For me, another one that the YH competes with is the Mowang. MW Spitfire or Redfury is a point or mroe cheaper, same armor, NCO, BTS6, Stealth, Mimetisim -3, and most important: NWI. If they give the YH BTS6 with Bioimmunity, then I might use him. It's sad because I think they look cooler.
I've been looking a lot at YJ recently because they are my current painting project. I love the aesthetic, and I've been trying to work out what their exceptional pieces are on the table. I should stress that I've only played one game with them so this is almost purely theorycrafting, but. It seems to me like the main thing YJ gets that other factions have a harder time with can be summed up as 'order shenanigans'. The Daoying is tough to beat as far as a cheap, well-protected LT goes, there's a few good options for NCO, lots of the HI comes with TacAware, and the Kuang Shi still let you run 5 regular orders very cheaply to fuel a big attack piece. The attack pieces look pretty good on paper too. The Su-Jian, Mowang, Guilang and Shang-Ji (well... a couple profiles at least) all look like you can easily pump a lot of orders into them and really ruin your opponent's day if you have an opening. A lot of the HI also seem like they'll shine even more in sectorials; tacaware HI fireteams can do a lot to circumvent the order cap. The difficulty seems to come in supporting them. There's a lot of engineers but most are HI themselves which is expensive and limits them a bit. There's only one doctor in the entire faction and they are bog standard. PH is usually fairly low so paramedics aren't super reliable. Hackers are comparatively expensive these days and there are no pitchers so you're relying on deployable repeaters and can have trouble getting the net as wide as you'd like. You have some hidden deployment options, but they are mostly expensive, less reliable than other faction's options, or both, so causing a surprise to open up the path for those attack pieces can be more challenging than some. I don't think those problems are insurmountable - it just seems like the internal balance here is that YJ have a lot of orders to spend on their heavy hitters, but when those go down, they have trouble getting them back up. Is that more or less the experience others have with the faction or am I way off base?
No you are not wrong. Unfortunately those are some of the drawbacks. Once you loose those some important guys it can be rough. BTW it's not circumventing the order cap if you are still around the same amount of orders. Sure ten guys but still maybe 15 orders. I think the key is not to be too greedy. Just because you can take a bunch of TacAw doesn't mean you should.
I would say that Vanilla YJ may be the hardest faction to specifically plan against. Other than lacking impersonators and DZ parachutists, pretty much any niche in the game can be filled moderately well by a YJ list. Some other faction will be able to do it better, but until your opponent deploys you may have a hard time anticipating what’s coming at you. Vanilla can pull off camo spam, guided hacking lists, alpha striker lists, order spam, AD focus, holo shell games, etc. The sectorials are more predictable, especially if the player you’re facing spends too much time on the forums, but vanilla’s list versatility is very high.
