External army balance issues in N4

The joke is more or less a play on "setting up terrain for advantage".

Getting the joke aside, various weapons and units are better performers depending on the distances, distances between terrain (terrain density), distances of uninterrupted firelanes and gaps that can be traversed in one Movement.

The set up of the table dictates these distances and can change how every unit and weapon performs.

 

Sure, and if you make it a claustrophobic mess Tohaa are going to beat everyone, and hacking and Jammers (and Pheroware) will be oppressive.

 

Mmmm can´t remember if I mentioned it in this thread already (the hiatus and the splinter thread has made things more difficult than usual to keep straight in my head), but I think this three items could become bearable if the Deactivator were changed to not requiere LoS, like a Jammer or a comms attack; coupled with its range bands (up to 60cm/24'' aprox, but the last one is at -6) would allow even the worst engineer to disable Pitchers from outside LoS and ZoC at 15+...

This would mean that you can remove a pitcher with one order, so placing infiltrated Hackers would be required for applying the Marked Status, and it would be a single attempt per order instead of "as many as hackers the enemy has and want to have outside of marker state", thus "capping" the Pitcher use as an oppresive extra tactic, without nerfing the pitcher for other uses, and active use.

 

This is indeed a correct assumption, probably a few other lists with niche units may have similar outcomes.

 

But at the same time, there's quite a few units out there who just trivialises that protection. Holoechoes moving out to trigger mines or perimeter weapons with 100% reliability, Taighas dodging/tanking the same with over 80% reliability, sacrificial 4 pts REMs removing them in the same way, just to name some of the more common ways to deal with them. Or have a were-person or TAG face tank it.
And it's not like these counter-measures are particularly evenly spread, typically they're present in some of the strongest factions

To be able to use a no-LOF Deactivator with reliability on most of these defences you need to get an Engineer up the field at least 8" (provided of course that you're able to strip Camouflage off mines) and that requires the Engineer to spend orders moving and spend orders Deactivating with a fail rate of around 20%. That's still a couple of orders or three dedicated to removing a deployable item which in my book is good defence economy, especially for the vast number of factions where the Engineer isn't a very useful piece that doesn't start up field.

I do think that people place too much value and entitlement on their disposable equipment and I think that No LOF Deactivator is interesting enough to try it out. Especially since it opens up new inter-faction balance mechanics that are currently basically dead*.

* although, yes it also means an increased value is placed on a part of the game that has until now not been considered as part of the inter-faction game balance, so while it may very well mean that the hacking game for a given current top faction is nerfed by it but the same faction has a net benefit of it if they have access to accidental Deactivators all over the place (*nodding meaningfully at Corregidor*).

 

I agree that the N4 points rebalancing missed a few things. They chose to make the top end models (HI, TAGs) cheaper, but did nothing to raise the bottom. Adding points to the baseline cost of putting a model on the table would reduce the theoretical maximum number of models in a 300 point game, help even out weird cost breaks between models, and more accurately reflect that the key resource of the game is the number of orders available to the player.

There are also issues with pricing of weapons, especially DTWs; the points formula doesn’t really account for the value inherent in sidestepping the FtF roll mechanics.

 

A non-lof deactivator mode with 8" range would be much more interesting that what it is right now. Wouldn't perimeter weapons like a Koala or Mad Trap detonate on your deactivator if it was in 8" so they aren't really a factor. Repeaters are going to get you a hack in most places, would that be normal rolls to deactivate/hack or face to face? Mines have Camo, so it's mainly the sensor/deactivator combo that would really work against them. That's a specific counter which though mostly available, is still limited , even a 6-4 a bot is going to take some orders to get there, sensor then deactivate.

I am also strongly of the opinion that repeaters should generate aros if used by the activated trooper to perform a hacking attack. Which I think would go well with non-lof deactivators as a defense. Most offensive tactics require you to peel away or thread the needle through the less valuable layers of defense to get to the target you want. What makes pitchers frustrating in my opinion is that unless you contest every possible fire lane from their DZ, it basically ignores any defensive layers you have. Giving an aro against the repeater a on hacking attack still gives the active player a chance to get their hack off, but link gets a chance to scatter away from the targeted guy and your AROs have a chance to limit the hacking unless you left a blind spot, but then that is on you.

 

On the other hand, it would affect only non-camo deployables (like perimeter weapons), which nowadays enjoy the extra perk (deployable repaters and some other few) of being placed not B2B, but within ZoC.

Problem being the HI Engineers, unable to remove states like IMM/ISO by themselves with Engineering at all, or until the next turn, and being yanked out of their fireteams, meaning Invincible would still be shafted.
Also, there are factions with only the basic engineer and AVA1...

Fun fact: the Sophotect is the *only* troop with Engineer and no Deactivator in their kit...

The problem with raising the cheerleaders in cost, is that you either improve them, or throw the formula away, because those troops have no justification to cost more than they do (and there are the self-cheats like the O12 hacker with SMG at the same cost a base trooper... what, no one else has even thought of making the switch?).

A solution could be to have orders based on the amount of points alive on the table (plus the self order for AD and Hidden Deployment troops), but that would change the game quite at the base, and require constant adding or removing.

If something is camo'ed and your hunter has LoF, he will usually declare Discover and see the AROs (specially if inside of a smoke template) while having the option to shoot at another enemy troop, or you discover from more than 21cm (the small teardrop template's range), there is no need to move a Sensorbot.
As the others, Deactivator is now +6/+3/-6 technical weapon, which means that you can use that or a combi/Multi weapon from outside ZoC, so it's useless as an item as it is (all engineers carry a B3, +3 because of range weapon on the second bracket, but for Parvati), besides of the burst bonus.

This would make a mess of the system, since more than one enemy trooper might have a valid ARO against the repeater, and one or more against the hacker (by having hackers inside a repeater, or having you own repeater in ZoC of the enemy hacker). Then there's the nerf it would mean for troops carrying a repeater (sensorbots, Rudras, most Nomad remotes, Iguana, etc...).

I think the idea of no-LoF deactivator is quite minimalistic and has a reduced impact (Perimeter weapons like koalas or pandas, deployable repeaters, pitchers, non-camo mines like the dropbears or wildparrots, etc..., but no troops, nor carried equipment...), which is something that makes it really easy to test, too.

 

Agreed. In my experience, the most glaring example is the Chaska Auxiliar with HMG vs TR bot. It's the same price, but only has nuerocentics, slower, no shock immunity and doesn't have 2 levels of unconscious.

 

If a trooper has higher WIP than BS then Deactivator is almost always better than a combi rifle due to the fact it ignores cover, Mimetism, and auto destroys the target. Even for a trooper like a Machinist with WIP12/BS12 the Deactivator has better odds if the equipment has cover. Haqq and Aleph engineers can hit 85-90% Deactivator success chance within 8-16".

 

While that's a concern mainly for ISS who are remarkably poorly equipped to deal with a hacking-intensive game, I'm thinking more about the other direction where Ariadna (notoriously the most hacking-impervious faction) has impetuous Engineers and Nomads (notoriously the most hacking-intensive faction) have an "even-non-Engineers-have-deactivator" HI.
Forward deploying Deactivators are uncommon (Caliban Eng, Krit Kokram) as is Airborne Deployment Deactivators (Meteor, Tomcat Eng, Carlotta). While the way people build lists and how the 8-pts baggage bots are still quite often used, it is Tohaa that primarily is missing options as I think both of their choices are unpopular (?) and expensive.
I don't quite have the patience to go through sectorials, but every non-Ariadna have at least three AVA in baggage bot and sensor bot while Ariadna could take Traktors.

Maybe the range bands are a bit too good with NoLof, but I'm really keen to test it!

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The main problem with Deactivators as they are at the moment is that they're (edit: referring to Pitchers and FastPandas) quite easy to hide in ways that require extra orders to remove.

 

Circling back to some of the fireteam discussion earlier in the thread, one of the features that make fireteams so powerful is that they are one of the few mechanics in the game that ignore the rules regarding burst mods in ARO. I think it would level the playing field considerably if units with (+1B) weapons were allowed to gain their burst increase in ARO. There are quite a few unit profiles that receive +1B on ARO-focused weapons (snipers, feuerbachs, HRLs, etc.) that just don't see that much use. To balance things, I would just make it so that you can't gain (+1B) from more than a single source.

I've also been wondering if expanding surprise attack to the reactive turn would help offset the proliferation of MSV profiles over the past two editions. At the moment, it feels that MSV units can effectively point-and-click to remove camo models. I think it would be more interesting from a narrative perspective if camo units could also "ambush" active models as they move up-field.

N4, and particularly the crazy wildcard fireteams it introduced, feel much more skewed in favor of the active player - to the detriment of the "its always your turn" feature that makes Infinity unique. I find that often the best strategy for going second is to deploy almost your entire army out of LoF, preferably behind a screen of mines/cheap chaff units (daylami) to force the opponent to burn orders. This makes the game much less interactive in my opinion.

 

They significantly revised the points formula between N3 and N4; I'm trying to describe some differences in how I wish they had gone about it. By decreasing the cost of expensive models they compressed the range of points costs, which is good - the gap in effectiveness between a Fusilier and an Orc wasn't as large as N3 made it out to be. However, by leaving the cost spectrum anchored at the cheap end (i.e. a Fusilier has always cost 10 points), they made the average price across all units move downwards. This is in direct conflict with the goal to limit the total number of troopers, as evidenced by the 15 model cap. If, in addition to all the other points rebalancing they did, they had increased the base cost of an order, the price of a Fusilier would have gone up, an Orc would have decreased by a lot less, and building armies of 20+ models would have been impractical as a matter of course without needing a rule to explicitly disallow it.

 

I guess they might have been attached to the most typical basic line troopers (Fusilier, Alguacile Combi) being a round 10 pts.

However they could have preserved that and done what you are saying by making every trooper that generates an order +1pt, Combi -1pt, all DTWs +1pt. That by itself would have gone a long way to solving the 'Order Spam' issue in N3 for better balance without the added skews and arbitrary order capping in N4 I think.

 

Burst 1 (also, technical weapon, so a fireteam gives no bonus to Deactivator) vs Burst 3, and if they lose the single STR point they are destroyed anyway (only Troops can go Unconscious, and in https://infinitythewiki.com/Terminology a Trooper needs to be able to generate and spend orders)... Also, only mines have Mimetism. So in the end, the difference is Cover for all but mines.
And I can live with a +3/-3 if I get 2 extra shots.

I understand, but making cheap regular troops more expensive would have meant people would ignore those as overprized and go for the middle-priced troops and HI. And, as I mentioned before, the formula would have crashed down in flames.

 

Even without Mimetism, if the target is in cover then a BS12 combi is at 67.5% to destroy a Madtrap at 8-16", still worse than the 75% WIP12 Deactivator.

If there is 2 points or more difference between BS and WIP (Such as a Mech-Engineer, Dozer, Dr. Worm, Clockmaker, Irmandinho, Najjarun, Kosuil, etc) then you are always better off using the Deactivator at 8-16".

 

All three of those weapons are more than capable active turn weapons when they pick up +1b and are hardly ARO weapons, just because something isn't burst 4+ doesn't mean it is an ARO weapon, especially this edition where those high burst weapons can't really kill anything, I'd take a B3 HRL over a B5 redfury/spitfire any day.

ML's on the other hand do fall into that category. I also agree that the +1b on a profile should be allowed to be used in reactive as it would open up a lot more profiles and make things more interesting (and before someone starts screeching about it being oppressive in a fireteam, fireteam bonuses are dumb as they currently stand and +1b should stack with the FT burst bonus).

 

The problem Is that Fireteam are hard to balance. Look at N3 the average point man was Just an order sink for your opponent then the Kamau sniper arrived and I don't think he needed extra help to survive. I am always of the idea that some combination should't exist like MSV1 + Marksman in a fireteam.

On the topic of the math building Tunguska list without using the 7/8 point bot show how just an bump from 9/10 point to 12/13 to the line trooper makes order spam way more harder.

 

Current Fireteams (with the infinite Wildcard grab bag of 4 schmucks plus Chad) are hard to balance. The early N3 fireteams were very balanced: if you wanted a BS14(+3) B5 HMG on a W2 HI, or a BS13(+3) B2 ARO Multisnipe on a guy with a Visor and Marksmanship, you needed to take 4 other expensive guys to pad that link.

A lot of factors in N4 have killed the balance and, unfortunately, my interest in the game for the time being.

Short list of balance issues:

- Edit: Spotlight as ARO
- Hacking (no reasonable KHD counter)
- Remotes (flavor & balance vs. non-Remote units gone)
- TAGs
- Burnt state deletion removes a unique counter to ODD/TO

The balance issues have created a situation where you have to play "kill the broken thing" before you can play a fun, engaging skirmish game. Objectively a lot would need to change to make me want to play 2-3x a week like I was doing in N3...it's honestly a struggle to get motivated to play more than one game a month.