N4 is pretty decent. Some things I liked better in N3. Just my random personal thoughts after playing for a while and comparing to N3. Spotlight can't be declared a second time by the same Trooper against the same Trooper in the same turn after a failed attempt (similar to Discover). - Speeds up the game from reactive spotlight spamming, and mitigates hacking / guided a little. Change the 15 trooper limit to each trooper after 10 costs a Command Token (with more Troopers having +X Command Tokens as a skill) - Makes more sense for command to become steadily more unwieldy as a force becomes larger. Makes it a softer limit, that can be mitigated as an interesting choice. Change Shock to just counteract NWI and dogged, instead of instant death - (or MI should be shock immune by default) Makes higher cost 1W models more likely to be viable. Change crits back to doing a straight wound. - It's more elegant, faster and high value high ARM troopers have enough going for them in N4 without the crit change (Troop limit, N4 price reductions Tac Awareness, Gizmokits etc). Make AP work against cover bonus - Balances it better against N3 style crits. Return Sniffers to the game, but make them always on on a model that has them (don't need to be deployed first, like a repeater on a REM) - The game needs effective counters to camo, streamlining Sniffers instead of making them a bit more useful was the wrong choice. Make any trooper in a sectorial able to form a fireteam able to form that fireteam with any other Trooper with the same fireteam ability (Fireteam; Core with Fireteam: Core, Haris with Haris, Duo with Duo). Limit others who can join to either 'Counts as' or 'Wildcard' - Just makes things simpler to understand, while keeping interesting flexibility. Probably a few others I forgot. What are other people's thoughts?
AP should always have worked against cover.* Cover ARM bonus should be 2.** Change my mind. *AP reducing cover adds verisimilitude and more importantly makes AP vs other ammo types (like Shock) an actual trade off in capability. **Cover providing better armour than anything except for heavy HI or TAG ARM values, for free, greatly contributed to the skew in ARM pricing IMO. 2 is exactly halved by AP for convenience.
To be perfectly honest with you; these are probably the only changes that I think are even worth considering.
I agree. But in return no Reset ARO (similar to Discover). Something I liked better in N2. They should pump pointcosts up like it was back in mah day! (Intruder MSR = 47-ish and so on)
I wouldn't oppose against AP working against cover. But in order to make it faster, I would add ARM + cover and then halve it. This would greatly improve AP, so this ammo could need a cost increase.
Cover doesn't provide an ARM bonus in N4, so you'd have to change that too. But no, the crit change is one of the best bits of N4, I'm enjoying ARM not being an overcosted millstone around a Trooper's neck.
Bring back the Hacking Program "Blackout" or let the Deactivator work like Blackout but only in the user's ZOC. Cybermines should be used to mine the opponent's hacking area (and maybe issued to non-Hacker profiles to counteract widespread hacking areas). Both measures against too oppressive hacking. Also the Deactivator should be usable against the Comms Equipment a trooper is equipped with (either in LOF or ZOC). Bring back the Hacking Program "U-Turn". Obviously to migitate the guided missle bot's impact. The Tartgeted State should let Speculative Fire ignore the BS-6 penalty This will bring back grenade launchers on the menu and therefore diversify the indirect fire game. Grenade Launcher troopers have their own set of advantages and disadvantages which makes them a good competition for the missile bot. Also grenade launchers are generally less deadly than the AP+EXP template missile I'm on the opposite end here: make Fireteams more restrictive (again). If one wants to play e.g. the super AP HMG Shang Jisus in a full core he should pay for it with less good (=expensive) options for the rest of the army. Further the ammount of wildcards in fireteams should be capped to 1 per team with a maximum of 2 troopers not belonging to the fireteam defining unit per team.
LOL, I forgot that N4 changed the way Saving Rolls are calculated. "If the target is in Partial Cover, the attacker will apply a -3 MOD to their BS Attack Roll and the target of the BS Attack reduces the Attack Damage by 3 for Saving Roll purposes, if the Roll was necessary."
Wouldn't that just make everyone use Grenades/Grenade Launchers again since they don't suffer from U-Turn?
They weren't taken by everyone in N3, even with the +3 rangeband the light grenade launchers had back then. Although there were some few sectorial armies (StarCo, Druze, Ramah) that had a high demand of certain grenade launcher troopers (Emily, E/M+N GL Druze, Ghulam NCO) with around 70% of lists containing them in 2019. And U-Turn could still be custom fitted to N4 needs or maybe stuck on the EVO HD to really hamfist that remote into peoples' lists
I agree with this (apart from cover bonus ARM2) but I'd go one further: AP should reduce ARM1 to 0. It's always irrationally annoyed me that strapping a crappy breastplate on makes you impervious to AP. Not that it makes much difference on the grand scale, especially when you're more likely to choose DA or some equivalent ammo, but it still irks me.
Rounding down massively devalues medium ARM models, the most struggling category. Almost all of the HI in IA would go from having a 33% reduction in their ARM to a whopping 66%, making them no better than ARM1 LI currently are against AP.
Could be interesting, but if you really wanted to tweak guided making it disposable X (5 most likely) means that for the most part you are going to get a limited amount of shots per game as opposed to per turn. spotlight doesn't need the nerf, guided does. Dear god no, old crits were cancer, and the chamge moves the focus more to leveraging the right tool for the job as opposed to brainless B5 gun go brrrrrrrr "strategies" that result in a TAG in cover dying to some trash weapon like a redfury. Burst no longer being king is a good thing, old crits will just revert the game back to it. I don't under stand why they were ever removed when they were used frequently, but junk like a deactivator was left in when I'm pretty they were the most forgotten and unused piece of kit in the game. I would be all for bringing back blackout, with the rise in effectiveness of hacking in the edition change i don't understand why they removed. Also putting on the KHD means it can actually do it's counter hacking role without a direct increase in lethality.
OK I get it people like N4 crits lol (I don't though! It's my list ;) ). My though was doing it this way (limiting the amount of Spotlight attempts) also speeds up the game. One thing I don't like about N4 is how Spotlighting every time something moves is a bit repetitive, often of little value, slow and dull. I do like Spotlight being an ARO, just not how it can end up spammed in reactive when you say, move a link through a repeaters ZOC. This might hust mitigate that a little. Same with how many reactive dodges there are now, but I like the reactive dodge change in general so I'm not sure how to fix that.
