No Fireteam Tournament?

The NA2s might never be, so a C1 tournament would also exclude people who start with the JSA or Spiñal box, which are both awesome, attractive starters. Same goes for a big Sectorial specific box like MO or Starmada.

 

I get it man, and have much the same issue with REM buffing and honestly with mimetism as a game element. But some things here are not true and I think you are catastrophizing it a little.

From the beginning this has been a game of cheerleaders, main pieces and secondary pieces, not every model having a meaningful role. I know that when I've taken ten decent dudes, it's underperformed so bad compared to five better dudes and five cheerleaders every single time. Would I prefer it if cheerleaders got price hikes and added value so that the category disappeared from the game? Absolutely. But thats not what the game is.

Likewise, link teams are not ablative wounds in any meaningful capacity. They are a boring stat buff and I'd love to see them change, but this particular criticism doesn't hit the mark. I only like the movement effect myself.

I've recently got into Malifaux as it has a far more active playerbase than Infinity at the moment where I am and I definitely agree that it does a better job of making every model count. But this is mostly the case for any game that doesn't have an order pool system, which actively rewards specializing into generators and spenders.

Re: "buying stats" comments from others I believe its in reference more to "buying" a +3 BS as opposed to a critique of stronger models existing. Similar to buff characters in other games that give the whole unit some benefit or another.

 

Maybe the warcor and vets should take a seat in the back if they find themselves unable to sacrifice a bit for one day/weekend to foster a group of new people being able to participate in the larger community instead of being relegated to some sort of kiddie pool.

 

Perhaps we shouldn't assume that new people won't understand or be able to pick up the fireteam rules. They're no more difficult to learn than any of the rules. There's a lot to take on board in general, so I doubt that fireteams are specifically a barrier to new players. If anything, they're probably helpful for new players (at least to some degree), as the bonuses may help shore up a lack of experience; although, that lack of experience may hinder some newer players when using the fireteam.

If anything, banning fireteams at a tournament probably won't help new players anyway, as Vanilla lists are often much more versatile and better than anything a fireteam can provide.

 

I have had two consecutive new players basically give up on Infinity after dealing with the utter shit that is the Military Orders Special Fireteams. They were barely even able to figure out how to make a legal list, let alone a coherent Fireteam. I'll agree that Fireteams as a whole can be beneficial and useful to new players (a plain Moderator Core was a staple of my earliest tournament lists in mid-N3), and are passable at a core rules level, but maybe leaving out Special Fireteams would be helpful.

 

That's possible.

I see up a couple posts that there has been a productive discussion and some other new options coming to light.

 

Oh classic MO. Destroyer of new players. Shame that their units are so good that they need to be hobbled with weird hard to understand fire teams.

 

In this situation, I would run a slow-grow league instead and work up rules complexity and points values each week, adding Fireteams as part of a 250 point or 300 point game.

 

Then perhaps they need better guidance? If they don't understand how to make a legal list, then I'm not sure where they're going wrong. Are they using the Army builder? Maybe Infinity isn't for them in general? Yeah, the solution may be to leave out the special fireteams. It would be good to have some data to help inform these decisions. We no doubt all have plenty of anecdotes to support both sides of this debate. For example, I know plenty of new players who haven't struggled with the fireteams at all, but I don't know how typical that is.

What about my post was not productive or adding to the conversation?

 

Also, I would think that if a new player wanted to play MO but didn't feel up to learning how the special fireteams work, they would just... build non-special fireteams? It's not like a Crusade team is a requirement in an MO list.

Banning fireteams entirely would just make MO unplayable, so the new player who had wanted to play MO would play vanilla instead. Which is fine I guess, I'm certainly not saying you shouldn't run the no-fireteams tournament, I just share @jamesy52 's skepticism that it would better for new players. I would see it more as an experiment for experienced players to see how the game plays differently without fireteams.

 

By them. :D

 

As someone whose very first experience with Infinity was C1, and then shifted to N4, I can get behind this. While I liked C1 as a learning too, I was able to tell that some things were "missing" from the rules before I'd even picked up the full N4 rules and read them. The biggest thing that improved the game for me was introducing Guts.

I will also say that while it wasn't terribly complicated for me to understand HOW to play with fireteams, I feel like in the hands of less experienced players they can be very swingy. I've had some games where a Core just swept across the board like a tide, and others where a slight positioning mis-judgment turn-one caused the entire team to get wiped out by a single missile.

I'm not certain if some factions are significantly disadvantaged by Limited Insertion list, but I also personally like the idea of a single combat group. I may just be speaking for myself, but as someone who's excited about all the options that the various factions have (and is collecting several different armies currently), I've been picking up new/different models to try things out rather than getting multiples of single figure types or picking up extra boxes of cheap troops that I already have a couple of just to hit full AVA on all my cheerleaders and get up to that coveted 15(+) orders. I feel like 10 figures evens the playing field a bit for people who aren't totally optimized yet.

 

As someone who mainly plays Tohaa, I think a “no Fireteam” tournament would in some ways be a soft ban on Tohaa/Spiral Corps. No triads would be… difficult to work around, to say the least.

Outside of that; Vanilla factions are pretty darn strong right now. Vanilla Yu Jing, Nomads, CA, Aleph, O-12… Not sure restricting fireteams would lower the power level very much. If at all. It would just make sure that factions that rely on them wouldn’t be able to compete.

Then again, if you’re introducing new players, throwing Tohaa at them might be a bit too much weirdness to handle, so idk.

 

I think there are plenty of alternatives to a no fireteam tournament, but I‘d definitely play. I‘d also play no Fireteam steel phalanx if the local warcor asks all vets to play sectorials and I think I would still have a great weekend. I do play plenty of international tournaments and usually am very competitive about it, but no sense in showing new players how crazy optimized lists perform before showing them how to win games with some basic pieces

 

As a sectorial player, I'd feel like no fireteams was taking away a lot of my power. For OCF, like... what am I going to do with my Unidrons?

 

Thanks Mr. Bonehead - if you really want to go down the route of name-calling, I can mirror you.

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To me it makes perfect sense. TAGs are a different category of models with their own inherent weaknesses. Granted they have less so now, than in N3. More importantly they’re a single model.

And that’s really the thing. I like skirmish games, where every model has a function. Infinity does a decent job at this - granted a lot of models only function is to hang back and ARO, but they do have the potential to make a difference - other skirmish games accomplish this better or worse, but they aren’t Infinity.

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The trouble with Infinity is the model variety, while having a very limited way of diversifying via rules - creating suboptimal choices, while allowing players to transfer all resources into the ‘breadwinners’. In some way the Fireteam rule was a way to make up for this, giving line troops comparable stats to heavier infantry, while making it unfeasible for the heavier infantry to get the same bonuses - and it was an okay ‘fix’. Yet with mixed fireteams, it just became even more apparent how useless the base troops are in the game.

And that is bad. A GW style of game design.

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Next you’re complaining about the power of your sectorial. Understandably, we all want a good ‘balance’. But fireteams bonuses are just a lazy way of compensating sectorials, when what really would make the game interesting would be to make all types of models valid and have a function to perform.

 

Tangentially, I'm considering reviving my Aeldari army as a means of socialising with some of my old friends, so I'm glancing over the newer rules thanks to an illicit page with the full rules on display.
I must say this is pretty good comparison, although to give credit where credit is due; the base troopers that "ferry" their superiors aren't as useless in GW games as they are in Infinity and unless they come from the HQ/Hero selection, those superiors are quite reasonably close in performance to their unit.

Now, that just the 40k rules costs more than all of CB's SKUs combined...

 

What you're proposing is an even *less* balanced game environment, so your arguments about how each model should have a role fall flat. Again, bonehead take. You don't like fireteams and think the game should be made worse in the process of removing them. That's fine, but cop to it instead of pretending you care about balance.