Look, I'd like to have a reasonable conversation about this but you seem dead set on being wildly aggressive and unpleasant so all I'll say is that I'm glad the game is how I like it, not how you like it, and I'm not going to bother engaging with you on it.
But being less efficient in orders is another handicap added to all those mentioned above that HIs have. It means that they prefer useful order pools that they cannot have with HIs. This is because the Teutonic Knights are objectively good, but above all, necessary in a sectorial like MO. I have nothing against HIs, in fact they are my favorite type of troop, not only conceptually but because the best CB miniatures are HI. But it is important to recognize that as things stand now, without an adequate anti-hacking protection network, they do not pay off their cost in points. Yes, but the investment in points is the same and Solar's post literally mentions "There's a reason why people aren't running expensive 1 W guys over 2 W hackable guys, having 2 W/NWI is perhaps one of the best things a troop profile can have". My answer proves that it is the case that LIs with 1 wound are preferred over HIs of the same cost with 2 wounds. There is nothing more to discuss there. If you want to compare a barebones HI with a barebones LI, refer to the first part of my post, in which I put some advantages of having two or more LIs for the cost of one HI.
It doesn't prove that at all People are taking lots of HI and TAGs are hugely popular right now. Taking hackable stuff is clearly common in the metagame.
Yes it does, the fact that people use HIs and Tags also doesn't mean they are preferred over unhackable LIs. It means that they don't have unhackable options to fulfill that roles or that they use sectorials with adequate hacking countermeasures, which is not the case of MO. Remember that this whole discussion began wit MO right?
That they do take them does in fact prove that they prefer them over unhackable options. I take Evaders over Wildcats even though Evaders are hackable MO do have decent hackers, but do also have problems, which I totally agreed with earlier on in the thread where I rated them at about CJC's level (i.e the worst nomad faction imo)
The thing is that it's never "having two guys vs having one guy". It's "having 15 orders, or having 14 orders, but one more heavy piece". And these choices are made in context - of one's army options and specific units quality, possible opponents, prevalent terrain, local meta, etc. Heavy units are deliberately designed as being more durable, with hackable balancing it out. That's why there are relatively few units that combine such durability with being unhackable (and some of those shouldn't be introduced, I feel like CB giving Shock Immunity to some of the units with NWI is a mistake). Players are almost never given a choice between durable and hackable units, and similarly durable but unhackable ones - and this is by design. And the fact that people field HIs and TAGs anyway, proves that for them being hackable isn't big enough drawback to pass on them. And bottom line is that there's very little objective truth to be found. Most of what we have are our opinions, and we shouldn't present them as facts.
This is 100% in line with my findings - the Teutons might be the most agressively price-optimized budget HI in the game (its them or Cenobites) - Discount weapons, 3 Armor, Impetuous, and built-in order economy. There's a point where you can make the 2-wound hackable body appealing, and Teutons answer that question by saying the point is when you don't pay for it. This is exactly the same as the results from looking at HB, but MO has an even lower winrate The categorical statement could have been made more explicitly in the post, however. But they prefer 1W skirmishers, specialists, and utility models at about the same price range as most HI (~30 points buys you most basic HI or a speculo killer). No, they're not. You've tried to make this assertion and failed. People take a lot of TAGs, but that's a much cheaper proposition than trying to Core-link HI, which is the topic that started this conversation. A single TAG is a much lower comittment of resources than even a Harris team of non-Budget HI, they don't get erased by one template ARO, they can have Camouflage for self-sufficiency without sacrificing gunfighting stats, and are much more likely to useful gimicks. And they're faster. Basically HI need to jump through a bunch of hoops to be commonly seen in good factions (>50%) - they need to have extra price reductions above and beyond the base hacking discount, link with cheap filler units, and have useful MODs or utility. In the ideal case, yes. But that doesn't mean they got the balance right. I'm curious what indication you see that it's correct. Well, "almost" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there, but that ship has kind of sailed. Sure. I don't know why no one takes HI is most factions with a positive winrate and a 100+ games, I can only observe that it doesn't seem to happen outside of Bakunin. There are a few obtainable metrics I'd like to make more confident assertions - average points spent on a unit in all lists, average points spent on a unit when included. Less realistically, a way to only look at frequency and number included in winning lists. Related - does anyone more versed in vCA know why the HMG Lieutenant Charonid is so popular? The unit has like an 18% pick rate this season and that's the most overwhelmingly popular profile - that's the oddball sticking out along with the Anathematic/Avatar.
No, that actually is the case. This is largely because of the DTW spam of N4. Being an elite unit with 1W and/or a lack of an ARM stat means the model frequently struggles to reliably prosecute an attack because they are highly vulnerable to eating a DTW or multi burst DTWs from an ARO unit and then trading on their first attempt at pushing an opponent. Whether the unit is hackable or unhackable, the preference for active turn solo pieces or fireteam pointmen is that they can take at least 1 failed armour roll and continue to attack. Multiwound STR units like the Vostok, Eurodos, or even the Dokkebei at a pinch are particularly good because you can patch them up immediately as they fight their way forwards. This is one of the reasons some of the smaller sectorials from the previous edition that don't have a good selection of more durable attacking pieces are exceptionally weak in the current meta. This is also an example of why strong units from N3 like the Bulleteer under perform in N4. Additionally remember in N4 nobody is actually "unhackable" because Spotlight and guided weaponry is more common. Eurodos is an example of a highly effective "unhackable" attack unit. Eurodos dies just like any hackable unit to incoming missiles. When I play pure Shang Ji fireteams I'm infinitely more concerned about the end result of my opponent's hacking turn culminating in a missile deleting part or all of the fireteam. Isolation is fixable, being dead isn't.
Nomads, really? Are you seriously comparing Corregidor's ability to counter enemy hacking with MO's? This case fits right into the part of my post where I say "they use sectorials with adequate hacking countermeasures" Which MO hacker is decent? The only one that comes to mind is De Fersen but it costs 51 points. In MO. I assume that when you say that "MO do also have problems" you are referring to MO's ability to project the hacker threat.
The Santiago KHD comes with a Tinbot and is very capable of killing enemy hackers And yes I rate MO at CJC at the same level that isn't to say they have the same strengths and weaknesses. Obviously. My point was that people take hackable shit over non hackable shit all the time. People take Zhencha over Guilangs. They take TAGs. They take things like Dakinis. These units are good and one reason they're good is that they're cheaper than they would be because they're hackable
And when people take expensive 1W units, which also happens, they take it because of other stuff they bring to table, not because they're unhackable. Being hackable is a factor in choosing units, not the factor. Of course people prefer to take such units as cheep as possible. For the same reason we like Kaitoks in MAF. But we also like Suryats, which are actually more popular, even if more expensive. Which shows that price isn't the single most important factor in choosing units, either. Absolutely none, please note, that I'm one of the people complaing a fair deal about balance issues :P But in this particular case I believe the issues to be caused by specific units, not by the whole unit category.
The best hacking countermeasure is to use non-hackable units to hunt down repeaters and hackers. In that regard, MO is okay with Dart and trinitarians, though they're a bit expensive. The second best hacking countermeasure is the veteran skill, because the only hacking programm you should be scared off is oblivion (spotlight is another issue on its own really). So the sepulchre could be a grood troop to just barge in repeater area and kill everything, but unfortunately he is a bit lacking in some key area for the job IMO (speed and close range guns). Stuff like tinbots or ECM only really works to dissuade active turn hacking attacks, and hunting down ennemy hackers with your own is often a very dangerous prospect, at least when you face actually credible hacking threats (like a firewalled dartok or any of the named nomad hackers).
In N4, being hackable is a price discount. Which makes sense, as in N4 being hackable is a large weakness. But it is not a crippling weakness for some factions who have strong non-hackables to push through repeater networks. If hacking becomes weaker, than HI should be more expensive (like in N3). @Triumph, @Stiopa and @Solar all also provided good posts on why 2W or NWI is so powerful. It also provides insurance if you have an unlucky FtF. It is one of reason why White Company, which has great single wound models, can struggle. It also is why, Tohaa, with their mediocre shooters, can excel. I was watching @RobertShepherd 's recent video about OSS and how an Asura with fairy dust can generally go into repeater networks and active hack through it. Looking at the stats, it seems like some MO lists are using EVOs for to supplement themselves to deal with hacking. It was also nice to see how common some version of the KNIGHT OF SANTIAGO (Hacker) were in lists. I also provided a large argument in another thread that it not that common to see more than 2 hackers in a list. So if you have a durable KHD, you can spend some orders hacking through a repeaters to kill the threats.
Yes, I understand this theory; it's also true. However, that does not make them more common than HIs - all that means is that in good sectorial/vanilla armies, the pick rate for HI is even lower than for the best expensive models, which is itself lower than for cheep trash, and probably lower than the total investment for TAGs. Within the context of sectorials that win over 50% and have over 100 tournament games recorded in the stats page, this is the case. In part because the favored 1W models often use protective States, and the armies that win typically have warbands to play template games. To be clear, cheap 1W warbands are more popular than both. So, this is also true, but it isn't really great for multi-wound models in a larger scope. You can very easily loose more than one wound in a single failed FTF roll - GMLs are the most dramatic example of this - EXP + AP is insanely destructive - but it happens everywhere you have high-burst weapons or DA/EXP ammo. This is a problem I've experienced with HI and part of why I preferred the Tikblang over the KotHS, who was much more prone to dying in one order when an FTF roll went against him. This is one understated advantage of cheaper single-wound units - they can only loose that one wound in a single FtF roll, they still usually get blown up in one GML attack, and so forth. ( That being said - Volkalk and Bears come very close to being actually unhackable. Most of the reason GMLs is such a pain is because of the AP + EXP ammo always used with guided attacks - the only part of that a Bearpode cares about is the free ignoring cover that the automatic blast template added by Guided provides, but you only have a 40% chance to be injured on each missile attack, meaning you're more likely to Reset out of guided than to take damage from the attack. I don't know if this a good thing for game balance but it's hard to feel bad for GMLs not being universal anti-everything. Which is arguably a bigger problem, but GMLs are another matter entirely) Sure, as long as you don't run it into an actual good hacker, like an Intervenor at half the cost. It's obviously doesn't have the standard "Hacking Device UPGRADE: Trinity (+Burst or Damage)" common elsewhere, but it does great at bullying Line Infantry hackers as long as you assume there won't be more than like two hackers on the enemy network, and that he gets the first strike. At 39 points it's shockingly dubious when it doesn't contribute to actually using hacking against enemy HI/TAGs/REMs, but also is weak enough at infowar that you need to have a plan B for when you run into an Anathematic or multiple Dartoks or something, while being expensive enough to make the rest of the list noticeably weaker for having included him. That's fair. I see the fact that the large majority of HI taken get Frenzy or Impetuous discounts (and usually expect to have those skills canceled by fireteams) as indicative of the fact that they've missed the mark on the hackable discount. Or they use a marker state or other factors to massively lessen the impact of hacking, a la Swiss or KotHS. The Suryat is an exception. Sure, but multiple wounds aren't multiplicatively better than one, except in the specific cases of trading against un-linked template weapons that aren't flamethrowers or vulkan shotguns, and un-linked AROs that aren't Missile launchers/Sniper Rifles/RPGs/Flammenspeers/etc. In every other case, you have a non-trivial chance of loosing multiple wounds in a single order - having an extra Wound (and Triumph makes a useful distinction here - structure is better) is better regarded as a sort of single-use backup saving throw. Continuous Damage makes this most obvious - if you fail the one save, you get a chance to pass the second one and live. I would submit that this is part of the explanation for TAGs being generally preferred over HI - in cases where you can loose the third wound in a single order, it's less likely than loosing two, so the "insurance" is more likely to actually work.
The Santiago WAS decent before the KHD nerf in N4. There is a very long post about how precarious the Santiago KHD is in this same thread that I am honestly not going to repeat now. Let's say MO has a KHD that has a tinbot, but even with that it's less than decent. Right now MO is bottom 5. I doubt CJC is anywhere near. This argument is totally fallacious. There are countless reasons why a player might choose a Zhencha over a Guilang, a Tag, or a Dakini, not because of the discount they get for being hackable. I don't see MO units listed either. In your argument you are presenting being hackable as something good because it brings a discount associated with it, or for making a unit good. But with the state of hacking in the game, being hackable in exchange for a discount in points is not profitable. Also, I have no idea how much that discount is, but I do know how oppressive hacking can be for a faction that depends on their HIs and has no means to effectively counter hacking. It is the perfect formula for the frustration that the vast majority of us who play MO have when we play. MO's hacking game to protect his HIs is mediocre to bad. A Santiago KHD has nothing to do against a network of pitchers from CA, Nomads or Aleph, and this is suffered by MO's HI, which the best it can do is reset. This type of mechanic is not bad in itself, but when it is so proliferated and so exploited by players, then it becomes a problem for those who do not have the tools to exploit it. And it is a mechanic that: 1- Has zero risk for the hacker 2- it has the ability to avoid tracing LoF thanks to the proliferation of pitchers and repeaters that are deployed in sectors that are difficult to access and allowing the hacker to remain comfortably prone in the most hidden corner of his DZ away from all danger In conclusion, any feature that exacerbates the exploitation of this mechanic is bad until it is balanced in some way where: 1- Hackable units have some way of generating a risk for the hacker in case of failure or 2- The chances of a hack being successful are reduced or 3- That the hacking continues as it is now but the areas of coverage by pitchers and repeaters are reduced so that the hacking situations are more circumstantial or 4- A combination of all of the above or 5- Surprise me, I am open to listening to new ideas. And one more question, have you ever played with MO? Honestly
I like a balance of unit types so I can cover one unit's limitations with another unit's capabilities. Pivoting between the two to achieve a ballet of options.
Inflexibility, MO can, knowing the mission make a list and win it, less so making an "all comers" list or two lists for a tournament, they could use a few cheaper alternatives for some key elements and fireteam composition could do with a rework. As I said again, wanting what others have is not the way you must approach this discussion, if you want to play generic Nomads or Morats, play them instead of asking PanO to become them.
As a point of discussion here is a MO force that is geared for hacking and can and has won hacking contests. Mixed (Hacking,GML) [Cyber Taskforce] ────────────────────────────────────────────────── GROUP 1 10 PEACEMAKER Heavy Shotgun / PARA CC Weapon(-3). (0 | 24) AUXBOT_3 Heavy Flamethrower / PARA CC Weapon(-3). (0 | 4) BULLETEER Heavy Shotgun / PARA CC Weapon(-3). (0 | 21) KNIGHT OF SANTIAGO (Hacker, Killer Hacking Device) Combi Rifle, Nanopulser, D-Charges ( | TinBot: Firewall [-3]) / Pistol, DA CC Weapon. (0 | 39) BULLETEER Spitfire / PARA CC Weapon(-3). (1 | 26) DE FERSEN Spitfire / Pistol, AP + Shock CC Weapon. (1.5 | 51) RAVENEYE Submachine Gun, E/Marat, Flash Pulse, E/M Mines / Pistol, CC Weapon. (0 | 12) FUGAZI DRONBOT Flash Pulse / PARA CC Weapon(-3). (0 | 7) MULEBOT (Deactivator, Repeater) ( ) / PARA CC Weapon(-3). (0 | 8) MULEBOT (Deactivator, Repeater) ( ) / PARA CC Weapon(-3). (0 | 8) CLIPPER DRONBOT Missile Launcher / PARA CC Weapon(-3). (1.5 | 16) GROUP 2 5 1 TEUTONIC KNIGHT (Lieutenant) Light Shotgun, Panzerfaust / Pistol, DA CC Weapon. (0 | 19) ORDER SERGEANT (Hacker, Hacking Device) Combi Rifle ( ) / Pistol, CC Weapon. (0.5 | 18) BLACK FRIAR FTO (Sixth Sense) Heavy Rocket Launcher, Nanopulser / MULTI Pistol, CC Weapon. (1.5 | 25) CROSIER (Paramedic) Combi Rifle ( | MediKit) / Pistol, CC Weapon. (0 | 13) CROSIER Combi Rifle / Pistol, CC Weapon. (0 | 11) 6 SWC | 298 Points Open in Infinity Army
Despite all complicated moments MO is one of the forces that have well recognisable disign. Yes, a little medieval for a "sci-fi" future but with their own style. Can't say that about other sectorials. May be Svalarheima have winter clothes on some units. That's all.
@psychoticstorm I fully agree that every faction should have their own playstyle, and not just poach solutions from others. The issue, as stated multiple times in this and previous threads, is that 1) different factions aren't kept to the same standards in this regard, and 2) PanO's distinctive features are generic, easily poachable by other factions, and the whole faction is more limited than others. As someone already mentioned, PanO feels like its being kept within old design restrictions, while other factions' design spaces get open more and more. It is frustrating for PanO players and no amount of not acknowledging the issue will change this, on the contrary. I'm all for stopping - for example - the proliferation of the "light hacker with its own Pitcher" unit archetype, because it gets repetitive really quickly. But I fail to see why shouldn't more PanO units get equipped with FastPandas to help with Repeater coverage. Or why more remotes shouldn't be allowed into PanO fireteams, without breaking composition, too.
