This is one of the reasons I am looking forward to Peacemakers being re-sculpted. PanO needs to lean into their tech. Maybe more eclipse smoke, killer hacking device options, and auxbots
The idea that a military would ignore the concept of limiting their opponent's vision drives me nuts.
I can't bring myself to try the new plastics, but I've wanted to see PanO getting new equipment for a while now. We're kind of stuck between the designated high-tech and low-tech factions, so we need to make up the deficiency in gear access somehow and I think the REMs are the way to do it- Auxbots adding extra quantity to the battlefield and good KHDs to counter the easy option for killing that numbers advantage would be cool. I'm down for PanO being the horde faction! My guess on this one is that they assumed any opponent worth effort would have the visors to counter it, and Eclipse Smoke is rare and expensive. PanO was extremely good at countering Smoke themselves back when hard ARO was worth the investment.
There's already complaints that factions are slowly loosing some of their faction identity. You're complaining in this very thread about how PanO isn't the only faction with top tier shooters anymore. No one wants every faction to play the same. Someone coming into the game (any game really) picking factions solely based on looks or "feel" has to be prepared for the possibility that they might not agree with the factions strenghts or weaknesses. In that respect Infinity is great because overall every faction can do everything. To a greater or lesser degree (some terms and conditions apply). PanO absolutely can play the hacking game. Most PanO players choose not to (judging by this and other threads) simply because PanO isn't top tier in that regard. Fair enough but it's a choice you make. No one is forcing it upon you. Certainly not CB. Any newbie taking five minutes to ask around or do some research will easily get the basics of what each faction does well or sub-par. PanO IS behaving as advertised. You're trying to fixing something that's not a bug, it's a feature. If it is getting in the way of you having fun, maybe try something different? Either within PanO or another faction. If you don't have the money you can proxy. It all depends on if you look at everything as an obstacle or possibility.
Space mans can make it on a ship and hand it out to furry wranglers. I think the money faction can afford eclipse smoke lol. Even with the presence of visors, it requires a far more expensive solution to a $40 problem.
People simply need to determine what is their driving motivation to play. Do they want to play by Rule of Cool? Rule 303? Rule of Law? Leg Before Wicket Rule? Whichever one you pick, you make trade offs with other aspects of the game. I love the way PanO looks, I love the fact I can enter most shootouts confidently, and I know I’m making trade offs to enjoy those aspects. I don’t get impersonators, my midfield presence will be limited, etc. I accept the limitations inherent in getting the things I do want, rather than agitating for further homogeneity in the game.
Just gonna break this one down, because you actually make some solid arguments in here that deserve to be talked through point-by-point. This one I actually agree with completely. I do think that with faction identity as heavily eroded as it is now, though, it's worth removing the last few big blocks so every faction can play at least a little in every field of Infinity play- easier than Uprising half the factions in the game to put all the evil back in Pandora's box, and fairer than just having a few factions with access to all the toys. In PanO's case, this would probably be limited to giving Acon, SWF and Varuna something Warband-like and NCA and SWF a real Skirmisher- which would really just be making the Locust useful. Again, mostly agreed here. Players picking purely on looks or fluff open themselves up to disappointment, but you'll often find developers put together these aspects to match the feel of the faction on the tabletop. This is something Warhammer actually does very well, for example. Factions with shining knights and advanced guns tend to be elite, ramshackle-looking groups are often hordes, CC weapons front and centre means melee, et cetera. This dissonance is part of why so many people on these forums hate minis with a CC stat in the low teens swinging swords about, or the female Grunt's ARM3 woolen jumper. Infinity is largely quite good about letting players have a little of everything in their lists in most factions, far better than most competitors, but it could be better. On the Hacking point, it's less because PanO don't have top-tier Hacking and more because top-tier Hacking destroys standard options. Nobody without Upgrade programs runs true Hacking skew because it's so easily torn apart by a single Interventor in a pittance of orders. I actually love the Hacking side of the game, the rare occasions where I can play my REM and Hacker lists without running into Morans are some of the most fun games I've played, and I earnestly wish for Jazz, Bit and even the KoJ to be nuked from orbit so everyone's able to play it properly again. It's very much a gamewide problem and needs to be fixed by either bringing the baseline up (as we've seen with most dedicated Hacking units, even the Morat) or nerfing the few problem pieces. The official channels aren't very good about this. The obvious anecdote concerns the several years after Uprising where Yu Jing was still billed as the CC faction despite being provably the worst at it in the game, but PanO's sold on tech and equipment that it just doesn't excel with, Nomads aren't remotely underdogs anymore and Combined Army have some of the best Order spam this edition despite allegedly being a very elite army. While other players tend to be accurate and helpful (Infinity's actual community of players is great), CB's own website is pretty useless and that's the first place most people will look. As an aside, I just took a look at the factions section to double-check in case I was wrong; it's gotten so much worse. So many marquees and subpages that mostly consist of fluff and "Buy Now" buttons, and the only units shown are "Heroes" picked from the character lineup of each Sectorial, doesn't reflect the game at all anymore. I was honestly considering getting a few ORCs and giving this game another go tomorrow, but that website's worse than some gacha games on phones. I picked up casual WH40K, actually. Been having fun. I've just been screwed over too many times by CB's lack of restraint to keep investing in Infinity, and while I value the games I get I'm not sinking any more money into armies that I can't trust to keep doing what I bought them to do. When MRRF or NCA come back, if the reworks catch my interest (which isn't likely, I hate named Characters being vital to my armies on a fluff level and CB seems to be pushing them hard) I might try and catch up to this game again, otherwise I'm going to keep going with what I have- which is a solid NCA lineup with a few other factions I can mix things up with in casual games.
Pretty spot on. Most factions can shoot or outshoot PanO if they want to. PanO has a hard time competing in the fields other factions do. With the influx of characters, random crossovers from their other games, and just getting really loose on what can go where most faction identities have become "We do everything well, but we do this best".
First of all, thank you for a well thought out and soft-spoken reply. I truly appreciate that. Owe you a beer! Sure, I can absolutely see your point here. However, to me this is a good example of how these kinds of discussions happen in a vacuum so to speak. It's just number crunching. My sub-par (actually average) PanO hacker versus the most elite hacking unit in the game. Of course you're at a disadvantage. But Infinity, unlike many similiar games, is played on the table (as opposed to at list making). Meaning that a basic KHD unit with BTS 3 and Wip 13 or there abouts in the right place and the right time will have a decent chance at killing pretty much every other hacker out there - except maybe your Interventor BTS 9 or a few other examples - simply because your average KHD hacker will have B3 versus B1 in ARO. Infinity is also a game or rock-papper-GML and you can and maybe should bring several lists depending on which opponent, table layout and mission you will play that day. It is absolutely doable to tweak your basic favourite list. It's not like you need to bring several completely separate armies. There's so many different levers and fixes you can make to work around or with these things. I can totally get that some people feels like that's unfun or unfair and there's really no right or wrong way to think about it. But I feel that these discussions reads a bit like "our toys should be just as good as anyone else's toys or it's unfair". I can't but help feel that it goes against a well established core design philosophy of CB. That said I absolutely agree that some armies out there, I'm sure PanO is one of them, deserves a little more love from CB than others. I've got one of my usual opponents playing Druze, training for an upcoming tournament. Let me tell you that I'm quite tired of E/M grenade launcher spam. I could have brought my Morats and been pretty much invulnerable and instead I brought a Charontid. That's on me. I realise that's a bad example (I'm a vet with three different armies) but hopefully you get my point. What I had to do was sacrifice my Greif OP to babysit the Charontid. A very sub-par solution but you work with what you have eh, eh? Yeah, I have to agree there. CB just isn't very good at welcoming newbies. Infinity is a dense game to get into not only with the rules complexity but also to pick your very first faction. While I'm 100 % a fanboy of Bostria and CB I feel they could do a lot more to help out and alleviate some of the problems. Having a proper webpage with easy to find identifying images for one. It's a crime that it falls to the community to pick up that slack. Take care man and good luck with 40k! ps. I wrote this fast and a bit tounge-in-cheek (it's getting late here)
I agree with a lot of this. Just to double up, the hacking game is a win harder scenario. Factions with access to good hackers tend to wind up having insane access to hacking tools. The limited number of hackers and low volume of dice involved propel certain hackers into the stratosphere. Being able to toss a hacker behind a tinbot B, chucking pitchers, having access to improved programs and low cost high quality hackers winds up pushing factions that can't compete out or into niche hacking. Imo, I value a camo hacker over the KoJ when I bring one so I can control more of when he engages. Otherwise, just a fusilier hacker to draw orders from my tag when its possessed and write him off.
Nothing like a little Jazz behind a Tinbot -6 and a couple of ancillary hackers floating around in camo state...
Though she is good, she can die, though I have to say I prefer to just shoot her instead of engaging in hacking duels.
Exactly. Or we can recognize that if she’s hiding behind a TinBot, that means there’s a Mobile Brigada that’s down Fireteam bonuses and is a ripe target for one of our shooters, be it a Bagh Mari, Nisse, Bolt, or Kamau. Fight on your own terms, not hers.
Usually Jazz null-deploys against NCA; with Morans in the midfield you don't have anything quick enough to punish it. I've played fully half of my N4 non-casual games against Jazz, to the point that I've started taking a tailored list with three Locusts in it as my counter to midfield Hacking. It costs a full third of my points and Locusts are pretty bad, but nobody expects NCA to Infiltrate something over the midline (to my knowledge I'm the only person around here who actually does it at all without a +6) so there's usually a way to get shots into something the opponent needs. It works, but it's so costly I can't sneak much else fun into the list and it's always one of my tournament lists, with the other one making heavier use of Hacking and Hackables being used in all other missions and matchups.
Honestly I think that PanO would benefit a lot from having Eclipse access. It keeps us from being able to smoke shoot which I know a lot of people are worried about. But it also allows us to find alternative options besides cautious more shoot.
Long time ago learned that a “named character” is just a fancy way tabletop miniature games have to call “limited access special profiles usually linked with a cool miniature”. And stopped caring about named characters proliferation on games. For example, you could have an attitude of “Why Kuroshi Rider, Aragoto Sekenbutai Rikogun Shoi, would appear in every black ops operation that have a Aragoto Sekenbutai Haris? This is ridiculous!”, that would lead to frustration and disenchantment… … or you could say that such named character profile is just a fancy way to say “The Rikugun Shoi of the Aragoto Sekenbutai regiment usually acts, is equipped and performs like Kuroshi, so it is not THE Kuroshi rider, but just a regular Rikugun Shoi of the regiment, which are naturally sparsely and therefore only one of them would appear on the black ops scenario” And enjoy the game as it is. Not counting that this much more nice approach opens the door for fancies miniatures conversions that would make such named character profile YOUR profile. For example, my Kuroshi is mounted on an actual 0-12 Starmada’s Lawkeeper bike. To further enhance the fact she is the Rikugun Shoi (and 100% of the time my Lt) of the regiment and have a more authoritative looks and aesthetics.
With MO it's a different story. Corregidor has it ridiculously easy to builid a huge hacking network using pitchers and repeaters. In fact if they try, and not that hard enough, they can make the whole table except your DZ a hackable zone. MO's shooters usually are hackable HI with the exception of the occasional Trinitarian, Dart or Black Friar. I don't know, but for me this particular situation is pretty desperate. You risk to have your ass hacked into oblivion as you carefully move between pitchers and repeaters to take down the key piece of the enemy, you spend a ton of orders taking out said pitchers an repeaters from a safe distance, wasting a whole turn accomplishing nothing, or you deposit all your faith in that Trinitarian to take out that key piece, and pray the gods that a) your Trinitarian is well positioned to do so, otherwise you'll waste precious orders to position him and b) the dice are on your side. If I take your example, let's assume I am able to kill the Mobile Brigada using a more or less acceptable amount of orders, then what? If I was lucky enough to have a Knight of Santiago KHD in my list, and if it's still my active turn I can try to hack Jazz back using her repeater/pitcher network. We both have firewall mods, the KoS has a tinbot and Jazz is behind her repeater/pitcher. The KoS uses Trinity, which has a +3 that balances out with Jazz's firewall and Jazz hacks back with exactly the same mods. It's the KoS B3 WIP 13 hack against Jazz's B1 WIP 14 hack. Doable but risky, since she has better defense against hacking attacks and the KoS will still be using orders from an already used order pool (remember we killed the Mobile Brigada in this turn). Best case scenario is, the dice gods favour us, but we depleted all of our orders to kill a mobile brigada and Jazz, and now it's Corregidor's turn. Worst case scenario, the KoS gets killed and it's game over for MO. The other thing is, I'm 100% sure that a Corregidor list will include Jazz, it will be idiotic not to have her. On the other hand, the KoS KHD is not an auto include anymore, in fact, I've almost completely stopped using it since the last KHD rules update. So they are using a 22 point unit that is an auto include to wreak havoc on any non anti Jazz dedicated MO list, while MO is forced to include the expensive 39 points KoS just to have a chance to reach third turn. Not to mention the ridiculous reliance on good dice rolls so the whole plan doesn't fall apart. Unless you go first and wipe the table in the first turn, most of the times MO can't fight in its own terms simply because it doesn't have the tools to do so. You have to rely only in shooting and tanking, and we've said enough times that an army with some tools and some resources can shoot better than MO even if it has lower BS. Sorry for the long and boring post, but to say that Jazz is an easy thing to deal with just because we may be able to kill the Mobile Brigada in her fireteam without proper analysis seems way too unrealistic.
Exactly, and assuming Corregidor only brought one hacker. I can easily bring 2-3 hackers in CJC and still have enough guns and other to do stuff. It's not hard to offer a ton of midfield challenges and still have a decent ARO presence. A limited FB tsyklon, EVADER FB, MB ML, etc are good hard AROs. Don't forget the likely targeted state... God help them if nomads go first, enjoy the GML.
