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Making 15 the baseline

Discussion in 'Access Guide to the Human Sphere' started by Triumph, Mar 27, 2021.

  1. Nuada Airgetlam

    Nuada Airgetlam Nazis sod off ///

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    Do you really not see the difference between the challenges and limitations of fitting 15-20 or more Troopers of the 8 to 60+ pts cost within a 300/6 constraint and doing the same when you have a maximum of 15 slots for each of them?

    That you can do more combinations when you have 20+ 8-60+ sized pieces and you need to fit them into a 300-slot box than when you are forced to use only 15?
     
  2. Daniel Darko

    Daniel Darko Well-Known Member
    Warcor

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    I absolutely love the 15 units cap.
    (Still I can understand why it feels restrictive for some players, who have played already without the cap.)

    My take on it is, that it is an improvement on the general gamesystem:
    In N3 orders were the most important resource and everyone did a good job in getting as much of this resource as his army allowed him. It never hurt to stretch the orderpool with flashpulsbots and the like. Actually those were boring autoincludes in at least our meta.

    Now in N4, this has changed: There is a new resource: 15 units and because of that there is a new challenge: get the most of these 15 units*. You might still feel the urge to go for most possible orders** with tactical awareness and so on but even then, there is still room to fill those slots that are one-order-only with your preferred unit matching your preferences and style. This seems to me more desirable as just using all the 8-points-and-lower-units there are. I also like the “nerf” to the extremes: There are armies who are the masters of the limited insertion. Their protection is gone. And there are the masters of having two (or more) full combat groups overwhelming the enemy with double the active aggressive combat groups as the enemy. This mismatch is less likely too.

    *It is the same challenge for every army as the mission is the same challenge for every army. It is always a bit uneven and that is the good and the bad of a game with asymmetrical armies. Use your strength, work around your weaknesses.

    **There is a theoretical soft-cap at 15 orders and an individual hard-cap that is defined by the abilities the individual armies can bring. That is okay for me.

    ______________________

    By the way - my meta is split over the 15-units-cap. After covid I will try different tournament setups – with and without the cap. I want to see, who likes what and who will visit which tournament setup. In the end, everyone is free to play the game the way he likes the most and in case, there is a majority of players who despise the cap, I can see myself playing without it on a regularly bases.
     
  3. Ben Kenobi

    Ben Kenobi Well-Known Member

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    @psychoticstorm I understand your point of view to hundert percent, but I have another opinion to the overall situation.
    I‘m a mediocre player, I‘m neither very good nor very bad at playing Infinity, but my strength are in Listbuilding, who I spent very much time with tweaking my lists between 13-18 orders (I never played more than that)
    I had the free decision if I wanted to play more cheaper models or more models with different rolls.
    For high competitive play, the rule is completely viable, but not for the midfield.
    Could my lists be a kingslayer? Absolutely.
    And that risk has been completely deleted with the 15 order cap, who make every list even more predictable.
    Is this rule now right ore wrong?
    That depends on the point of view.
    I personally don’t like limitations, like black lists etc., cause they only hints to a bigger problem.
    Infinity works, despite its flaws and not cause it is flawless, but therefore I’m really thankful.
    Is Infinity good? Yes.
    Could it be better? Definitely.
     
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  4. Nuada Airgetlam

    Nuada Airgetlam Nazis sod off ///

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    Yeah, and I'm not even that much against the 15 slot limit itself, just observing that we had that imposed and nothing else structurally changed, not to adjust for that, so there was the take and there wasn't any give.
     
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  5. WiT?

    WiT? Well-Known Member

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    There are a few people who like the added 'slots' resource, myself included. My issue is that hard 15 is less organic and less interesting than a system where we can modify that cap in exchange for other resources. In my earlier suggestion for instance there is still 'slots' but now a LI army is effectively playing up on points due to playing down on slots. We see nothing like that with a 15 cap.

    I actually really like that idea especially the two dice. B1 is one of the reasons ph sucks so much. An alternative is just to set ph and wip to a similar scale as cc and make them higher for cheaper than BS
     
  6. Kiwi Steve

    Kiwi Steve Well-Known Member

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    I'm a big fan of the 15 slot cap as it makes the experience feel more like a specialist black ops group and less like a bunch of madmen charging into battle.

    In my mind the issue that now exists is more about internal balance, (e.g. Why would I take a wildcat instead of an evader or an Alguacil rather than a Jaguar etc).

    In my opinion N4, like any edition change in any game I've played, solved some problems, but created others. In the whole I believe N4 to be an improvement however.
     
  7. Triumph

    Triumph Well-Known Member

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    I don't know if it interests you but SASR platoons operate with 24 men and are often deployed as a troop together, four 5 man patrols and 4 members making up platoon command. During the Shah Wali Kot offensive in Afghanistan one of these platoons was inserted by air behind enemy lines on a kill/capture mission to headhunt Taliban commanders which is more or less what you're describing. Also involved were crew for the aircraft so in total there was likely 30-40 individuals actively involved in the operations area just on one side.

    The Infinity combat group size is less of a spec ops or black ops group, and more of an Ocean's 11 heist team in reality.
     
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  8. Tourniquet

    Tourniquet TJC Tech Support

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    yes but out of those 24 how many of them were angry rabid idiots charging recklessly at the opponent with a glorified blunderbuss and a sword?
     
  9. Triumph

    Triumph Well-Known Member

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    Well 2 of them earned medals for charging together across open ground to take out 3 machine gun positions that were pinning the platoon down... so at least 2 of them?

    Probably didn't have swords though.
     
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  10. Someone

    Someone Active Member

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    Swords seem in genre, giant robots too even though we aren’t using them in real life.
     
  11. SpectralOwl

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    I'm a fan of the order cap, but the armies need a bit of adjustment to bring out its potential- some armies can fit everything in 15 slots and still have heaps of orders while some are hard-capped to 15-16 orders and lose a lot of options.
     
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  12. wuji

    wuji Well-Known Member

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    15 is probable better than "long turns"... maybe I'd like to see people to have the freedom to bring 20 if they like but have that 20 balanced against 8... Since CB brought out more TacAware, NCO, Lt+1 and troops are more survivable I suspect it's only a matter of time before CB figures out they can make armies equally likely to win even if it was 8v20... might be 4 years before that happens but whatever.
     
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  13. Kiwi Steve

    Kiwi Steve Well-Known Member

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    This might be more what I'm thinking then. Let's not let reality get in the way of my imaginary sci-fi black ops game j/k.

    When I'm getting friends into the game, I often describe the game as a cinematic style black ops game - with a crack team of elite specialists. This is just personal preference, but I would prefer the game to be smaller for most factions (i.e. limited insertion) - but I understand some factions are built with different play styles, so it should be a one size fits all approach by faction.

    These rules are a great way of making factions better, but I've always found they were even better when applied to a force already close to 20 orders. My main opponent is Yu Jing and always seemed to have me outgunned on his elite HI, and more orders than me (in N3) between Regular, Irregular, Impetuous, ways of using his Lt order on other guys and TacAware.

    The thing I've always found the most confusing with the 15 order cap is it doesn't scale by game size - i.e. a 150 point game or a 400 point game seem to both be limited to 15 orders.
     
  14. Mahtamori

    Mahtamori Well-Known Member

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    If you're playing outside the standard 300 points you may want to alter the game through extras
     
  15. Muad'dib

    Muad'dib Well-Known Member

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    In N3, there were 4 key limits that influenced list building and of those, only the point limit was truly a hard limit:
    • 300 points (hard limit)
    • 6 SWC (modifiable by some LTs)
    • 10 models per combat group (Impetuous/Tactical Awareness provide additional orders for individual models)
    • 1 LT order (can covert to regular with Strategos or use on NCO model)
    I understand that CB was concerned with order stuffing, whereby cheap regular models (flashpulse remote for example) were used to bulk up the order count of a combat group to increase the efficiency of using one or two high value models. Rather than impose this arbitrary hard cap of 15 models, I think it would have been more elegant for CB to use their existing mechanism for limiting orders - namely the combat group model limit.

    If CB had reduced the number of model per combat group to 7 or 8, you would have the result of reduced order stuffing without placing an arbitrary limit on the total number of models in the army. TacAware and NCO become more valuable (as they have become in the current 15 model cap) and previous lists of 18-20 models now have to split their order pools into three combat groups. This changes the calculus of list building as the order efficiency break point is no longer 10/20, but rather 8/16/24 or 7/14/21 (my personal preference)
     
  16. Nuada Airgetlam

    Nuada Airgetlam Nazis sod off ///

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    All those too-cheap models should've been made Irregular and the en masse Irregular to Regular skills like Wallace's should've been done away with. Boom, problem solved, large lists are not an issue anymore.
     
  17. Delta57Dash

    Delta57Dash Well-Known Member

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    Personally I would argue that the 15 order limit didn't "create" an environment that makes lists easier to solve; rather I think it pushed the community in a direction that caused them to be more efficient at finding the "solved" lists that already existed.

    It restricts list building, but most of the lists that it restricts are lists that either A: weren't competitive (see: the average number of order-generating models at N3 tournaments being 14) or B: were skew lists that played completely counter to how the game was designed and, if allowed to set the meta, would provide a notably higher barrier of entry for newer players due to needing double the models.

    If this game was as mainstream as something like 40k, nearly every list that would've fallen under "A" would've been created, playtested, and discarded as a bad list just by sheer weight of numbers of people playing. By changing the order limit to 15, this cuts those steps out completely, leading to the current list-building feeling "solvable" because you are essentially forced to only play "good" lists.

    Removing the 15-unit limit wouldn't really change anything for most factions, because those "A" lists wouldn't come back. It would just let the "B" skew lists back into the meta, and whether or not that's a good thing is heavily debatable.

    I also agree with @Nuada Airgetlam that part of the problem was things like Inspiring Leadership; A Regular Troop costs ~4 points more than the same Irregular Troop, so letting a single model turn ~20-30 Irregular Scotsmen into Regular units is sort of like giving that player a free ~80-120 points as long as Wallace stays alive, which is probably not healthy.

    With the 15 order limit it's usually only 3-4 models benefiting, which is much more reasonable.
     
  18. Tourniquet

    Tourniquet TJC Tech Support

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    Agree with the deleting of inspiring leadership though now its one of the few ways for some factions (like CHA) to reach order cap with something coming close to a reasonable list, as for making too cheap irreg game wide, that I agree with less especially considering there is nno protection for single combat group lists any more and some armies (especially those without abilities to fudge order counts) rely on them to offset them having more expensive models on average in order to pad the order pools to a point where they can actually accomplish the mission.
     
  19. Mahtamori

    Mahtamori Well-Known Member

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    Top performing players during N3 were using more order generating miniatures than bottom or middle performing players did by a noticable amount. Most factions hovered around 15,5 miniatures for top performers and 13 for bottom performers, but several factions (above all else Dahshat) sat at over 17 average order generating miniatures per list. That means that for the best players, playing with two full groups was reasonably common.

    I can only speak for myself, but without the pressure of having to clear a large number of bodies on my opponent's side has allowed me to pick several less hyper-optimised units. I don't strictly need to move-shoot with a core linked HMG in a limited list for preferably 30+ orders per game, I actually have room to set up defences and push buttons. More importantly, since my opponent feels each loss harsher, I can also posture threateningly to make them think twice instead of sending in the next wave to kill my key models.
     
  20. A Mão Esquerda

    A Mão Esquerda Deputy Hexahedron Officer

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    Exactly. Knowing my opponent is laboring under the same cap frees up choices.
     
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