My first game as Yu-Jing

Hey! and welcome to the jade empire. You've made a great choice :)

To answer some of your questions in brief: Yu jing can definitely play a hacking game. You might sometimes encounter factions which will have superior hackers however, so something to be aware of about "over investing".
Your basic synergies will be a basic zhanshi or celestial hacker with a husong or rui shi, plus a ninja killer hacker and maybe a guilang assualt hacker. Then you can use a second guilang with a repeater and the chaiyi messenger bot to get repeater coverage where you want it.

For your in game questions;

1. You did it right, and your opponent did it right too. First the basic rules - being attacked through smoke will allow the model being attacked to react as if the smoke was not there, however any attacks will be at -6 (dodging does not suffer a negative for balance reasons). Link teams of 4+ members gain sixth sense L2, this allows you to ignore the -6 for shooting back. Shooting through smoke with a Hsien is brutally effective, you'll find your opponents will quickly not leave models exposed to this tactic.

2. Yu Jing and JSA are two very different armies at this stage. If you enjoy the yu jing toolbox, then stick with yu jing. Any army can be good in the right hands and yu jing are still a very good army. Invincible army will be out in a few months which will rebolster our options as well!

3. Normally no. Units which can be hacked either have the "hackable" trait, like heavy infantry and TAGs, are REMotes or other hackers. The hacking charts on the wiki tell you what is an eligible target for each hacking program.

Congrats on the win too!

 

Yu Jing's hacking is mediocre to poor. It's not the worst, but that's purely on the back of some armies basically don't have access to hackers. Yu Jing has poor repeater coverage and no access to the more advanced hacking devices and programs.

If you want to hack alot pick a different faction, you'll mostly only use it to support some of your remotes or to remove a problem hacker that is trying to immobilise your heavy infantry. Trying to build a YJ army centered around hacking is pushing shit uphill and it only gets worse if you play into a faction that is legitimately good at hacking, like Aleph or Nomads.

You'll find it's like having a CC stat of 18. It looks good on paper, it's certainly better than some other people's. But when it's actually time to use it CC 18 performs about as shitty as your bog standard trooper and it's fucking useless against a model that's legitimately built to be a CC monster. You need all the support and special equipment and skills that go with it to actually make that CC stat work.

He was correct on all accounts. Link teams get bonuses dependant on the number of members they have in the link. At 4 members or more they get Sixth Sense level 2, which allows them to return fire through the smoke without the normal -6 penalty.

JSA isn't a better option in that sense, but Yu Jing is weaker by default from losing access to the JSA midfield skirmishers which were an important part of keeping rambo models out of your face in the early game. It exacerbates one of the Vanilla factions weaknesses which is a limited to poor ARO presence. It was further compounded by the fact that literally nothing was done to compensate things in return, which was a fucking idiotic move by CB, but you work with what you've got.

If you are struggling, switch to ISS. They remain top tier and were unaffected by losing the JSA stuff.

No.

 

Congrats on the win!

Mechanically, the biggest losses with JSA gone are the Oniwaban/Shinobu, Aragoto, and Raiden HRL. Yu Jing does have other competent-in-CC troops available to fill the role of the Domaru, though not at the points cost if you want HI. But Shaolin are always amusing for their cost.

The loss of the Oniwaban/Shinobu makes people less afraid to run big rambo models. Superior Infiltration and a CC24/25 MA4/5 Monoweapon could happily murder someone's TAG in a hurry. Almost as good as LT-hunting with an Impersonator in Haqq or Shas.

Aragoto took some learning to get max value. But a mimetic bike or two charging up the table with a Spitfire was fun.

The Raiden was a good backfield shooter, and another way to annoy people with more Camo Markers (IIRC, you could get 6 Camo markers in YJ before the Uprising: Daofei, Guilang, Guilang Minelayer+mine, Raiden HRL+mine) Made for a nasty game of Yu Jing Roulette.


IMO the big losses has been fluff, not mechanically. Not to downplay the loss of the JSA units, because we did lose unique capabilities. But the fluff was ... ugh. See if you can find a copy of the Uprising book you can read before buying. I wish I had.

 

More than that. Yuriko had Minelayer as well, and you forgot Lunah. Also the Guilangs could potentially also be minelayers

 

Yuriko sort of negates some of the shell game by telling your opponent that one of the markers in ZOC is a mine and you'll quickly run dry on SWC and AVA if all you do is get the Minelayers

 

You know one of the markers is a mine, but if you put her marker near two other markers, like say the Raiden and its mine, the question of which marker is a Raiden becomes alot more difficult.

I've put both mines on top of a building before then my opponent walks into LOF of the one that's in the open assuming it was the mine and then it's bad touch rocket time all of a sudden.

When you put an "all the camo markers" list down on it's not about winning. It's about sending a message. A message saying "You may win this game. But you are never going to trust a camo marker again and that's my goal here."

 

Yuriko doesn't have camo, and Lunah wasn't out yet when I was doing the worst of the Yu Jing Roulette. Plus, I usually used a Guilang MSR for one of them, for an MSV1 sniper.

Lunah can sorta fill the role of a Raiden Sniper, but that lacks the 'entertainment value' of the HRL (and is ~10pts more expensive!).

I suppose if I was going for maximum asshattery in a YJ list, I would use a Daofei Hacker (for an infiltrating specialist), two Guilang Minelayers, Lunah, and a Raiden HRL (were Raiden still available). That'd give 9 camo markers for ~160pts and 3SWC, and still enough points for a Zuyong LT HMG and Yan Huo HRMC, plus doc, engineer, and FO-bot.

But you're really better off playing camospam in Ariadna or Shas. There you can hand someone a blank sheet of paper as your Courtesy List and have 20+ camo markers on the table.

 

You'd also wish to add ninja KHD deployed in camo state downgraded to CH lvl2 then ;-)

 

Works too. I've made Hac Tao pretend to be mines/lunah as well before.

 

Missile Hac Tao pretending to be Luna? A nasty surprise indeed :)

 

No I don't rate the ML Hac Tao. Not having some kind of backup weapon like an SMG or Shotgun makes it a pretty shitty one trick profile.

The idea is just your opponent spends a turn avoiding what he thinks is an annoying ARO piece and just circumventing or ignoring it. Then it starts running at him and kicking his teeth in because it wasn't what he thought it was.

 

Could, but that starts to cut into mission-critical units.