Alpha is a bit of an issue in the game. If performed well, with the right units, the game ends before the second player got to do anything. Even if it is not an all encompassing extermination, eliminating key units on the first turn can be extremely powerful and hard to defend against. In a game where it is always your turn, the current alpha focus can be a real negative play experience and I would argue it is not an desirable outcome for the game. We currently have -2 orders as a sort of haphazard countermeasure, but this feels both forced and mandatory, rather than an organic response. Proposal - allow the second turn player's models to preemptively spend their order on certain actions. They can use this to enter suppressive fire or use EVO programs, and perhaps certain other abilities like Cybermask, I am not 100% certain on which skills should be enabled. I would not have a limit on the number of models that could do this, and instead let people organically find their own limit of how many orders they wish to spend to do so. The first outcome of this is that the first turn active/reactive balance would shift. Suppressive Fire is usually pretty bad, but troops in this state are harder to rampage over and through into the rest of your army. While this would help almost every army, it would particularly help armies that cannot marker state all of their important assets, as well as armies with weaker link options. Overall, the defensive floor for everyone goes up, but moreso for the armies that are bad at defending themselves. The second outcome is that certain skills can be up from the beginning of the game, rather than leaving the model vulnerable simply because you went second. It feels bad to have a defensive skill be useless simply because of turn order. This could help some profiles like Zerat KHD and Interventors who are seen as a bit risky, by allowing them to activate cybermask and defend themselves, or a heavy infantry could be protected by fairy dust before the hackers come for him. The downside is that this may modify the balance regarding these units - Morats don't get T1 marker state models and Interventors become a reasonable LT for Nomads as two examples. A potentially problematic third outcome could be strong suppressive fire models deploying quite aggressively to lock down areas of the board. However, given that suppressive fire is not enormously powerful, and the first turn player still has initiative to engage these units with superior pieces, I don't think this would be a major issue - am open to discussion on this one! Wondering what people think of the idea, and also of what other issues could arise?
This would maybe allow the odd hacker to hide under cybermask, but functionally I don't think it's going to achieve much because it to truly effective as a speedbump it's requiring MOD stacking mimetic users with SF Mode weapons that aren't putting themselves into fireteams which is getting a little specific to really be far reaching and effective on the broader metagame. Personally I think it's a bit of a band aid fix. The real fix is to disincentivize the alpha strike or people are going to keep looking for ways and and the new best profiles to alpha strike with. Alpha striking is effective for a reason, remove or devalue the reason and you have a real solution. I think the two greatest things that could be done to work towards a solution is a better focus on mission design (stop. fucking. designing. annihilation. missions.) and a tighter control on general game balance (we all know hacking and designing crap like Andromeda and Rokots is problematic right now).
The order mechanic means that alpha is kind of baked into the system. The only in-mission solution I can see is one that forces you to spend every order on objectives - like that old Beacon Race. That wasn't very fun. They could mitigate alpha by not designing profiles that perform it so effectively. and nerfing the existing ones that do. Players could also mitigate many forms of alpha by using denser deployment zones that grant more hiding places for their troops. But CB isn't going to change their bears or sphinx and players are hard committed to their open wasteland DZs, so I think the best thing we can accomplish is ultimately a band aid.
Andromeda got hit pretty hard such that she is no where near as reliable as she was, she is basically a slightly better coinflip to land now. You dont need to be that extreme, just a mission that incentivizes actually doing it than beating your opponent of the head and doing it all last turn is enough. A good example is the reworked version of Looting and Sabotaging found here, It basically curbs the outright aggression as you are needed to pretty much accomplish one mission critical thing a turn to win.
I do like those mission changes, next time they are proposed for a tournament I will point the TO this way and see what they think.
Yeah I know, I was referring the CB's habit of designing alpha strikers that start in or next to your opponent's DZ and are more and more frequently giving them shit like guard and marker states. Yes the order mechanic means the ability to alpha strike is baked into the system, but incentivizing it is certainly something that can be fixed. People leverage the ability to alpha strike stuff because they're trying to get a desired outcome. That outcome they're after is overwhelming momentum. Players are trying to gain a massive momentum advantage through an alpha strike to take control of the game and put it in a position where it is either extremely difficult or impossible for an opponent to fight back for the rest of the game. If you adjust the game so people can't reliably gain that momentum players aren't going to be incentivized to deliver the kinds of crippling alpha strikes that currently plague it. That's something we discussed in the 400 points thread. We've found more combat effective models meant alpha strikes were more often failing to cripple player 2 to the point where it's completely fallen out of favour as the dominant strategy. Mission design is also a big factor in this. Tourniquet already linked one of the threads but locally we've been doing alot of testing and rewriting for ITS missions. One of the things that gets checked when we do these is what happens when one player ignores the mission and just tries to kill the opponent. Moving away from missions that either blatantly incentivize indiscriminately killing the opponent, or have a scoring system set up that allows a player to easily ignore mission objectives until late in the game helps incentivize the player to play the mission rather than indiscriminately murder the opponent. Highly Classified is an example of a mission that fits that category of just ignore the shit out of it until last turn and murder the enemy instead. It's hard for the enemy to complete classifieds if their army is getting gutted, let alone fight back effectively to put pressure on the opponent. Meanwhile even doing a single classified on the last turn for the aggressor player is enough to score a major victory. Adjusting the scoring so more order investment is needed does alot to help curb that behaviour, and it's effective enough that we're running an adjusted version in a local event later this month. Anyway, whatever fix or series of fixes you come up with I think the best bet is to focus on the key reason people are alpha striking and that's securing a big momentum swing on turn 1. Remove or at least reduce the momentum, it'll have the greatest effect on nerfing alpha strikes.
Ok, I'm convinced. That doesn't mean other changes are not a good idea, but that would be a better approach. Kind of reminds me of warmachine, where the scoring was so fast and you could win instantly by pulling sufficiently ahead. If you don't give players a chance to spend those orders and cross the board then alpha gets harder.
One of my usual opponent favorite tactic is to focus on mission turn 1 and then expose all his army to defend the objectives. If I'm first player, focus on killing on turn 1, and again on turn 2, he is probably going to end in a retreat state on turn 2 and win a minor victory. If I don't and focus on the objectives, I'm getting shot by all his army. I have used this tactic effectively since. But you need to commit everything to avoid your opponent letting you with just 76 pts of surviving troops (if you play 300 pts games). It's actually a fun way to play as every trooper in your list is actually fighting. Doesn't work for every mission but for certain mission wich are focused on a few key points on the middle line it's an interesting tactic.
Good for goose good for gander. If player two gets too many advantages so that player one can't push the advantage of attacking first and hardest, this only shifts the alpha striking to player two. My years of playing handball comes to mind where the best opportunities were counter-attacking. In general I agree with Triumph, but how to do it in practice is harder. We just can't hard code all missions to have three centre-of-the-field objectives to push. Well we can (glances at TACO and 20x20), but you know. I think one way is to leverage the defensive units and abilities they have in the system and incentivise these units. Primary examples here are EVO Hackers who really should be allowed to be deployed with a program running (or at least Enhanced Reaction or Fairy Dust) but also Neurocinetics. More so than Impetuous, Neurocinetics is a pretty hefty drawback and primarily is a defensive ability that almost denies the unit from working offensively, having this skill offer the unit a noticeable discount to incentivize its use would be great. E.g. 12 points Neuro Baggage, 38 points Neuro Yan Huo, 22 to 25 point for Sin-Eaters and 17 points of Neuro Chaksa Auxiliar (that's a 4 points discount instead of a 3 points cost). One could also look at making DZ-bound minelayer profiles both cheaper and less of a trade off than they typically are atm. Another way is of course to look at specifically taxing the abilities that enables alpha striking or implement specific restrictions on what units should have them. Maybe two-wound units shouldn't be allowed to enter from opponent's table edge, maybe units shouldn't be allowed to infiltrate into the opponent's DZ, maybe the value of a free activation is actually a lot closer to the value of being able to have cover? As with everything; not all at once and small adjustments can make quite large differences.
Triumph makes a very good point about momentum. One of the reasons why alpha strikes are effective in Inifinity is because they both degrade the opponents order economy and combat effectiveness. This means that your opponent will now have more difficulty degrading your capabilities on their turn. This is effectively a negative feedback system. One thought that came to mind when I was reading through this thread is what if retreat, loss of lieutenant, and regular order count was calculated at the start of each game turn instead of each player turn. This would allow the turn 2 player to retain regular orders even if they lost models, giving them an opportunity to strike back. It also reduces the relative value of turn 1 Lt assassination via Fiday or Andromeda - you know that your opponent will get one turn before the loss of Lt status kicks in. I would keep irregular and impetuous order counts in the player turn since these are generate and intended to be spent on specific troopers. I am also a strong fan of expanding the strategic use of command tokens to include activating Evo programs and cybermask and removing the limit on how many strategic command tokens you can use.
1000% agreement. Posting mostly because a like doesn't nearly cover how important all of these points are. Difference between armies with Libertos, Daylami etc and armies without is night and day. Literally "armies that get to play" and "armies that get bearpoded off the field" in my meta. Defensive tech lags so far behind offensive its not even funny. But the thing is, what the fuck would a reasonable defensive piece look like when the benchmark for offensive are impersonators, bears, Duroc etc. I think its just as important to look at these profiles, put the hookah down, and realize that they warp the game in a way where the outcome is going to be alpha.
Yes, relative costing for a unit can be difficult under current circumstances. You design a Jotum, give it ARM10 and 3 Wounds, pinnacle of defensive stats in the game. However, how much should these defensive stats cost when you have to consider a certain subgroup of players can deploy a single model right behind it and remove it from the table in literally 1 hit while totally ignoring all the points paid for that ARM10 stat and 3 Wounds. You realise this is an impossible question to answer so you give up on the Jotum. Next you design a Gator.
#makejammersgoodagain On a more serious note, I like the idea of generating orders at the start of each game round rather than at the start of player turn. This still enables alpha strikes but means that Player 2 still has their entire order pool at the start of their turn to counterattack and do mission objectives. Losing 5-6 models in the first turn would therefore still let you play with 15 orders, with a reduced model pool, but you would still have a chance to play. This might incidentally also see an increase in profiles that do not get used as often ie. Jack-of-all-trades.
While order generation done per round instead of per turn seems great, I'll level with you: a failed first turn where you don't at least partially succeed with an alpha strike where you can reduce the opponent's orders by an excess of 2 (strategic command token use 101) has a huge potential to just lose you the game. The player going second will then get a chance to play first turn player - and they will have an extra turn at the end of the game compared to the actual first player. I think defence being much weaker is a design choice. In general it is a design choice I agree with. Due to the ARO mechanic, a game like this risks being completely bogged down into WW1 defensive trenches otherwise. With that said, I also think that they went a bit overboard with offensive abilities in N4. It was like they either made the false equivalent that Van Zant having existed in the game for so long wasn't making balance issues and that this meant that they could put more such units and stronger such units into the game, when the reason that Van Zant wasn't causing issues was that he was present in so few lists - and then did this for several more abilities to create cool new functions. In either case, most of those units have some form of weakness; bears can't stand BTS saves, wolves tend to fold under burst pressure, TAGs and HI pain trains gets slowed down or stopped by hacking regardless of firewalls, Airborne Deployment can often be zoned out by even light guns and spread out repeaters etc. There's some that doesn't; Impersonation-1 doesn't really have a drawback, Jaan Staar takes the benefits of IMP2 but none of the drawbacks (no combat sustain), while Pitcher play is on the far side of order efficiency and combines silly well with GML play, and there are some unhackable pain trains. So the first category can probably be solved by improving some of the defensive skills. Loading a few factions up with a large amount of BTS damage (Haqq has started with viral while Yu Jing is ahead of the curve on Breaker) will make over-reliance on bears more of a risk. Making Neurocinetics and the Total Reaction Baggage a lot more attractive points-wise would make light(er) zoning easier. Making Jammers have unlimited ammo again would also make the last stretch more of a struggle and also address the impunity with which bears and werewolves speculatively fire grenades at least against some factions. Second category is tougher and needs a closer look at what makes them good. Maybe Repeaters need to activate along with the hacker to be used and therefore themselves become a viable ARO target. Maybe BioV needs stronger function and possibly even extra benefits to compensate for the crummy units they're put on and to get good at countering IMPs.
The following post is slightly off topic, but since it stems directly from ruminations on the alpha strike-centred meta of N4 Infinity, I feel like this is as good a place as any to post it. I feel quite strongly that the alpha strike potential is the game's biggest drawback right now. Therefore, me and my regular opponent have designed a mod (for casual play, of course) that we will be testing in the near future. It basically combines the order system from Infinity with the activation sequencing from Malifaux, for those that are aware of that game. What it basically means is that both players count orders at the same time, with the player having less orders making up the difference with "pass tokens", which are like an order that you can spend, but don't let you do anything, instead forcing the opponent to act first. The crux is that any leftover pass tokens get added to next turns initiative roll (with this system, you obviously need to reroll initiative each turn, but since it only lets you activate one model before the opponent, or vice versa, it's not the end of the world if you get "double turned" as in some games) Players then alternate activations, spending one order or pass token at a time. Command tokens can also be used to do coordinated orders. AROs work normally. This will, of course, radically change the way that the game plays, but I think it will change for the better. Models that rambo without support will likely get surrounded and taken out quickly. Both players actually get meaningful turns and there can be more back and forth in the midfield. I supsect that non-camo skirmishers will be the big winners of this style of play, since they will not get automatically deleted by a warband on turn one. Likewise, medium range ARO-pieces may benefit since they can delay exposing themselves until the enemy has committed to an attack vector. I understand that this might not be what everyone would prefer for Infinity, but I think it would be an improvement over the current system of batch activating all your models.
I think probably the biggest consideration with that idea is it kills CC as a mechanic, vulnerable models can generally flee as fast or faster from CC specialists while retaining the possibility to shoot them. It also pushes mines/koalas/deployable repeatesr as a piece of kit from strong to ludicrous value. Basically it would more or less allow ZoC ARO mine dropping/repeater dropping which right now isn't possible because it'd be broken as shit.
Both valid points. I am not too concerned with CC getting worse, since if someone is fleeing from your cc specialist they might still open up other vectors of attack. I've always thought CC should be more about area denial and attacks of opportunity than a primary attack strategy in this game. The mine thing is something that might cause problems. Or not. I think messing with the activation sequence will alter the way you fight too much to be able to draw conclusions in that regard without testing. Remember that an unsupported troop trying to sneak around a corner runs the risk of being counterattacked itself, so maybe mining and holding back to ARO is not the strongest option anymore? I think deployable repeaters may become a more powerful defensive tool, but we've thought about limiting hackers to only having one active program at a time, much like EVOs work. Anyway, thanks for the feedback. I'll report how it goes when we try it out for real.
My gut feeling is it's something that will need sympathetic changes elsewhere to make it function fully, and it might have some issues with value vs cost changing but it's an interesting idea for sure.
