Ariadna and Haqq too. In fact the only faction where vanilla doesn't seem to overperform compared to sectorials is PanO.
And that’s only, cause it’s the shooty faction. Imo, pano is as strong as any other faction in vanilla, only nobody plays it this way, cause shooting is in the sectorials obviously better. Example of strong units: Auxilia, KothS, Swiss Guard Hacker There only Problem is the Midfield if the don’t get the first turn, but since the beginning of N3 the got one Heliot and nowadays the Beasthunter, who are reasonable roadblocks.
You also only really have Croc Men as reliable objective grabbers, and they're pricy for the role. One ZC too if the board lets FD2 be good enough for the job. The extra AVA on midfielders in the Sectorials is often as big a deal as Fireteams for PanO.
Vanilla PanO is still marginally better than sectorials, but the margin is slim, at least in comparison with most other Vanilla factions and their respective sectorials.
I purposely try to avoid playing fireteams. It takes away from the skirmish feel of the game. And is mechanically. Unbalanced. Personal view but I enjoy infinity much better with out the fireteams.
as a reply to having 3 models max. I did play double elite fireteams as a 3 men haris and a 3 men core. It kind of works. But a 3 men core of moderators would be pointless. Some line troops needs full core. Note that vanilla player only take them as cheerleader. If they are not linked, or can't link more than 3, then they are only cheerleaders; and as such you'd put the link up on another group of models. Remove core for moderators, you are removing their linkability altogether. Well, that was back in N3. I didn't play with the new HI in a LI core options Bakunin received.
When I first started playing N4 and hadn't digested the rules annex for fireteams yet, I assumed that the fireteam skills were universal... e.g. Fireteam: Core meant that any unit with that skill in their profile could be part of the Core team, mixing and matching as necessary (like the way Triad actually appears to work). I just sort-of read the different fireteam names as something along the lines of, Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, etc. as set buckets that troops could fit into. So an Orc and Varg and Fusiliers are all Core, they could go into a Core together. Eventually I read the rules and figured it out, but I'm remembering now how weird it was to have to identify "a Fireteam of X" especially when the unit creating that fireteam is sometimes a minority member of the team. So in the current fireteam rules, an Orc can be part of a Fireteam: Core of Fusiliers in Sval, AND an Orc has Core, but it's not the same thing. The Orc doesn't join the team because it has Core, but rather because... reasons. Not to mention, it's unlikely that anyone is going to make an actual 150+ point Core of Orcs, so they need to throw in an additional special rule that allows you to add Varg (another model that has Core on its own) to an Orc Core. So you can form a Core with Orc and Fusilier or Orc and Varg but not Fusilier and Varg... but also you have 7 wildcard troopers so any logic for the fireteams just goes out the window. It's completely arbitrary. It would almost make more sense to have a handful of 'hard' lists for fireteams rather than needing to reverse engineer the rules to get to a few viable builds. So you've built yourself a Core of 3 Fusiliers, an Orc, and Agnes (just some random pilot whose sole claim to fame seems to be as a cheap wildcard specialist). Although the Orc is the tallest guy with the biggest armor and best gun, he's not really 'leading' the fireteam in any traditional sense - Leader in this instance just sort-of means the 'active trooper'. If he dies while being active though, then the fireteam is broken for some reason. The shifting leader thing is another gameplay contrivance that is sort-of incomprehensible. Not only does the unit which forms the fireteam not really matter, but in many Core teams at least, that unit won't be leading the fireteam 90% of the time either. I'm not necessarily proposing that my original misunderstanding of fireteams become the new version of the rules - I don't know enough about all the fireteam options across factions to not assume it could mess up game balance with the current setup... But I do hope that fireteam bonuses aren't the only part of the equation that gets changed, since the whole concept of fireteams could get streamlined and massively simplified. edit: One idea might be to separate fireteam leadership from fireteam composition and fireteam activation... so certain profiles can lead/form fireteams (e.g. Fireteam: Core (Leader) skill), fireteam activation works using a Spearhead (which is more logical than calling this person the "leader") and the fireteam only breaks if the Leader themself goes Null (number 2 rules would still apply and I think would make perfect sense in this setup). The Leader/Member dichotomy I think could be used to make fireteam composition work functionally very similarly to what is possible with the current restrictions.
I like this idea. The shifting leader thing is so dumb. Much fluffier if the team is an actual team with a specific trooper who's its leader.
Would not change anything except creating a new profile whose only purpose is to be the basis of a fireteam, we had this with the Haris skill on a single model to form a Haris fireteam, and change of this skill is to be based on the troops that can form a Haris and not one single model is one of the things most of the player base is considering an Improvement.
How come not change a thing? In the 'Fireteam Leader' proposal You kill the leader, GG fireteam. Would make the game much more strategic, going after some goon, around it's high caliber buddies. Let's say now you have HI plus 4 goons, HI becomes a leader, goes after you... good luck trying to dig it out. You gotta strip some goons to drop +3BS and at times SS. Then you can take the big guy out. If there were specific profiles meant as Fireteam Leaders, preferably not the most skewed fck up'd OP stuff with ALL THE RULES AND TINBOTS... then you could always go around to take these out and break the team completely. At that point your investment would already be rather big. Or in reactive you could sacrifice to shoot a moving leader, rather than F2F against the Spearhead, to try and break the team. Seems legit to me. A big, but simple change. Would change how we build the Fireteams and how we react to them, but not really how we ourselves use them actively.
If I understand the proposal, you create a fireteam with a leader whose purpose is purely to form the team and teams composition purely exists on its existence, by past example this profile will be something generic and a filler, spearheads elimination will have no impact on the fireteams disbanding, this will have not much of a practical impact in fireteams and their composition, static fireteams will be mostly unaffected beyond not disbanding if the tough attack piece that is the spearhead dies and it creates a marginal disadvantage in moving fireteams adding the possibility of disbanding them if the spearhead model is not attacked. Again though this is roughly the way 3rd edition Haris teams were behaving, given you needed to have the model with the Haris skill and if it died the Haris team could not be reformed again.
I'm not necessarily implying that the options for leadership need to be terribly restrictive either. If enough profiles have a fireteam leader skill, you could certainly create a team with multiple figures with the leader skill and then one of them becomes the backup leader. Better yet, get rid of the "Number 2" skill altogether, which is super niche, and just make it so anyone with a the Fireteam: X(Leader) skill becomes the next in command automatically if the leader dies.
I was sort of thinking that the point of fireteam leaders would be to address this very issue because the natural leader of a fireteam logically would be a more 'experienced' trooper, and it's not like "filler" profiles aren't already the basis of many Core fireteams. In fact, I think it makes much more narrative sense for the Leaders to be characters, veterans, or otherwise key pieces in the team. In TAK, for example, it stands to reason that the Veteran Kazak would be the leader of a team of Line Kazaks (it's certainly implied by his name). What I'd hope for is that instead of generic troopers being the basis for fireteam composition, fireteams would associated with the trooper leading them. You could also reduce the prevalence of wildcards and turn some of them into leaders as well of some or all fireteams. It makes much more sense from a flavor perspective to say "Col. Voronin is leading a fireteam" than "Col. Voronin is tagging along as a wildcard in a fireteam that is defined by being Frontoviks even though it only has one Frontivik in it and they're not currently the leader of said team". Sure there could be some mook profiles (or sub-profiles) that get a leader classification as well if you want to invest in a backup leader or just keep the fireteam from dying if the guy with the big gun goes down by keeping the leader hidden, but I'd hope the net result would just be more intuitive options overall for fireteam composition, rather than more limitations, and a way to functionally get rid of the sectorial fireteam charts. Maybe it's a bad idea and/or will be hard to balance... but I do hope that whatever CB comes up with is a true reinvention of the fireteam rules.
In the current system, a static fireteam will have an ARO piece standing up who's not the team leader, and the team won't disband if it dies. The player can choose any of the other four guys as team leader who's the weak link - take out the leader with a Fiday or something and the ARO piece loses all its bonuses. In @Lawson 's proposal, nothing changes except that the fireteam player has less control over which of the other four units will be the weak link, which would be a small be meaningful nerf. It's much more significant for active fireteams which venture into the midfield where they're all at risk. Lose the leader, no more fireteam, unless you've invested in a backup. I would vote for the leader profiles to be mooks with rifles - which is consistent with my mental image of how real life squads work. The leader isn't the guy humping the HMG around. Maybe give them some command-type skills and equipment like Sensor or Chain of Command, but no SWC weapons. I also like the idea that if you take multiple units with the Leader skill, it functions like Number 2. So you can invest in backup leaders, but they cost points and each one you take is one less specialist or gunner in your fireteam. In fact, maybe make the Leader skill cost 0.5 SWC...
Lets add complexity to fireteam rules without solving any of the issues people actually have with fireteams. EDIT: My above comment might feel needlesly incendiary/contrarian so I'll add that: You do you, I'm all for house rules that make the game more fun for people. But I do hope that whatever CB has in mind for n4 fireteam changes will go in a different direction.
Again this is exactly the N3 Haris fireteam rules and composition now with the much despised 0.5 SWC tax everybody hated, just expanded on 3-5 man link teams.
In N3 haris, one of the members had to have the skill in order to form the team, but once the team was formed, any member could be the leader and the leader switched around with every activation, just like it does now. Which is super dumb. The five of us just take turns being leader, and if the guy who happens to be playing leader right now gets killed, the rest of us are like "oh no we're leaderless" instead of just appointing someone else again. @Lawson 's proposal would have a team with an actual designated leader who, like, leads the team.
Yeah my goal is not to make things more complicated - mostly just to to do away with sectorial charts for FT rules and make it so it's more straightforward (e.g. fireteam with anyone with the same skill). The leader idea was just a way to protect against the creation of potentially oppressive fireteams and to correlate the nomenclature of fireteams more with what a layperson would assume when first coming to them. I understand WHY leadership currently cycles in fireteams (such as determining the "fireteam's order"), but you gotta admit it's not an intuitive concept outside of its technical function in the rules. The point i was really trying to make is that the ideal system to me would be sensible fireteam creation criteria baked into the profiles themselves which you could understand solely in army builder and that didn't amount to the separate 2 pages of rules/exceptions per-faction we currently have. I do think there's a way to do this that would solve some of the complexity in fireteams and also clear up problems with some specific combinations being oppressive, but the only way to keep it from complicating things would be to fully tear down the fireteam rules as they currently exist and re-write them, rather than duct taping more stuff on top of them. In that sense I think we're actually in agreement.
The proposal is: You need a specific model to form the team (extra this model costs 0.5 SWC), if that model dies the link team cannot be reformed, any model of the team can be the acting model (spearhead), if the model that is the leader dies the link ends automatically. 3rd edition Haris link teams: You need a specific model to form the team this model costs 0.5 SWC, if that model dies the link team cannot be reformed, any model of the team can be the acting model (Link leader). They are close enouph.
Big problem with that proposal for a “fireteam Seargent” Skill: Triads. :-/ And it doesn’t seem to do anything other than eliminate that moment where the fireteam player has to go “If I do this, will I lose the fireteam leader to ARO?”
