External army balance issues in N4

Indeed, this is something that I am missing from the debate. My experience since N4 launch, playing approx one game per week, is that I find more ways to listbuild than before, and focus more on execution than what tools I bring. Of course, I am already fluent enough in Infinity to know that I need button pushers, long range fire platforms, midrange brawlers and ample redundancy in my lists, but once I check all those boxes, I have tended to approach the game with a very different mindset than I did in N3.

I am not saying that there exists a perfect balance that cannot be improved, but I find it interesting that we do not tend to talk so much online about the user input that makes certain pieces work. Yes, there is a discrepancy in the amount of work that you need to apply to use certain pieces compared to others, but I think we often tend to conflate "needs more practice to use effectively" with "has a worse best outcome once mastered".

Problems arise when some pieces are easy to use and nobody knows how to counter them. However, this has been a thing in the game since I started early N3. It would typically go like this:

Me: "This is my list for the tournament"
My travel buddy: "What will you do against Achilles?"
Me "...back to the drawing board..."

Later, Achilles would be replaced by Kitsune, and then Camospam, and then core links, and then massed warbands and so on. There would always be some hurdle that seemed insurmountable, but that now feels like just another day at the proverbial office. We learned to deal with them. That's why I am always a bit sceptical when someone comes around and calls something broken.

Having played against the OP, @Zewrath, on several occasions, I know he is an exceptionally good player, and I have the utmost respect for his skill at the game. I have learned a lot about how to approach the game just from those interactions, but I also have a niggling feeling that I would like to bring up: Could it be that when you are used to being the one with the answers on the table, the dominating player with a firm grasp of the nuances of the game, that you get unused to running into stuff that you cannot easily figure out how to beat? I know that this has happened to me at times, and that my gut reaction has been to shout "NERF THAT SHIT INTO THE FLOOR!!!". From that feeling I can sort of imagine how it must be for a much better player than myself to have to adapt to situations where there is no directly apparent solution to be found in your existing playbook.

TL;DR: As with most paradigm shifts, some of us will have a harder time adapting than others. For some, it is lack of skill that provides the obstacle. For other's it might be too much skill adapted to the old paradigm. I don't know. I think it is an interesting discussion to have.

 

The way I understand it, your argument with that list of old N3 complaints is that, since the pendulum has gone to the other extreme, it is all good. I disagree: virtue is found in the middle point of the pendulum.

Dead specialists score nothing. Just saying...
And this was the reason for my "OMG WTF" when I saw the 23pts Hidden Deployment Trinitarian with mimetism -6 and camo... ("forget him until last turn, score").

While I agree in part, when someone exposes the reason for a certain thing being "op" (or simply really hard to counter with their faction, not counting lucky rolls), a barrage of dismissals (so used they are nearly memes now) starts until the theme is dropped.

And while I assume all profiles are "legal" (that is, following the formula) in 90% or more all across the board, being costed for what they have is not the same as being costed for what they bring to the table. For example, a Marut in OSS Vs a Marut in Vanilla, with one or two Myrmidon bodyguards devoted to melee-cover and smoke-screen. Or, more fragantly, the Boyg Soldier with MK12 paying 0 SWC for what is, in essence, a +1dmg Spitfire (because the unit has a +1B for all BS attacks. Sure, it's built into the unit. But it turns the mk12 into a spitfire with +1dmg, and there are troops with +1dmg built in, paying 1.5SWC for a spitfire... that has exactly the same effect as the Boyg's).

Then I'd say your got the wrong idea. The spam + crits was NOT a "universal counter", but a mitigation factor, now banished with the Limited Insertion one, while certain NEW things got added, usually into troops or sectorials that already had a lot of options.

So, how can you fit ALL of what you need in a single, 300pts & 15 troops list that can face everything of:

1. Avoid being forced to spend several orders to deal with a pitcher/repeater.
2. Avoid an enemy mine in the face of your primary fireteam. Which was placed by (at least) one Speculo Killer, which will kill whatever remains.
   
3. Deal with Total Inmunity berserkering charging unhackable 2-3 wounds with PH 16, smoke and ARM 5 that ignore the pretty lasers of your flashbots which were the core of the counter against them (because, you know, viral ammo is not precisely present in all sectorials).
4. The same, but ARM 3 and shows up directly on your deployment zone. After your Total Reaction was killed, of course.
5. A 4 orders Avatar, which will have 9 more behind.
6. Having your engineers prioritized for removal because with those out, the rest will suffer the tender mercies of the stacking maluses to dodge/reset.
7. Enemy unit pops up and wrecks your day. Usually, you won't be caught on your second move, but...
8. Not having much in the "long range" ARO department (Starmada: chaksas, omega, Nyoka HRL, and Kappas...)
9. Facing a BS16 B2 DA or EXP mimetic with MSV and 6th sense ARO piece... or two.
10. Infiltrating enemy unit pops and attacks your Lt, which was fairly obvious because now you need to state your Lt's WIP. Apparently, because some people cheated somewhere.
11. Enemy unit that simply has Continous Damage in their already AP BS weapon, and a good BS value, position... and possibly visual modifiers.
12. Having your Lt Oblivion'ed in turn 1. Or your fireteam leader.
13. Being bombarded from outside of LoF with EM or AP+EXP thingies.
14. Having your MSVs killed (attacked) from Albedo/White Noise.
15. Having your nonMSV's killed (attacked) from Smoke combo.

etc...

No, I'm not saying you will face all of those examples in a single game. I'm saying you need to account for the possibility of ANY of those showing up in any given battle of the tournament. So you have 3-5 chances to tick all the points in the list...

Standard Barrage of Dismissals against any criticism, sadly.

 

Most of your 15 examples are things that are not countered at listbuilding, but are countered at the table by how you play.

A given list won't deploy the same way versus every faction it's facing. You can use sub-optimal profiles to patch lacking roles by playing them / positioning them differently.

I don't disagree that some factions have a better toolkit to deal with some matchups. But that's why you can edge your listbuilding to patch the ones that you're not inherently strong versus. A counter can be mediocre and go a long way into swinging the matchup into a more favourable one.

 

You don't happen to have a YouTube channel or some other way to engage with your community as an outsider? Sounds a great place to be tbh.

 

Snipping for space, hope you don't mind, let me know if I missed something important.

I mean you can't. You shouldn't. The list building game means you should be making choices and having to make do with sub-optimal units for a given task. Playing sectorials should mean that your opponent should be able to make a few assumptions about what you won't have or what you will have that makes playing counters easier.
Issue is there are some counters (maybe "themes" is a better word) that are much better than others in some armies, and the issue is that you shouldn't need to play themes that counter. Not with a game as complex as Infinity.

 

Not sure if sarcasm, but I'm considering making a podcast. Have been for a while. :)

 

No sarcasm, I'd tune in.

 

This feels exaggerated and tone deaf to the major changes N4 brought.
N4 is a mixed bag at best, but it's overall at least a slight improvement over N3.

N3 had limited Insertion on one end of the spectrum and 40 Orders Caledonia on the other.
N4 isn't even in the same galaxy as that level of matchup disparity.

I agree that Spotlight into missile is shit. It's not interactive, it's not fun, it's all single dice RNG and pretty much devoid of actual gameplay.
And some armies deal with it better than others, a lot better actually, to the point where you'll laugh the other guy out of the room for spending points on that crap vs your 20 Camo Markers.

But then there are complaints like HI Links walking past a midfield filled with Camo Markers. That's not a problem. That's people playing N3 list concepts while stuck with 15 slots.
In N3 you'd had 5 additional chanrifles lying in wait on top of your Camo midfield to outtrade the same expensive HI Link, overload it with possible targets, swamp it down with bodies, Smoke and Chainrifles until you ground it's Order pool to a halt. Then it's your turn and you probably didn't have any problem killing 150 points of HI efficently with 50 points of Smoke and CC troops.

Complaining about the armies able to go camo heavy being subpar, while painting Bearpodes and Dogs as unstoppable forces that suddenly don't fail half their saves vs HMG hits... seems a bit odd.


N3 let you get away with putting 20 bodies on the board and calling it good defense.
N4 took that away and you have to build your lists in a way to actively contest what your opponent wants to do.
That's significantly harder to pull off, learn how to do and execute in the game. It's no longer possible to invest a quarter of your points into having a significant chancer to overload your opponent with cheap targets that can ruin plans in a single Smoke and will do so sooner or later given enough attempts. With less Warband saturation your opponent has space on the table to avoid them, punch through 1 or 2 troopers flank your defenses and go ham on your exposed defensive perimeter lacking the N3 classic 5 extra bodies geared to outtrade basically anything relative to their points.

That said this is hard to do. And as correctly pointed out we still very much have Factions that are not created equal and loads of matchup problems.
From what I've seen N4 is completely littered with Alpha Strike lists that know they're getting a headstart if their opponent loses the Lt roll or tries to play the mission early.
Coincindentially those same lists take like a Noctifier and 3 Taigas with an Avatar and end up surprised when the other guy can punch through that easily.
I do not know how to balance the existence of a Cutter next to defensive Link setups that easily fall to BS15 Multi HMGs while costing an arm and a leg more. You have to oppose in N4, yet at least half the Sectorials just can not put up a defense that can make a Multi HMG TAG think twice the way it would have had to in N4.
For some reason CB removed stuff like Stun ammunition on Multi Weapons that would have been a perfect fit for N4 gameplay dynamics. The Crit changes don't do what they are supposed to do and mostly skew the odds in favor of tanky troops during their active turn, brushing past or shaking off AROs with much less risk than in N3.

Then there are force multipliers that circumvent the 15 slot limit to boost your offensive or defensive capabilities. Puppers, Posthumans, Antipode Assault Packs, Überfallkommando and the likes of it.
There need to be more troops like that to level the field for everyone and I think it's a good replacement for what N3 achieved with Warbands.
Being able to take at least some calculated losses that leave you combat ready are vitaly important, especially in Factions that lack access to something with the raw damage output of a linked Karhu Feuerbach (not that it helps Sval being anywhere near the top, but it's a nice bandaid).

I'll just mention Hacking really quick for the extra layer of difficulty it adds.
For most of N3 KHDs were so oppressive that Hacking was somewhat rare, while crit mechanics and pricing made multiwound models a lot less desireable than they are now. Non KHDs were still around, but if you didn't want to think about Hacking, most armies gave you the choice to run a list that simply didn't have to play Infowar or your opponent abandoned Infowar so you didn't have to care.
That brings us back to how to you set a price for something that's potentially very useful or entirely useless? The Spotlight changes are an attempt to answer that and I don't think a lot of people like being forced to deal with that and the resulting missiles, where they could abandon that aspect of the game before on purpose.
On the other side are people who want to have a fixed value assigned to Hacking. And while the ability to Spotlight is great and all, a +3 to hit doesn't make a dent in an Avatar rampaging through your linetroopers. So people running hacking use Missile Drones to have fixed minimum value assigned to their investment. Worst case trying to assassinate non marker gunners and Lts. Best case getting Oblivion AROs left and right on top of getting lucky and nuking a TAG from orbit in 3 Orders.
I think balancing here still fails hard. The discrepancy in between fighting Ariadna where a 30 trooper is expensive and taking out an Avatar Lt in turn 1 is inacceptable.
Basically just makes expensive targets occasionally shit by default and punishes you for wanting to play something that has little increased survivability over a Gecko against a specific target vector that's completely out of your control. Basically compareable Monofilament mechanics, but significantly more common to run into. Not that Monofilament is a good mechanic either.

Overall the game is too lethal.
25 points SAS with D-Charges means your TAG is probably dead if they connect. N3 had nothing anywhere close to that level of lethality combined with ease to deliver in the same pricerange. Musashi wasn't more expensive than that and more lethal, but significantly harder to get there and limited to one Faction. Andromeda or a Caliban tune the same thing up to 11 by combining it with Guard or Protheion for good measure. And of course they're all Specialists.
Remember when Zero FOs were good in N3? Powercreep on Skirmishers is running rampant with no fucks given. As if that class of troops was terrible in N3.
You know, like basic MI or something.

By itself new Martial Arts is boring but functional. Add in D-Charges on half the cheap CC guys that can get places and it's just not okay.
N3 had nowhere near the target value of N4 either. 15 slots means a lot more pricey individual troops, making options that hit hard and kill anything handily more attractive. A Jotum having to take out Monks to get to the Hsien is a lot less happy than a Jotum that gets so lay into a Guija straight away.
With HI and TAGs getting cheaper and individual price per slot risng Factions that struggled with spam before get to play the game. JSA vs any sort of Haqq or Ariadna was an uphill battle in N3. Loads and loads of low value targets with the ability to trade efficiently.
N4 took that way too far. There were already plenty hard hitting options everywhere. Not everyone needed an AP HMG option (looking at you Montesa Tik), E/M did not need to be E/M2 and Oblivion did not need to have B2 DAM16 Breaker.
Some armies got vastly more powerful upgraded "N4 punch" than others. You're basically yesterday's news if a Swiss Guard HMG still makes it into your lists at this point.


Taking all of that into account N4 is a very different game from N3.
Especially if you used to play something that ends up holding a very very short stick, basically failing to check every single box needed to keep up in N4, like ISS or USARF.
Accepting that ISS are the new Morats or Druze there is a lot to work with in N4 though. It's not great balancing and I've been salty about how shitty a job N4 did to actually improve things that could have built on the 15 slot limit.
I really did not want N4, what I wanted was N3.5, but I'll take N4 any day over N3.
If you are willing to leave N3 behind and actually play N4, it's an ever so slight improvement.

 

You absolutely can tailor your list for matchups even in a massive event. You don't need to know what you're facing to know what faction your factions struggle versus and have plans for those matchups.

So many people, open literally any thread on the forum about list discussion or go on any discords. Most people take building blocks for their list and use cookie cutter archetypes, only altering their specialist to fit what bonus the mission gives. With very little regards to their weak matchups. It often works decently versus people who build similarly, but it ends up falling flat when your opponent skews for the mission or the matchup.

 

I just want to say I like this thread, and a lot of the opinions that are being brought up are very intriguing.

Personally, I find N4 to be pretty good. My biggest gripe is with how not all armies seem to fare equally in the N3 to N4 transition.

 

I agree.. There's good points being raised on all sides and I sincerely hope people can acknowledge that and it doesn't degrade into taking past each other.

 

I very much agree with the OP, coming from a background playing late N2 and the first half of N3, though I think this post conveys my sentiment even more strongly:

N4 made a number of changes that I think are fantastic - by far my favorite change is that we no longer have nesting skills that reference other skills (Veteran - I'm looking at you) so actually understanding a profile is way more streamlined. However, I think N4 suffers from the fact that they changed so many systems at once, without appearing to evaluate all the potential overlapping impacts. Excessive wildcard implementation without addressing the fireteam bonuses/rules is one aspect, as is the very strange proliferation of GMLs thanks to a number of hacking/targeted state changes - targeted state no longer removed at end of player turn, spotlight no longer at -3 MOD, resetting from targeted now imposes a -3 MOD, and standardization of hacking device programs. I also feel that capping armies to 2 combat group would have been a much more reasonable approach than the current 15 order cap, which seems clunky compared to the elegance of Infinity's combat group mechanic (actually one of the features that got me into the game to begin with).

Short of implementing a significant rework of the N4 core rules and fireteam systems, hopefully based on public playtest feedback, I am not sure how these issues can be addressed. I do feel that N4 is a "better" rule system than N3, but too many of the changes have eroded the mechanics and flavor features (I too miss burnt state) that made Infinity a truly unique and engaging game system.

Edit: To provide a bit more context, I have been playing 1-2 games of N4 per week since early February, so I feel like I've played enough to get a rough gauge of how the rules interact vs. previous editions. My core army is QK, but thanks to TTS I've tried out a number of other factions to see how they play in the new edition and I see similar themes.

 

What is a "typical strong list" if not a "cookie cutter list"?

:P

I see what you're saying, but I think you're disproportioning their influence. Counters are more present, but they're far from insurmountable. You get parts of your list hard countered, you get some uninteractive things.

But you can mitigate a lot of the counters via play adjusment imo. And as long as your list isn't all eggs-in one basket, you're never getting your entire game trivialized.

The more you skew your list, the more you're prone to being hard countered by the skew that counters yours.

If you tailor your list for your bad matchups and you adjust your in-game play for the bad matchups, you're going to be looking at a fairly close game the vast majority of time imo.

 

People overestimate armies with 15+ during N3.
Caledonia was a one trick pony with an exposed liutenent.
Impetuous orders will never have the same value as regular orders.
Many "spam" armies had better lists at 16/18 regular orders depending on the faction.
All the elite factions could reach 15 orders alredy in N3.
Additionally if those "spam" Armies were such a balance issue why aleph, CA and tohaa armies were systematically on all the tournament podiums. You can check the 2019 stats in this forum.
Also check the USARF stats and see how having more bodies was working for that army.
Maybe people don't like to play against those lists but those being actually better or stronger is something that the data doesn't support.
And now some of them are barely playable at best, and I don't see why people who purchased those armies should be removed from the game unless they buy another army wile CA can field avatar lists with 23 orders.

N3 had important issues, but N4 balance is just broken.

 

What I mean is that is not a new issue born in N4. Problems and "list that were not fun to play against" already existed in the previous iterations of this game, but now the focus shifted on new aspects. And in N3 we were so used to certain aspects of the game (HI scarcity due crits mechanics, for example) that we internalized it as part of the system, rather than addressing them like we're doing in N4.
I very much agree with you that in medio stat virtus, but I'm aware that's still a game with really complex interactions and mechanics, so a perfect balance is quite impossible to achieve (even if I believe Infinity, especially in the current status, is one of the most balanced games current on the market)

 

I think there were about 4 or 5 factions (primarily Dahshat, ISS and Caledonia) with an average of 18+ order generating list-building choices, with most hovering around 15, it's important to remember two things about N3; those order generating list-building choices had a significant amount of irregular orders (with the exception of ISS) and that the best performing players had a higher average number of such choices than the average performing players who had a higher number than the lowest performing players.

This post doesn't actually contribute to the thread, I know, I just wanted to point out that N3 was more about "bodies with some form of gun" and not as much about regular orders. The emphasis was on units designed to "trade up" rather than those that interact with the face to face mechanic, and since then we have more units with DTWs. A lot more units with DTWs.