I'm hovering on the verge of Spiral for my next army and I am suitably perplexed. I'm slowly getting my head around the playstyle and roster and I have to say I'm excited; it looks like a really unique faction and a nice tonic to the more brute-force ones I currently play. But I'm all at sea when it comes to the beautiful Kiel-saan. Love the model and with symbio support we're looking at a 4 wound beatstick that is truly scary in CC. Great haris and 2 Kiel-saan with a paramedic sounds like a lot of fun. I like it, very interesting unit... But how on earth do you protect it from hacking? Is it purely a second-list pick for when you bump into JSA or Ariadna? Is there any way to run this unit in the new repeater meta? Or is it just best to think of it as a super-skew pick? Thanks for your thoughts in advance.
You can start with those 5 options, hope more players can contribuite with more options! - Do Kiel Saan + Kaauri + Aelis Keesan triad (Aelis is Wildcard) so you can use your Killing Hacker Device to fight the other hackers (Plus the Sensor to reveal nasty surprises) - Play the Kiel Saan alone, it will be easier for you to move it arround, with Stealth and full orders to move it better, and do not get wrong, not linked Kiel Saan can perform a very very very good job - Deal with hackers with other units, Igao, Clipsos, Impersonators... you have a bunch of options to clear Kiel Saan path if it's needed - Play Aelis Keesan alone, with Cybermask she can move easy near the enemy hacker area to deal with it - Also, the metchemistry roll will help you in certain ways, you can use the improved movement 15-10 or 20-10 to perform good berserker attack on the hacker, or if you get +6BTS you will get more resilent to the Hacking saving rolls, etcetera...
to expand on the above, play it like you would a light tag if you want it to survive. don't push it out past the midline, save an order or two to bring it back to safety. Spiral has a meat grinder of defensive tools to slow advances, so there's no reason to keep him moved up unless you want them to waste a lot of a turn bringing him down.
Thanks you two, very useful. Have either of you had any experience of running them against good hacker lists? That's what's really worrying me about building a list around one (or even two) of them. Once they've eaten an Oblivion (and bts6 isn't enough to stop that programme without a firewall, ime), what's your choice of engineer for support? Do you run servants? Or do you generally crutch on a symbiomate getting you through one hack and then yolo in with a berserk?
I love to play the Kiel-Saan, great unit and the ppl fear Him, I like to play Him with 2 Kaauri Paramedics because of the burst , but Aelis would be a great pick to Support Him... What I would try in a far future is a 3 Kiel-Saan Special Triad to make a j4f berserk Run with everytime 3 Kiel-Saan on the Target
Hacker lists are an issue with any HI, but I don't think of the KS as being ridiculously vulnerable. As general rule in spiral, I recommend trying to play cagey - you can get so much work done on your opponents turn - and active turn Alpha plays are usually a trap from my perspective. The KS breaks up the midfield, and then dares your opponent to commit more. As for engineers, I like the Kosuil a lot - good toolkit unit. But in many lists I don't have room for him, so I take a monstrucker instead with a chaksa. this ends up being a pretty great option, bc you will always have something to do with that irregular order (especially with the drop bear gal). One other thing I didn't see above is don't forget symbiobombs. you can punish ZoC attacks with a bomb pretty easily.
Ah yes of course, good point. That necessitates running without the Kaauri then, as it breaks stealth? Leaving the Draal haris. Hmmm...
Nope, while the enemy can Declare AROs against a Stealthed trooper in a mixed Fireteam, the ARO becomes invalid if you don't break Stealth with the second skill, so you can Move+Move a KS+Kaauri Fireteam out of LoF without the KS getting hacked.
Oh really? The hacker could still declare spotlight against the Kauri I suppose? Honestly, sometimes Infinity feels like learning irregular verbs ...
Yep the Kaauri could be the target of a spotlight or other possible com attacks , they got no stealth But you can split off the Triad and you move the KS alone