I honestly can't understand the reason for all this hate against the generic ''vanilla'' factions and the desire to force all players to play sectorials. In my gaming group no one plays sectorials, and it is inevitable to observe how much the CB wants to penalize these players compared to the players of sectorials. The initial ''exchange'' was between choosing the versatility of vanilla or the power of fireteams. Sectorials had limited choices but all the fireteams bonuses. As time goes by, vanilla are losing all their charm and what drove us to choose to play a generic faction. Sectorial factions have gained many more choices, and even exclusive units that generic factions don't have access to. With n5, from the preview releases, you can see that the choices for the vanilla factions have been practically halved. In this case, now those players who collected entire factions and decided to sacrifice the power of the fireteams to have the freedom to choose to play any model of their own faction, even just for the charm of the miniature, what should they do? Choose a sectorial and sell all the models excluded from that sectorial? At this point, what is the advantage of playing a vanilla army instead of a sectoral one? Truly from the latest releases (reinforcements, moving iconic characters from factions to other factions, etc) I can't find positive points on CB's marketing choices.
According to some of you guys, CB seems to hate a lot of people right now... Yu-Jing people, PanO people, Aleph people, Vanilla players, the list goes on and on! Clickbait and wrong title but anyway... :) Vanilla will get a compensation, with a bit more access to Fireteams, and will still benefit from a wider choice of options, including (I guess) exclusive options (like the Aspects in CA). To be honest, I find this choice is one of the best things of N5 to come. Vanilla being composed litteraly of several hundreds of profile (and growing) was really starting to become nonsense... Especially considering that this (way too) wide choice resulted anyway in a very limited amount of used profiles. Of course, we'll only be able to judge all this after we saw the final rosters of all factions/sectorials and how it interacts with the N5 ruleset.
Who hates vanilla? Surely players, but not CB. They're doing vanilla players a favor by reducing the unit bloat in thema: by making sectorials more relevant to themselves, they releave vanilla from their design bloat, making them easier to balance, design and update in the future. Many people were now playing vanilla for the wrong reasons: Joan and all her shitty merc friends list, Combined Army "but I have all the sectorials only units with me", Nomads "all the fun unlocked", etc... it was more a joke than anything in the end. You can question CB marketing choices, they've always been weird, but surely making vanilla better and relevant is not.
Also - all we have for now is fragmentary data. Like, a sheet that is supposed to be N5 list of units for vanilla CA, and some remarks from Bostria upon how N5 armies are going to be designed. Which are typically Bostria-esque kind of vague. We have not been given enough information to pass a judgement yet.
It's true, the length of the entries in the generalists is a problem. Initially, the generalists were beginner-friendly factions that reduced the mental load by not dealing with the concept of fireteams, but today, with sometimes more than 100 entries and not to mention the options, a beginner has to go for the sectorials. Making army lists from a generalist is a nightmare when you're playing casu or as a beginner, because there's too much choice. As a result, it's not uncommon for players to be veterans only. For example, if in Ariadna the Generalist was just the Cossack faction (the faction that runs the faction, so it makes sense in terms of lore) or Kosmoflot (which is already a Generalist in disguise because of its mixed sectorials aspect), not only would we be streamlining the concept, but it would also give it a faction identity and it would help beginners. Spoiler: ex: ID Sheet nightmares https://human-sphere.com/PanOceania_Sheets
Maybe, but to be fair: I am still waiting for my trailer for a animated movie of my own sci-fi franchise, the range of new Action figures and my thrid (more or less successfull) Kickstarter :-D so, it can´t be that bad.
My long-time opinion was that vanilla armies were too big and unwieldy, and I'm happy to see an effort to prune them down somewhat. Remains to be seen if that effort will result in an even and enjoyable playing field, but for now I'm cautiously optimistic. This doesn't translate into any hate on my part towards vanilla armies. I just think that over the years they got too bloated and could use a rebalance. I'm sorry that this upsets some of the players, but this is true of any changes; we're getting accustomed to playing in a specific way, and sometimes it's hard to adapt when things get moved around. But the alternative is to never change anything, and this isn't a sustainable strategy for a game like this.
I have entierly another point from which I see this topic. The only ones playing generalist armies in my 60+ gamer group are those who collected every sectorial for the overarching faction and, as a result, own every or nearly every miniature already. I, maybe, know of one Nomads player, who plays generalist Nomads without collecting any sectorials, but that is it. Playing generalist faction is hard, it takes time invested, expirience and finesse to do so. Playing sectorial is comparatively easy. In my MO, I have exactly two options for Camo and exactly zero options for smoke or Warbands. At the same time, I have exactly one MSV1 option and three MSV2 options, so to combat smoke or mimetism, I have to, either, bring them in or bring my own. This atrificially constrained design space pushes you into a direction. I need to be ready to counter smoke and mimetism, so, I need this and this trooper in the list. When I am thrown into wider PanO, I have eight options of MSV1, four options of MSV2 (of which two I am familiar with already), and one option of MSV3. Scrap the need to invest much more money on a tight budged - I need to invest much, much more time to thinking and playing the game to figure the right tools for the right time and place. I am nearly fourty, with job, family and kids. I can not afford myself a three times a week gamers evening, I have wife to hug, kids to lull to bed and job to get to in the morning. Regardless of mirriad other problems which creep up on a daily basis and need addressing regularly, like leaky valves, broken chairs and so on and so forth. And so are other 60+ players in my gaming group. If you are high schooler or a uni student, absolutely. You still have parents to take care of you, you can buy models with allowance, and bash fifteen games a month. Me, I am lucky to get two games a month in. Handling generalist PanO is way outside both my monetary and time budget.
While from my perspective, I vibe with Vanilla Haqqislam much more than I do with the sectorials. I like the spread of sneaky infiltration specialists mixed with super soldiers and crazed bikers. I get to build a narrative about my druze KHD and Asawira duo and their grudging respect for each other. Or my hunzakut tag teaming with the Barid. Or trying to make a Govad HMG work instead of my dependable proxy Djanbazan HMG. I like the grab bag. But I fully acknowledge that Vanilla factions are way too unwieldy right now. And the availability of certain units in some vanillas makes the some sectorials unable to compete with their main factions. Like @Darvain implies, I have the historical knowledge to be able to filter through all the dozens of profiles. A Vanilla clean up and more sectorial-only choices makes sense.
And there was also the anomaly concerning ONYX, where tacticas often advised playing it through the generalist. As a result, people tended to play CA generalist in order to play an optimal ONYX, and the ONYX sectorial then had no point in existing.
I will equally point out Shasvastii Except for the fun, there’s no real competitive reason to play SEF over vanilla. The AVA that Vanilla sacrifices is far less important than all of the tools becoming available. Mind you, I play SEF because I have tons of fun with them, but they’re far less powerful and optimised than Vanilla
The reality is that veteran players will have already mentally filtered out all the profiles that don't really work in vanilla, either because the profile just isn't great or because they pale in comparison to another better profile. New players get overwhelmed by the 90+ units multiplied by 2-8 profiles each. I'm excited by the changes to vanilla factions. We might even see more people gravitate towards vanilla factions because of these changes.
I've started to play SEF in N2, and back then - especially between N3 release and SEF rework - there was indeed no point in playing SEF aside from liking the flavour. I did, but then again, I played Vedic Aleph before OSS was a thing... XD
I myself play NCA for its flavour and for the better Hexa availability, and dislike Fireteams. I'm keeping an eye out for more news on Vanilla's potential N5 Fireteams as a result; being basically forced to run links worries me more than the units getting partitioned, and I'm not fond of that already- unit bloat could have easily been avoided by not releasing forty limited-release characters and mercenaries over N4. A full quarter of White Banner's current units were released after the faction's launch right before N4...
Same here... although i like the idea of a group of soldiers working as a team due to their year-long service and training, how it was back then in N2/N3 i am so not a fan of a team of 5 with everyone from a different unit. I miss team out of 5 Modells of the same unit, maybe including a single char. But yes, i know, thats me telling warstories.Still i miss the sight of 5 Mobile Brigadas on the field. Whilest most Player seem to see the B+1 and the BS Buffs as the most impactful bonus a Link offers, i always thought that the sheer Order advantage to move up to 5 Units at once with one order brings so much value to the table. Just beeing able to advance with a Attacker and a specialist at the same time without any need of additional infiltraters or FD units to reach the midfield asap is order-economicly a huge advantage to the (mostly) 16 Orders per round limit. Making everyone better (sometimes more than a 100% - Better BS, ARO burst, SS, ...) is cherry on top.
If I understood correctly, Vanilla would be limited to Duo/Harris. Althought I found 5-men Core incredibly cumbersome to play, I feel like Duo and 3-men Harris teams are much more "natural" and fit for Infinity. Feels to me almost like not playing FT. Thus, I don't mind having the option (not the obligation) to play some in Vanilla. About the unit bloat caused by the release of tons of minis, well... CB only exists because they are selling miniatures. You're not maintening a nice cash flow by releasing a very limited amount of miniatures, with no special edition, no mercenaries, no characters, etc... Definitely. It's basically a free coordinated order, that you can do as many times as you want. Because of that order efficiency, it also allows for something crucial and often ignored with single unit, which is retreating to a safe position at the end of your active turn. FTs is then optimally used offensively and defensively, in addition of bettering its survival chances. How many powerful units are lost after a nice active turn, just because they overcommitted and couldn't return to a safe position?
There is no "hate" for "Vanilla" otherwise known as generic lists, reality is they need to be trimmed down because of an overwhelming plethora of options and sectorials need to become more exclusive. Both are to the benefit of the gameplay and overall playing experience for both generic list players and sectorial players.
