By implication, he did. Because hacking requires you to actually do things to your opponent's models, if your opponent has both a more expansive hacking network and better hackers, attempts to do things to their army will just result in you spending orders to kill or isolate your own hackers. I reiterate: wasted points. The issue is that shooting a repeater forward is generally order efficient because you will then have to deal with it on your turn or else have all your hackable stuff disabled in a 17" diameter circle. Of course there are. But its a really good way to alpha strike someone who null deploys; this is something that PanO does not have access to, typically, whereas Nomads can sacrifice a Heckler to kill your lieutenant top of 1 pretty much with impunity. It is a good question, but the answer is no. Because of how hacking works, having second-best hacking against an opponent who has better hacking frequently just means you give them free points. It was better in N3.
No, because after the kill your hacker, they now spotlight+guided your Lieutenant, and then you're stuck in LoL on the next turn. It's not like a Nomad or other hacking-focused player can't exploit that repeater to do other things. It's definitely worth it for them.
I do agree that a fusilier hacker is going to die to any KHD after getting pitched. And then the hacking Nomad/CA player is going to spotlight+guided attack the lieutenant. But I fail to see how not having the fusilier hacker is going to change the fate of the lieutenant, as he is going to get spotlighted into guided attack nevertheless the inclusion of a fusilier hacker or not. Nevertheless I am curious what you consider the Pano player can do, and what to include in the army, to avoid the pitcher + spotlight the Liutenant + guided attack of the usually obvious lieutenant if going second against a heavy hacking list. What I have found best so far is to try to play hide with several of those obvious Lt to at least make him having to guess which one to spotlight first. But I hope you may have found another possible strategy?
If you're letting the opponent put a repeater on top of both your hacker and LT, it's not a PanO hacking issue, it's a player issue. These arguments are getting silly and they're really reaching. If your opponent is dropping repeaters on your hackers and they have a KHD, of course they'll kill your hacker. If your opponent is dropping repeaters on your LT and they have a hacker and a missile bot, of course they'll kill your hacker. These are not issues about PanO's hacking. None of this changes my argument of earlier that the opportunity cost is ridiculously small and contributes a ton to the faction.
This remind me a lot of how the magic phase worked in Warhammer Fantasy Battles. To those who didn’t play around 6th to 7th edition of such game, investing points into magic was a binary question. If you have invested all your character slots into mages of high level with magic items and powers who granted them more magic dice, your reactive magic phase (dispelling spells) was so powerful that an enemy who had invested some of their points and character slots into magic would find that they would be unable to cast a single spell. And the heavily invested in magic player would have so much of a powerful active magic phase (casting spells) that the enemy would find that they could not realistically dispel any spell except by the use of the disposeable (1) magic dispel scroll that would automatically dispel a non-crit spell. So the answer was binary: at army construction you choose either going full magic, or only having an “scroll caddy” of the lowest and cheapest mage possible carrying two of those disposeable dispel scrolls to try damp a little bit the onslaught of the magic player by dispelling the first 2 non crit spells. In WHFB all armies were more or less equal in this binary approach. It could be argued that skaven, all undead, and all elvens had a ‘more powerful magic phase’ if going all out than empire, orcs, chaos and others… but in reality when two armies that have chosen to go all out in magic fight against each other the one winning usually was the first who either ‘crit’ (total power) with the ‘big spell of doom’… or in contrary the first one who could gain the upper hand in the actual hacking and slashing part of the game as the forces to be in magic were equal. It is Infinity as binary as WHFB? And in case it is, it is worse than WHFB in which not all armies can go all out into hacking and fight in more or less equal ground? Of course, this question does not include ariadna, who is more like the Dwarves of WHFB in that sense.
No that's pretty much the standard practice. Multiple fusiliers or auxilia as decoys, deployed spread out in the back of the DZ to force an extra order out of your opponent if they go for it. There is the Bolt CoC, but she's pretty expensive and obvious because no one takes a normal Bolt. The Zulu Cobra Lt is the most survivable option, but only available to Varuna, and also obvious because its the only WIP13 Lt besides Uma.
The point is if you don't take the hacker you can spend the points on something else. Not much, and it's a serious problem. A CoC Bolt is 28 points, fielding a Cutter lieutenant in marker state is also allowed but is a ballsy move vs. a hacking-focused faction, for sure.
The fact is that you now are down an extra model when you didn't have to be. Sacrificing 15 points and a half swc for a slim aro threat is not good.Thats more than twice the price of 2 flashbots. You're throwing extra reward at placing pitchers in and around your DZ by letting them remove orders from you in addition to any other actions they take. Thats pretty much it. Make it inefficient to go after the LT as much as possible. Zulu cobra, multiple duds and the like help. Having aggressive AROs to keep pitchers as locked down as possible to minimize the number of orders they have to operate. KHD hexa hiding nearby to try to exploit a mistake in skill or order declaration isn't a great option but it can buy time at very least and may catch someone unawares. And of course going first and throwing a hail mary to take out either the hacker or the missile. There aren't great options and from N3 they became significantly more reliable and powerful which is why people are howling about guided missiles this edition.
This is so wrong though. Hacking isn't just "My KHD kills your worse hackers". There is so much more nuanced use, and even when it ends up being their KHD killing your hacker, they're forced to do this, because your hacker is probably preventing them from doing something else. At worst it's just another layer of things they need to deal with before going forward, at best it brings support in a lot more ways than "giving them free points".
Do you know how Hecklers work? It just needs your Lt and hacker to be within about 17" of each other. It does, though. Take another try at it.
It's 5 points. In the worst possible case scenario where you gave them a free kill because they were going for your LT with targeted->guided. You saved them an order to kill that fusilier because they can KHD it. But to do so, they need to have a regular hacker, a killer hacker, a way to put a repeater on both your LT and your hacker. And if you didn't take that hacker, they could STILL have killed that fusilier with only 1 extra order. However, they need to kill your hacker before they kill your Lieutenant. So even in the worst possible scenario, you're still adding orders and rolls before they put you in LoL. That's literally the worst possible scenario for a 5 points investment. But the benefits you get from those are so much more impactful and oughtweigh this tenfold.
And you will never get to use that "nuanced use" against, say, a Nomad player who has better hackers than you, because they don't rely on hackable units (REMs etc) to extend their repeater network, and they can beat your hackers on your active turn. No. Using units as sacrifical defensive pieces is cool when they're a 7 point Fugazi... not when they're a 20 point unit that costs .5 swc and gets swatted aside trivially. This is especially relevant considering your opponent is going to want to put repeaters deep on your side of the field anyway to engage in that sweet noninteractive zero-risk gameplay... so they don't have to go out of the way to kill your hacker, just spend 1 additional order to rack up an easy kill.
Again with the exact worst case scenario, see my above post. The Heckler also can't reach a model that's all the way back to your DZ in their usual 2 orders, they need a 3rd one. Are you not contesting it at all? We're talking about when people take literally Paper and you take Rock to a Rock Paper Scisor game, and the worst thing that happens is the scenario I explained in my other post, where you save your opponent 1 order at best, lmao.
Bolt CoC, for NCA. GMLs kinda suck if they're not getting a key target, so having a CoC trooper on the other end of the table where the troop that has a Pitcher can't see is basically foolproof against that strategy unless the table is garbage. It's amazing how many people don't recognise it on sight, including several regular players around my meta who've been in the game for years. A few think of it as a potential LT, but nearly nobody remembers it's a Specialist- something that has won me games more than once.
It's not 20 points though, it's 15. And it's 5 extra points. And if they had a repeater on that trooper and were going for Spotlight + Guided, they could've killed it anyway. You're literally only looking at the KHD engagement versus the literal worst case scenario, and it's still not a bad situation, and it's only relevant if you go second, and it's only relevant if you didn't cover for the heckler and gave it 3 orders to deploy it. Lmao.
Nah, they just need one. Losing it is a non-trivial thing, however. Posting ARO pieces (whether with guns or hacking) that are just giving your opponent easy rolls to remove them turn 1 is a good way to lose the game, everyone knows this. You want things that will force your opponent to waste more than 1 order. No, it's also 5 points to allow your opponent to spend 1 order to remove three of yours. No. There are no appreciable benefits and you're only saying that because you're thinking "it must be true that hacking is useful in this context" rather than first checking to see *if* that's true.
Anything poking its head out to contest is just going to be shot by the Szalamandra or whatever. And it doesn't matter if you discover the Heckler on the second order, because now it can still walk forward + FastPanda and you're still fucked. It was a suicide run anyway. You can call it a "worse case scenario" but the problem is that the worse case scenario is *common* and trivially achievable by the opponent. The issue is that PanO is generally forced to take rock, as many of its good options to play the game are hackable, and trying to take units to protect your hackable units doesn't work and in fact just makes your army *more* vulnerable.
Sure, but it takes more orders to spotlight + guided than to Trinity. It's still bad even if you go first, as you have no way to aggress into the Moran zone.
