CB doing something, anything, does not equal CB needing to do something. CB have plenty of times tried to make changes and fucked things up, like the whole shooting something in the rear arc from the front arc issue they created for no reason.
That is an entirely different discussion. As far as the success or lack of thereof of changes, that would be your opinion.
This thread is about strategizing Cryogenics at 300 points. I don't care in the slightest how the mission might play at 400 points or 250 or 5 or any other number. I don't think it's a good strategy to plan to play Annihilation. If both players play Annihilation, the best you can hope for is a 4-0 win. To score a major, you or your opponent need to open boxes. You need to plan for when and how you'll open them. It would be a bad strategy to assume your opponent will open them for you. In my game above, my opponent in my opinion erred by opening too many boxes on T1. It was that mistake which allowed me to play Annihilation. If your opponent doesn't helpfully open the boxes for you, then when and in what way should you open them?
The strategy I used is open the ones close to your opponent and defend the ones close to you, but I have played it only a few times so I am not sure on the validity of it.
Playing annihilation in disguise doesn't mean you don't press the buttons, it just means you alpha the shit out of your opponent and then press the buttons/do whatever it is the mission demands when he is in a crippled state unable to effectively contest you. This sums up the majority of 300 point gameplay. Beat your opponent into submission then do a victory lap to score points, this was made easier to achieve when the scoring system changed to reach 5 points for a major rather than the requirement to stay 5 ahead.
That's not very helpful unless you're confident that on turn 3 you'll have enough orders to advance specialists and push up to three buttons. Of course, your goal isn't to be helpful. You're not here to talk strategy, you're trolling around your obsession with proving your idea that 400 points is better than 300 points, which has nothing to do with this thread. Please go away.
From playing second perspective, over infiltrating to your opponents containers probably has some merit in preventing them from opening them, but I have not tested it practically in any way.
You don't need to wait until turn 3, nothing is stopping you from spending a singular order on some infiltrated specialist to press a single button on an earlier turn. You can quite easily execute a crippling alpha strike by devoting the vast majority of orders on turn 1 to killing priority targets while spending a couple of orders in a secondary group to start pressing buttons. The fact of the matter remains that crippling your opponent is more important here as a primary goal than pressing buttons. Cryogenics requires a significant amount of movement and army points spread across the table while maintaining defense on a critical unit designated as the master breacher to score objective points. This is extremely hard to achieve if you are already playing on the backfoot with limited attack vectors because your list has been hit hard on the first turn and you're playing in a format that allows this to be easily achievable. Simultaneously an explosive early offense makes it even harder to devote resources into reaching let alone attacking your own master breacher, here offense is in fact also defense. 400 points has better strategic gameplay than 300 points because the mission mechanics matter more. 300 points is an alpha strike metagame, Cryogenics is no different. You can of course choose not to play it that way but you're merely handicapping yourself for no reason. The fact that you don't like that reality isn't my problem.
Can you please stop? make a thread about 400 points and preach there, most people do not care about it, and you have been asked by the thread originator to stop.
Stop what? I'm on topic, the discussion on this mission strategy revolves around alpha striking. Oh look, it's you who's actually trying to derail things because he doesn't like it when anybody points out problems with CB's game design.
I will agree I got carried away by you insisting the best strategy is to play 400 points more or less, otherwise the game has no strategy other than Alpha strike, but I stopped once I was asked.
@QueensGambit would you be fine with us speculating how Reinforcements might change the approach? Being able to guarantee 100 points around a tech coffin in your table half might change how the match will flow.
It does seem like it could change the mission a lot for events using the Reinforcements extra. Especially the dynamic of when to open the boxes and locate the HVTs. For myself, I'm refraining from speculation and waiting for Aug 3 (I started speculating but just got upset worrying that Reinforcements will ruin the game, so I had to remind myself it will probably be fine and now I'm just waiting for the rules to come out). But I won't object if you want to start the discussion early.
