In SWF, which you’ve mentioned is your next army on tap, you can still take advantage of it. You also have multiple troops with WildParrots, so you can leverage that as well, along with your Climbing Plus troops.
That is a huge assumption from your part on what people think and a huge stretch in interpretation on what they say. I would suggest reading other peoples comments without assuming they are your enemies and that they are out there to get you.
No. I will critique the game design; your bootlicking is not a meaningful argument for why the game is balanced in this arena. You're saying "The game is balanced because you don't have the right to make judgments about the game's balance." Which is both insulting and incorrect.
No. It's very consistent from you. It's disrespectful; you should apologize and admit that people have the right to take a critical look at how the game is put together. This should be trivial, but here we are. You also should stop letting @A Mão Esquerda getting away with insulting people as long as he butters you and CB up first.
Not necessarily, or not precisely, all PanO attack remotes are repeaters so using them advances the network, not as easy as Nomads and other network setup factions, but it is a way, the example said camouflage and surprise can be used to cut some edge from the enemy hackers, it is indeed an option, so maybe PanO has a certain way to do hacking that is not as optimal as other hacking optimized factions, but still viable. As I said I will have to look for it, thinking on starting with two fusilier hackers a killer hacker and some attack REMs as a basis.
Those will be free kills for any competent enemy with hacking. Hell, I could do it with OCF and OCF is not particularly good at hacking.
And those KHDs can start forward as well, ready to contest straightaway, or put Morans down and take the repeaters out of the equation.
? care to explain/ elaborate? I have honestly nothing to apologize, especially the fact you constantly choose to interpret what everyone says as a personal insult for you, moreover since you think people get away with, have you reviewed your posting behavior?
Maybe? potentially? this is what iterative list building is, start with an idea and work with the results, build up with what works, change what it does not. I did not care much with hacking in PanO since I can shoot the issues dead, but hey why not try some PanO lists centered on hacking? some viable playstyle has to be there.
Exactly. Try things, find what works for you. Scalpel parts of Jazz’s support away until you’re ready to go toe-to-tie with her. Shave off that Brigada by Isolating or killing him. Force her into a bad ARO with a Deployable or Perimeter Weapon. Try different terrain set ups, different missions.
Frankly many times shooting offending hackers is an easier and more direct solution for many factions... I do that with Corregidor...
One thing I want to say is that, in a lot of ways, hacking in its current state is a lot closer to cylindrical Troopers fighting in a vacuum than actual gunfights; you don't have things like terrain and rangebands and facings and all those other things which tend to moderate the power of really impressive gunfighters; hacking is all binary. No only are PanO's best hackers (upper-mid level, honestly) likely to just get stomped by an Anathematic or a Nomad Character hacker or whoever else, there is very little you can do as far as deployment or whatever goes that mitigates that, unless you just dump all your remote-repeaters in a corner and hide the hackers, in which case you may as well have dropped them and just brought dudes with guns. Combined that with the fact that PanO hackers very rarely contribute anything to network projection (except the Acon regular and some Alpeh loners), so the investment in building a conventional hacking list ends up being way harder than "Just take Bit & Kiss, now you have a hacking list, augment to taste". As others have said, "it's not worth it" tends to be a theme that comes looping back a lot with PanO hacking. There's no Dartok who folds a Pitcher, a Veteran Hacker (thus immune to Oblivion), an upgraded Killer Hacker, and a link filler in that comedically flexible Morat Core in one ludicrously cheap package. Closest is the Acon Regular, who is inferior in a lot of ways. At the top end, the best you've got is like... De Ferson, maybe? Who still doesn't match [Nomad Character] with various upgrade programs for like half the price. I think the approach almost has to be backwards from the standard way of building a hacking list. In a PanO list which has a lot of aggressive REMs, you now have a good forward repeater network, so adding in hacking elements is a lot less painful. If just throwing a Fusilier Hacker in to do ARO spotlights and force enemies to waste orders Resetting counts, that's a thing. I'd say it depends more on Sectorial and with some variance between sectorials Dart would be the big one in the sectorial where she shows up, and the Tikblag is good, but has obvious problems in a hacking-centered threat environment. A big variance source - in so far as clearing midfield repeaters goes - is how easily you can get LOF on a prone base hugging a parapet in the midfield. There's a definite difference between When it comes to deep penetration, PanO isn't very good at that without an Impersonator or a Bear or whatever. But of the units in that "my dad works at Nintendo and he said you can kill Jazz with a Squalo" post, the only unit which jumped out as being somewhat plausible for that was the Varg. In Winterfor, I think you are correct, you take Shona, or you take a Varg and hope the enemy has enough MSV to make yourself feel better about the cost. This is a solution that I've found typically works best after you've won the game, and you can go into their deployment zone and shoot models prone behind rooftop parapets with relative ease. Board setups without those parapet type things are probably a bigger problem, as they make defensive shooting ARO setups way harder than they already are. Those are probably worst for PanO, as only lists spamming auxbots have the disposable template units to play defense in that environment. Edited to add some clarity to the opening point
Not bad remarks, worth considering, though I am not sure bringing PanO to the enemies deployment zone is a position the game has been won by PanO, it is a serious investment in orders, and while is can be oppressive, dice do happen... I have been known to loose my HMG Swiss twice by failing to roll under 19s.... Though yes, Orc fireteam and bolts fireteam in the enemy deployment zone is quite the damaging experience.
As abrasive as Hecaton is, he's not alone in thinking that Mao is consistently dismissive of critique of the game and his word choice and tone comes off as condescending. Not saying that Hecaton is a much better poster with his extreme negativity.
I've been forced to Yolo my midfielders into my opponents DZ turn 1 in my last few games. If I hadn't I would lose the board control. Spent my entire turn to do so each time to various degrees of success.
It is very definitely and advantage state. PanO penetrator units (not you, Shona) are usually going to be REMs, TAGs, or HIs, so getting into the enemy DZ means you are killing Ikadrons and flashbots just to be able to do it, and probably also able to be generating lots of favorable shots into line infantry cheerleeders as a side benefit. A skilled player can turn it around, but it's pretty traumatic for the OpFor order pool regardless of what you are doing. Which is a recurring theme here - PanOcenia always has to fight honorably, so that's an implicit risk to any discussion of the faction. A Tikblang or a linked (ORC | Hospitallar | Teuton | Karhu | Bolt) shooting at combi dudes from 16" to 32" is basically the best you're ever going to getting. I don't think there is a contrivance to hit a BS above 20 without using a shotgun on a model that can have Marksmanship (A Bolt in a Pure Core can still miss on 20s in his good range, a TAG or Switzer can will miss as you said, and they much more often have to deal with cover), so the dice can always go against you. And that's not a problem except insofar as it's something that can be avoided unequally. This isn't a suggestions thread, but one thing I have been mulling over is Signal Loss terrain, which would block comms attacks when the shortest line between the attacker (PT user or repeater*/hacker) and the target passed through any amount of Signal Loss terrain. This would blunt alpha strike pitcher bombs, and maybe make Morans- eh, "aggressively priced midfield repeaters" - less oppressive. It would somewhat undermine the design intent of what a comms attack is, but it is at least the simplest fix that doesn't involve creating an alterative graph space where we care about the distance between repeater "nodes" in a hacking network, make hackers jack into a nearby phone line, and assign ranges or the like to hacking programs. *This would require hackers to affirmatively declare which repeater they are using to make a hacking attack from but that's usually obvious and if it has to create a change where a deployed repeater generates and ARO then maybe that's actually not a bad thing.
I find the idea of a 'Signal Loss' zone to be pretty interesting. Personally, I have my doubts that such 'Signal Loss' zone will be implemented in the rules, but it would make a great houserule addition for anyone willing to put it out there. Last time I checked, special terrain rules are probably still vastly underused. I'm not sure if such as solution will totally solve the problem that we're discussing though, and I'm still mulling over what the core issue is and hopefully how to address it. But I still really like the idea of a hacking 'Dead Zone' and will be using it as a houserule in my own group. The idea of introducing rangebands to hacking, however, I'm not so fond of because it would require a complete reworking of the hacking rules that I don't think is needed. Additionally, hacking already has a sort of range band already, as you need to get your target within a target's hacking area, whether it be through a repeater or the hacker's ZoC. Admittedly, that's not too hard to accomplish, and I think that the ease of use of pitchers might be part of what's fueling some players' discontent. EDIT: I just remembered that Nullifiers were one of the things that got axed in the transition from N3 to N4. Perhaps they would happen to be worth bringing back to give some factions an option to counter hacker threats. I don't see any reason from a fluff standpoint why PanO shouldn't be able to develop the technology and deploy it, and in gaming terms, I don't think it would break the game if they were handed out in moderation.
