that's on him, the fact that you jumped in like you did is inappropriate though. Its plainly visible that his arguments are pick and choose. Now if you have the same opinion about a combination of mobility skills and smoke vs mimetism, then I think it's really you who isnt getting it. And I remembered the damned thing has wildcard. No one's being honest about the fact they'll bring one every time as part of a fireteam as a close combat escort and smoke thrower to move the team up. And shooting through smoke is just as effective as mimetism. Plus for those who have no visor. You can choose to ignore them entirely. You may not like the mobility idea but that's a personal preference, not that the tactics that combination of skills wouldnt work.
CB seems to have forgotten that you shouldn't let reality get in the way of a good idea. They want an all-HI army without all the silly compromises and without leaning on the discount skills because they're unfluffy? Make up some new discount skills, like extra vulnerability to Hacking to pay off the Haidao's new BTS or having the Zhencha's rudimentary medical systems simulated with a heavy malus to Doctor and Medkit rolls instead of NWI. Not creeping the order-manipulation stuff out to almost every other faction in the game would have also helped the badly restricted IA a bit, too. ...what?
I find the Hulang works decently. It's not the hot sauce that are e.g. Yara Hadad or Nourkias, nor what they'd be if their E/M Grenades were Smoke Grenades. They do have a tendency to die quick, but that has more to do with the opponent's threat assessment and their tendency to be put as a road block. We really don't need a literal Shikami copy-pasta, even if the lack of mobility skills is a bit iffy on the Hulang from the sectorial's design perspective, and the mimetism is what makes them worth fielding. Only thing they truly "need" is 6-2 MOV, just like Crane. P.s. IA is fine and doesn't need a re-work. Game currently has issues with Pitchers making Guided too powerful, but that's not an issue with IA.
Fixed And yeah, think outside the box, I get they wanted to slim down on rules but they invented a new thing, individual mods which is huge. Being able to mod things in the game without giving it a name means less fluff explanation. -1, -3 here and there aaaand, I would accept a unit with move 6-0 or 4-2 if the rest of it waa built to do something every second short skill. Like deploy the something if it doesnt have a target...
Well? Isn't IA a good target for assblasting guided to their link? Or are we talking about our abundance of tinbots?
IMO, IA isn't any more a target for guided ammo than are other sectorials. It's not a unique problem for IA. Kosmoflot has the same problem as does Morat. Yes, there's Oblivion and Total Control to contend with, as well, but those have the exact same attack vector as spammy over-the top Guided does - those blasted Pitchers. Fix Pitchers and, IMO, you bring the other in line as well. So far I haven't experienced hacking to be too oppressive with or against lists that don't have Pitchers, but it has been useful.
That's not entirely true some sectorials/factions are less vulnerable than others. Kosmoflot can build into camo heavy lists + rape bear, it's considerably resilient to guided shenanigans, while Morats can't do that period. SEF vs IA for example as well SEF can stick a Speculo, 4 Calibans + Shrouded under camo markers, toss in some Taighas and laugh at you trying to fire guided missiles at stuff. IA can at least get their LT under a marker but it's pretty hard to build a good IA list that doesn't leverage vulnerable links as their solo operators aren't on the same level of tactical flexibility as SEF and a big part of playing IA is buying into "Wildcards: The Sectorial". However @ObviousGray it's still more or less on the money, it's more a metagame issue than a specific problem with IA. Similar to how I like both our TAG profiles and think they're decent but still find them close to unplayable given how the hacking metagame currently operates. Wuji I get that you're enamoured with the idea of some very mobile scalpel unit. The reality is what you're describing doesn't work like that. It costs too much and has a shittier order efficiency than the current option. Do you know what the difference is between an MSV2 unit shooting through smoke at a hard link ARO such as an ORC FB, KoJ ML, Riot GRRL or any other such ARO targets? Fucking nothing. Literally. You get the exact same MODs as if you just activated the MSV2 guy and shot without smoke. This is also entirely ignoring the fact that you also probably get better odds if you activate the B5 AP HMG and go to town with that. Meanwhile for the "clean up" the Hulang is now much, much, worse at this job against anything that wasn't packing MSV2 already.
Yes, but then you're building specifically around this problem and you're playing lists that tend to not take advantage of Fireteams which is the primary offer for Sectorials and I've seen more than once people declaiming how similar vanilla combined can make lists to typical SEF lists (not that this is the only way to build SEF, of course, but at least around here where Guided isn't overly spammed, SEF still builds lists like that). Hence, not a unique IA problem, though it's true that IA's counters to it is weaker than many factions due to lacking vast AVA of relatively cheap Marker state units. I just don't subscribe to the idea that IA specifically needs to be buffed to counter something that I consider to be a major weakness of the entire game, though.
Yes, agreed. The required fix is the game needs to change not to IA (or the particular TAGs mentioned).
I can think of a few examples that make it more efficient. A. You dont want to spend orders shooting when you can just grab the objective. B. MSV2 shooting through smoke at mimetism, HMG odds just went down. C. It's already got wildcard, its efficiency doesnt change at all except for the FD profile. D. For the FD profile it still has Smoke, which means instead of trying to win a firefight where both it and its target have cover, it ignores the idea of shooting someone in cover at all. And with Move 6-2 its cautious movement is better and it can Move+Dodge 10" on 19s through the air and on walls. Avoiding a firefight with an enemy in cover is hugely efficient. Oh and it has BS 12 vs the MSV units BS13 or better in Vanilla. So no, there is, at the very least 5% improvement my way but what about damage difference and links providing 6th sense so MSV1, Lei Gong would be even more effective than he already is. I could probably find even more examples but you're head is stuck one way, I can tell you cant think outside the box. Cause not onlyndidnyounforce me to reiterate things because you consciously chose not to address them yourself, I even found new examples. So again, you arent honest. If you dont want to admit this build works this way cause we see it work on similar units then that's on you. Our conversation is officially done cause you cant admit that these tactics work, because you cant admit it, you're dishonest. Because you say this would be less efficient when there are clear ways it's more efficient, you are again dishonest. I dont deal with dishonest people. Deuces.
I hate to defend Triumph, but he's kinda right here- albeit stubborn about it. IA isn't built for avoidance tactics or trick movement; it's just too slow and relies on expensive troopers for its most vital tasks so there's little room for waste. A heavy forward Smoker would be great in Haqq or Nomads, especially Vanilla, but it doesn't solve any of IA's most pressing issues- it even causes a new one, since the Hulang's E/M Grenades are the only good Speculative Fire option in the whole army and removing them would cause issues against guys in tricky places. An expensive piece in IA needs to either grab objectives or kill enemies very quickly, ideally both, or else it just gets replaced with a Zhencha or another guy who can. If you want a good example of unit ideas that work well in one faction but terribly in another, compare the well-received Hassassin Shujae with NCA's hated Locust- they're almost the exact same unit (Shujae's about 6 points better optimised, but the Locust has more profiles to choose from and can do more objectives total), but the Locust is barely even usable because of NCA's godawful presence in the midtable while the Shujae is comparatively quite handy as it's likely to survive until needed with Daylamis, Farzans and Ghazi all available to watch its back.
