Hey, I'm just offering the friendly warning the historic precedent doesn't look great for those hopes.
PanO is looking at getting 2 Sectorials removed and thinking about MO makes me cringe. However Vanilla and VIRD are nice and we have Sval on the horizon, so I really don't give to much of a damn. That is assuming N4 won't just massively improve MO and the new iterations of NCA and ACON are gonna be great when CB finds the time. YJ is fine, got all the options and can fit all of them in the same list. A bit boring maybe but that's not my problem and there's a new Sectorial and N4 to look forward to make things more interesting. JSA is what I'm actually concerned about, they could use some help doing Infinity things like fight a shitload of bodies, Mines or Camo Markers.
My personal silver lining is that I might be able to complete my Acon collection on the cheap very soon now :P
I believe CB could have ported the discontinued sectorials without issue. Sure there would be some profile bloat. But they could remain untouched letting us grumpy grandpas keep playing with them until they got revamped. After all not like CB really patches the balance frequently enough All this does is generate ill will, even if it "cleans up design space". Infinity has a relatively small player base as is. Pissing off not insignificant chunks of it and having this mark on its history is not going to do wonders for attracting new players either. Hell were i a betting man, I'd say a lot of infinity sales are veteran players buying 3rd and 4th armies. It is not easy to get brand new people into this game. I certainly dont want infinity to go the route of warmachine where most of the player old base goes "yeah i used to love that game, but the company and it are turds now"
I mean... If you're mostly a painter, and don't really play, at least you can take comfort in the fact that your miniatures are easily proxied. If your attachment is to the miniatures, and not to the rule system those miniatures represent, you can still get them on the table. CB isn't coming into your house and taking your metal away from you, and I've played Shock Army entirely using VIRD proxies without any difficulty or inconvenience, so options do exist. It's not great, but you can take some comfort from it. For myself, speaking as someone who played 500+ games with NCA and Shock Army in the last 7 years, I'm definitely grieving. These Sectorials have unique playstyles and (more importantly) unique units that aren't replicated anywhere else in PanO. The Swiss Guard is a unique unit. The Acon Regular is a unique unit. The Tikbalang is the most competitive TAG in the game. Losing the ability to play these rules is a heavy hit to take.
You're also making massive assumptions. We're losing NCA and ASA we're not necessarily losing the Tik or the Swiss. Grief is entirely reasonable, but you need to temper it with the joy you're experiencing from the new options that are likely to replace some/all of those missing units. CB can't reasonably be expected to fully support 5 sectorials in PanO; particularly not with the economic climate looking like it does. This is the reality of the hobby.
They don't need to support them, they need to transfer them into new rules and leave them otherwise untouched. And the economy for CB certainly isn't harsh and hard, they are expanding and juggling 2 games and currently making 2 new ones on the side. Writing the rules for 5 already existing sectorials won't either break the game or cause them significant financial loses.
All the "unnecessary" ones barely have dedicated units, so they are pretty slim in terms of SKUs (JSA and SC being the exception, but SC is replacing Tohaa anyway, so that's still a net reduction). Deleting non-NA2 sectorials gives CB the opportunity to get rid of unwanted products and profiles, so it's not quite the same.
Yeah, I don't see how translating a few sectorials worth of rules into N4 would put a strain on their capacity to support the game properly. We're perfectly fine with models being OOP, and armies in question are flexible and robust enough to survive the next 2-3 years without a major overhaul. What is true, is that with five sectorials vanilla PanO is a bloated mess. But this can be easily fixed by streamlining their design. There's zero need to introduce more and more units, especially since a number of existing ones struggles to be relevant - even within their own sectorials - or takes design space without bringing in anything unique.
To say nothing of the fact that "but but if discountinued sectorial is OP opie then ppl won't be able to bring the latest cheeze!" Well uhh....to the people saying anyone worried should stop crying...."just proxy your other minis as them". Can't wait to see CB backwalk on that one as if it becomes the default answer to everything, people really will only buy 20-30 minis and call it a day :D
Not really. I think they're going overboard there. I'd drop StarCo, FoCo and Ikari. But they're clearly prioritising NA2 over expanding core factions, there's clearly a business reason for that. Probably because they're a good place to park LE models, which are clearly very profitable for CB. Honestly, I'd have cut back to Vanilla + 2 for all major factions (dropping Tohaa), JSA, Spiral and Druze and then release more sectorials (starting with Sval and WB) throughout N4 to bring everything up to Vanilla + 3 and then, maybe, expanding to Vanilla + 4 if CB grew to accommodate it. I'd have announced that 12 months out. Which means I'm actually saying that I think CB should probably have temporarily cut my favourite sectorial, the one that got me into the game, which is also the one I've just spend a lot of money getting commission painted. I'd have honestly think I'd have been ok with this because I see it as good for the long term health of CB and the game. I mean I'd have been gutted, but I'd know that I had a better game to look forward to as compensation. If CB isn't profitable then we don't get to enjoy Infinity at all, let alone the specific sectorials we like.
I think for any sectorial to exist within it's parent faction it should have a distinct play style and a flavor you can't find anywhere else. There's countless posts within this sub forum and this forum as a whole saying things like "every sectorial feels the same now" "everyone has mixed-link power houses" "Every sectorial is defensive ARO supported by 4 line troops" In some ways this was true – this was CB's go-to for making older, under designed units more relevant. NCA and ACA have been around for so long at this point and the PanO identity needs to evolve beyond what was previously established with those two sectorials. I've probably played ~300 games with each of them, personally I feel as though they're very stale. If they have to leave to make room for something new, I'm all for it. TBH, I hope N4 tones down the mega-link nonsense. If they do that, I fear a lot of these older sectorials wouldn't have much of a competitive edge anymore anyway. This is all from the perspective of a veteran player though. I couldn't imagine the confusion of a newbie coming into army builder, looking at PanO, seeing 6 sub tabs and then learning a third of them are OOP and are essentially only there to keep legacy players from screaming at each other on the internet.
that's where the "proxy anything with anything!" clause comes into play and fixes it right-quick, supposedly
NA2 in its current state a mechanical dump for everything that lacks its own army. We use the abbreviation so often we forget the "non aligned" is in there for a reason. However that collides with the mechanical precedent that a Faction has a Vanilla Part where you can mix and match (which doesn't make sense for NA2). It works but it feels wrong. JSA is a proper Faction of its own right (possibly getting its own Sectorials at some point in the future) and doesn't really have any business next to the Merc Sectorials. The Merc Sectorials feel at home next to each other. Really like the Mercs (aside from their balance issues), but would rather have them be a separate things from "real Factions".
It is a full blown Faction now. Not saying it needs Sectorials, only technically speaking. Considering how small Ariadna and some of the Merc companies are, it's actually bigger than some existing Vanilla Factions. What irks me a bit is both NCA and SAA are more representative of the PanO theme than MO and Varuna, so we're taking a hit in that regard if (and only if) NCA and SAA end up not being ported into N4 on release. Sval goes a long way to smooth that over, since it's pretty much the "best of" Sectorial with Knights, Fusiliers, Orcs, Nisses and Jotum covering all the bases.
Only in the fluff, not in army size. NA2 includes minor factions as well. If anything, O12 should also be in NA2, instead of getting large faction status on its own. That is true, though it was obvious for a long time that CB doesn't have a clear idea what to do with PanO.
And then they introduced O12. I'm seriously really not going to pity a person who repeatedly and with such dedication is (trying?) shooting himself in the foot.
