And they are also an intensely frustrating element of current listbuilding when key scoring criteria is tied to this AVA1 unit, as well as immersion-breaking for more narrative games if they are overly prevalent. In NCA for example, Shona Carano is the only moderately powerful anti-materiel CC in the faction and almost unavoidable for Looting and Sabotaging, and if she is killed the mission becomes very difficult. Uma Sorensen is also our only Unhackable midfield Specialist, and so important for safety strategies that I see very few lists without her- not a serious problem from a competitive gameplay perspective, but very silly for anyone still trying to make narrative Infinity work. Able to take a full Core and have it present enough of an obstacle to the opponent that it makes its points back with decent play and average luck. People like Joan and the Boys, and the biggest feels-bad I ever inflicted on an opponent was catching that link under an E/Mauler and Repeater from a Zero, then Oblivion-ing Joan. More than half a list dismantled in three Orders from a sub-20pt Skirmisher. I'm not an MO expert myself, and in fact intensely dislike playing active-turn Fireteams in general, so you're better off getting ideas from one of the MO players about specifics. Experience. It's high investment for low reward, and your forward Repeater projection risks Troops and provokes AROs so if the opponent gets there first you're at a disadvantage. You can make a fight of it against Haqq or Yu Jing, even win if you're smart, but your numbers and projection are so inferior that it's almost wasted points against the AIs or Nomads, and they're common enough that you can't count on Hacking even being a part of the plan in a tournament format. WIP 13 and a smattering of BTS really doesn't cut it against walls of Pitcher coverage and UPGRADEs, no matter how much you spend, so I'm quite comfortable claiming the faction is bad at Hacking- if no amount of skew lets you even make a game of it against the most common opponents, it can't be part of a core strategy and becomes a "nice to have" at best. That one was from the tier list video, where it was stated to be a problem by people who play at far more tournaments than I do these days. It has always been a problem, with only ORCs and Patsy having an ablative Wound for template trading and the Echo Bravo being a decent but not exceptional flanking gunner from day one in N3, but they had a fairly definitive long-range shooting advantage at the time that made up for it.
There is no mechanical difference than any other AVA 1 unit like Garudas, Blockers ectr, except they have a name and backstory, their design is made to cover a niche need in a sectorial. With stealth alone you can do that, but MO lists are more complicated that that, you really need to play MO to understand the problems MO list building and list execution faces. In a sectorial were you can have Bulleteers duo with bolt hackers and killer hackers, have the largest AVA of REMs and such a wide variety of hackers including devas but also infiltrating hackers and hidden deployment hackers, I am not sure why you cannot make a list that has core component the hacking element. And remember if you want to enter an enemy repeater network with a remote you dodge into it. I think people have the misconception that the fact that Varuna has a really strong defensive firepower means they do not have offensive elements, they do and a good Varuna player should utilize the gaps such defensive firepower creates to advance and position their offensive elements.
If I can step in this discussion, the thing with Varuna is that anyway, it’s a sectorial that goes forward on the table very slowly. You need your hellots in front of your links / Tag. And only once there’s a breach and you held the line, you can push forward (typically turn 3). Does that make VIRD a non offensive faction? Semantics. ‘They are good in active turn. They are excellent in reactive turn. But certainly they are not going heads down like MAF can do, or attack the midfield as of turn 1 like Shas can do
I think this is missing the point a little. Yes NCA has a wide variety of hackers, some which are high WIP even, but they don't have the projection tools to really make a hacking focused game viable. Imo the hacker sitting behind the repeater network doesn't really matter that much unless it's something really exceptional or unique - like a Stigmata, Anathematic, Dokkabei or something sitting behind a tinbot (-6). When you are evaluating the ability of a faction to play the hacking game, the most important thing is their projection. NCA's only method of projecting it's hacking network is the Peacemaker which... I like Peacemakers, but I don't think they are that good unfortunately - just too expensive for how unwieldy they are imo (S4 sucks bad, even with 6-4). But even leaving that aside, as a hacking projection tool, it's really not that fantastic. It doesn't have the cost effectiveness or ease of use of the canonically great hacking projection units like B&K, Hunzakuts, Hecklers, Morans, linked Barids and linked Dartoks. I don't think building NCA around hacking is building to it's strengths. NCA also doesn't have access to (HD) camo infil hackers, which are pretty valuable in their own right as defensive midfield tools. Hexas have half the package, but being DZ bound is rough. For my money, the best hacking projection tool in PanO is the Crocman FO with it's deployable repeater. Expensive for sure, but very strong in mechanical terms (HD so it's hard to counterdeploy, camo, FO and dep rep gives it a fork), and it has a lot of utility outside of just enabling offensive hacking plays (camo infil specialist, mim-6 midfield combi).
I mean knights cost less because they are hackable. If you take lots of things that can be hacked and no ways of dealing with to be hacked... you're gonna be taken apart by hacking lists. This is true of all hackable things. They get the discount and the flipside is you get the weakness too Nomads aren't even the most oppressive hacking faction imo. CA is.
Both can be really nasty but it kinda depends on the list construction imo. Vanilla CA is very reliant on B&K for their projection - if you can scalpel them out, their hacking game plan can fall apart. The other side to it though is that the Anathematic is an absolutely absurd unit, and can even turn your opponent's own hacking projection against them, as they are pretty much the only hacker in the game that can just walk into an enemy repeater net and expect to mind blast everything in it to death. Vanilla Nomads not only have some excellent projection, but they also have so much projection - Morans, Hecklers, Pi-Well sync, Zero Dep Reps - it's not unreasonable for a list to take a lot of these at once. Vanilla Nomads don't have any hackers as overwhelming as the Anathematic (you can actually Trinity Jazz if you get a repeater on her), and it's not uncommon to see lists that only take a single hacker. Granted, it's also not uncommon to see Vanilla Nomads lists that take multiple hackers, and the Stigmata is a lot harder to scalpel. I think broadly I'd say Vanilla Nomads have a stronger hacking game, if anything just because they have more redundancy - but the ability of the Anathematic to charge into enemy repeater nets and murder what ever is in there is pretty crazy.
I was just thinking about how to make Order Sergeants - and Auxilia, for that matter - useful, and part of my solution would be giving them FastPandas, as well as equipping their Auxbots with Repeaters. This should help coverage some.
I've been toying around with SAA for the last few months, and the Regular Hacker with it's fastpanda is a really fun profile, and honestly probably reasonably balanced. I do wish it didn't have the GL which kinda bloats it out a little (esp in terms of SWC), but it's p fun.
It's one of my favourite profiles and I do appreciate the GL for spec fire in a pure regular link. It also carries an inbuilt SWC discount for the hacker + GL combo that would cost 1.5 SWC in a Fusilier link. Fantastic utility piece. My only gripe is that it never got its own sculpt.
The problem is that the disadvantage, as things stand now, far outweighs the advantage. Today it is much more advantageous to be unhackable than to have a little more ARM and 1 additional wound, especially when, regardless of the discount for being hackable, you continue to pay a premium for using an HI.
Does it? If you deal with their hackers it's not a disadvantage at all. In fact it's purely a discount. The idea that it is better to be unhackable and have 1 W flies in the face of the majority of community opinion. There's a reason why people aren't running expensive 1 W guys over 2 W hackable guys, having 2 W/NWI is perhaps one of the best things a troop profile can have
I think the frenzy discount and a panzerfaust on order sergeants would not break the game. The HRL would could do with a MSV1 visor (and no panzerfaust) to make him a bit more consistent as an assault piece.
As corner guards or - kinda - warband substitute, sure. But by now they're N2 unit in N4 enviroment, showing their age and being boring af. I think they should be the utility unit for MO. Not touching their statline (maybe throwing in Shock Immunity), but expanding their loadouts to something along these lines: Order Sergeant FTO - Combi Rifle, Nanopulser, Shock Mines, FastPanda (Minelayer) Order Sergeant FTO - Light Shotgun, Nanopulser (Doctor) Order Sergeant FTO - Light Shotgun, AP Mines, D-Charges (Engineer) | Deactivator Order Sergeant FTO - Combi Rifle, Nanopulser, FastPanda (Hacker) | HD+, Tinbot: Firewall [-3] Order Sergeant FTO - HRL, Nanopulser (Marksmanship) Order Sergeant - Combi Rifle, Nanopulser, Shock Mines, FastPanda (Minelayer) | Auxbot_R (HFT, Repeater) Order Sergeant - HRL, Nanopulser (Marksmanship) | Auxbot_R (HFT, Repeater) FTOs being able to link in their own Duo/Haris, 0-2 able to join Crosier/Magister fireteams, and 1 being a Wildcard At the same time I'd remove Trauma Docs and Curators, essentially folding them into Order Sergeants for MO Their cost would went up, but every option would bring some utility and have a reason to exist. For Auxilia I would mostly expand their Auxbot roster, so they'd have several with different functions.
I agree that OS should be utility unit, but OS doctor and OS engineer will kick Infirmarers and Curators out. Marksman HRL will kick Black Friars. More so if they become wildcard. I think maybe pure core with Crosiers would help them, but I'm not sure that's a good direction. I don't have any good idea to help them.
Absolutely. The Dartok is a good add to that list, because of how Veteran interactions with hackers - if he's hiding in the back, Immobilizing only prevents it from using the pitcher, so you can only really stop him from making hacking AROs with Trinity, and he has Dogged and a lot of BTS to deal with that. Pretty much the best case for NCA being good at hacking is that the Bolt Hackers can be much worse Daroks (lacking dogged, the role compression of having their own pitcher, or the free UPGRADE on Trinity and getting regular hacking programs, on top of costing more) but that's torpedoed by the abysmal repeater projection in every PanO sectorial outside of SAA. It's a model you probably want at least two of if you're leaning into SAA hacking. You want to reliably land you hacking AROs and have multiple dice to work with against enemies pushing your repeaters, plus potentially have an extra guy to walk into midfield once it's reasonably safe, throw down some Pandas, and then find a corner to hide in. Since you'd rarely take a second fusilier grenade launcher and never a third, it end up eating through your SWC very quickly. That said, it's an excellent profile, even compared to line infantry hackers in other factions. That's probably part of it, but at that point I'm curious as to what you think the problems with MO are. Anyway, stealth is a great tool until the enemy does literally anything to interfere. For example, any core-linked hacker who ignores it. Moreover, any cheap midfield unit is going to force some kind of response - you need to send in something else, and one problems of MO listbuilding you learn from playing it is how brutally expensive everything is, and shelling out 150+ points on a heavy core is usually going to compromise your ability to take expensive PanO skirmishers and (what passes for) midfield. And yes, Trinitarians are a well-optimized unit and very effective in their use cases. However at 23+ points each they are still pricy in an absolute sense, and their selection of weapons means that only the MSR reliably really comes out ahead compared to the usually-cheaper Mimetism (-3) skirmishers elsewhere. This is workable when you're playing with a TAG as the core of the list, or using the KOTHS, who is more self-sufficient, but when you take a massively more expensive option as as your big stupid hackable wincon, you put the squeeze on everything else. And that's not even talking about passing the other gear checks. No Pitchers No fastPanda No infiltrating repeaters/minelayer + deployable repeater/etc No Upgrades He's not proposing MSV + Marksman, and the visor is why you take the Friar at all. You could get away with something like Crossier MSV/Spitfire + OS Marksmanship HRL, but the range loss on the spitfire and subsequent risk of getting picked off/restrictions on use (not to mention cost) seem like enough of a tradeoff that they can coexist. I fail to see the problem.
Infirmarers as they are now are a botched unit and should get reworked as well. Given that MO doesn't lack competent combat specialist they should be pushed into more specialised role, maybe getting Doctor (2W) and Dogged, which could keep them relevant in sectorial with multiple HIs. Curators - as I've said, they would simply get folded into OS, that's the plan. Black Friar has BS 13, MSV2, and built-in Sixth Sense (the last one should be a general Black Friar skill tbh), it'd do just fine in this competition.
"Just win the game first, then it's not a problem". Since you pretty clearly haven't read the thread, a quick rundown - anytime it's not veering wildly off-topic to talk about weapon labels, "just deal with the hackers" is the core recurring theme of the thread (along with bad trading ability, maybe). How did no one ever think of this basic game design concept? Only a luminary who's completed the excruciating study of watching a YouTube video on basic game design could have come up with such deep wisdom. I'd expect no less from the visionary author of "just win the game lmao". Surely none of us groundlings could possibly have any more nuanced issues with the relative power of the various mechanics, the paucity of the hackability discount, or the questionable decision to design a faction purely around hackable units and then not include particularly good tools to deal with hacking. Source: I made it the fuck up. No, they're running cheap 1W guys instead. But you're just flat wrong about the preference 2W hackables over expensive 1W guys as well. Unfortunately, we do have at least some stats for this (Infinity Statics Initiative). Picking cVA as an random first place to look, since they're the most popular single faction and better than most armies at most things, the preference rate by frequency seems to look like this: Cheep order generators (Free space) > Cheap warbands > Expensive 1W models (LI/MI/SK) > TAGs and TAG equivalents (Anathematics/Charonites) > Heavy infantry. There are a few wrinkles here - adjusting for points would probably make the TAGs the highest-investment single category - but the Anathematic is the best hacker in the game and so isn't really an issue on that front, and the Sphinx has camouflage. 2W hackable units are very rare, however. In ITS 15, the most popular appears to be the Rindak in 6% of lists. Good number of Speculos, Noctifers, and Calibans, though. Noctifer is basically 2W, but unbackable. I also checked Steel Phallus and vAleph, since you'd sort of expect the Greeks to do heavy infantry, and both are doing pretty well right now. But the only ones to show up with any frequency in SP were 2W + shock immune dudes. At least the average list spends like 1 more point on Hector than some random 31 point 1W character with TacAware who's in 45% of lists. In Vanilla the Asuras get the consolation of being marginally more popular than the Rindak. So at this point, it wasn't looking very good for the "people aren't running expensive 1 W guys over 2 W hackable guys" theory, but maybe I haven't been giving them a fair shake. I need to look at a real HI sectorial - Hassam Barahim. Yep, the weird assassin cult that inexpiably has a the same roster of HIs than the Haqq SWAJ team. But this gives us a comparison, in a sectorial where link bonuses offer HI something over TAGs, but plenty of 1W options are on the table. And yeah. Asawira are pretty popular. So all you need to do is add a template weapon that can do ARO forks, BTS 9, a strictly better doctor, and AP ammo on the SWC weapon for basically the same price and BS and you can make an HI people actually take. But HB has a much lower winrate than I'd sort of expected, so that isn't as illustrative as I'd thought. Tohaa were a lost cause - the Ectros and that one Ectros character were both around `5% pick rates, but I'm not sure they even count - Tohaa HI have 3W total, and are downgraded but unhackable on the last one. At this point, I was running out of factions that had actual sample sizes (100+). Bakunin was the last place to look. And Riot Grills are pretty popular. 68% of lists recorded take an average of two of them. Combined with 80% of lists taking over 2.5 moderators and the RG ML being the most popular profile by a fair margin, it seems likely that they are favorable as an MSV ARO in a Moderator core. Cenobites are actually less popular than I expected, being taken slightly less often than Morias and Custodiers at 35%, but showing up in larger numbers when they do. Task Managers are even less common at 25%, but still more popular than HI other factions. There's no way to tell if they are being used for the Regular Morlock core - but Morlocks are extremely popular, as is every similiar unit when it's an option. Still, this is the first sectorial we've found where hackable heavy infantry are actually reliably more popular than expensive 1W models. All it took was cramming them all full of discounts and value skills and giving them flexible, strong link options in a sectorial with strong hackers and strong network projection. Since someone is going to ask - Vanillia YJ is a mess I don't feel like wading through - but their most popular HI by far is the Hac Tao Special Unit (45% pick rate, more than twice the next contender) is a camo unit. Plenty of expensive 1W units like the Guilang Skirmishers, Daoying Operative Control Unit, and Major Lunarch are generally all more popular than 2W hackables. The most popular hackable unit wasn't even an HI, it's the Yaofang, which has cammo and a ton of value stuff. And, of course, the most important case - Kosmofloat, in which the unhackable 2W Volkolak, Unknown Ranger, and Mirage-5 Bear Team are all more than twice as popular as the most-picked hackable HI. Volkolak are in 70% of lists to the Patcher's 30%, with 1.14 of both being taken if they are picked. In conclusion, people running expensive 1W guys over hackable 2W guys. Players are almost always opting for 3W options if they are going to be committing to running an offensive hackable unit; if the 2W models show up, it's when they're jammed with discounts and value, camo being strongly preferred.
Deal with their hackers? Are we still talking about MO? The thing is that the decision is not between a hackable HI and a non-hackable LI of the same cost because it is not a realistic scenario. The decision generally is between using one hackable HI or using the equivalent points in two, or sometimes more, non-hackable LIs. Suppose I have the possibility of using a HI of 32 points or two LIs of 16 1- Both options represent the same number of wounds 2- Two LIs give me more orders than one HI 3- The HI has a better ARM 4- The HI is hackable, the LIs are not 5- Two LIs can cover more LoF than one HI, although this advantage is merely circumstantial Even taking the scenario you are posing verbatim, I leave this question. Hospitaller with BSG for 29 points or Trinitarian with BSG for 28? The question answers itself.
In this particular example it's because units compared are decent skirmisher specialist and barebones HI in sectorial who needs all of the former it can get, but can swim in the latter. Trinitarian brings much more utility. Interestingly, according to the same data the most popular unit in MO lists are Teutons, which shows that 2W hackable units aren't exactly shunned. In this particular case they are pretty decent and inexpensive HI warband, and Spitfire NCO, most popular variant, has good utility and meshes well with linked Lieutenants. And the fact that people take inexpensive 1W units over hackable 2W ones doesn't prove they prefer the former over latter, it means they prefer running lists with useful order pool.
