Exactly. Every faction has some skeletons in their own closet. Take PanO's flavour. I'm rewatching Neil Blomkamp movies, and see a lot of parallels between them and the 'elites' in District 9, Chappie, and especially Elysium.
It does seem that CB had planned for a duality to exist in Yu Jing. The ISS being brutal secret police and the Invincible Army being the honorable professional army. The ISS uses prisoner suicide bombers and disgraced HI units, Pretty clear they are not good guys. On the other hand, the Invincible army uses no warbands at all and is a purely an elite army based on HI. Too bad they didn't release Invincible army sooner, it would have made the sting of uprising a bit less painful.
I think nobody playing YJ was under the delusion that ISS weren't brutal police, it's only Uprising went overboard and they made them into nazi genociders and idiot ones on top of that; also, with YJ's command acquiescence and collaboration (that bit about shooting on friendly ships was not the ISS)
Your post literally read that the Shang Ji Haris model was not as good as Tai Sheng because same points and better stats on Tai - as you were responding to someone's positive experience with the Shang Ji Haris model. I called you out on how this is not the case. This wasn't a Shang Ji vs Zuyong argument, this was you saying Tai does more and better than Shang Ji Haris, when they are different profiles that fulfil different roles.
No no no. Wu Ming are particularly violent and brutal criminals with a postponed death sentence that can be overturned through service. Kuang Shi are irredeemable criminals.
YJ Army High Command ordered the destruction of one of their own Consulates. YJ Judiciary did NOT jerk PsychoCrane up short when he went on record threatening civilian noncombatants with death. Further, YJ Judiciary publicly created an entire unit that was basically Einsatzgruppen, and hasn't had them brought up on charges. So, while the YJ Army might, just might, be clear of War Crimes in general, the YJ Judiciary is most emphatically not. You cannot be 'nice' and deal with certain elements. Ask @stevenart74 how he feels about organized crime, sometime. But you still need to be really careful to not become just as evil as that which you are trying to destroy. You also need to work really hard to not push people into the arms of the other side, which all of the public heavy-handed actions in the Japanese territories did. Are the Wu Ming actually on death sentences, though? I don't remember any fluff to that effect.
Yep, and they're pretty much completely seperate entities within YJ, with different people in charge and with little either one can do to reign in the other directly.
I am pretty sure every single faction counts as war criminals, every single game, thanks to the Concilium Convention. Even Boarding Shotguns are prohibited under the same treaty as Haqq's insanely lethal biological weapons!
But she isn't bringing fire ammo. Which is the point. Burning off camo. So she's doing something different. Exactly. Ah. Misunderstanding then. Good points. Yep in that regard. Yes, Zencha has the edge there. But that zuyong isn't bringing fire. Like I said above. Also, less ARM and PH. So more fragile. Like a remote in a Haris you pointed out. Either way. I like using them. You don't. I'm stating my opinion. Yes I can. You may not remember. But I was the person that said originally to use Lu Duan for the mid field mine clearing in the Zencha thread a few months ago. And they are great too. I've taken a Lu Duan in every IA list to date. The only auto include for me. But sometimes the large base and lack of ARM make it an unnecessary risk. Shang Ji and Lu Duan are different beasts. Lu Duan is more scalpel to Shanger's brick. Lu Duan also needs some support while the Shang can take a hit.
Fire's super niche dude and it's not particularly more useful over any other DTW at midfield skirmisher clearing. Most things with camo really don't care if they're getting hit by fire or not when you go after them, they're squishy enough that either way they're in trouble when you hit them with the DTW that they're going to get forced out of camo state anyway, and if they get hit they're probably dead regardless of what you hit them with. Think stuff like Ariadna camo spam, whether or not the template is fire or not doesn't really bother a foxtrot either way getting whacked by one is trouble. Fire's real advantage is against ODD stuff, but that's not on the infiltrating mid field skirmishers so much as the more high tech attack units. Myrmidon links, etc. But I'd really need to be playing into alot of ODD to want to bring a Shang Ji over Tai Sheng who unlocks speculative fire and brings an FO to the unit, and still essentially keeps the same number of orders or more with NCO.
All I read from this is that you live in a magical land where no one passes armour saves. Brutal reply, yes. But judging from previous posts by you. That's really a conclusion I draw from you. You never expect a skirmisher to pass. Burning off marker status or the potential for the model to burn to dead instead of unconscious is something of value to me. Something I don't think you value. But we are different people with different playstyles.
Fire is also a big deal against Camo heavies, like Daofei, Cutters or some Posthumans. Chain Colts don't cut the mustard against targets that need to fail a lot of unlikely saves, especially if it gives them a free shot at your NCO/Coc Link Leader, but the Fire cuts their safety net so that bigger guns can get to work. A lot of the time I'd use a Lu Duan still, but there are some places only a Shang Ji can get to, or so much to get done in the mission your flame trooper needs to drag along a Specialist.
If you burn camo dude it goes to mimetism, which is still a -3 MOD it doesn't change the math there. If you hit them with the template they lose the marker state regardless because taking an ARM or BTS save is automatic grounds for cancellation. I also don't like burning the forward deploying models to dead because it eliminates your chance to do easy classifieds, as well as it also actually opens room in combat groups to shuffle models around. The high value models you're listing aren't really on the list of midfield skirmisher spam we're trying to clear out of the midfield here, we're talking stuff like Antipodes, Guilangs, Bandits, Foxtrots, Zeros. Junk that exists to annoy and slow you down. High value toys like the Dao Fei and Cutter are not going to be on the first line of defense or placed where you can easily run a link team at them because that's a good way to lose your high value models to brute force.
@Triumph; if you are talking specifically about clearing the various forward-deployed trash roadblocks that incessantly show up in every game, I can think of only one reason you'd use the Shang Ji: Speed. Stick the most barebones profile in front of a more sane link team, then Move+Move and hope you pass saves, or fire back with the flamethrower to maximise the chance of a dead foe. Only way to make ARM, BTS and CC pay for themselves is to roll more dice, regardless of whether the game makes that a good idea. There may be a niche on Armoury or Looting and Sabotaging for an insane alpha strike into the objective zone to start scoring and smashing. LFT is also something no enemy wants to walk into, so having a Shang Ji in midfield for defense of objectives may work, since the turn 3 objective-ninjas almost universally suck at tanking DTWs, and losing their Stealth in active could be very painful if your own list is passable at infowar and the enemy is Hackable.
You have missed the point. Which is cool. Easy to misunderstand on the internet. The point isn't the -3 mod. Or even loosing the status because they reacted. It's about them being unable to regain marker status should they live. You know just as well as I the value of marker status. And there is a psychological element to it. People don't like it when things (in this case abilities) are taken away from them. A chain colt (Tai Sheng) isn't as deadly. But the chance of survival weighs in the back of a player's mind. Make it fire. And the value of the model surviving is diminished. As they've had something taken away from them regardless. That causes people to not want to risk loosing the model in a different way. Causes them to doubt, second guess. Which plays into a units protection in a different way. A more subtle and psychological way.
Ok... now we're moving into the realms of this model is so not worth its cost we're going to do tactically unsound maneuvers to try and make it worth its cost? Yeah.... no. Let's not do that. There's a time and a place for aggressive trades. Running your 40pt model into the open to try and burn a what, 12pt? Hardcase isn't it. But... the Shang Ji basically can't even hurt scenery on Armoury they have a Multi rifle and that's it. They can't even touch the objective on Looting and Sabotaging they don't have any access to anti material CCWs. Again, you don't need to be a fire template to achieve this. Anybody forcing a stealth model to dodge, or shoot back, or try to not die to an attack period around the objective will lose stealth because that's how stealth works. They should be straight up dead regardless as you shouldn't be attacking these markers without enough orders to make sure they go down. You don't march a 100pt Haris link up to an antipode pack and hope you kill them all with the one order you've got left, because if they don't all die you lose your 100pt haris link to angry dog things. Even walking up to something as crappy as a foxtrot or Hardcase is going to get your link in trouble if you don't bank enough orders to put them into unconcious before you give them a turn, they'll do annoying stuff like light your link up with a shotgun or throw mines at you suicidally and then let another model punish you. There's no psychological element to it either. These models exist as speedbumps, they're trash you throw at your opponent to slow them down and trade up. Your opponent should care about them about as much as I care about my 40pts of Monks and Kuang Shi, the answer is I don't care about them at all.
Haidao do, and they're linkable. That's on me, should have been clearer. The Move-Move thing is tactically sound only if you are looking far ahead to end game and want to get objectives done early so you aren't doing the same thing in Turn 3 with a less suitable piece and few options, and expect to survive the AROs. Running into linked Missile Launchers is basically always a bad idea, but I'd take the odds against a Zero. The Stealth comment was for later in the enemy turn or game. Burn a Ninja Hacker, or a Zhencha, and if you have a Repeater anywhere afterwards, it can't move freely up to objectives for a single uncontested shot at a WIP roll. If the Chain Colt fails, they still have a chance of stealing the win. In any case, I'm mostly theorising here. Only times I've taken Shang Ji so far are for the HRL, or to provide a Tinbot and tough defender for a Core of two Zhanshi Hackers, Haidao Killer Hacker and sacrificial Son-Bae. I'm cavalier enough about LTs that throwing Tai Sheng into danger doesn't bother me, and Hulang bring the same weapons on a platform I personally prefer. Speaking of which, the Hulang's E/M Grenades are fantastic for shutting down revealed Hackers and Repeaters, since Spec Fire lets you attack from outside the enemy Zone of Control, and does an even better job than the flamethrower at shutting down most Camo heavies. I really like 'em so far.
Trust a man who was the unit's legal clerk, the level of 'waste of oxygen' required to get someone sent to a military prison as opposed to assigned all the shit details that the Senior Enlisted can find for them to do makes 'gallows fodder' a polite term of endearment. I think I put it like this when talking about the Uprising: Assigning someone to Wu Ming means that they are seen as potentially redeemable, once you beat military discipline back into them.
To be honest, being assigned to Wu Ming is the redemption part. Your never leaving the unit....alive. But at least you are given the honor of continuing to fight for Yu Jing. As opposed to rotting in a prison cell or just being shot.
