Full Linked Prime can handle linked Phoenix and Cenobites HRL: Active (0.99 wounds / order): Wins F2F: 73.1% Causes 1+ wounds: 58.7%, Causes 2+ wounds: 29.8%, Causes 3+ wounds: 10.9% Failure: No wounds caused: 30.0% (14.4% chance active player causes no wounds) (8.4% chance reactive player causes no wounds) Reactive (0.20 wounds / order): Wins F2F: 19.8% Causes 1+ wounds: 11.4%, Causes 2+ wounds: 5.5%, Causes 3+ wounds: 2.6% Against the Avatar you can constantly win the FtF, but it would be hard to put it down; Active (0.45 wounds / order): Wins F2F: 80.4% Causes 1+ wounds: 35.7%, Causes 2+ wounds: 8.2%, Causes 3+ wounds: 1.2% Failure: No wounds caused: 52.8% (44.7% chance active player causes no wounds) (2.7% chance reactive player causes no wounds) Reactive (0.19 wounds / order): Wins F2F: 14.2% Causes 1+ wounds: 11.5%, Causes 2+ wounds: 5.7%, Causes 3+ wounds: 1.4% But a linked prime can do work against anything lighter than a tag.
The Avatar is really hard for most armies. That nightmare is of questionable balance. The alternative to killing it is to destroy its order pool. Or to focus on grabbing objectives while denying the Combine Army scoring points. Both of which torchlight has tools to do so.
@Brokenwolf That math is far more impressive than I realized. My Prime was winning face to face rolls vs the Anaconda and Scarface, but was just having trouble pushing wounds through. But it was enough to keep their heads down and let my other units hunt the order pool. @Death The Avatar is the extreme example, but things like the Jotum, Cutter, or Maghariba Guard are a little scary to me still. But you're right that TB can play the avoidance game. I've been running the Prime in a Harris, separate from the Rovers. This gives me two pretty scary fighters (in separate order pools).
Spot on. Good summary of the similarities, and the advances for TLB. Missing the balancing factors of IA's greater resiliency to hacking and maybe still-nastier Pain Trains. But your raise some concerns well here. Hard disagree, and the over-reaction discredits your other good points. Giving O-12 the UberMarines is great. O-12's design space is "what everyone else does but optimized." It does not reduce other factions' viability to put out a hard as nails O-12 faction. It's incorrect and an overreaction to call it "LAZY". TLB is not lazy, it's quite well-considered it seems like. Just inside band for power, without going over. Optimized but not a steamroller, looks like. I'm really looking forward to facing this force, not dreading it. What you are correct about and does reduce other factions' viability and the fun of playing older factions is a failure to do balance passes or updates to reflect unintended or too-serious shortcomings that have become clear post-publishing. Especially when those updates are fairly obvious. This need for small ongoing tweaks to keep older factions relevant when new forces and play concepts come out is something CB could do better. You're right there. You're right that a lack of balance passes for other forces is a mistake, and I understand your temptation to call it lazy. Seems like an overreaction though, and you lessen the strength of your otherwise good arguments by insulting the company instead of pointing out the problems at a granular level and suggesting a solution Regarding the "why" on no balance passes, we can just speculate but as a long-term fan here's my guess: Usually a failure to rebalance past work is a matter of prioritization of resources. Decent rebalancing is a stone-cold b!tch to accomplish without introducing new problems, consuming a lot of development resources. It also doesn't have a clear financial reward, so it's a hard thing to get management to let you spend much time on, when there are new products to develop with those same workers. It does need to be done though. Fortunately there is a third way: If CB did a better job of gathering fan feedback on these forums, and then using the community to test potential tweaks, that could save a lot of internal work and give the community a feeling that they are heard. There's a cost to that activity too of course, both in time/labor, and having to dig through the weirdness of a nerd forum where people have very strange, sometimes straight-up rude social boundaries. And that's the real "Tragedy of the Commons" that comes from shitting on CB in our posts. The game devs probably would listen more to the quite-good analysis that happens in these forums if they didn't have to wade through a bunch of "CB IS LAZY WHAT FAILURES" crap to find decent feedback. When we restrain the attacks on character and chicken-little-ing, we will both be understood and agreed with more easily by fellow forumites, and more likely to get good ideas such as your folded back into the game we clearly care about. My guess: TLB will almost certainly be fun to play with and against, and is not so out of band on powercurve that they will distort the game. Hoping to face them this week and will report anything worthwhile. [ Our local IA player @wes-o-matic (who is quite good with the force and the Infinity rules in general) is converting to TLB for a while to get a feel for the comparison. Looking forward to his thoughts on TLB's balance and IA's viability a couple months from now. ] IA paintrains will still hit harder. I'd much rather go second against TLB than IA, it feels like so far. IA definitely needs a buff though. The buffs are all pretty obvious to. Let's hope they get adopted. Sorry @psychoticstorm but have to agree with others that the aesthetic opinion here does not address concerns about the new force being super-optimized while older forces do need a balance pass. (I agree with you about the theme of the units, but IA is also a heroic army if a standing one, and needs a few changes to remain relevant according even to some of its most insightful and level-headed players). Best summary so far. Well said. ...unless you are facing Morats. In that case, definitely pick the KHD.
I was not commenting on anything Aesthetic, but purely mechanical. As far as Aesthetic goes, for me Invincible Army if far superior to Torchlight. From a mechanical perspective Invincibles army plays as a coherent professional army fireteams cannot be broken, specialists in fireteams and key elements with tactical awareness and NCO, overall the army feels like interconnected parts that work together as a whole. Torchlight plays more like individuals that are loosely banded together and each does its own thing. Again I am not saying IA does not need a refresh for example it has only one KHD, but mechanically I think it is distinct from Torchlight.
Have you played a lot of Torchlight Brigade yet? I haven't, although that should change tomorrow, so my take on this right now is based just on the way they correlate on paper, but initially TLB looks to me like CB understands the problems IA has...and decided to push out a new sectorial for O-12, instead of patching IA and giving O-12 whatever home sectorial the Gamma and Omega belong in. The idea behind TLB is interesting, and I think I'd feel better about it if some of the profiles weren't such close analogs to IA staples. Not everything is apples-to-apples, but a lot of it is oranges-to-tangerines. Respectfully, I don't think your observations hold up, but I hope to be proven wrong. TLB does a great job of permitting links with specialists (including doctors!), provides plenty of Tactical Awareness where you want it, and includes NCO much more affordably — an IA list will generally struggle to include more than one NCO, but TLB can (and should if using the Raveneye LT) take 2-3 of them, providing a much more flexible way of using NCO. I'll give you the thing about Number 2 and fireteam resilience, but that and slightly better Tinbots aren't really that meaningful in terms of gameplay differentiation. I would challenge you to make an IA list that I can't build a roughly equivalent or better version of in Torchlight, other than a quadruple Liu Xing skew list—Yellowjackets are good but they don't quite look to perform as solo attack pieces the way the LX multi rifle and spitfire can.
Not yet, I might do a few demo games if there is enough interest, otherwise I will probably face them, it will be interesting to hear your thoughts after you have a few games with them.
For sure, but Torchlight has everything it needs to hit as hard enough to do the job, and they can actually survive if they go second. If anything, their defensive presence is going to prove to be oppressive in the right hands. In addition to the amazing midfield they're going to have going on and strong (pseudo)warband support, the Prime is going to be a defensive bick shithouse, both with its linked and suppressive fire options.
Got my first game in last night, against @Savnock as it happens, running a list of defensive/specialist core, prime+doc+hellblazer haris, evo, moonraker, solo wrecker, and unlinked engineer and flash bot. I can at least confirm that this army can absolutely be run like IA with better support pieces, a crumple zone, and cheap camo FD trading pieces. I’m looking forward to seeing what they can do over the next several weeks. *tactica note: I put the evo bot in g2 and used it to simulate tinbot on all the HI, switching it to marksmanship for a linked stormbot at one point. This let me leave rovers out of the list entirely and use a pair of hellblazers as link starters. Since they don’t have IA’s signature tinbot (-6) the evo did about as well. I wouldn’t try that in a list where using pitchers or depreps was a primary strategy since an evo is easy prey for an enemy KHD stagediving it via your repeaters, but it worked well here.
After just one game, I'm feeling like you were pretty spot-on @Weathercock . The Prime is indeed an amazing ranged defensive piece, and the Moonrakers are great midfield defenders -and- good at sweeping out other midfield defense. Playing vanilla camo-Nomads into @wes-o-matic 's TLB build (Prime haris, Wrecker, and a Stormbot and support core link), I managed to stall their T1 alpha strike as vanilla camoMads can... but then lacked the teeth to really take out the key TLB pieces. Definitely partly due to my own errors (I meant to bring BJC but forgot those trays...), and Wes played very well with tools very similar to those he's quite skilled with in YJ. But getting to grips with TLB when the Prime had a commanding view of the field was quite difficult. I used my camo strikers and UFK poorly, but the margin of error that I usually have with those units was noticeably absent. You'll have to get really good at closing using Eclipse and/or over-infiltration/Impersonation placement to get hands on that Prime, especially as it will have a Hellblazer in tow quite often. Reactive hacking is probably one of the important defenses vs. TLB but you're definitely going to need multiple hackers because the Waverider is no joke. Defending against TLB hacking (single Waverider no Tinbot) was dicey for me even with 2 hackers, one Jazz and the other a Zero. Odds should have been in the Waverider's favor, I got lucky. Without that barrier remaining, TLB could have alpha-ed like IA. Lists I'm now building to fight TLB (revenge is nigh!) will either have 2 high-quality hackers with defense -or- 3 basic-ass hackers. Playing into TLB felt like playing SP, or Avatar pre-nerf. IE hyperoptimized and discounted opposing units making the fights feel a bit unequal. It's not game-breaking, but definitely feels uphill. We'll see after a few more games to get used to it. Anyone else having experiences on either side of this army, interested to hear your thoughts.
