So a critical Dodge on 7 (PH10 and -3Mod) cannot save you from more than one hit of the BS18 enemy roll? You have to hope your enemy rolls LOW even if you crit otherwise you have no way to survive. Not so good in my eye...
It depends if you like the 1/20 chance that a lucky roll would save you from a situation you would have probably died instead. I personally don't. After all, a roll of 6 how many hits would have saved you? And why all of a sudden a 7 is a miracle? (that let's also menace the hitter in case not a dodge)
It is the basic of this game. Active turn has the advantage of rolling more dice. Reactive turn has the advantage of screwing your plans with just one roll. Remove this and every time your enemy opens fire you lose a model.
Remove this and you have a game that is more aligned with a gaussian distribution without lucky spikes. But we are all allowed to have have different tastes. Also, the basic of this games used to be auto wound as well, so it can be changed it looks like.
The problem with auto-wound was that it wasn’t factored in trooper point cost very well. Troopers with high armour were overcosted. Instead of changing the mechanic, CB could have radically adjusted all point costs. Personally I like the current mechanic more because you can no longer solve problems by throwing (any) dice at them.
As much as I don't like criticals in a game system with such permanent consequences; I think criticals are necessary in Infinity to keep the reactive player's actions relevant. It should be very hard for a player to put a trooper in such a position that the opponent can't meaningfully attempt to defend themselves. For Dodge and any form of Attacks, even if the chance of succeeding is small, this is true as Dodge allows a short movement to potentially make further attacks a lot harder or costlier to affect and for Attacks obviously the consequence is harm. Now, for some numbers. The risk of an Avatar being laid low by a missile launcher crit is about 1,5% - when not in cover and hit by AP+EXP. If in cover or if hit indirectly this percent drops to as low as 0,25% due to the Avatar's enormous amount of ARM. This is, by the way, not wholly unrepresentative of the chances some armies have of taking down the Avatar at all, to put things into perspective. Yeah, it's a bit anti-climactic when this happens on pure chance, but the game system doesn't really support a Battlemech-style systematic dismantling of the Avatar's systems until the defences are sufficiently lowered that it can be hurt, so you'll have to fight it at full strength until it is dead and the game's other systems demands that even a 110 point unit needs to be killable in a reasonably low amount of orders. But at the same time, the Avatar is on the very edge of what's sane in this game system. It's on the other side of that magical line where ARM and BTS goes exponentially bananas and it's immune (or extremely resistant) to many of the game's systems to deal with similar threats. And as for stuff that aren't the Avatar? Well, you should have a plan B, or a unit B, to call on or you've over-extended something fierce. And C. And D. And failing that there's plan F which is ritually melting your dice down for their abject failure to perform and making a comeback with new dice in the next one.
To me, the auto wound version was even much worse. If I had to recap, I have two issues with critical: 1 - it does too much (beats any roll, beats multiple rolls, inflicts extra wound) 2 - it does not depend on the number. This leads to situations where a extremely unlikely roll completely subverts the situation when it rolls a critical. I know the second it's probably an intended effect, I just don't like the player experience it generates (at all!) . Thinking better, my proposal would actually be: - for each critical, the player rolling it decides whether to cancel a higher non-critical roll OR to inflict an additional wound. Still much more than a normal roll, but not completely subverting an almost impossible situation. But again, I can totally see some players preferring as it is. I am just not one of them.
Crits can create narrative experiences. How a much inexperienced player beat the uber-HI thrown at them piloted by a much more veteran player. How two players were such in a stalemate that a crit changed that game into a complete bloodbath. etc.. etc.. The feeling of critting someone is amazing. And the feeling of getting critted is not as bad, because you still have a chance that your trooper lives through. And if the trooper does live, that can make up for another amazing narrative that you will tell your friends afterwards. The mechanic makes the game feel really high stakes and appeals to high level play, since you need to improvise, adapt, overcome, when your plan A gets foiled by a crit. In my meta, good players, crits or not are still the ones on top, because they incorporate this mechanic into their strategies and play for and around it. I think this iteration of Criticals is the best yet from CB.
Of course good players are still the ones on top, this is a very, very skill-intensive game and the crit mechanic alone is not gonna change that. And I think no one would ever even argue that. But your words mark the difference between tastes in player experiences I was referring to. To me is exactly the opposite: it's an awful experience being critt'ed against (especially by those unlikely low rolls) and it's by far not as good to crit someone. Actually, the latter is almost a bitter-sweet sensation, as part of me is happy for the crit but another very present part is sorry for a result that I did nothing to earn. Like when you hit the net on a table-tennis game sending the ball into an uncatchable spin and part of you feels sorry for a completely unearned point. Let's not even speak about crit sequences, where you have the impression you are playing against the dice and not against the other player. And, I don't know you, but THOSE times I feel bad even when I am the player rolling the criticals sequence. And for how much it generates more "unlikely events" to narrate, it totally diminishes the control over the game flow in a way which is definitely too much for my tastes. About the last sentence, this being the best crit iteration in CB rules, here I agree, since previous ones were even more over the head on everything mentioned above!! :P
We don't need to add more complexity to the game for something as statistically irrelevant as this. Reactive is not stronger than active and this is not needed.
The complexity issue is actually relevant, and I agree my proposal was probably on the complex side. It can be any other, like "in a ftf, a critical hit is always at least as high as the highest opponent roll and, when hits, inflicts an additional wound" which is not much more complex than the currrent rule, but does not create the extreme overturning situations described above. My focus was not so much on my rushed proposal, but on the issues I see. But I see most players do not feel the same way I do about criticals, so I guess I'm on the minority regarding tastes in gaming experience (kinda used to that, actually ^^). Anyhow, I just wanted to let the guy who opened this thread that he's not alone in his line of thinkning, guess I did that :) By the way, the statistic relevance argument, in my opinion, does not stand as it's about experience not statistics. A game "ruined" by a rule is relevant even if it happens only one every six, seven games or even more. It's not a tournament, it's a way you invest your (precious) free time and, for how unfair it is, our brain records bad experiences much more than good ones. Personally, I know more than a player who walked away from the game for this issue (not "just" for this, but "also" or even "mainly" for this).
I still have some issues with new crit mechanics. For light HI like Zuyong, Riots ect, old crit was just a wound after which they could still function with 100% effectiveness. With N4 rules, getting crited in cover by HMG has a 20% chance of inflicting 2 wounds, 50% of being old 1 wound, and 30% for full save. Sure the average is technically better, but as long as you are not UNC getting 1W doest matter that much, but the risk of hyper failure is worst to me than guaranteed 1W. Even 1 wound LI units in armies with decent doctors should still prefer old system. In n3 they had 100% to go UNC but still be alive, in n4 1arm unit even in cover has only 20% chance agains HMG to not take a wound, 30 % to take 2 and just die and 50% to get old 1 wound. So average outcome is worse than n3. I said it before but IMHO crits sould still be auto win in FtF. They still should inflict additional save, but the extra from crit should only matter if original save was succesful. Or make it even stronger and roll all the dices for saves together but limit amount of wounds to number of hits suffered (keeping in mind DA and EXP ammo you multiply hits by 2 or 3). Either way Crits are good, they add element of uncertainty to every FtF even if you managed to create -12 MODs for opponent. It keeps game exciting and fresh and I would be very dissapointed if CB were to remove Crits.
One of the things I’ve said before in previous threads like this on is that crits pretty much exist to make a certain style of player unhappy by making a certain play style or certain assumptions not work. Crits are like pineapple on pizza—it’s here because the designers like it, in spite of the people who are nauseated by it. :) So if someone walked away from the game over crits, well god damned good for them for knowing what they like and going to look for it elsewhere. But them having to walk away doesn’t make crits bad for the game.
Sure, in fact I think I made quite clear that all my comments come from my personal gaming experience and tastes. If the majority of players, and the designers as well, like the play style crits foster, long live the crits :P Oh, by the way, being Italian the metaphor of pineapple on pizza feels just spot on to me. In every sense. ;)
Just to share my results from the latest 5-mission tournament. Game 1:no crits on my side,3 on opponent's. Even game,lost on turn 3 because opponent had one specialist, while I had none. Game 2: 1 crit for me (Hac Tao put Avatar in unconscious),7 crits including some major (TR bot on Hac Tao=death,TR bot on Liu Xing=death, TR bot on MSV2 sniper=death). Lost my chance to destroy AI server. Lost 6-3. Game3:no crits, irrelevant. But I won 8-0. Game 4: 7 crits for me, 0 crits for opponent. Crushing victory opponent lost all but 2 netrods. Very good player and Aleph list were destroyed 10-0. Game 5: 1 crit for me,5 for my opponent. Haidao lost FtF on crit through smoke to HMG and died, Hac Tao lost the same (HMG had to roll 6 vs 11 and crit twice), Lui Xing spitfire lost FtF to a core pistol and died (non crit, just bad rolls). Lost 10-2.
I'll just say the same stuff I was saying in all those endless crit discussion threads: crits don't exist separately from entirety of F2F check, and if you want to talk about changing crits, you'd better do that with a clear idea on how you want to change final wound distribution of every F2F roll in the game and why it is exactly change to crit mechanic that will bring results you want. Otherwise we'll lose the forest for the trees.
