So I was planning to spend alot of time in N4 exploring multiple duo fire teams with White Banner. Unfortunately the sorry state of the Tian Gou left me fairly disinterested with playing White Banner outside of the Ye Mao haris so I've put that on the back burner. Instead I've decided to spend time playing with non 10-5 combat group structures. Specifically I've been playing around with 8-7 in Vanilla, but I also want to try some 9-6 set ups with fire teams at some point as well. For now though my interest has been focused on putting warband spam back into a game that has tried to eliminate it, I think Yu Jing is in one of the better positions among the factions to make this work. To clarify on warband spam I also mean providing the warbands with enough orders to be a potential threat in the midfield. I've had several games with lists that are 10-5 with 4 Monks 4 Kuang Shi, but the Kuang shi are in combat group 1 as order batteries while the monks sit in combat group 2 more or less order starved. They function as close range smoke support and DZ protection. That's not a bad thing, they function just fine like that but I wanted to get back the kind of threat they posed when I had a combat group of orders fueling them as well. So I've mucked around a bit with different things but I've come down to the following list as a decent template to build out from. Essentially 3 Monks being fueled by 5 regular orders in 1 group, backed up by a group of 7 that has NCO and multiple TacAw models. I've switched a few things around tried one where I busted 1 Shang Ji-sus down to a Zuyong lite version, and then swapped the other one for a Blue Wolf for Show of Force. I've also considered swapping a few things around, or dropping the infowar/missile aspect to include some hidden deployment shenanigans (but not too much). This list specifically lacks long range hard ARO. I'm ok with that, I don't think it's a particular problem. The list has enough warband spam that it fears very little that wants to dive aggressively on it. You want to walk into a deployment zone littered with chain rifles, exploding peons, mines, and hackers looking to cover you in spotlight aids? Ok, bring it on. I'll take those trades. I was more or less stuck playing like this for a year after Uprising. My findings were people don't want to push into a deployment zone filled with aids, it's super risky and sucks ass getting repeatedly smacked in the face by templates, and if they don't hunt down a pair of big hitting HI plus the missiles/hackers they get punished really hard and can lose expensive models. Their other option was to ignore my army entirely and try to take control of the midfield. I find that letting my opponent get into the mid field and take control of it is fine, my opponent being on the 24" line means it's easier for the Monks to reach his nerds and beat them up than if they have to run to his DZ to find them. The risk you ran with no hard ARO in N3 was your opponent matching you in chaffe to rush your DZ with a combat group of equally annoying chain rifle/shotgun toting idiots looking to trade up on cost. Thanks to Tactical Window though, this falls off as a threat because it's unlikely your opponent has this kind of 10 man trash order group to spam you with Hard Cases, Desperado, Preta/Gaki, and other cheap shite anymore. As it was though I played the above list into Capture and Protect on this table into Starmada. My opponent was running a defensive Kappa core with a Psi-cop Haris and an FD Crusher looking to punch a hole for a KHD Raptor+Devabot to snag the beacon with. The KHD Raptor is actually a super funky piece of tech, it comes with a Heavy Flamethrower toting Devabot that gains the ability to approach targets with impersonation from the KHD which is really neat, also a pretty good way to bum rush defensive links and set the gunman on fire. The Devabot can also be used to approach the beacon in Impersonation, yoink it and shift it 6" back towards relative safety or outside of a hacking zone without risking the Raptor. Overall, really cool unit and had some neat applications to the mission. Overall the game really put my list through the wringer thanks to a fuckup that I made right off the bat. I badly miscalculated whether or not the Daoying was visible prone on a rooftop, turns out the Crusher managed to get a line on her and get her out of Camo. She survived the initial onslaught but the Psi-cops managed to get another angle and pushed very aggressively to finish the job. For that mistake I earned a loss of lieutenant on turn one. Definitely a sub optimal start to the game but not entirely un-salvageable. My opponent burned his entire order pool to put me in LoL and to clear out repeaters/mines on the way up, aside from entering Impersonation his beacon runner the Raptor hadn't made any moves towards the target. So I opted to just pummel his order pool as best I could and trade model for model as aggressively as I could regardless of value. Krit traded himself for a Bluecoat, the Son Bae splashed a 2 for 1 Psi-Cop trade with its missile from range, but I gave up the Son Bae in return to the Kappa core link killing it. Annoying for my opponent but given how scared he was about the Raptor eating a guided missile outta nowhere in the final turn and losing control of the beacon I think overall he was glad for the trade. Elsewhere the Guilang Minelayer traded templates with the Crusher and they killed each other. With the Crusher dead one Shang Ji had nothing to do and just went into suppressive fire for no real reason, while the other one spent both its orders to take down an Epsilon sniper. Meanwhile the Guilang HD and 2 Monks set up to watch the beacon and waste orders. I wasn't going to stop the Raptor from stealing it but I was pretty sure I had ability to prevent him from getting all the way home with it in one turn. Overall I downed 5 models with orders to spare despite being in LoL. I think this fairly accurately illustrates the point I was making on how dangerous this kind of list is to dive deep on for your opponent. Anywhere over the 24" line for your opponent is well within your striking distance, and you can really make someone bleed for coming close. Meanwhile you take less damage than you'd normally expect in your opponent's turn because you're not giving them long range AROs. I was Loss of LT going into turn 1, but I only lost the Daoying itself besides mines/repeaters. Playing a more conventional list I could've been down another 3-4 models like Hundun, Chaiyi, etc. Things that are normally placed on longer range ARO duty. As I predicted my opponent had enough orders to snag the beacon, but needing to deal with the Monks and Guilang in the process left the Devabot dead, and him wounded and stuck in no man's land trying to get home. My Shang Ji were the last surviving members of their combat group, but the really nice thing about the N4 Kuang Shi is that they behave themselves and it's very likely they hang around as late game order batteries now. In this case their group was also cut down in numbers, but it was Monks as casualties so it really didn't matter. When I bumped the Shang Ji across to group 1 I now had 7 regular, 2 Irregular, and an LT order for a total of 10 orders to run through multiple AP/Shock HMGs into my opponent. Given how shit turn 1 started and how much firepower had been traded by both sides I was actually in a solid position. Shang Ji that was promoted to LT spent 2 orders killing a Flash Pulse bot, while the Datatracker Shang Ji successfully fought its way to the Raptor and killed it and a Varangian on the way. The Kappa link didn't suffer any casualties in the process thanks to some impressive armour saves, but they did fail their guts check and ducked. On a tangent, the Shang Ji used a 4" active turn dodge to cross a gap to get itself into a position to engage the Kappa ML under the 24" range from an optimal location. Active turn dodging continues to feel like a really good addition to N4. Opponent re-secured the beacon with the Kappa, the Shang Ji had opted to back off onto a building and not contest the re-secure, and then backed it up into his DZ and set up defenses. That cost him his remaining 7 orders to pull off though. Given that I still had my Datatracker alive while the Raptor had eaten AP HMG shit, I opted not to chase my beacon any further and just secure the opponent's one which was a pretty simple matter with 10 orders between the two Shang Ji still. The Shang Ji successfully downed the Kappa left on overwatch and then dodged and scooted into the Tian Gou's jammer zone to secure the beacon to squeeze out a very narrow win. Overall I've been pretty satisfied with splitting combat groups into <10 numbers with the varying lists I've tried. I think the meta shifting away from warband prevalence has helped the particular lists I've been running somewhat given that their counters have also become less common, and with the warbands becoming less suicidal it's been a huge boost to how effective it is for Yu Jing in particular due to making it far easier to repurpose a warband combat group because ours double as extremely cheap order batteries. Bumping a couple of TacAw/NCO models over gives you a surprisingly beefy order pool to otherwise just Kuang Shi and great value on command token expenditure. Something I've tried to focus on for these particular lists is bonus orders from LT2, NCO, TacAw etc. I've also stayed away from Hidden Deployment/Airborne for the most part for the moment but I'm going to try and work them in a bit more later. I think they're definitely still viable I just need to be careful how many orders they potentially take off the table, and also that they don't fully synergise with the TacAw/NCO models still present in the list which can dilute firepower somewhat if I'm not careful.
For reference that's the full Starmada list. Probably would've pushed the haris forward anyway, I needed to remove as much of your hacking threat projection as possible as it posed a large existential threat to the entirety of army with minimal risk on your part. Additionally, parking a large template with glueguns, a Hacker and a visored MMR did cost you orders in that you were unable to take advantage of the impetuous orders, but due to the mess that is how I ordered the combat groups they didnt really have the orders to move into a better position and were more exposed than I would have liked. Accurate, but it wasn't just the raptor I was concerned about, it was that you also would have the ability to just carpet bomb my defences with impunity and just waltz up to my beacon and nab it, as I said above, the Son Bae represented and existential threat to my entire list and game plan and I needed to either remove it or your ability to effectively project hacking threat to my side of the table. This was a couple of fuck ups on my part; 1. Putting an unlinked sniper up in ARO that isnt either dirt cheap or under a marker is largely an incredibly and irredeemably stupid idea, like the kind of stupid mistake that normally gets beaten out of you by about your second game of Infinity. In the end all it cost was the suppression of 1 Impet order and a pair SJ orders. 2. The above idiocy is further compounded by the fact that now warbands no longer run screaming out into the open means that standing something out with the intention to pop them is no longer a valid strategy. 3. If I am going to stand an unlinked sniper out so they can their brains blown out I should at least do so later in the game ideally after I have taken down anything that could threaten it. that being said setting up that board state would require to dive deep into your lines and take down both SJ which is just a losing proposition as anything sent to do so would just die through weight of dice armour saves from the DTW spam and if I managed it I would have gutted your army enough anyway that a lone sniper would make no difference. Later in the game I was tempted to shot it on 6's with a medkit for the giggles to tgry and get it back and to be annoying, but that would have been a waste of orders as it would have again just got backhanded off the table by a HMG anyway. Pushing in to this kind of shit show in close quarters would have been prohibitively costly, which is unfortunate as Starmada not only does it need to go first to be effective in way it also needs to deliver a massive beating to the opponent so that the defensive elements of the army aren't just rolled over. So while you were in LoL I was unable to really hammer home a meaningful long term advantage in order to keep the game's tempo in my favour. Should have had the deva yoyo out and back to grab the beacon so that if the Guilang dropped it the raptor wouldhave been able to grab it with out exposing itself and then leg it back to safety. As opposed to what I did which was dick around trying to put down a camo skirmisher with a MR outside of 16 and eating a wound for my troubles. After giving ML's a second chance with this edition all my testing so far indicates that they are just as bad as they were last edition and I probably swap them out for a weapon that isn't hot garbage.
Depends what you want to do. There's definitely an argument to shuffle one of the Shang Ji over to the other group if what you want is MOAR AP HMG, but that's not what I want. I'm pretty good with one group of that. I actually want the second group to spend most of its orders making a mess in the midfield with the warbands. Monks and Kuang Shi storming the midfield will do more work in rooting out camo skirmishers, the Shang Ji aren't actually very good at that.
There's 4 active turn killers in that list and 2 primary active turn button pushers and all 5 of those units are in the same group with the support group without any primary units to spend orders on. You must be very confident in your ability to get mileage out of Shaolin.
A good portion of my N3 lists basically had this as a second combat group. 5 4 8 CELESTIAL GUARD Monitor Combi Rifle, Smoke Grenade Launcher / Pistol, CC Weapon. (0.5 | 13) KUANG SHI Chain Rifle / Pistol, CC Weapon. (0 | 5) KUANG SHI Chain Rifle / Pistol, CC Weapon. (0 | 5) KUANG SHI Chain Rifle / Pistol, CC Weapon. (0 | 5) KUANG SHI Chain Rifle / Pistol, CC Weapon. (0 | 5) SHAOLIN Chain Rifle, Smoke Grenades / Pistol, Shock CC Weapon. (0 | 5) SHAOLIN Chain Rifle, Smoke Grenades / Pistol, Shock CC Weapon. (0 | 5) SHAOLIN Chain Rifle, Smoke Grenades / Pistol, Shock CC Weapon. (0 | 5) SHAOLIN Chain Rifle, Smoke Grenades / Pistol, Shock CC Weapon. (0 | 5) 0.5 SWC | 53 Points Often just a Warcor filling out the 10th spot in the group. This is basically just a cut down version of that to accommodate Tactical Window so I'm relatively confident in it. I've never had an issue before finding work for Monks. I think it's even easier this edition now the Guilangs are in on the game dictating where they want smoke grenades to leverage maximum abuse, especially that HD profile.
