We just got rid of Achilles! We don't need a new #$%&. The other sisters of Penny and Hippolyta would be cool. Antiope and Melanippe.
By no mean my suggestion was to have JUST Heracles, my idea of the Amazons still stands (heck, even the Furies I would like, they could be some kind of Posthuman logic, max 3 of them: Alecto, Megaera and Tisiphone that may have a vengeance special skill/profile) Heracles could be the answer to the betrayal, there is an interesting mechanic in there as well since Heracles is related to Perseus (same father). On the other hand Odysseus could be an SP hacker as an answer to Pandora's betrayal, maybe with some bonus for a software that shields an HI (cybermask and/or farydust etc.)? He was put by Dante in with the fraudulent advisors in the 8th bolgia
In July release: Essential box with Aleph/Nomad. 2 Thora and 1 Arjuna. Considering the availability of the two across the faction, it is open to anything. This more than Mazebreaker is a starter box for me. It also sends a message which I like to new players. Still I would like to see something for Steel Phalanx so CB bring it on!
I think theses boxes are meant for vAleph. Don't know about Hoplite and Apsara yet. I hope the are added.
Here Rob starts from where I begun: Aleph was not in a good spot and now it's back on track. I understand that, from a market point of view, it brings more sales to "sacrifice" a faction and correct it with a new box (that will have more sales). Still Infinity is the game in which "army books" come out altogether and it is the power of the game itself, but N5 didn't start like that. Factions were left behind and I believe that at some point an analysis is going to be due. With the Monday signal we are seeing that effect: Aleph is 3rd for games played and is on par with Nomads for wins (the latter consideration actually shows the problem of hyper-compensation: the 2 renewed factions are winning more than anybody else, followed by NW which also just came out). Let's try not to hyper-compensate again (ref. to the video): Rob says that fliers are going to be nerfed significantly.
While I also agree that Aleph is indeed a top-tier faction, just a quick heads-up regarding Rob's faction evaluation: looking at the actual ITS data or tournament performance, some of his takes might need a bit of a correction. To be clear, I'm not saying his insights are worthless—on the contrary, there's always a lot to learn from his videos. However, Selection Bias is something that affects all of us.
Absolutely! He didn't hit me as an Aleph fan though. Also if you look at his faction list he started form PanO and while having 4 rembots is definitely an advantage, I wouldn't consider that too much of an advantage (still there is a limit at 15 models and I would argue that Posthuman be considered 1 model regardless of how many you bring...). That being said I would like to raise a point in that Aleph, being Elite, most often has 1 model for a job, lost which you may find yourself in a pickle. That pickle not being impossible to recover, still coming back is a task that one needs considering. I also noticed that there must have been not many tourneys since Mazebreaker (there is a 7 round tournament in the US soon) and the tournament rankings were not affected much. On the other hand the Monday signals are giving a benchmark which is quite interesting and that is the basis of my considerations: Aleph being the 3rd faction for games played is good, but in the economy of the game this comes after a significant release. On the other hand the number of matches won (equal to Nomads in 1st place) for me is connected to the experience of players. What I said before about the coming back may have, as a cause, the fact that Aleph players are rarely rookies (I can be proven wrong in this). This leads to an above 50% win rate (SP 53%, OSS at 44.6% but it was in a bad spot and vAleph at 63% but with the lowest number of matches played). Now with Mazebreaker I am expecting the win rate to increase for OSS and vAleph along with the number of matches played, contextually SP will remain steady. That is another reason to start working on SP that needs a bit of power shift (personally, while powerful and fun and even quite varied, the 2 Enomotarcos list is getting a bit old) and, I may come as repetitive, the 3rd sectorial. Consider that the Orbital/Landing section of Corregidor are just another way of giving Nomads an additional sectorial, without creating a new sectorial (for a faction that, by background, could not have it and in games terms doesn't even need it). Especially the location of Shinju gives possibilities for Aeleph 3rd sectorial. I am a fan of the work of one of my country and region fellow man, Dante Alighieri and the mythology of Hell, Purgatory and Heaven gives a lot of opportunities to work with. Look at the scenics they put in Mazebreaker and tell me it doesn't evoke the underworld of the circles of Hell...
We need to remember that a win-rate can go up also just from being the "new hot thing". The more people play the better the rate.
That is more connected (directly proportional to) with number of matches played. Win rate is a complex concept, it is connected to many factors. In a 100% balanced game in which all factions have equal difficulty of play (unrealistic case), with a Gaussian distribution of experience in the game by the player base, considering an equal frequency of match-up, the win rate is 50% across the board. This shows the number of parameters that matter outside of "dice-roll": varied difficulty of play per faction (not all factions are carbon copies) varied experience of the players (veterans can counterbalance luck to a measure) uneven match-up frequency (local meta) uneven number of players per faction Intrinsic balance of the game how do you work with the list in hand (this is a big one and it has many facets) dice selection (no need to cook 'em, just roll them and find out if they have a favourable defect) and probably there are an equal amount of parameters of which I am not aware off the top of my head (I can think of a couple more esoteric in nature). This list alone can generate a spread of win rate beyond any acceptable standard deviation. Win rate is used only to advertise "oh look how balanced this game is!" (I can tell you that based on win rate even a certain hammer looks balanced...). In the case and point of my previous post I can even add that the average win rate for Aleph players is 53%... oh look! It's SP win rate! Does that mean that SP is the faction that does not need a bit of love? Absolutely not (we would need an SP/OSS match-up which generally doesn't happen because Aleph players can be counted on the fingers of 1 hand, to extremise it, let alone finding 2 Aleph players in the same gaming club...). In order to have a statistically relevant win rate we should start playing like chess: me w/ my list Vs. you w/ your list followed by me w/ your list Vs. you w/ my list.
