So we played L&S last night, and I was shocked at how powerful (hard to kill) the AC2s were... first, you have to get across the whole board into CC with them (not always easy with some armies) it has to be with something with anti-materiel/d-charges (which all good/fast CC troops don't necessarily have) then they get an opposed roll (which is only an 8, so no biggie, except when it is) then you have to get through Armor 9! THEN you have to do it THREE times Holy crap! So I ran an Iguana over to it, managed to get one wound through before it died (not to the AC2, to be fair). Then I ran Carlota up and JUST managed to kill it (with arguably the perfect tool for the job) with my very last d-charge. If I hadn't gotten that hit, I wouldn't have had any way to beat this thing. And that was after throwing a 1/3 of my army points at it. Meanwhile my opponent charged multiple JSA CC heavy hitters at mine, didn't roll well enough (on a LOT of dice) and only managed to do 1 wound to my AC2. Is it supposed to be this hard to kill the thing?!? P.S. --- why does the AC2 have a BTS value?
Previous to ITS13, Looting and Sabotaging was probably the worst mission in the game. It was solved and in some matchups, certain factions going first could destroy it unopposed without any counterplay. Now with the defense system, it's a real casino and is going to boil down to who rolls better dice. Probably still the worst mission, but for a different reason.
This mission has 100% become worse. Why? Simply because of the wording: Every AC2 is equipped with an ADS to avoid tampering with the AC2 system. Any CC Attack made against the Heating Unit will be a Face to Face Roll, even if the Berserk Special Skill is used. No MODs can be applied to the CC Attack.If the Face to Face Roll is failed by the attacker, they suffer a Stun Ammunition hit, forcing them to make two Saving Rolls against BTS, with Damage 15. The Immunity (Total) Special Skill is not effective against this hit.’ As written no martial arts can be applied, no burst bonuses from multiple models attacking together, no skills like cc burst +1 or AP may be applied as they are all modifiers. The modifiers are on page 43 and page 56. All burst increases are called modifiers by name as are skills. So the models that were already good at this stay fantastic and all the engineers or anyone else got worse. If you don’t have a cc skill above 20 your odds go down terribly. For instance you take an engineer with CC15 over to the AC2. You have a 35% chance of success. A 35% chance you’ll be stunned and take saves, 5% chance to bounce, and a 25% chance to fail. But say you are McMurrough. You have a a 20% chance to be stunned and take saves, a 5% chance to bounce a 55% chance of normal success and a 20% chance of a critical success. The strong become stronger and more incentivized and the combat engineer became severely disincentivized. Everyone the rule was intended to help us now worse off. The mission is now more imbalanced. A simple fix would be that engineers can turn the defense systems off. Or Engineers and hackers, or all specialists etc. Or that place D-charges is not an attack. This rule also breaks game mechanics for no good reason. Why take away berserk if they are willing to stun themselves? Why break total immunity? It seems to simply be to penalize those troops which have a bts of 0. The punishments/penalties seem arbitrary. And is a program that harms those it intended to help. This is by far a worse mission and quite honestly not fun. In tournaments it encourages the Uber units to be used in this mission. In casual play it just increases the number of orders to succeed. This should be fixed immediately.
L&S in ITS13 is a solid attempt at making Infinity an inbalanced game. It leaves have and have not factions, skews list building for some and changes nothing for others. And is a mission that at best will leave both players feeling vaguely disappointed as any win will be entirely on luck over skill.
@Derpidicus Making place D-Charge not an attack is a bad idea as that interacts intentionally with Stunned state. Be mindful that placing D-Charge is the best way currently of dealing with the AC2 because the units that were previously... okay... at dealing with it by slashing at it can no longer use martial arts to increase damage, which is critical to get reliability. Just winning the roll isn't enough, the roll has to stick. Wailing on it with Saito is a bad idea and, as you note, units like Shona with her CC Attack (AP) isn't gonna have a good time. Yes, your Engineer will probably be stunned, you probably need to bring more Engineers - or a Doctor to clear the state to try again (or Engineer if you're using a Lunokhod to place the charges)
I still don't think the ADS activates if you place the D-Charge. Its rules have it trigger on the attacking model making a CC attack, nothing about placing D-Charges turns it into a CC attack. Honestly the rule appears to have literally been born to fuck with Andromeda because Guard makes defending objectives slightly problematic.
Helllois still hasn't posted the answer in a part of the forum where everyone can read it, I think. He posted a ruling in a hidden subforum on the 25th or 26th of October that zap happens on Place Deployable as well. Edit: and also clarified that the notation on the attack does indeed mean that the ADS will always "roll" an 8.
Models that were good and still are include any with an AP DA weapon and a phys of at least 14 or D-Charges and a CC of 20 or higher, though 22 or higher is best. I don’t dispute D-charges is still the most efficient method, but it doesn’t change the fact that the needless order burn isn’t fun for anyone. The units least impacted are those cc monsters that were probably sent anyway. Anyone who doesn’t have that available or used specialists is now much worse off. Andromeda is still capable of starting within striking range of the AC2 and will succeed at cc at least 65% of the time. The units most impacted are thematically the units that would specialize in this sort of job, i.e. engineers. Which makes no sense. It’s simply a bad rule.
There's a tiny Rube Goldberg machine that Tohaa can set up that requires almost no rolls other than a LT roll (or an opponent willing to let you go first) and prevents meaningful AROs using Mirrorball, smoke and Jaan to clear the way for a Greif to just dump D-charges on the AC2. Supposedly only Jammers and Eraser can stop it. That said, it's also custom made to prevent Shona, Ninjas, etc, even most TAGs, from dealing damage to it. During N3 I used to say that the best CC unit was a Servant. CC abilities were more rare back then, but ADS and the old Electric Pulse are remarkably similar and you just didn't melee REMs back then unless you had serious CC ability. Against AC2 you need serious CC ability AND good phys.
Same could be said of just about any faction that has eclipse grenades if you spend your whole turn setting up a non hackable infiltrator with D-charges to pop the objective.
Aye, but the Tohaa setup is relatively risk free because of the excessive amounts of infiltration-like abilities on the critical troops and the pokemon on Jaan to clear mines and perimeter weapons. There's probably one or two other really strong setups like this in other factions that I'm not aware of, but I assume there's a Nomad and a CA setup that can do similar stuff because those are the factions that tend to have tools that do these things.
It needs to be written out of ITS lol. Its a bad mission and CB should feel bad for continuously putting it in ITS despite being a bad mission. Not even constantly flooding the game with profiles seemingly designed for the sole reason of playing L&S has helped. They need to give up and stop beating this dead horse of a mission. It sucks and its always going to suck.
What if ADS instead put the devices into a reinforced state until the end of the turn after taking a single point of damage? Would probably need to move the AC2 forward a bit to give the factions that foot-slog from DZ a bit of a chance.
It's fixable, I've already got a pretty good idea of what the main issues with the mission are and how to make it play better. It's got other problems like it doesn't function particularly well with the revamped ITS scoring system and it hyper focuses too much attention on a single point of the table. I'm fairly certain splitting it up into 3 objectives to break, pushing them further forwards, and then making it so you can only damage one objective per turn will probably be the way to go.
I mean... we already have such a mission. That one requires you to flip a switch first, but still is it interesting to have two very similar missions?
