About the repeater network: The strategy is stronger in Panicroom (for example), because you know, where your enemies are going to move to, than in other missions.
Infinity is inherently a risk management game. Players are naturally going to trend towards skills which mitigate risk to your own forces while maximizing risk to your opponent. Currently I think the guided missile bots, xvisor pitcher and hacker spotlight do that a little too well. And much like the jammer of N3 I think the main issue is the lack of ability for opponents to invest in effective counterplay and it can feel pretty bad. There are lots of ways they could tone it down, but I'd be in favor of harder drop offs on the range of pitchers, as other means of delivering repeaters open more counter play, and puts pitchers into more of a midfield denial tool.
It's almost like there's somebody designing Infinity who doesn't understand that, to be honest. Deployable repeaters are better than repeaters on bots because they can't be hacked to turn off in ARO, and don't expose themselves to an ARO just by positioning them.
Now if only there was a way to add some risk to this strategy by giving people a means to attack back through the repeaters to defend themselves effectively.............
You dont need to predict over much when it comes to developing a repeater network, just drop one in a very annoying spot near their current position or where you dont want them to go or they have to go and profit. Mission doesn't really factor into it's viability.
The "risk" this presents to even the most mundane of WiP 13 BTS 3 hackers throwing an unmodified oblivion is pretty small for the investment. Against better hackers it starts to look similar to saying a basic line infantry HMG or sniper rifle is a 'risky' ARO to HMG attack pieces.
This. Odds of the missile versus Achilles (the 6 ARM version) which is one of the highest PH prime target of guided missiles. Not only is this comparable odds to some of the better FTF you can do, but it’s also completely risk free. It is also very easy to imagine a scenario where this is also the most order efficient way to deal with a particular trooper. (If they’re inside of a building in their dz for example) it’s a hard counter to Rambo-based archetype and a extremely potent reactive turn deterrent. Your opponent will lose way more orders than it takes you to setup a repeater lol. - - - - - You can Reset versus Guided. Reset has a clause that lets you declare it as a valid ARO any time you have an opportunity to ARO.
As we've gone over multiple times in other threads, the issue with this line of balancing is that it retains the attack vectors but makes them hostile only to the side with the least amount of hackers. Now, if Reset worked like the old Counterstrike DHD program it'd be a different cup of tea, but I'm fairly certain this is not what you (or the people liking your post) mean.
At this point as long it achieved the desired effect of offering a halfway decent defense against a hacking alpha I would be all for it (Though if you want a nonlethal option I would prefer having ZP negate a hacking attack regardless of f2f and putting on EVOs baseline), kinda getting bored of the game play equivalent of flipping the bird at my opponent while I put their toys back in their bag while all they can do is watch.
And that's the point I've been trying to make about the old style KHDs; they don't offer a defence against it, they just put more emphasis on the type of gameplay we're complaining about in this thread - not to mention that given the uneven distribution of hacking resources CB likes to do it will primarily protect factions that can do this style of gameplay against the countermeasures of the factions that can't (with only a few exceptions).
A point I thoroughly disagree on but we have been over it ad nauseum. The only factions that really come to mind without hacking countermeasures are Tohaa (no huge loss), and Ariadna a faction that takes Low Tech to an asinine degree and has needed a design overhaul for a long time. anything outside of those two is at least passable.
It's not enough to have hackers, which Tohaa and Ariadna do have, but to have sufficiently decent hackers to be able to overcome in ARO an active turn KHD from Nomads or Combined that's required to form a defence through hacking. If Mary Problems can just have a Pitcher stuck right next to a hacker or two and then murderize them, you have effectively achieved nothing in the form of defence, all you'll have done is force literally half the factions to abandon participating in the hacking game (at least when facing Nomads, Tunguska, Corregidor, Combined, OCF, and probably a couple others) while leaving those specific factions barely more inconvenienced than they are at the moment. It's not a good prospect. Now, on the brighter side, my experience with N4 and hacking has been excellent when those factions are not involved (or when they choose lists that do not to prioritize hacking through pitchers or overly dense repeater fields). It's been meaningful while allowing lists that opt in halfway or opt out or are forced to opt out to still in a meaningful way participate. I have also been able to use KHDs in a meaningful way regardless of the dooming and glooming, as a tactical tool, even if the tool itself is difficult to use and units that start in the home zone and don't have pitcher support are... not pointless with KHDs, but not very valuable. So really. Stop trying to destroy the part hacking game that works and is fun, please.
Sure. Honestly even outside of the factions you mentioned (Sans TJC) the hacking game is just as oppressive, Hell our Pano players are some of the worst perpetrators of this. It's not just pitchers, but more often than not (outside of the tsyklon, mary or druze shocktrooper) it is far more efficient and reliable to run a camo piece with a dep rep down field and achieve the same effect, which opens it up to nearly every faction, and thats before we get to AD hackers and DepReps. The few times I have not seen hacking spam has been against pain train factions like IA or MO, the player dislikes hacking or one of the two non hacking factions turned up.
Then I suggest that you stop them doing that. If you've got problems keeping a dep rep getting that close, you've got problems keeping anything with camo off your vulnerable units and we're no longer talking about an issue with hacking.
similar reasoning can be applied to pitchers. just stop them doing it, ensure they can't get into a position to fire it off without getting tagged in return. Unless you are playing on a table with less terrain than the average WMH table or a faction that can turn the midfield into a cancerous mess with deployable weapons, it typically isn't all that difficult to get a camo marker where you want it, especially if you play with building interiors.
Similar reasoning can't be applied to pitchers (and to a much lesser extent FastPandas) because of the range they can operate in and the indirect nature of the "template". Because if the ranges involved, to prevent pitchers you'd need to have ARO pieces covering almost the entire enemy DZ which is impossible. To work against a camo marker you only need to have ARO and Discover pieces cover your own half of the table. You don't need ARO pieces looking down the pipe of their HMGs. Most importantly, because of the ranges involved, sticking down those reliable repeaters require a serious order investment which is what makes it "fine" (and usually makes it never happen in the first place because if you could get that close, the camo marker or AD hacker is probably sufficiently equipped to go on a murder spree instead of faffing about wasting more orders on Repeaters) Edit. Or put a different way. The entire game is about the back and forth of moving troopers into correct positions like those dep reps you are talking about so if you can't manage that then you are going to have problems with all of the rest of the game. Pitchers are different because they circumvent that movement entirely.
Depends on the unit and army. Outside of having a minelayer in your list you can't really stop your opponent from going MOV-MOV-MOV-Repeater+DIE suicide run with a camo infiltrator. For some factions that's an expensive ask. Throwing away a Guilang like that is a considerable trade for a Yu Jing player to make, that unit isn't particularly cheap and they have few options outside of that to project their hacking sphere if they throw it away too fast. Druze, Nomads, ForCo or Haqq using cheaper stuff like 20 or less point Hunzakuts and Zeroes in a throwaway second combat group is much more palatable to consider. The units are cheaper plus their hackers have plenty of other options to project the network in turns 2 and 3. Personally I see Druze often use Hunzakuts to open the game like this on turn 1 then start lobbing pitchers turn 2. It does sacrifice a cheap unit, but it gets more bang for buck out of both their combat groups turn 1 rather than relying on the one group to fire pitchers, spotlight, and fire missiles. The Hunzakut is frequently the reserve piece during deployment as well, so it has a pretty good chance of starting about 12-18" away from whatever it wants to stick a repeater over.
Absolutely, but that's also fairly order intensive and typically non-repeatable as well as depending on the trooper being positioned well with terrain being favourable to begin with, as well as the opponent deploying valuable targets sufficiently close. There is an order of magnitude difference in impact and investment between these two strategies to exploit this particular part of the game.
It's not really that order intensive, it's 1 extra order vs farting the pitchers out on turn 1, and if you're utlising a second combat group to do it that otherwise wouldn't be helping guided missile stuff you're actually coming out ahead on order efficiency allowing your first combat group with the hackers/missiles/linked pitchers to have more orders to work with. Like I said I often see the local Druze player hold the Hunzakut back then deploy it as the reserve on the halfway line. With 3 short moves it's touching the oppponent's DZ line and projects the repeater way into their deployment area.
*shrug* okay, but I've yet to see anyone put something like that to sufficiently meaningful use in ways that aren't manageable and it's not a very common tactic to be able to employ (mostly available to factions that are already able to link Pitchers without getting very costly). It's also a very weak argument for why we should be letting this Druze player do this exact same tactic, but with spending a short skill on a KHD to reliably kill off any KHD (who are now not even protected by Tinbots) that got caught in the Hacking Area first before having their way with whatever is still inside the zone.
