Tangentially, but on the IGL Discord it is now being discussed how Reinforcements make a large chunk of missions unplayable. Not because people are engineering to drop reinforcements early, no, but by being second player and choosing to drop their reinforcements on T3 regardless of outcome of the game.
This doesn't surprise me - reinforcements leap out as being able to be a much much more powerful version of the old trick of hiding a couple hidden deploy specialists until bottom of three, but without sensor as a counterplay. I wasn't sure how many missions I'd really want to do it in but e.g. Acquisition seems like an easy choice to hold until game end. On that note, I wasn't quite able to tell from the rules as written - are reinforcements optional or mandatory once the trigger is met?
We miss a key component and that is we do not have the next season ITS missions, they might be the same or the scoring been tweaked to account for reinforcements.
Well also the big change is that normally you probably can't afford to spend 3 turns with 100 points not contributing to the game, you're probably going to get run over if you do that as player 2 and player 1 isn't. With reinforcements player 1 is forced to do the same so you don't have that problem. Personally I think an easy fix is just for missions with problematic round 3 scoring is just to make them force reinforcements to arrive turn 2.
Looking back at ITS14 scenarios: The worst offender for "reinforcements just have to drop and chill to steal the win" definitely is Frontline, with all points scored at the end. Supremacy and Quadrant Control are both kinda bad, but you can "only" contest half the quadrants and you can score all game long so it's not a guaranteed win. However if you accept the premise that on turn 3 and on a proper table it should be possible to drop somewhere completely safe and just spend 1 or 2 orders moving in a scoring zone, or that active turn advantage and a limited order pool should be enough to clean up at least one objective, a few more missions become quite swingy: Frostbyte, Acquisition, Power Pack, and to a lesser extent Armory and Panic Room. On the other hand, all the missions where - You have to attack deep into ennemy territory: Mindwipe, Looting and Sabotaging, Capture and Protect, Rescue, Unmasking - You have to participate in a bit beforehand so your opponent doesn't tuck the objectives safely in his DZ: Cryogenics, Supplies - You have to kill stuff: Biotechvore, Firefight, Decapitation, Anihilation - You have to do classified: Highly Classified, Countermeasure For those I don't see the reinforcements enabling a one-sided victory for the second player: they either won't have the order pool to do the mission on their own, or they don't provide anything other than a few more attempts at scoring some points, but not enough to go win back a one sided game (Classified/Killing mission). Ironically, I think that for the problematic missions the first player won't have a better option than going balls to the wall aggression either to force his opponent to drop early, or to curbstomp him so hard that even the 100 reinforcement points can't steal a victory. So the anti-alpha strike game mode actually force one player to alpha strike even harder if he wants to win...
Optional (for now). I'm lazy so won't dig up the link, but Koni has officially confirmed that the wording is intentionally leaving it up to the player to decide when to call for them. In general I agree with this decisions, letting your opponent dictate when you get your units landing by counting points is real feel bads, but it might be good to prevent reinforcements from arriving on turn 1 or on turn 6; as such player 2 would have guaranteed reinforcements arriving on their second turn.
Interesting stuff guys but maybe it should be in the main Reinforcements discussion instead of the thread dedicated to Daebak force.
They need to have the ability to turn up turn one. Kinda no point having them if you're allowing a window for player 1 only to attack with no repercussions for over extension, especially if you're playing the lowered points level where there's even fewer defenses on the table allowing alpha strikes to be more effective than normal. The whole cheesing the army list and using ambiguous wording to abuse a loophole to play a turn 1 gimmick list can simply be fixed by changing wording on the rule, make it require army points in a null state and the whole problem goes away.
To be fair Daebak force is the thread that started the reinforcements discussion and has more discussion about reinforcements than the thread about reinforcements.
Sure I get that but there's also at least two threads now about just the Reinforcement. Something about Deabak I'll add is that the Comms +1 is a complete joke for YJ. I almost need to force myself to get up to 16.
I would not say I had issues making 16 model list is white banner, I am sure it can be done with others too, and as @Triumph said there are other point brackets too.
I wish that were the case. My group unfortunately follows what the tournaments and/or CB says is the "norm". Drives me nuts because there's only about 2 tournaments a year in my area!
Following the norm is... the norm... 300 points is the chosen points of the community, we will see where the community will decide reinforcements will reside.
On Daebak force specifically: One of the most interesting feature of reinforcement is that you don't trigger ARO when you drop. So anything that tries to bunker down on your side of the table is at risk of being charged and diced by a hwarang dropping straight on his face. Just for this reason, I'll probably include at least one hawrang in most of my reinforcement group, for counter-attack purpose. As for other units - all the NCOs are good, even the humble sulyong is really good at just doing objective or giving orders to move more combat capable troops. I really like the FO, he can do a whole lot of classifieds, but I can see good value in the paramedic. - Jujiaks are okay, if a bit pricey, they bring interesting utility to the fireteams and most of them come with flamethrower which is cool when operating in the middle of the board. - Dokkaebi might be just a bit overrated I think. His kit is amazing, not arguing that, but it's a timing issue. It's a profile I'd need on turn 1 to deal with hackers and drop repeaters to be annoying, if he drops on turn 2 or 3 his impact and value seriously drops. - Haetae HRL is pretty damn cool, HMG is non-existent. Sure guided HRL is not as good as missile but it's more like a bonus anyway, BS14 B4 HRL in a little haris is where its at. - Sulsa I think have the potential to be extremley annoying, defensive troop in the middle of the board. Just drop them and start dodging in AROs to creep up on hostiles. However they're a bit on the expensive side, so they're a hard sell. - The various remotes and chung-hee, I'd put them all in the same basket since I feel like they're supposed to work together. At first I though rounding up the lists with various remotes would be the way to go, but in the end they feel like expensive cheerleader that won't do much so I'd rather make a smaller reinforcement detachement with NCOs and an Haetae in haris and keep some lists slots for my main section. OveralI, I really don't expect units outside of fireteam to do much, NCO and tac aware orders are too important to reach at least a decent number of orders to do anything. Only exception would be hawrang is there's a good counter-charge opportunity, this is the only reason I'm considering 4 units reinforcement at all to be honest.
I got to play Reinforcements on the weekend. I lost. Badly. The mission was Supplies, ISS vs. Spiral Core. I made a bunch of mistakes. First not taking the rights side. He was able to have a hidden Clipsos sniper on a building that could see most of the board. First off, it’s not the going second (I was) it’s who brings their reinforcements out second. My opponent killed 103pts of my force in the first turn due to his sniper. I was going second. My Reinforcements came out first turn because I lost so much. I probably should have waited but because I had such a bad first turn, I felt like I had to bring them out, I didn’t have specialists that could get near the supplies. My team was Hwarang Combi, Sulsa KHD, Sulyong FO then a separate Weibing. I did put my Celestial Comms guy move into the team but it still felt like I didn’t have lot of orders to get stuff done. Normally a team like this would have been in my “big” group and have 10 orders to do things. My other mistake in this team was not having at least one long range weapon. I had a lot of problems with dealing with a Draal AP Marksman rifle. The only MSV I had was the MSV1 Sulyong with Light shotgun. On turn 3 my opponent then brought out his 5-man team of Brawlers on the last turn and got the secure HVT, another HVT card, and the last supplies. I was in retreat. The comms celestial was a pain for me making my list. He took the place of my .5 SWC LSGL. I should have just kept the smoke because I really needed it. Even thought it was a bad first experience I’ll try it again. I may have no choice if that's what other people want to do. So far, I’m not liking the list making though. Technically I have more points, but I feel more constrained by the 250 and 100 groups. I ended up having less troops than I would normally have. Like always with YJ I feel like it’s a choice of Guns OR Specialists. It’s going to take a lot of adjustment for me.
Not to knock your experiences but to be straight up honest with you it sounds like your table was terribly set up terrain wise and terrain has a massive impact on how Infinity plays. If you have a single rooftop position that can see the majority of the table and either prevent advancing or starts killing targets from that position the terrain needs to be reworked as there isn't enough on the table. A single unlinked BS11 basic bitch sniper should not ever exert that much control over a game, that is absurd. Secondly whether or not you want the reinforcements to come down first is heavily dependent on what you need the reinforcements to do. For example I also played Supplies into Bakunin yesterday, and I engineered the situation to get my reinforcements to show up on my second turn as player 2. On turn 1 I deliberately ran a Hac Tao into a speedbump position in front of my opponent's core link and sat in suppressive fire with the intent for it to straight up die by trying to force my opponent to have to come through it to get to my Zencha holding two of the supply boxes. This allowed the Haetae fireteam to arrive on the bottom of turn 2 and repulse the Bakunin HI encroaching on my side of the table, then set up a defensive line to absorb the Bakunin reinforcements arriving turn 3 to the sap all of their orders and leave them with insufficient resources to actually complete the mission.
