That's right, but not the min-maxing-Teams with one fat Wildcard-trooper and 4 squishy cheerleader. I know it is not possible, but if you try to build a Troop Profile for the disgusting KoJ Wildcard-Link you get something like this And this is not even reflecting that the Link gets 5, not 2 orders, has more wounds, gets boni to Discover aso. If you compare it to some smaller TAGs (Blue Wolf or something like that) it's looking pretty sick, isn't it?
Well, what I mean is that if you back out and take a bit of a birds' eye perspective on the sectorial. Maybe Varuna specifically doesn't need Fusilier Fireteams which would mean a Kamau would have to attach themselves to a Core with at least 2 Orcs or form a Core of 4 Kamau + Machinist, both of which drives the price for a stationary dude on top of a tower up significantly (although 109+/1.5 is still not bloody) so that it might no longer be viable to use them exclusively for ARO.
Bit of a worked example of play against a SSL2 eraser from my game this evening: Spiral turn one, a tricore with a Draal and Kriigel pushes up aggressively to punish my impetuous elements. The Draal sets up in an aggressive elevated position guarded by a well-positioned kriigel. In my turn, I restrain a few impetuous elements and move with others. I engage the Draal initially with a Rui Shi which after several exchanges of fire does a wound and forces the draal back into total cover. My options for pushing in further against the Draal are now extremely limited, since mirrorball AROs will stop the Rui Shi in its tracks. It's too dangerous to give the Draal a second turn of active shooting and ARO attacks against my impetuous models, so I have to engage it. I get Liang Kai into melee using super jump. To do this, I must accept an Eraser ARO from the Kriigel. My opponent splits the link to let the Draal viral pistol and the Kriigel eraser. Liang Kai kills the Draal but the Kriigel crits and isolates him. I've positioned him assuming he doesn't get any more orders, so his turn ends there. In his subsequent active turns, my opponent tries to engage Liang Kai but I'm positioned defensively so his only option is to try to breach up a ladder with the Kriigel's viral pistol. My shotgun ARO dissuades the attack and claims Liang Kai's second victim. My opponent abandons efforts to kill him and just sets up overwatch to nail him if he moves and keep him pinned down up high. Pinned down, Liang Kai passes the second turn without much to do other than lightly reposition. By the third turn, though, the situation has deteriorated into a hot mess. I've lost a Su Jian from full health to dead from a rocket hit, REMs are screaming around everywhere, and a brawler core has attacked into the midfield then retreated. Liang Kai has an impetuous move that will drop him about 6" into melee with a brawler doctor with no other AROs. The risk is worth taking since he's already isolated and I can afford to be aggressive, and as it happens he survives the DAM10 falling hit thanks to V:NWI and kills the brawler. At this point I have a breach but the only way to exploit it is to move a Yaozao up, which I do as part of a run that also repairs an unconscious Rui Shi. Repairing Laing Kai drops him back into a group with three more regular orders in, which he uses (along with his irregular order and some smoke from supporting monks) to cut the rest of the brawler link to bits. Game ends 8-2. TL;DR: sometimes the right choice is to attack into a jammer/eraser threat if a model is possibly going to get isolated, positioning it as if it won't get to spend any more orders can ensure it remains annoying for your opponent isolated models can still kill in ARO and active, and be points in zones repairing isolated models is a viable option from time to time
In ideal circumstances, a Jammer is does little, particularly when you're lucky when a 50% vs 25% in your opponent's favour comes up benefiting you, but is a Jammer really as useful as V: Courage, CC 14 instead of 13, or Forward Observer? Or is it perhaps a tiny bit more useful? And is using any of those skills as dangerous as using a Jammer in ARO or perhaps a tiny bit more dangerous? I had the opportunity to actually shoot a linked Jammer for the first time yesterday (it's funny how people really avoid getting anywhere near my WBA Core) because I was playing one of those golden scenarios for it (Looting and Sabotaging) and the jammed Irmandinho still got to use their irregular order after being jammed to toss a smoke grenade that prevented my Husong from having LOF to the objective. Then Pavel McManus spent 3 orders running through the Jammer without being jammed. That's a 7.8% chance of avoiding all being jammed for the first 2 orders and a 2.8% chance for all 3 of them, so I had a very literal 72% chance of a minor victory and 92.2% chance of a favourable outcome (with 10 orders to spend on Liang Kai or Jing Qo) Now, "72.2% chance per order of Jamming Pavel sounds like terrible odds" you say, and it's true, but Zhanshi are fleeting creatures who can't take a missile launcher to the guts, so I was down to a 4-man Core. So while I'm certainly shifting my opinion a bit on that Jammers aren't godlike for WBA (it is in fact quite difficult to move a bunch of over-priced drunk hobos around in a tight group when one of them is screaming on top of his lungs "I'm totally not a jammer come kill me!"), I do find that I'm asking myself "would I have been able to make use of Courage on a Tian Gou equally effectively during this game?" and the answer is of course "No." And to the question "Would courage or even Mimetism literally *anywhere* of my choosing have given me as good odds as that Jammer?" and the answer is "You know, this is a highly theoretical territory because without the Jammer I wouldn't have taken the Tian Gou and I'd have built that list very differently and would have to get a vastly differently balanced list, but if I could get Husong with Mimetism like CA does it would've saved me at least 3 orders and killed a few units deader, so I'd have invested in more of them, so yeah, probably Mimetism on TR REMs because it is such a huge force multiplier, particularly against a force like TAK that's got low amounts of MSV1. But that's about it, that's the only one I can think of where Mimetism would've actually been both 1 point and highly effective. Oh? Courage? Don't be silly."
Did I already mention that I think, this game is very dependent on luck? Sometimes (most of the times) it feels like ... a game of Ludo.
Sound like a scrub argument to be honest. Luck doesn’t explain why the same top players have +90% win ratio or always ends up in minimum top 5 of any given tournament. Similar to people who think poker is mostly luck based, even though it’s consistently the same masters who keep winning.
Thank you for being blunt about this! The more I play, the more I believe this sentiment to be true. Poor players often complain about luck swinging against them, while good players will identify where their deployment went wrong, or what moves they could have made to mitigate running into a crit at the wrong moment. Regarding meta-defining pieces: When I started playing, I got beaten using Achilles, and so every list I built needed to include a counter to Achilles. Then I got beaten using warbands, so I needed to learn to take on those as well. After that I had trouble against fireteams, so I learned to dismantle fireteams. Then for a while I had trouble with MSV2 snipers in links, but now I don’t anymore. Right now I think skillful camospam with excellent warband support is difficult to face, so I’m developing strategies and tactics against that. My first point is that my current lists are still capable of dealing with all the threats I listed above, and none of the solutions I have learned have been dependent on increasing my personal store of luck with dice. Quite the opposite in fact, since most issues are countered best by simply avoiding rolling dice all together. My second point is that I have stopped thinking ”that model is too good compared to my models”, which is a sentiment I see often on these forums. Instead, I have begun to reframe that as ”that tactic is to good compared to my current skill level”*. This is something that helps me avoid getting bitter, rather than better, and it is my absolute top tip for anyone wanting to get better at this game. *Yes, I am aware that tactics are dependent upon the tools used to execute them, but if you prepare for the tactic, you can counter whichever tool the opponent employs.
Might be true, but if you see your attack pieces critted of the board three games in a row although the odds were in your favor it sounds like ... luck. Maybe if you play 100+ games in a year it evens out, but if you manage 1 or 2 a month ... it doesn't. Oh, sometimes I have luck myself, but it still is ... luck. If I win a FtF-roll with 2% chance and with this win the game, it's still luck.
I think the point we are trying to make is that if you build some redundancy into your game plan you can still win after getting that attack piece critted off the table. It is not meant to be disparaging. I’m just trying to show a different perspective that is more beneficial to one’s enjoyment of the game.
You really think I only use one attack piece? Like I wrote: "attack pieces critted of the board" ... plural. And even if it's not a crit, getting sweaped of the board with chances of around 8 percent or less against you is ... bad luck I guess. You really wanna tell me, that luck is no factor in a game with a) many 1 wound models and b) pretty few dice to roll? It's not chess, you know? But you can think what you want, I have seen enough strange dice rolls to realise how luck dependent this game is. If both sides have the same amount of lucky (or bad) rolls in a game and at the same roll (means, not the one is loosing his units, while the other one is just not doing damage) then it's okay, but if not, the game is f*cked up. Doesn't mean you can not win against the luck, but it doesn't make it less luck dependent either.
That's also why spamlists are so effective. They mitigate luck a bit. At least all the top tournament players over here usually have those kind of lists. You do still need a big knowledge of the ITS missions and all factions, though. It helps but it doesn't win the game solo.
Sorry if I misunderstood you. When you wrote that you got your attack pieces critted off the board three games in a row, I did not assume that you meant several each game, because that would be extremely improbable. Lost, yes, but not critted off the board, unless your opponents were rolling a lot of dice against you, in which case they probably were playing well to create that opportunity. Please try to lift the discussion from anecdotal experience. Outliers do happen. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that it is possible to have enough redundancy to not get stopped by poor dice. For better players, it will be possible to leverage their troops to achieve that redundancy with fewer pieces. Therefore, better players will be less sensitive to luck, if it is possible to achieve significant redundancy within the parameters of the game (300pts, for example). The consistent tournament results that @Zewrath alluded to above indicate that is the case. What I am trying to communicate is that I have often been in situations where I have depended on luck to win, but that practice helps to minimize those instances. Sure, they will still happen, but almost only when facing an opponent of similar skill level. Against better players I tend to lose consistently, and against less proficient players I tend to win consistently. The luck factor is an element that makes sure that two players of close enough skill can have a tense game that will not always end the same way. If I often end up in situations where I need to leverage luck to win, I personally chalk that up to having to play better to achieve rear arc shots, forked AROs and the like.
Luck often seems more important when skill levels in a match are similar. I've had a lot of games that were so evenly matched it came down to one close moment of the game where both players deserve it and it just tilts one way.
@FlipOwl I could not have put it better myself. There is such a gap I find in the skill level of players with a fixed mindset vs a growth mindset. There is obviously an aspect of luck in infinity, it's a dice game after all. But if it was simply based on luck, you wouldn't see the top players performing so consistently. The skill part of the game is almost entirely based on how well you can leverage the probability of dice rolls and mitigate bad luck. If you put a unit on 2's to hit and they crit you, you shouldn't just be going "aw shucks, I guess that's bad luck." You should be asking yourself if you could have instead managed to put them on 0's to hit. Or reduced their burst through saturation to lower their chances of critting. Or shot them in the back to eliminate return fire at all. Or spec fired them with no risk to yourself. Or used a template to guarantee the hit. Or gotten into CC for even better odds of you being the one to crit. Infinity is such a beautiful game because there are so many options, tools, equipment, and tactics that there's almost always an answer for everything, the trick to getting better is finding those answers and learning how to utilize them. I know we've kind of drifted from the jammer talk, but I think the points being made overlap. If someone runs out face first and gets crit or jammed and it costs them the game, the issue isn't with the dice or the equipment, the issue is with them not utilizing the tools and tactics that are available.
You've also disdained an option designed to remove the risk to your attack pieces. This is something I see very good players do: avoid situations where dice matter as much as possible. This means they reduce the occasions when bad luck can ruin their game plan.
While I generally agree with the sentiment of luck vs skill in this game that you have... I think this might be a poor example. The problem is that orders are a limited resource and all of those options for less risk from an already very low risk play would probably not be worth it in an "I need to win this game, not just this one exchange" perspective. Losing a FtF when your opponent is rolling on 2's is definitely a case of bad luck. That's kind of the definition of "bad luck", actually. Over many, many events probability takes over, but each individual die roll can be correctly perceived to be good or bad luck by either winning against the odds, or losing in spite of them, respectively. On the whole, I'd say that it's certainly a good mental exercise, but to dismiss it entirely is almost as bad as leaning on it as an excuse every game (luck*, that is). *I want to be careful in defining "luck" not as something that someone has or does not, but as an adjective for the result of a random event.
On the other hand, I made this exact mistake in a game last night. Mukhtar shoots TR bot from cover through smoke at 16.5". TR bot crits on a 2. Repeat. TR bot crits again. The odds of the double crit were extremely low... but if I'd deployed the Mukhtar two inches to the left, I could have gotten him to 15.5" cover and the bot would have been rolling zero dice instead of four. Alternatively, once I realized my mistake it would have only taken one wasted order to get into the better rangeband. I made the wrong decision twice, and bad luck punished me. So I think it's a pretty decent example :-) I do wish that luck played less of a role in Infinity. In particular, I wish they'd found a good way to eliminate crits entirely from N4. Nonetheless, I agree with the sentiments above: a good player never blames the luck. No matter how much the dice have punished you, you can always think about better plays you could have made instead.
@QueensGambit oh, it's always possible to blame both luck and skill ;) But in the end we can only control one of them. The path to progress is to polish the skill, constantly improving and planning for situations when the dice might screw us, and if they'll screw with our backup plans too - oh well, shit happens.
It's much, much, less mobile than a TAG, however, and actually worries about Chain Rifles and so on. I agree that for most of N3, fireteams had a disproportionate power level compared to TAGs, but it seems like CB is making cautious moves in the opposite direction - if you ignore Varuna.
