I think vanilla armies shouldn't have access to every troop their sectorials have. Some units are just inferior to their sectorial brothers. You will never take grenzer while there is an intruder, OS while there is a croc man, zerat while there are shrouded and so on. Having access to that many units may be confusing and hard to a new player and being a bit of irritation for the old players. On the other hand, vanilla nomads are slowly getting stronger and have less and less weaknesses (they even have a fireteam now). Another problem is that vanilla armies don't have fixed amount of units, Yu Jing now is basically IS+some other stuff, while Ariadna is now preparing to get 4th sectorial. This gives it clear advantage in terms of variety. What do you think?
I've seen similar thoughts expressed by different people here. At the very least it's a good point to consider. I won't speak for all armies, but for Pano, for example, TO Sergeants in Vanilla with a crazy swc tax look strange. I mean, nobody takes them anyway, because why pay that tax if there are Croc Men. Maybe certain named characters like Constantinos and Singh should be restricted to sectorials too.
Vanilla YJ probably isn't a great example because even before the Uprising changes ISS was probably the second best sectorial in the game. The reasons to play Vanilla YJ right now are basically Tigers, Hac Tao, Guilang and Daofei (and those are all excellent reasons.) Looking at what we've seen of TAK so far, I worry it might actually do the same thing and out-do vanilla in a bunch of places. They have ambush camo minelayers, Vet Kazaks will likely link, T2 ammo on everything, etc. I'm a little worried because I feel Ariadna's vanilla game is already really good. Vanilla Nomads on the other hand got lots of new and strong stuff from Tunguska, but I don't think Puppets are it. All it takes is one AD unit, Superior Infiltrator, or Impersonator to effectively remove 60 points from the table by shooting a guy that can't even ARO.
They need to add a few more Sectorial only options, as they have in Tunguska recently. That or start adding more SWC taxes for using specific profiles outside of sectorials (though I recall seeing that be a giant point of contention with PanO over Order Sergeant TOFO - lol).
The OS TOFO or MSR are my go to Infiltrators in Vanilla. Finding the SWC for him is usually easier than scraping extra points for a Croc together. If SWC are an issue I settle for a Hexa in the DZ.
Vanilla armies don't have access to everything their Sectorials have. As an example, here's the ISS profiles that Yu Jing cannot use: Ashcroft Hunting Party, CSU, Sforza, Sophotects, Dakini, Garuda. That's without even getting into AVA differences, linkability, and the differing value of units with different competition. Variety is the strength of vanilla factions, and I think it should be left intact. The lack of variety in Yu Jing post-uprising is indeed a serious, but separate, problem, one that I hope is addressed sooner rather than later.
Vanilla is missing link teams, which is big, while many of the extra troops are redundant. It's easily tuneable with AVA. For some reason it's not a problem for vanilla Ariadna to have 13 skirmishers, while it would have been a problem for vanilla Pano to have an infiltrating TO Order sergeant on top of the 2 Croc man, so they strapped some nasty SWC tax on them. So overall I don't think Vanilla need to be nerfed by removing troops, maybe just don't add too many redundant troops.
