I don't think it undermines that statement at all, and you don't necessarily want to totally ignore ARO. Not everyone is using these kinds of attack pieces, they're unlikely to have several, and you might want to apply AROs in multiple places. Dodging, hacking, deploying weapons, firing direct templates, are all very relevant so it's not fair to dismiss them, and you'll still want AROs to slow down other units. If you totally drop all options for ARO, then you're going to get absolutely wrecked by warbands. Having all these exceptional attack pieces really only means you'll have to be flexible in how you play and write lists. The game on paper is very different than on the table. Having to think more about your army, and how you play it on the table, is good for the game.
I could probably make separate cases for all of those, though I generally agree that the things people complained about in N3 are laughable now in N4. Nerfing Jammers when we now have N4 hacking is particularly hilarious. In the case of the Bolts and the Bulleteers, NCA's basically the most limited, inflexible force in Infinity. They need to kill whatever they look at, because they're hiking their ass out of the DZ whenever they want to get somewhere.
That applies to NCA and is a faction feature along with inherent other design limitations similar to what inane.imp mentioned with QK. This I accept and infact embrace as it sharpens the borders to other forces. But most of the recent changes involved giving everyone nearly everything while optimizing every profile e.g. giving everyone NWI+SI or the ludicrous amount of wildcards in CJC (my main faction so no envy).
Yet to have that happen, most players I've played against recently tend to be holding them back to fulfil a specific purpose as opposed to running them screaming up the table, if they play them. Generally I agree with that sentiment, and some factions lend them to flexible builds and have deep enough rosters to get away with it, others however are constrained to one or two builds that are fairly inflexible, and more decision making in the game is a good thing, however things have been devolving into more and more gear checks lately over intelligent play and decision making (removal of options doesn't help much with that either). I am well aware that the game is very different on paper than it is on the table, and it goes both ways a lot of what you have said does appear to be good in theory but would also break down on the table as far as some armies are concerned. Also there are things that seem like they're effective on paper and really are in practice a regular occurrence lately for me is getting beat over the head by the karhu, Not a problem when I drop Nomads because they have access to a lot of good soft defensive elements that can either stop it or slow it down enough to be ineffective, but unless I hid completely it would roll through Starmada without noticing. Poor wording on my part, I meant to say hard ARO, soft ARO elements like hacking, mines/koalas/madtraps, and dug in DTWs are still fine. It's the use of defensive MLs, snipers and other such direct pieces (yes there are exceptions) are largely a waste of points and effort. Which is fine for some factions and in a majority of the missions. but it very quickly shines a light on the haves and have nots in the game (which is quickly becoming a theme in this edition). These ARO's specifcally only work in short range defence and if you access the tools such as repeaters and half decent midfield hackers (or just midfield pieces in general) to leverage them not everyone has access to this unless the opponent has decided to intrude in their DZ. While not every faction may have access to these the most prevalent ones that see the most table time do, and have the means to keep them alive reliably (thankyou medic change). To use your own logic, not every faction can apply meaningful defensive pieces in multiple areas if at all, and again missions that use exclusion zone throw all of that out the window. I think Starmada takes that title, NCA can atleast punch it's way out of the DZ and defend itself adequately.
That's really more of a meta thing... If people aren't taking advantage of poor deployment and lack of AROs with their warbands, then you're right to not worry about them, lol. Most competitive players I see always include a warband or two just to force the opponent to leave out AROs. I fully disagree with everything you just said there, sorry, lol. If there's an army with only 1-2 inflexible builds, then I haven't found it. We'll just have to agree to disagree. I see the powerful attack pieces putting a higher value on board control. You're putting a lot of emphasis on exclusion zones, which only 3 of 20 scenarios in ITS11 even use, and can be mitigated with airborne deployment, or even deploying over the center line with infiltrators.
Links have gotten fully stupid. They never should have gone to these massive mixed links or made so many things Wildcard.
Infinity, is like a good friend of mine. He or she has been acting more spicy and funny recently, and it might be because of the increased dosage of alcohol, Redbulls, some spicy Mexican tacos. Infinity is try-harding to be "new" nowadays, so I respect one's own decision. And I'm not the mother of him or her, so maybe I'm not gonna behave like a scolding parent, saying "eat more veggies", because I like him or her being new and spicy and funny. But, if things get nasty, like if Infinity starts to punch everyone around and mess with the relationship with me and others, I would start telling him or her, like "yo mate, you gotta stop drinking those and eat more greens". Anyway for now, things look settled, so it seems OK to stay calm for now. Long story short, I agree that this is getting a bit unhealthy, but I would choose to observe a little more.
Have to say I'm not impressed with PanO in particular thanks to this. It feels like all of its Sectorials (save maybe Acon) are crutching off very particular links to be effective, and bringing anything else puts you at a huge disadvantage since PanO relies on direct firepower. That promises to get stale fast.
NCA before the Bolt rework was definitely like this. Your options were "Swiss Guard and Hexa supported by Fusiliers and Botspam" or "The same thing but with an Aquila". I absolutely agree with this sentiment. We're far too early in the lifetime of N4 to be making extensive judgments (though we can obviously identify trends). CB has shown they're willing to hotfix things before, but I worry that the design has gotten a bit too rocket-tag-y for the past year or so. As long as they're willing to move to a bit more of pumping the brakes on the factions that are overperforming instead of pushing the gas more on the underperformers (which seems to have been the solution thus far), we should be fine. Infinity's math starts to break down when we get into the combined BS values and Burst values of the original post, and while it feels nice to throw 5-6 dice at your opponent on insanely high numbers, it's probably not a great decision to push this to even further extremes while some armies are only now hitting vanilla BS16 at B5 (JSA finally got this in the core-linked Daiyokai!) and some don't even have that at all (Druze). It may be time to revisit Fireteam bonuses soon, but first we need to observe how things play out.
OTOH PanO has 6 sectorials that mostly share troops, so there's lots of ability to bounce between sectorials for different archetypes. Not saying that's ideal, but wanting a faction with 5 sectorials to have as much variety within each sectorial as a faction with 3 seems a touch naive. Admittedly this would require CB to slightly revisit the "each faction will only have 3 live sectorials" plan. But the fact that Frenched are still playable and relatively up do date (indeed I expect to see ASA return to its well liked place) does show that being Frenched isn't as bad as some thought. I don't think that returning to a time before mixed-links is possible. But I do think they need to have their power toned down: the details of which, I tend to agree need more consideration.
I'd agree with you, but sadly those replicated troops are the problem- the specific link taken is always the Fusiliers+Mimetism/MSV Sniper, maybe with an ORC Feuerbach, because its effectiveness for its cost is nearly unrivalled. For all the versatility available to the non-MO Sectorials, if you don't like the mixed Fusi Core PanO has little to offer. Acon is admittedly a bit better about this because Regulars are a lot of fun beyond simple cheerleading, and in NCA a full Bolt Core seems viable, but it's still a very narrow band of distinction compared to most other factions in the game. I'd also argue that the problem lies more with CB's lack of ideas and creativity in the design space that is creating problems for PanO rather than simple number of Sectorials; Ariadna is equal to PanO for Sectorial count and (excepting Kosmoflot) have easily the least duplication of troops in Infinity. Agreed on getting the power of links toned down. Losing Sixth Sense in particular would open up the game in a big way, since surprise and flanking would have value again.
I don’t know about you but I think there are better solutions to fixing Bolts, rather than giving them the ability to shoot the wings off a fly from a 100 yard distance, same goes for Grenzer. I mean forward deployment would be a good start, which could make people actually use those Combi + Light Shotguns, that CB likes to plaster all over the Bolts and actually make them utilise the Drop Bears they are handed. As for the Bulleteer. I just don’t agree with your sentiment. I’ve abused the Rui Shi and Bulleteer senselessly and none of them ever really had any difficulties escaping their DZ, save for very few situations. I would also dare claim that there was largely a consensus that those two REM were contenders for being the best point-by-point attack pieces in the game. The last thing they needed was a buff, or more specifically, they could have buffed other units in order to compensate IMO. On an unrelated note; regarding your comment about hacking. I need more data and experience in my games but I’m starting to think that giving Oblivion to every normal HD, as well as AP and increased burst was a mistake. It feels like there’s too many buffs in 1 program but I don’t think it should swing entirely the other way and make it useless either. I can’t decide whether it’s the AP or the B2 that needs go (in my world). I wouldn’t say both.
This here is a gem of a post, and I say this as one of the most loud "nerf Jammers" forumites. So far I'm enjoying how Hacking works in N4, so when I glance at the double-nerf that Jammers got (quad nerf in case of the Muttas), I'm thinking maybe that's one nerf too many. Maybe in an environment where 15 units is the max and where Jammers suffer from Firewalls and Sixth Sense no longer sets up un-Resetable AROs and everyone and their mother can be targeted through hacking for orbital exterminatus, maybe Jammers didn't need to be disposable.
maybe that's what the game needs now... years ago, some factions were more "deadlier" while others were more "objective focused", and it worked. But some people complained that they had it hard in objective missions, so little by little, CB gave them more specialists. Also, the missions became more killing focused, so the "objective focused" factions needed more punch. Now we have a lot of specialists options in all factions (giving different focus on the type of specialists to different factions), and little by little, more killing options too, each one with its own flavour in the bolts case, even if I am a hatter of what CB did with them (they got more buffs in only one edition than some units in 4 editions), I think is not as hardcore. They share grenzers spot...bs13 and vm1... is not as the ones that are msv2 and mimetism -3 for similar costs, those that were allready better in n3, bented completelly the game, but didn't bring as much hate as kriza did then (and as I see, keep bringing)
most things in the op are single wound units and those that arent are: vostok that has 24" positive rangeband kriza that requires a particular fireteam and is in a trash sectorial bolt and grenzer are pretty equal to kamau since they dont have mimetism and die to bruteforce i am more concerned about duroc and msv units abusing aro bait than active pieces being very strong as usual in infinity
Did you actually run the numbers on the Grenzer and Bolt sniper? Turns out the Marksmanship is actually pretty damned close to Mimetism in a direct face to face (unless you actually try to brute force them out of cover which is like... why would you do that?). Better, even, in some situations.
Brute force with a strong active piece like a fully linked Veteran Kazak AP HMG has less than 42% chance to succeed against a Grenzer Sniper for example. Saying things like, “they can just be brute forced away as normal”, when that tactic will only succeed 2/5 times, is disinformation at best or straight up lying at worst. I’m not saying this doesn’t have counters but let’s drop the pretence of this just “normal” pieces being strong “as usual”. That’s a false narrative that can be debunked by math. Regarding the Vostok, I think the better argument is rather that the link and the footprint a link carries is a liability for the Vostok, rather than pointing out its 24” rangeband. like the Rui Shi and Bulleteer, the rangeband becomes irrelevant after 1 or 2 orders.
cool just double template them then 1 wound so it is basically Kamau Sniper with +2 arm that has been in the game for two years I think? cool
