September>December 2024: Nuclear winter has struck, leaving room for the N5

Looking at the sectorials and damn, I feel sorry for Pano players, and I'm an MRRF player. They got hit even harder than I thought. It does however make sense for MO to be a sectorial for Pano despite lack of common untits. You ideally want your sectorials to be as different as possible from vanilla in order to maximize number of units/minis spared from the cull.

For Ariadna, it's pretty much as I expected. CHA got the chop. USARF remains and MRRF gets the consolation prize of being the reinforcements team. To be honest, MRRF are just losing two units, Zouaves and Metros so it could be worse. Maybe this means the yanks will get some new stuff.

 

CHA was, to me at least, a fair bit unexpected. We get a novel about them and then they get discontinued?! That's hardly a move that could have been expected, to be honest!

 

Have you seen the Vanilla PanO roster? It's in a bad, bad place unless Kestrel is a masterpiece of design- they take up fricking half of Vanilla. We kinda need those knights to be accessible if they're going to eat a full third of the faction's design space, especially given the decision to introduce a new Sectorial. Given SWF wasn't exactly taking the world by storm, there's a fair chance MO is all that will be left of PanO at this rate.

 

Honestly this so far has been my biggest problem with what we've seen from N5: Vanilla PanO is basically just Kestrel + Friends, when it should be an even blend of the various sectorials and sub-factions more like Vanilla CA.

I get why they did it, because marketing wants everyone buying the new shiny PanO sectorial to be able to play them in Vanilla as well, but it really, really rubs me the wrong way.

 

Or, it allows MO to be more distinctive from Vanilla PanO. Let's see what tweaks the MO profiles get. And looking at the Fireteam changes, Vanilla PanO is in a great place. Fireteams are much much weaker than before, which allows PanO BS to shine. The Cutter and Swiss Guard are even more terrifying than before against Fireteams. Lone shooters, which is most of PanO, in general got relative buffs. We also don't have the deal with the same level of direct templates spam.

I am sad with the loss of VIRD and Acon, but hope KCF allows some Acon like play.

 

Don't get me wrong- I very much like the core rules changes we've seen so far, and they'll probably be a big help to the PanO gameplan (even if it favours the Combined Army to an even greater degree...). But I have to disagree with the point about MO. If the point is to have a faction sharing basically no units or common playstyle, why have it take up PanO space? The rest of the faction's not actually all that unpopular even with MO excluded, certainly not enough to warrant a two-Sectorial format like ALEPH has. Not to mention SWF and KCF being frankly awful fits for the Hyperpower's representatives compared to how well SP and OSS fit ALEPH... Where's the well-established and well-supplied units emblematic of an economic juggernaut? If I wanted cowboys or cold-weather gear, I'd have bought Ariadnans!

 

I still dont understand how, adapting the 3 CHA units that are sectorial exclusives you can make the sectorial fully N5 ready, but you decide to axe them and save USARF, that have literally almost nothing in common witht the rest of Ariadna

 

Isn't the "nothing in common" part a good thing?

 

if your are judging the difficulty to translate sectorials from N4 to N5, no

 

Interesting FT redesign.

However there's one thing I don't understand. Suppose you run a Harris with 1 Fusilier and 2 Black AIR, does this count as 1 (Fusilier) FT so only activating the Harris with a single order or does this count as 2 (with the 2 BAIR) with also the +1B?

 

two units of the same class, so lvl 2 of bonuses

 

Actually, I would go by the Fireteam name. So for Fennic team, you need Fennics to get the bonus. That makes sense to me.

We will see when they release the Fireteam video.

 

Wait... I have conflicting answers here. So that wasn't a stupid question in the end :) To be seen then

 

What I'm wondering is if Duos with the same class give the level 2 benefit.

 

I guess it does. It's not stated that the bonus are dependent on the FT size, but on the number of coherent units.

Now we need to figure out if the coherent unit is according to the FT name (eg Fusilier), or the highest number of equivalent units (eg 2 BAIR in a Fusilier Harris).

That is critical info to receive asap ;)

Also it means the most important bonus is for a clean Duo. And I like that. Will give plenty of room for flexibility for interesting Duos, making the games more dynamic and list building more diverse.

I'm really very pumped about this change!

New FT rules also puts back a lot more emphasis on the individual units stats and skills. A BS14 or 15 now means a lot more than previously whereby you, due to FT rules, factions able to easily outgun "better shooters" via an easy to field and flexible pure core (looking at you MAF outshooting PanO!). Also the huge nerf to cores makes it that Sixth sense becomes a luxury skill, putting back more focus on Surprise attack, shooting through a smoke, or Albedo.

I hope the meta won't be figured out too quickly

 

This is gutting, Varuna was my favourite PanO sectorial and Acon and NCA were how I started out in N3. I really hope CB publish non-competitive, friendly rules for them, for N5.

 

Varuna is in Vanilla. You have almost of their units. The Kamaus though completely disappeared :(

I guess I have now a good excuse to proxy them as Bolts. Just have to add some Red here and there. Really looking forward to know more on PanO Vanilla FT options and composition

Th same can be said for NCA.

SAA though have been completely axed. I'm very sad for my Regulars and Bagh Maris :(

 

Sectorals
I’m surprised by the sectorals for PanO and NA2. I didn’t think PanO would be cut so much. Also, I can’t tell if the Druze are the “vanilla” of NA2 or they are still 4 sectorals. It seems kinda hurtful that they would give PanO a new sectoral and then take away 3. But hey, at least they got a new one. Better than they did after Uprising. I think it would have been nicer up-grade Shock Army or Neoterra instead.


Fireteams
Going by the colors, the grey is the MAIN troop that must have at least one of to make the team. All the bonuses depend on how many of THAT troop you have. But even with just that troopers, the bonus are nerfd. At most a pure 5-man team can only get +1 BS, +1Burst (remove one), Sixth Sense, +1 Dodge. I think we are going to be seeing a lot more Haris teams of two+one. I don’t see myself taking a 5-man Zhanshi team just to get +1 BS and sixth sense. They still suck after all that.

 

I think that if your faction have access to a good gunner that can make a pure duo with a cheerleader (Griffin+fusileer for example) it could be better put 2 duos for ARO duties than invest in a full pure core fireteam