It is obviously not ready for release when the fireteam rules are released only in pdf because they want to "revisit them in the future"
There's a difference between something being less effective and something being banned. We have room to, as being discussed right now, improve elite units, versus just fucking banning low tech low cost armies. One route can maintain diversity, the other outright removes it.
Did they actually say that? I mean I figured things had taken some bumps due to covid but jesus christ that does not fill me with confidence in terms of this not being a rushed product.
They have done it several times during N3. Humansphere, Uprising, Third Offense, Daedalus' Fall. I think they wanted to put thing won't change during the N4 in the rulebook, so rolls, weapons, equipments are there but not unit profiles and fireteam. "Revisit them in the future" means they can add new profiles and rework fireteams in the future, not an unready rushed product.
For what it's worth, I would consider one of the first things they could have tried before moving to the 15 trooper limit would be to remove or cut back on a lot of the mechanics and discounts that they use to game their own system in developing point costs. All those cheap warbands going up to more appropriate levels (sorry, that also includes Kuang Shi) might impact the game more healthily overall. Most egregiously, I am extremely disappointed that Frenzy is still going to be a thing.
First of all: Adil in power armour, sexy. Now that that is out of the way, let me say that you do not fix order spam by making elite units better. That's how you get ISS - order spam with a few elite units. Orders are the engine that drives your units and if you can have a bigger engine for better elites, there is not as much incentive to make elite armies. No, the key to reducing order spam is to make orders more expensive or simply limit order batteries using AVA. Like in White Banner... And as a final remark: ISS is fully capable of making an elite army. There's less adaptation required than you might think. We'll just have to see where N4 takes Wu Ming and Cranes, don't we?
I agree. When everyone else has a 15 man limit, ISS doesn't need 20 orders to compete effectively. Heck even Caldonia can actually work well at 15 orders max because it has a lot of good units and links that are not used merely because people obsess over order spam. And they do so because its hard to compete vs 20 orders lists unless your at least 16+.
The idea is when you're making this balance is that the ISS effect is either non existent or far rarer. In this scenario you're not supposed to have your cake and eat it. ISS is an example of an army that shouldn't be able to get huge buffs to their elite models, run their mixed links, and also put a load of Kuang Shi on the table. As far as it goes anyway with ISS as it stands for every discount you get on Kuang Shi you're paying for some stupid CC stat or gimmick gear on another unit somewhere else so it mostly evens out, the raw combat power of the ISS link leaders isn't as hyper optimised as other stuff.
They didn't before, either. Granted, ISS didn't do very well at 10 orders, but 15 is very possible and more than 4 Kuang Shi kind of wasn't so much a gold standard as it was fool's gold to use as standard.
It's an inelegant solution to the real problem, which is atrocious under-pricing of whorebands and pseudo-whorebands. If they fixed that, it might not be necessary to implement hard unit counts. We might even end up with both, which could be overkill. But whatever, hordes of impetuous warbands are something I put up with in the game because I like everything else, so I wont miss them.
I mean keep in mind the design standard for ISS was for an absolute show of brute (police) force and they are the embodiment of disable the hand so it cannot press the button philosophy. There was supposed to be nothing subtle about the army, they traded all their skirmishers and specialists pretty much for raw order count and were given, at the time, a uniquely cost efficient core link that mixed a HI bruiser with LI body count that was the precursor to the mixed link madness we see now. The entire way the sectorial was designed was to slam a tonne of orders through a couple of high tech beatsticks. Even now there's not that many armies that can replicate that kind of list to that degree. Ariadna certainly has plenty of high order count options, but they run those orders through low tech low cost shit. They're not spamming orders through a BS14 Su Jian.
I don't think I agree that the philosophy was to design an army with a metric tonne of orders, I'd say that that's the least important part of their design concepts and more of a community invention.
If I'm a designer of infinity and I give you 8 orders for 5pts each it's most definitely a major part of my design intent for the faction. But then again I'm not a coke addled Spaniard so who knows.
Eh... If I gave you 8 orders for 5 points each with an attached rule that I predicted would make nearly all of them suicide during round 1, I wouldn't expect players to build their lists exclusively with those as order batteries unless my playtesters highlighted that it's quite possible for them not to suicide all the time.
Yes. With an opportunity cost of taking up the Core slot. Which incidentally makes it very convenient for supplying Hsien with smoke, but also makes it very difficult to make proper use of Bao. Honestly, the biggest problem with mid-level order lists for ISS is the crap that is ISS' mid-cost units.
No you just hotswap the links. You deploy with the Kuang Shi linked, and then if you're running the crane link with them you swap the link after the impetuous step and go to town. Even if they die on turn 2 you've had 2 turns of orders generated out of them.
The most simple solution would have been, to make the cheap spammable profiles more expensive. That would automatically decreased the order count by one or two.
Some people might think it's a serious attack on CB staff, but they probably also think triskeles are prominent hate symbols. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
