Well, multi-year, playtested solutions to issues brought up multiple times in multiple venues are entirely the same as quixotic quests presented in a hyperbolic and caustic manner, affecting a handful of troops that can be dealt with by other means. And, again, it seems more likely than not that a few units finally performing as they’ve been described throughout the history of the game is a feature, rather than being a bug in the document. Shoot them in the face rather than stage diving them.
You say just shoot the bastard, sure, if at any point you can pull that off outside of using a rare skill like Impersonation, @Hecaton's point was valid. The game is already more or less over at that point if you've stage dived an Interventor sitting in the most defensible position on the table and successfully murdered them with a bullet. The path to that key kill will basically be littered with the bodies of all the Interventor's friends. Incidentally that's exactly how the last time I faced tunguska in a tournament went down with Invincibles. Shang Ji and friends ran across the table, murdered everything in their path, then put the Interventor down. To get that kill I had to kill 3 of the 4 other core link team members, every single ARO piece, Mary, and also kill the LT to get the Interventor. Requiring that level of table the fuck out of your opponent turn 1 aggression to deal with a hacker is pretty dumb, not necessarily imbalanced, just makes for a really dumb game. While I'm not going to call the match up imbalanced, what it was was a totally lame and shitty game experience. Both my opponent and I were facing off to see who got the top spot, and we both fully understood that our match was literally going to come down to who's alpha strike on turn 1 went off better. I don't like that, the fact that we'd both more or less solved the game just by knowing army comp before the match even started. I won that game and I still think the match sucked, the game being in such a strategically solved state before we'd even rolled a dice just sucked all the fun out of things.
Seems like the interventor isn't a very big problem if you can just table them with a army that is supposed to be "weak" to hacking
My complaints largely aren't focused on power levels, my complaints are largely focused on the imbalance between factional ability in the hacking meta game causes heavy strategic railroading in either avoidance (camo spam etc) or disregarding the mission to unleash a crippling alpha strike (pain train fireteams etc). Being encouraged to straight up avoid the hacking fight is lame, the hacking oriented player doesn't get to flex his thing. Being encouraged to ignore the mission to simply unleash the most devastating alpha strike you can is equally lame, and it sucks when both players fully understand their game is going to be decided turn 1, possibly before player 2 even has a go. I don't think that's imbalanced, I just think it's really dumb and boring gameplay. One of the reasons I find 400 points better balanced than 300 point games at the moment is because it's much harder to reliably unleash an army crippling alpha strike turn 1 via hacking due to there being more combat effective troopers in any given list. This makes ignoring present hackers more viable in favour of pushing the mission or getting board control. It's not perfect, but I find it allows hackers to more reliably do their thing in the background without being an omega level threat that must be eliminated turn 1 or you get shut out of the game. Comparatively I find at 300 points it's frequently very viable to eliminate one or two models and cause an inordinate amount of low risk, highly effective damage that firmly causes your opponent's army to unravel. That's not just hacking by the way, that's any highly effective turn 1 alpha like Uxia, Mirage, Andromeda, Impersonators etc etc. In a nutshell I find too much of the metagame is predetermining strategy rather than the game state being fluid based on player agency, and hacking and alpha strikes (which are mutually inclusive) share a big portion of that blame. I don't like looking at the table during deployment and knowing exactly how my game is going to play out, it takes alot of the fun out of the game. It may always be my turn in Infinity, but my turn isn't really that fun if I'm more or less following a mental flowchart during the game.
You're still saying I can basically table this army turn 1, so plz nerf their signature strength because it's too strong tho. Also you guys continually ignore that you can whack the repeater that is annoying you with something cheap and unhackable to disable this entire supposedly impervious Nomad tactic.
No, I'm saying I'm railroaded towards tabling them turn 1 because it's the most (and only) viable option for some armies to deal with it, and I think that's dumb. I also don't think they need to nerf the top end hacking factions, they need to buff the low end hackers so they can engage in a hacking game rather than saying either A) Fuck it I'll hide everything under camo markers and nobody gets to hack or B) Fuck it I'll alpha strike and brute force table you turn 1 and nobody gets to hack Either way, you don't get to engage in a hacking metagame. I find that dumb. Like I said earlier, hacking is only consistently useful in N4 when your opponent allows it to be. People who don't want you to be able to hack them can and will set themselves up so your hacking is largely ineffective or meaningless. This has flow on effects of internal factional balance issues, such is increasing the value of camo spam, or making certain LT options redundant, or vulnerable attack pieces less desirable. While I don't think the current state of hacking causes irreparable power disparity between factions, I think how it functions right now is a negative overall for how the game plays strategically and how internal faction balance shakes out. I think you're focusing on some tribal knee jerk reactions right now, I have literally argued in this thread that hacking is too simplistic and CB should expand on and buff hacking in general, and make sure Nomads are the top end hacking faction still.
I would love for CB to add more asymmetric ways for low tech factions to interact with hacking. Give me something like deployable suppression zone for hacking - reducing hacking burst by one. Or a hacking zero-vis/albedo that prevents hackers from targeting any trooper within the effect. Maybe make zero pain able to neutralize any hacking attack that occurs in their zone of control. What makes hacking so frustrating for less advanced factions is the fact that hacking as currently implemented is very one sided. If someone has better hackers/repeaters, your only option is to hide or shoot them dead. It doesn't feel participatory. Things like spotlight/GML lists where once you are tagged, your only choices are dodge (and receive another missile if you happen to pull it off) or take the hit and try to reset in the hope that you make your saves. Or the fact that if someone pitches a repeater right in front of you, the trooper is not able to target it in ARO even though anyone in the Infinity universe should know that its the source of the hacking attack and prioritize its destruction. Infinity is at its best when the "it's always your turn" maxim is felt in all aspects of the player experience.
I mean Hacking had a lot more complexity in N3 and it went over most peoples heads. After KHDs came out and added nuke to the RPS of it many in my experience just asked their friend what the best program was every 10th or 100th game it came up outside supportware. Hacking in N4 has less options but produces more interesting choices IMHO. To me the straight forward way hacking works now works. And I think, outside perhaps some concerns about guided that may or may not settle further than they already have, most players seem to agree that straight forward, useful hacking in N4 is good. To me it is obvious hacking is designed to be and is good as a counter to how much better Armour has got on hackable things. And that's good. Some other factions have other counters and that's good too. Making Nomads best, obvious, squishy CoC-less Lt options trivial to kill with a hard counter through their own repeater network on the other hand would not be good. I reject the dichotomy of hacking meaning binary alpha striking for many reasons, partially bc you don't need to (you could deal with the repeaters and ignore the Interventor or bring less hackable troops for example, or many other things), partially bc Alpha striking is a default way to play first turn anyway, so it's a false opposition being set up. It's easy to blame the game for our own tunnel vision. Also I admit it does bug me slightly how targeted at Nomads this kind of hyperbolic attack tends to be. Happy to swap Jazz + Tinbot for a Nomad Anathematic + Bit & Kiss any day. Just wait till the complainers figure out what they do...
And give the win to the hacker? Who places their repeaters so that this is not going to cripple the opponent's economy, anyway?
You say that like it's a given that you can easily always place them that way. Which is not true, at least not against an opponent who deploys capably. It's just as easy to say - Who deploys so there's an easy place to put a repeater that could cripple your order economy close to your key pieces without easily being easily disposed of? - and more true too. The core truth though is that it is a complex game with many nuances we ignore with blunt, concrete, context ignoring statements like those. The only way to judge the whole context is to look at the whole, where this trick is not making Nomads win tournaments disproportionately. If any of the hyperbolic claims about it were true, it would be.
Generally agreed with most points here; N4 Hacking is a far more interesting experience at a core rules level, and expecting any schmuck with a KHD to be able to turn-1 kill an Interventor through the network they paid for is a "bad feeling" experience. However, the top-end Hacking combos are pretty much impossible to deal with due to how Hacking fights can't really be taken on piece by piece: you can and have to fight the Hacking capability of a whole list every time you step under a Repeater zone. Certain lists can skew the numbers to such a high degree that taking any degree of Hacking skew that doesn't match those top-end lists becomes a total liability should you run into them. By far the most common of these due to its downright silly price and high extra utility value is the Correggidor Jazz+Morans list, or its slightly weaker Vanilla flavour, so that's what most people will have run into and have complaints about- but it's by no means the only one. Notably, PanO/MO (possibly the weakest Hacking faction overall out of those who actually have the capability) has one of the toughest variations on the list archetype thanks to the KoJ Hacker and Peacemakers, but it's not as often seen due to its higher cost and reduced utility outside of Hacking matchups. My fix idea of the minute would be to give KHDs the Silent trait and the old Program Blackout; you could theoretically fight your way through any Hacking defences with one under Stealth by disabling Tinbots and supporting Hackers before taking on big, risky targets like Interventors, or carefully clear Repeaters in front of your main attack pieces, but all this would come at a cost in Orders just like moving a shooting piece forward to deny cover, clear AROs etc. might while still respecting the need for a Hacking solution given the different playing field available for Hackers.
I wasn't using even the slightest hyperbole, but considering your second paragraph you seem to think I was saying that about repeaters tossed into the opponent's DZ... I really wasn't. I'm not a fan of that tactic, I think it's got too high risk of failure and mostly only serve a purpose as a talking point. If you're chucking repeaters into your opponent's DZ you're essentially over-extending them and putting them in positions that are already surrounded. When we're talking about the repeaters that actually pull the heavy lifting beyond a "first turn nuke let's gooooo" tactic, the ones that allows an Interventor to operate from the safest possible spot on the table while affecting half a dozen or more ZOCs across the entire table - yeah, they're trivially easy to stick in spots that'll take your opponent a massively disproportionate economic loss compared to what it cost to put them there - simply because your opponent's troops are on the other side of terrain features and pitchers and pandas have a pretty large area they can be placed in, don't need LOF to the opponent's pieces to place, and can do their thing without LOF to the opponent's pieces when placed while your opponent typically needs LOF to the pitcher/panda to do anything about them. Primarily because hacking reactively is very strong when you can do it at zero risk to your hacker* and letting your opponent spend the orders for you to do it. Plus the missions do tend to be designed to force you out of your DZ and into conflict points on the board. The big lie when it comes to saying "just shoot the Interventor" is that it implies that the Interventor is somehow exposed to being shot at. Yes, this alternative approach should be the tactic to use, but @Triumph is entirely correct in that it almost always ends up being that you work around the Interventor until the game is decided. Whether that's due to a strong alpha or something that happens a bit later is less important, in my opinion, just that as a challenge or problem on the board, an Interventor isn't typically ever "solved" by the opponent. While this may be an intentional design choice, I can't ever agree it's a good one. Hell, you know it's bad when Mary is considered a bad hacker because she's designed to operate in the mid field where she's too exposed... * Note to the other other side of this argument; I'm not talking about against killer hackers here. Making killer hackers good against Interventors on the other side of a repeater isn't going to magically turn all REMs, TAGs and HIs into killer hackers. But it will make the good hacking factions even better at clearing hacking threats off the table.
I dunno about this idea specifically myself (you can't pie slice or yolo into your opponents squishy Lt with BS attacks) but it's at least thoughtful, interestingly asymmetrical and potentially nuanced and I don't doubt the hacking ecology could be refined or improved in some similarly refined way. Again though - though something resembling this situation can occur on occasion, it seems to me this is the kind of idea popular on the forum because imagined with absolute conviction on the internet it seems a lot more convincing than it seems the vast majority of the time on an actual table. On an actual table it's rare to find a place to put a repeater who's 8 inch radius covers an absolutely vital part of the table that is also so out of the way it will also "cripple an opponents economy" without being in easy range of say, a climbing plus / super jump warband, or in easy LOF of plunging fire from a TAG, or where they could defend with a skirmisher or impersonator or AD troop. Where are you putting it that is going to cripple the order economy of a 6-6 climbing plus Gaki exactly? And how's it stopping LI or WB or Sk doing whatever they want anyway? It sounds more like the theory crafted fears of a non Nomad than actual common experience. Like if this is so insurmountable, what's Pheroware? Literal resign at first sight?
if moran is prone on a roof (and therefore difficult to interact) it is a moran that cant do missions or shoot - and probably easy food for Dart besides not all tables would offer such extremely safe spots
I've honestly never played on a table where it's not possible. By.. having... the opponent... spend orders... on the Gaki? Why would it? Since when does Pheroware have repeaters so that they never have to leave their DZ? Like... I'm not saying that hacking itself is bull or anything. You realise that, right? In the rosy tinted sky castle, I'd like (not Oblivion) hacking stronger in the active turn, but somewhat weaker in the reactive and weaker through repeaters.
I mean I'm not saying you can't shove a Moran in an annoying place. That's kind of their job. It's even a strong advantage of Nomads applying their strengths. But to claim its trivially and insurmountably crippling in comparison to the strengths of other factions is hyperbole. Bearpodes dont give a damn about it.
So your definition of 'crippling' an opponents order economy is having them spend most likely 1 irregular order on it? Maybe 2 orders outside, possibly 1 being impetuous. I think we have a different definition of crippling then.
I honestly don't know what to say here. We're talking about something that's been so extremely trivial to do when I've played Nomads or Combined that it's laughable, really. Like, there's so much nuance in the game as a whole, but when playing a faction with repeater supremacy capability, you're in the driver seat to initiate the whole decision chain and if you've run out of good places to put your pitchers/pandas (or good targets for your hacking), you can always spend your orders on other stuff. Such as shooting their Gakis. Or more realistically since you're playing against Combined; try to figure out how to deal with their pitchers
