I foresee the Mukhtar FO will see a lot of appearance in my Vanilla lists. Probably kept in reserve and use our other infiltrating specialists to hit buttons first, and then the Mukhtar emerges later to clean up. very useful too in missions such as Supremacy where you both need to hold sections and press buttons.
So I played my first battle with Mukhtar (MSV2, Red Fury) in Vanilla Haqq, against Morat Aggression Forces. To test him hard I played aggressively and burdened him with most of the job - Kasym rode beside as a smoke support ;) MukhtaR kill list in my first turn: Yaogat Sniper Q-Drone (through smoke, it was in 0 range and -12 mods) Morat hacker (linked) Wound on linked Suryat HMG Daturazi w/Chain. Then I hide him a bit, put in suppressive, and in reactive turn got attacked by linked Suryat HMG - got one wound and hide from the link. Kornak went from another angle to attack Mukhtar but got shot better and died (shock ammo!). In my second active turn I went for the last 5 Morats (linked wounded Suryat, 3 Vanguards, Raktorak), but this time the luck abandoned my hunter and in the first firefight I got crit on 11 by a Vanguard while shooting on 13 with my 4 dices. Kasym avenged his comrade by killing 4 of the link with Chain Rifle, and Djanbazan HMG ended the uneven fight. So - MukhtaR is really nice. I like his mobility and his set of skills. Mimetism is great and paired with MSV2 is even better. Very good active hunter, and I'm a fan of this kind of warriors. Especially when they can take an unlucky hit and keep on doing their job ;) He is a fresh and unseen unit in Haqqislam. Still I don't think his OP, cause he's rather expensive in points and has really low ARM. PozdRawiam / Greetings PS. Attached is my proxy of MukhtaR ;) Normally I'm going to use AyyaR, yet I was bootCamping the game and wanted to use painted minis.
You don't think it's OP? Expensive? Actually it's a bargain for his points. The Mukhtar is the most blatant example that powercreep is finally a real thing in this game. It's ridiculous all the stuff he gets for his cost. Compare it with similar units in his cost range like Pheasant, Intruder and HaiDao. Even the Intruder looks a bit inferior when compared with Mukhtar ( the other two look like crap ). I really don't get how this unit is costed but for sure his price in points is much lower than what he's worth.
Hmm, I dunno about that. If anything, the Intruder seems to show that costs are actually quite static. The Intruder HMG costs 5 points and 0.5 SWC over the Mukhtar Red Fury. Those five points give you an HMG over the Red Fury (+2 DAM, better range bands), Camo over mimitism (in arguably superior), a point of PH and two points of ARM. The Mukhtar has better movement, better BTS, NWI+Shock Immunity, and two nanopulsers. Those are real advantages, especially the NWI+Shock Immunity. But the HMG + Camo is very dangerous and extremely easy to exploit with the smoke trick. On average, I think it will be easy for the Intruder to earn those five extra points. Set up in a good position, pop smoke and go. Mukhtar will be more order intensive as it maneuvers up and it doesn't have the defense of a marker state. What this really shows us is that ARM and, to a lesser degree, PH are probably overcosted. Look at the Mukhtar vs the PH13 Khawarij, for instance.
You folks must be comparing everything to daylami and mutts if you think Mukhtars are expensive. Their price is firmly within wu ming territory, which is very vanilla HI - something that our new units can actually match in resilience (mobility and support go a long way there)... Except Mukhtars also don't have HI vulnerabilities while boasting "inhuman" mobility and firefighting profile of a freaking nisse, a unit that almost single-handedly kept vanilla PanO on a life support, and, unlike said nisse, being in a faction that can actually synergize with everything in that package. Yeah, yeah, wu ming have arm 4 (as if that matters), nisses have multitude of profiles including HMG, can't compare that directly, yada yada. Offending mukhtar may not cover many roles, but in the one he covers, he takes the best of many worlds that used to be the golden standards for respective functionality (accompanied by many downsides and anti-synergies when it came to particular units) and combines that for no extra cost. And brings that all into faction that has a lot of support options balanced against the fact that pieces you could support were never stellar. Sigh. I realize that I overvalue unit differences. I should know by now that basic mechanics of Infinity contribute a ton more to outcomes than particular profiles (maybe). "All toy soldiers are the same" etc. Yet I'm pretty close to impulse-selling my entire collection (poor naive idiot, as if that's something easy to do), being under impression this game is not going anywhere nice. On the other hand, poster above makes a good point about overcosted stats and the like. But I think there's more to profile evaluation than static out-of-context point formula evaluations.
@Barrogh. I largely agree with your concerns, but I find that they're mostly theoretical. Despite the trend for more clearly optimised profiles the game remains fun. OTOH I think it's the Shock Immunity that does it. It's probably only 1pt (at most) but the utility that adds to an ARM1 NWI attack piece... just wow. Particularly with Ramah's Dr options. I say this having run Moiras*, Intruders and Kusanagi often. There's a reason I advocate at least 1 Shock Immune gun in a Nomad list: Shock Crits are scary m'kay. It's the same problem with the Kamau. They're really great but glass cannons.... Oh now they've got Shock Immunity without a price change, so even a HRMC has relatively low odds of killing them outright... yeah, that seems like a good idea. Honestly, given the amount of Shock and Viral in Infinity right now I think a non-SI Mukhtar would be awesome. The right balance of super scary but with a key vulnerability. * He's only 3pts more expensive than a Moira HMG... seems reasonable.
I completely agree, but I don't know if this points to a problem with the Mukhtar. Instead, I think this points to the difficulty of the Sectorial / Vanilla divide. I don't know that the Mukhtar is bad in a vacuum (I suspect it is not), but I do readily agree that it may be especially strong when paired with Ghazi/Kum etc... It's not expensive, but in RTF nothing is particularly cheap either. It will be hard to find the orders to support the Mukhtar hunters and we won't have freed impetuous smoke improving them. This used to be the argument for Djanbazan. Yes, they are objectively outmatched by Nisse/Intruders. But they have cheap, order-free access to smoke. The units were individually different, but the factions were more or less balanced. Mukhtar seem fine in a Haris, but brutal in vanilla. First, I agree that the sky isn't falling. The basic opposing roll system of the game lets it resist optimization. Skill matters, but luck / unit vulnerability can mitigate a lot of imbalance in profiles. Crits especially, but even just rolling better. As you saw, however, this is why Shock Immunity is so strong. When combined with NWI, it gives the Mukhtar a get out of jail free card against the game's core balancing mechanic. ARM can be overruled, Shock+NWI can't be. I don't think it's automatically OP, but it does break the game at its very basic level. This is very powerful, especially on a piece as otherwise optimized for attack as the Mukhtar. Again though, it's not as bad in pure RTF. Yes, they have good doctors. But the units are expensive and the Mukhtars durability is a way to mitigate a lower order pool. But in vanilla...
As always I think in a game as complex and diverse as Infinity with its many factions, its worth pausing and looking at the game overall. With the immunity abilities CB has always left the viral door open. Not only does Haqq have easy access to it but AFAI can see, so do the Xenos (and Druze!). If we think about performance outside of a single match and perhaps in a day of competitive gaming, you'd think in an 'average' meta, your Shock/Total immunity heavy list would comes across at least one Haqq and/or Xenos list that would hit you hard enough to reduce your likelihood of effectively winning the day by default. These skills may make you powerful against specific factions but they're also opening you up against others. Its hard to imagine or demonstrate balance in this... 'holistic(?)' way but it's worth considering IMO. SP ruled the fields when I started playing shortly after the release of N2 and now VIIRD is the word (possibly because no one knows how many S's should be used to spell out Vedic's official name). Every rock - as determined by army, faction and list in an overall meta - has its paper. I think the problems show in faction skewed metas which it always will in wargaming because its much more expensive and time consuming to reroll than it would be in a video game. But no one thing I believe has come close to breaking the game when it has natural counters available in more than one faction. Closest to breaking the game IMO was the pokemon which let you ignore a critical gameplay feature of Infinity for one instance (and has no straightforward counter).
For the record, I don't think that crits are primary balancing factor as much as odds of spectacularly losing F2Fs over certain amount of orders in general, which depends more on your ability to use distance and terrain to stretch out opponent's pieces before they can actually bite you, and maaaaybe make sure that conditions are less favourable for him when this happens. So, it's mostly about positioning and movement, something that isn't being fundamentally changed by specific rules too often. As for actual crits and other less likely outcomes, relying purely on those are a trap IMO because as you play more games, relying on outcomes with lower probability will naturally lose you more games than otherwise for obvious reasons. Another important thing to note about this game's foundations working as equalizer is that comparing to some other TT games, difference in raw stats between what we consider good tool and a garbage tool for a particular task is relatively minuscule, at least as far as rolls go. We say that WIP 11 is terrible to do missions while WIP 14 is top-notch, yet it's merely 3 positions on a 20-sided die compared to, say, whatever systems that are built around 1d6s. It's other things that can make a world of difference between pieces in that regard.
We tend to overvalue +/-1 stats IMO. Part of the reason we consider skills more useful than stats is that +/-1 is worth a lot less than +/-3. This is why a Bandit is still a decent KHD: Redrum is soo good that it means that it can reliably fight higher WIP opponents with an active advantage. If anything getting WIP12 BTS3 rather than WIP13 BTS0 balances it out.* Compare Hecklers and Zulu Cobras. Both are considered pocket attack pieces: the Zulu edges out the Heckler not because of +1 BS but rather because of Breaker Rifles, Sensor+Assault Pistols, SMR w/ XVisor and proper Camo. Even if they were both BS12 the Zulu Cobra would still be better: it doesn't need the +1 BS to be really good. This is part of the reason why CC and ARM are considered overpriced. You don't really notice the small changes: CC14 vs CC13 is basically irrelevant as is ARM1 vs ARM2* but you pay for it. * Although because of the FTF mechanics +1 BS/WIP/PH also has a defensive property so it gets a little more confusing and makes BTS/ARM even less valuable. Random Infinity stats talk: +/-3 on a D20 is roughly the same as +/-1 on a D6. BS10 is the same odds BS3 and BS13 is ~ BS4. Between B2-B5 +/-1B ~= +/-3 stat. So very roughly BS10 B3 vs BS13 B2 is a 50/50 FTF. Generally you shouldn't take a FTF with less than +6 in your favour: so B4 BS13 vs B2 BS13 is decent but not great odds. The maths is loose enough that you can round off the +/-1 and the fundamentals will hold: so B4 BS12 vs B2 BS13 is still ok odds (although right on the cusp of 'a bad plan') and B4 BS14 vs B2 BS13 still carries similar risk to the baseline scenario. It gets skewy if the target numbers are really high or really low though. +1 stat has a cumulative effect as burst increases. So BS12 B3 benefits from the +1 BS three times in the FTF whereas CC14 benefits for the +1 CC only once. It's part of the reason why +1 BS is the single best stat upgrade (aka the reason why PanO was a mistake).
I think the Mukhtar is a good example of minimizing/maximizing unit effectiveness. It has no fat like the Khawarij do (Poison/high cc). While the flavor fits the Khawarij they are paying points for the flavor. The Mukhtar is straight to the point. It has what it needs for its fluff and for gameplay purposes, and has nothing else. The Intruder sits in a similiar situation, its Camo and MSV2 with a big gun. Thats all it needs, so thats all it has (of course it is MI, but longer range negates that weakness). I think all the new units are very well balanced, and fit in very well with Haqqislam. They are not invincible. They have 1 Armor, and PHYS11 so a flamethrower, other template weapons, or Missile Launchers will eat them. They do have increased defense against viral, but all they need is to fail one save and they are dead.
