How many of you have experimented with 5-size combat groups or "max 5 orders pr. model"? We are two intermediate players, who know the rules, but still sometimes see the game be over in turn one, due to problems with alpha strikes or generally bad deployment. As the saying goes, you can't win infinity in the deployment phase, but it's pretty easy to lose in it, if you don't know what you are doing. We then started talking about different ways to "solve it" (being the noobs we are, it must be the system that's wrong!), in which i found the idea of combat groups being up to 5 models, instead of 10, an interesting take. It would limit the "alpha strike" potential for a given single model, make it more tactical as to what opponent troopers to target given their group composition, as well as give each combat group a feeling of it being its own "squad" (which i personally find very thematic, from our typical 10-man army +2 cheerleaders waiting for command tokens to move them into the "real" group). It would also slightly nerf core fireteams, since they would then need to be their own "squad", and therefore won't be possible to make a full 5-man defensive core team that gives its regular orders to others. (We also thought about the idea of changing turns between activation of groups, so player one choose one group to activate, then player two chooses a group, repeating until no more group is left which ends the game turn (again, to increase the interactivity of the game). But that would be a whole other discussion, and a far greater change to the system as such.) I'm mostly interested if others have tried to do similar things to this or have had similar thoughts? What would you miss the most, if 5-sized combat groups would be the rule, and what possibilities would it have? When we have tried it and we were a bit sluggish in our deployment, it felt like a small improvement, since a bad deployment gets punished, but it is not an instant wipe like we are used to.
I mean I don’t want to seem harsh but… deploy better. If you are getting consistently wiped on turn 1, stop leaving models out of Total Cover. Anything that can be seen by your opponent can be killed, so not leaving models out in the open is Deployment 101. You might want to stick to smaller games with no advance deployment options until you get used to protecting stuff.
5 man groups are absolutely a thing I want to try. Mainly it'd be about reducing the swing of what happens when a good unit starts rolling as it screws up the order economy for units that otherwise would retreat and cower. I think the implications of what this'd do are a bit hard to judge. Would it truly nerf cores? All cores? I'm not so sure. Defensive cores will become a lot stronger, IMO, but at the same time the economy of moving a defensive core out late game to try and accomplish mission is probably not all that doable.
You might find a similar experience in the Mercenaries Campaign system that one of the forum posts here is working on. You lose fireteams all together but it is much more focused on a small group of individual units as one squad for the entire mission. Either than that if you are having a lot of issues with practicing against alpha strike you might find it better to stick to C1 games for a much faster game experience that isn't reliant on major alpha strikes. It also feels less bad when individual minis get taken out in C1 as even a normal Line troop can get some stuff done there.
I have been thinking about using 5-trooper combat groups for a narrative event, where I want to limit how far a force can push up in a single turn. In this case, I would also couple it with alternating activations of combat groups, i.e. I do my first combat group, then you do your first combat group, then I do my second etc. Not necessarily a desirable change for the core rules, but I really want to try this in this specific context.
Game would be wildly different. For starters, you would need more turns. If you have ever run one of those three model demo games for newbies you'll know that jack shit gets done in a turn with so few orders. As for playing that way to solve your alpha issues, short term gain and long term loss. Alpha is a thing you need to be able to understand and deal with. I'd recommend you post up some lists and boards and deployments for feedback. It could be that boards are too enabling for this strategy, that you are not taking the right pieces for defense, playing missions that support it too much or just not deploying well. I'd suggest crossing off that list of in-game fixes before crossing into fantasy rules territory.
The Avatar and models that receive impetuous/frenzy discounts don't need a reason to become better than they already are. That said, as the big fish in a small pond, I definitely understand where you might be coming from, and the idea of smaller combat groups to offset snowballing and alpha striking does sound interesting, albeit something that would require some adjustment in the greater scope of the game. 5 might be a bit too low, but I could see an argument to be made for group size limits of 6-8.
I'd be worried about alpha-strikes from advanced deployment pieces like Duroc or Fidays becoming even more impactful. Losing three cheerleaders is already painful now, when it brings your attackers down to a two-order pool it would be horrible. I've wiped a poorly-deployed backline with a Paracommando's Rifle in 5 orders back in N3, it would be even worse now with the power creep available for that playstyle.
Well its not harsh. Its true. And the advice you put are solid, and we also follow them as much as possible. The problem arise when we deploy a little too fast, and then something which might was meant for full cover does only give partial, etc. I agree that our deployment could tidy up (and we only use these rules when we are rusty. We normally play it normal). But i still find it sad that a bad deployment can give a game thats as good as over before your turn starts (which is true for most miniature games i know btw!) How would removing 5 orders to be used on the Avatar make it better? Instead of 13 orders it get 8 instead (which would be massive compared to other groups max of 5), but wouldnt it still be an indirect nerf? And btw. the 6-8 order group idea is a good take i didnt think of! But would that paracommando not just steam roll the whole team with 5 orders more to spend when he can shoot the enemy team in the rear? Also the paracommando would have a max of 4 orders to "spend" on the drop turn, since it would be 5 orders pr. group total. In general, i feel an AD deployment wreaking havoc in 4 orders feels threatining and fair, whereas 9 orders can totally decimate an army which have a single weak entry point (making the games skill floor during deployment the highest i know of all the games i play) Also its important that most of these considerations dont really matter when we talk ITS. To score max points, you won't wan't to decimate the opposition immidiately.
I slightly disagree. When we have deployed so alpha strikes are not a problem using normal rules, we usually use 2-3 or 5 orders pr. model (which is the same as this system almost) The amount of orders are the exact same. They are just split out in 5-man groups rather than 10-man groups. I do agree that i generally want to "play it right", but as alpha strikes is an occuring theme of the player base (and something which actively discourages new players), i thought this would be a relatively small change which would lower the skill floor, while keeping the same skill ceiling and feel of the game.
I could see it as a beneficial for new player, but once the level goes up a little it's the complete opposite: amongst veteran I see more games lost because of a failed alpha strike which resulted in overextended attack pieces vulnerable to counterattacks than because of a successful alpha strike. It would definitely get worse with 5-men combat groups. Also it makes camo skirmisher and the like even more prevalent compared to DZ bound troops. Having to spend all your orders just to get to the midline...
I don't really understand parts of this post due to the wording. If you are deploying so Alpha isn't an issue, then this thread would not exist! Often models are only going to spend half an order pool, but the game is vastly different when the option to spend more is gone. Order quantity and order distribution are just are important as one another - see 11+ order pool shenanigans and also irregular models for examples of this. An army that is 10 in one group and 5 in another plays very differently to the same army with an 8/7 split, and would certainly play differently than a 5/5/5 split. Many model uses boil down to "move a bunch of times, bypass obstacle in the way, spend last couple of orders on the model to achieve most of your result" and so a lot of aggression and a fair amount of button pushing become disabled when that last few orders is unavailable. If you were to insist on a rule change to counter alpha, I reckon it would be better to leave combat groups as is and use a "5 orders spent on a model per turn" cap. This will teach less bad and weird habits than messing with army construction and have the same result.
I have the complete opposite view on this than a lot of people in this thread. I'd say a 5-OG system would be a lot harsher for newbies, for instance, considering how the amount of planning ahead you need to do to manage the orders will be a lot more demanding. It also has some pretty hefty implications for particularly Hidden Deployment and Airborne Deployment as the order generation leaves less room for mistakes. Oh, and I seriously doubt this will have any impact on the balance between a newbie and a veteran. The worse players will still be making poor decisions, you can't really design rules away from that (well, you can, but that requires the rules to be a lot better at communicating the consequences of actions and typically limit the number of choices more severely, and these changes aren't doing any of that)
One of the first things I thought when coming back to N4 after several years out of the game was why didn't CB just reduce the number of troopers per combat group to 8 (or less) instead of implementing the 15 trooper rule. I think would have been a much cleaner way to reduce the impact of low cost troops boosting Rambo units. Combat groups of 5 might still be too small though. The bigger issue in my mind with N4 is that the power of the active turn relative to the reactive has become more imbalanced with every edition (though N2 was probably too favorable towards reactive). This means that the player that goes first can largely steamroll any ARO that the opponent presents and if the opponent deploys in total cover, you can still get steamrolled by impersonators, infiltrators, and paratroopers. I think CB needs to rethink ARO mod limitations (surprise attack, burst mods, etc.) to make AROs more threatening again.
Depends on the faction. My current thinking on N4 is that the second turn player really needs to know their opponent's faction well enough to deploy against it. Against Pano, hide your ARO pieces and defend your DZ. Against HB, put up lots of AROs and protect them from infiltrators. Against Kosmoflot, face your AROs backwards. etc. Whether that's good or bad is a matter of taste. Certainly a disadvantage to new players who don't know what to expect from each faction. Personally it doesn't bother me, but then I'm used to chess where you have to study openings. Studying Infinity factions seems fairly minor in comparison.
Usually you'd expect a Paracommando to die before really wiping a backline. They're worse than most skirmishers in a straight-up fight thanks to the lack of marker state, so once the opponent gets their guys turned around with Alert, Warning, good Dodges etc. they can go down quite quickly, especially to Templates. This goes for most other quality AD as well, thanks to a bunch of shared traits. The reason I think that the burst of damage from an AD alpha strike would be more of a threat in an orders-per-group-capped format is the amount of relative damage they can inflict to a given group. It's less of a problem for armies like Hassassins or Ariadna with good midfield presence, but footslogging-reliant armies like most NCA lists need every order they can get to put Specialists on Objectives. From my anecdotal experience, it takes about 5 orders to get to a midfield objective and 10 to reach an enemy DZ with a 4-4 trooper if you have to handle opposition. Under this format, a foot army reaching the objective in Looting and Sabotaging would need to keep its order pool nearly full for the entire game in order to even reach the AC2, let alone score, as well as spend at least one turn with key pieces isolated in the midfield. Every loss inflicted by a suicide run from a more efficiently-moving trooper would make the mission exponentially harder.
Oh god, yeah, missions like looting and sabotaging would be completely impossible with 5-order groups. Even a Rasyat wouldn't be able to do it.
It raises the comparative value of orders that break the command group limit. Each extra order doubles in value going from a 10% increase to a 20% increase. An Avatar currently has the ability to do 40% more actions than a strike piece limited to 10 orders. If you were to limit the combat group to 5, it would be able to do 80% more. Think of it less as the Avatar becomes better but instead that it becomes significantly less shit due to the change than everything else to a potentially unfair degree. This, basically. I've done alot of small combat group games teaching people to play with Red Veil, Wildfire etc etc. Limiting the combat group size doesn't do anything to fix the problem, it's an experience thing. I always have to pull my punches and refrain from punishing the ever loving shit out of a badly deployed opponent. As @Delta57Dash says the only true fix is for you is everyone needs to get better. On a tangent, N4 has got some alpha strike issues but they're probably different to what you're experiencing. I am assuming the issue you are facing is that bad deployment allows for an easy first turn incursion into a player's deployment zone which results in indiscriminate killing and a general loss of orders. The alpha strike issues I have noticed have been based around selective models being targeted. The complaints around hacking and guided fire for example, the big issue it poses is bypassing defenses to target key models, often attack pieces, and neutralise them. The removal of these models tends to defang an entire army and leave it unable to effectively fight back.
You're talking about this as if the total number of orders would go down... You have 2 other order groups*, the only thing that really changes is that you need to solve the problem of maintaining a slightly higher number of plan B. That said, missions like Capture and Protect are quite terrible given how the game's movement economy is designed. Even in the base rules I don't think any objectives should require you to get to the opponent's DZ and back and objectives that require you to go to the opponent's DZ should be relatively simple. It's a bit too common for these missions to devolve into a state where one side can't compete half-way through the game and is spending the rest of the game trying to prevent the opponent from getting 10 TP. And just so we're clear; the armies with a good midfield presence already has a tremendous advantage. If the main dude goes down, the plan B is already in the midfield and can pick the slack up almost immediately while the footsloggers need to get a new dude from the back line. In a more fragmented order group system, the footslogger from the back line will have their own orders and will be moving up more in synch with the plan A. Yes, it changes a lot of dynamics, but you also need to keep in mind that this also happens to your opponent. And my congratulations on wiping a backfield using only 4 orders and 1 to land. That's way up there in statistical anomalies with a Hac Tao destroying an Avatar in a single crit, even when your opponent is cooperating fully with making it happen. * I'd actually want to see what happens to the dynamic if you remove the body count restriction given how as the order groups are fragmented it prevents the worst offenders that were pushing 10 orders onto two units per turn from N3. I still suspect that the strongest armies will be roughly the same ones - namely the ones with the best optimised 15-20 points cost units and the most optimised low-20s skirmishers. You know... like in regular N4...
