Holomask and repeater : checking repeater range

Exactly. So when any unit from Saladin holomasked army, let's say a humble bluecoat, is activated, if requested by the Saladin's opponent player, your must check his ZOC and Hacking Area from Active Trooper and his repeaters.

(Edited to include a mention to the opponet)

 

Read the 1st post. Saladin(fake) is inactive. Active opponents hacker is moving towards him.

 

To check repeaters fake Saladin's owner still need to activate a hacker.

 

Unfortunately this interpretation breaks the game if they have a holomasked hacker activating. If you prevent reactive player from checking for any trooper, they will not be able to declare an ARO when the holomasked hacker activates. And then the holomasked trooper could Trinity the opponent unopposed.

However, if you let the opponent measure always, they could get an ARO they're not entitled too if the activated trooper is not a hacker.

Regardless of the interpretation, the game currently breaks because the Hackability of a holomasked trooper is not open information anymore in N4.

 

This whole thread is being originated from the OP original thread talking about Saladin here https://forum.corvusbelli.com/threads/saladin-in-starmada-how-do-you-play-him.41580/#post-443384, where our forum mate Matahmori was explainig to OP why holomasking as Saladin in order to play shell games is bad when you have the first active turn as the Saladin player. I think that everyone agrees that the shell game is still at work when the opponent is the one who has the first active turn until he reach either the 'fake Saladin' ZoC, or moves a hacker into a Saladin repeater ZoC.

(Edited a missplaced 'is' because OCD is my burden)

 

Or a Kanren decides to Oblivion/Posses/Carbonite your TAG as her second skill declaration when you have 'forfeited' your ARO chance as you were in the hacking area of a repeater but she was still holomasked as a celestial guard when she declared IDLE in her first skill declaration.

 

Being a hackable trooper in the active trooper's hacking area doesn't confer an ARO. Being the target of an attack through a repeater confers the ARO. Regardless of whether the Kanren is holomasked, when it activates outside the TAG's ZoC, the TAG doesn't get to declare an ARO. But when the Kanren then targets the TAG with its second short skill, the TAG can now declare an ARO.

 

I am corrected. Thanks for the aclaration.

 

Isn't it the purpose of holomask?
And what if holomasked killer-hacker is pretending to be mere bluecoat without repeater? Game is still broken and no way to prevent it?
Be carefull and declare reset then you deal with holomasked armies and someone suspicious walks near your repeaters.

I see more breaking in asknig to measure something that clearly not exists on a table such as Hacking Area of a non-hacker trooper.

 

Yes. Correct.

Checking is optional, however, so fakes can pass under the radar if neither player bothers.

The point of checking Zones of Control is to make it 100% certain for the reactive player when they have an ARO to declare. If you are allowed to measure fakes, that also means the presence or the absence of an ARO is in doubt (and remember, Hidden Deployment units and other Holomask units puts spanners in the logic here!). In essence that means the rules might as well regress back to the state they were in N3 where the player had to guesstimate if they had an ARO or not - this is perfectly workable, but you should remove the Zone of Control measuring entirely in such a case... it did cause some people headaches, though, so it might not be desirable.

I can see a bunch of solutions:

• Remove Zone of Control pre-measuring entirely, forcing players to guess ZOC AROs, allowing declarations at any range once again. Validation of AROs done retroactively just prior to resolution.
• Accept that Repeater units just like Impetuous units are valid but not necessarily the best against players who know and bother with this optional check.
• Regress to where active miniatures would be forced to be honest if they are hackers, and as such only allow Repeater ZOC measuring when an actual Hacker is activated.
• Nerf Repeaters to where they can only be used if you are in Zone of Control of them, allowing daisy chaining of them. This reduces the number of cases where Saladin would revealed - of course this probably means most hacking programs need to be improved somewhat to compensate for the general loss of hacking area.

 

I think the cleanest way to solve this is the following ruling that I wrote for our community FAQ:

"In addition to normal ZoC measurements during Order Expenditure Sequence (OES), any player can measure the activated trooper hacking area from repeaters if the activated trooper is a hacker. If the active player has any Repeaters, activated trooper hacker status is therefore public information. This also means that because holostate can’t mimic hacker or repeater status, Saladin fakes are very easy to spot."

Upsides:
- No rollbacks because ARO check (2.1 in OES) is ALWAYS public info.

Downsides:
- One more instance where private info gets removed from the game.

 

I would honestly say that just accepting that Saladin and Chung-Hee just aren't good targets to pretend to be is the least messy one instead of needlessly nerfing stuff. Like Holomasked hackers really don't need more nerfs. I mean, the list of units you nerf by fixing stuff that doesn't really need fixing is quite large.
It's just a newbie-trap so the easier thing to do is to add "Oh and don't make your non-Repeater Holomasks pretend they are Repeater units" to a tournament FAQ/hand-out.

 

To be honest, the amount of newbie-traps Infinity has is quite high... and surpringsily the game is still amazing despite this fact.

 

Aye, that's kind of Holomask in a nutshell. It's entire reason to exist is to trap people with less experience into making bad choices.
The reason why altering the rules so that Hacker status is known for the activated miniature is my least favourite is that it makes a lot more combinations than just two combinations new trap options. Two steps forward, twenty steps back.

 

This is really simple. Is OES "2.1 ARO check" is public info or not?

In my opinion it is, but I understand if some people don't like the implications of that ruling.

 

Oh heck yes! Haqq can now use 15 point Hafza as Saladin decoy also. Thanks for pointing this out, I'm way too busy right now to go through the PDF looking for all the changes myself.