A Primer on Massed Armour Tactics

Not that much variety there though, IMO.

So I do hope IA will at least give more variety to that ( Which so far seems like it will. ).

Plus, am I the only one that struggles making lists with Kuang Shi...? Buggers are so cheap I can't think of how to spend all the leftover points, honestly.

 

So... fiddling about out of boredom on Infinity Army ( As one normally does. ) trying to get down a vague idea of how to think up lists for such a style of play for vanilla and sectorial factions...

I noticed thinking up lists for that is a bit harder than I thought. Mostly because finding a way to fit in those HI you want isn't that difficult compared to trying to find out what stuff to support them with AND how to fit that stuff in to achieve that. Kinda like a jiggsaw puzzle, building the outer rim of it is easy, filling in the inside is hard, except toss in a bunch of extra non-mandatory or optional pieces into the mix.

Which now leads me to ask...
How does one support the armour in a massed armour list? Would like to at least find out more on that topic now, I suppose.

 

AVA 4, 6.6 pts and 0.1SWC orders. That start to run towards the enemy, pants down, on first opportunity. Who also forgot to bring their own smoke. Still, cheap orders.

 

Well.

IA has dropped.
MO re-work also dropped in.
And even the Morat HI got a nice tune up too.

It is a good time to enjoy Heavy Infantry.

 

Or, well, at least a good time if you like Yu Jing and PanO HI, and also pretty decent if you had some interest in Morat HI ( Like me. ).

Also, that MO box is looking mighty tempting now...

 

The good thing in this box is you can form more than one FT out of it so it is pretty helping for new players to begin to be familiar with forming FT according to the situation and not only to the list.

 

Well that's highly convenient.

 

This is some hard oversimplification about the problems of wound centralization. You need to take into consideration a lot more important factors not just a couple

1. ARM, a Second class Atribute Overcosted
   
2. Enemy Order economy:
   amount of orders the enemy need to spend to begin shooting and the subpar nature of ARM
3. Burst and special Ammo: (almost all of them Downgrading Armor performace or simply bypassing it) are becoming more and more at hand with every game expansion.
4. Dirt warfare: hacking and other defensive/offensive asymmetrical tactics. That has the potential to choke you out or render most of your profile useless.
5. Less Board control

Of course it has good things too, And it can work with decent rolls and good tactics. but on an even match during a High level game... the adversary has the upper hand if he can deal with the 2-3 key pieces

 

This whole thread is about you giving better answers than this.

If that's the level of response anyone engaging is going to get then it's time for @psychoticstorm to close the thread.

 

I mean, I get it mate.

And maybe it IS time to close the thread.

But thanks for making the effort.

 

That's what you say when you don't understand the heavy armored warfare.

1. Less board control: At the first turn, if you're not the first player, yes. But it is a boarder control focused on the quality and not the quantity. All the point is that, because you have less board control at the start, your opponent will have to spend more orders just in order to gain LoF with your first line guys. And because they are harder to kill than a random flash pulse bot (thanks to superior FtF and ARM/BTS attributes), they have good chance to loose only 1W or not. Then you retreat thanks to guts roll a little bit so your opponent will need to spend a new order to gain LoF on the first guy. Problem, there is now a second guy to face before trying to take down the first one. And the second guy will retreat a bit and so on. At each FtF, you only need one lucky roll to end all this order expense and transform it in a pure loss. And at each FtF, your opponent is using orders to just put you one order down while his attack piece is one order further to retreating to its position of security. At the end of the turn, if he want to take some objectives too, he may have put you unconscious/dead one guy if he want to play it safe. 2 if he is more relentless/careless but then, the guy who put you down your guys is close enough to be dealt with immediately, without spending too much orders to kill a threat to your remaining heavy guys. Then, you can push your attribute advantage by slowly and relentlessly gain control of key parts of the table and lock them down.

2. Ennemy order economy: how many orders do you think you'll need to use in average to bring a trooper able to take down Patsy in LoF? How much more orders do you think you'll need to take her down while she is retreating just enough to loose LoF with your attacking guy at each lost FtF? How many orders will you need if your guy gets stunned or killed while challenging her? Heavy armored lists work on the frustration and temptation and a good deployment will ask you at least 2 or 3 orders from a guy in the middle of the table to gain a LoF to the easiest LoF to get plus 2 more to put her unconscious (in average) so equiped with a B3 DAM 13 weapon 90% of the time. Your opponent want your heavies dead because they are both great threats and the first orders he can kill you. It will be rare to see someone investing 5 orders to just leave a HI to 1 wound and still alive before retreating.

3. Special ammo and burst: yes, this hurts heavies when a Spitfire of a HMG comes and shoots at them. But only if the firing trooper is good too. I don't see a Keisotsu HMG succeeding in killing a FK ML easily. Even a Line Kazak AP HMG wouldn't be found of trying. So, essentially, it's fighting a heavy unit with another unit putting similar active firepower in play, nothing exceptional here. Exactly what you'll do once it is your turn. And when you're playing good units with 2+ W/STR, you can afford to split your burst in order to kill more than one guy in one order because you won't face a lot of hard to kill targets. It's not the case of your opponent who can't afford to split his burst between troops fighting on an even foot with his active trooper.
On the special ammo topic, the most common (Shock) has no effect on HIs and TAGs. AP is pretty common too but you don't find them on every plateform. You can have some armies using SMGs like others would use combi rifles but those are pretty focused on close range firefights. The same can be applied to BSG. So, then, you have AP HMG (only Ariadna and Haqq), MULTI weapons (often on costly plateforms or crap fighters who are in defensive FT) and some AP loaded common weapons but they are rare outside of Ariadna. So, AP is a real problem against Ariadna. Outside, you'll find AP on elite, long range ARO and close range units only. Don't expect to cross more than 3-4 guys loaded with AP ammo when fighting any other faction. T2, Viral, K1, Plasma, Breaker are pretty restricted ammos in their access. Just like AP, you won't cross many units with weapons using them. E/M becomes a greater problem but is on low burst weapons so your high attribute valors make them hard to connect and successfully fry one of your guy. And since the guy is still alive, your opponent hasn't solved the problem if your Engineer is still alive. Same is applied to ADH and high PH makes them harder to work successfully. Then Stun and Flash: really common in ARO but not as harming as if you have only had one attacking guy. You have backups and the stunned guy can still find a defensive position and be ready for ARO. Plus, heavy armored units always have some BTS so, it's harder to stun them.

4. Dirt warfare: you can play dirty with HI and TAGs too. Discover the mine then use it to place a template catching the minelayer, use stealth and your 2W to tank CK and cross the repeater area and go chase this pesky hacker, KotHS can deal easily with Moran, forcing hackers to aim his holoechoes thanks to stealth while shooting the Moran... what we lack is a LGL on our ORCs like Wu-Ming have but you still can use good units like BF or Bolts in a heavy armored list to solve your repeater and infiltrator problems.

5. ARM and BTS is "overcosted": I would really like to know where does this come. Because ARM 0 guys can tank DAM 15 hits? Because partial cover already grants 3 ARM/BTS? Well, wounding a ARM 4 unit in cover with a plain Sniper rifle isn't as easy as it seems. You have less than 50% chances on wounding the target for each hit unbeaten in the FtF. With the good attributes numbers HIs have, you would find one hit in average out of two shots. Then this lonely shot has less chance to wound the target than you have to wound it than it has to stay unharmed. So, you need high burst weapons or multiwound ammos to get chance to pass the two former layers provided by high attribute values. And after that, there is a third layer: 2W. You really need specific weapons to even put unconscious a HI while Normal ammo is enought to deal with 1W units composing 2 groups lists.
ARM/BTS are also really handy to break through blockade. Since you have 50% chance of just ignoring the damage of a mine, you can focus more on moving and killing rather than stopping by each speedbumper your opponent cared to leave here to you.

Not sure if I'm clear and consistent everywhere but I tried to give what my experience taught to me. I've played 10 orders lists countless times to the point that I need now to learn back how to build and play 2 group lists and I can tell you that 10 orders lists played well are on par with 2 groups ones.

 

So have you had more opportunities to apply this approach to IA by now? Between the NCO fueled Zu Yong Pain Train, the Yan Huo Haris and the Mowang, there should be plenty of ways to realize your ideas, especially since they all bring additional order efficiency via Tactical Awareness and NCO.

 

I'd imagine the recent ( At least I think it's recent, vanished like a forgotten AD troop the past few months. ) addition of Tactical Awareness to every single TAG has also improved the usefulness of the double-TAG or TAG+HI friends approach as well.

Also, as a complete side note that isn't PanO related... what do you guys think are the best factions/sectorials for pulling this kind of stuff off beyond the obvious Yu Jing and PanOceania?

 

Nomads and CA. Both can run really good HI and TAGs. Quite often they're better off for blind side defence with the quality of their warbands.

 

Assumed Nomads would be on there, what with good bash-bricks and the great HI specialists that are Hollow Men, didn't really expect CA.

Also, sorta was expecting to hear O-12 as well: not much variety, but what is there is VERY solid.

 

They probably should be. I just have less experience with them, so they don't come to mind immediately.