Poll: All being equal, vote for the Vanilla Factions and Sectorals that you think are the strongest overall right now in the game!
If this is supposed to have any meaning it should be moved to Human Sphere section of forums. @psychoticstorm hm?
Ideally a great way to ask this question would be to have people create an order of the full list or to have a reactive form that asks you A or B? Over and over in differemy combinations to help the user meaningfully express their assessment. I don't like the way this form is set up, because it's too binary and noisy.
I mean... we could just bug CB as long as it takes for them to spill the beans on ITS Win/Lose Ratio for the Factions. They have the data lying around, it's just a matter of if they want to make it public. I'd recon there will be a few surprises, and some different metrics for i.e. tournament top 3 placings vs overall performance. Pretty sure some lower rated Sectorials will perform way better than average at top tables as a result of a few standout players that can utilize the Faction/Sectorial to it's fullest (or simply had a lucky streak).
Which would again be not that deciding as it wouldnt distinguish between some "rock paper" matchups or "hi/low skill players". Also it would be a disaster to this forums ("X is objectively bad! we need to fix X, why are you not fixing X?")
Oh! Maybe people could then use these factions/sectorials in some sort of competitive endeavour to determine the victor in each pairing? We want people to have fun, so we'll call it a game... and it's sort of representative of warfare, so maybe we can announce it as, I dunno... a gamewar? Doesn't really roll off the tongue. I'll have a think.
We should probably add something to the ITS scoresheet for 'game had a disproportionate amount of luck happen', just to help separate that. I mean, we all know that 1 die in 20 should crit, normally (barring wacky stuff like CC monsters). But when someone gets a streak of lucky crits (or unlucky ones!), that should be noted somewhere if you're trying to use ITS results to adjust balance.
I think it opens up some interesting debates, ideas, perceptions on what individual or many people think about which factions/sectorals are strong, which are average, and which are a bit weaker. Of course the skill/tactics of the player is most important, and building a good list has it’s importance too in giving yourself the right tools for the mission. However if “equal” like players skill wise (for the sake of this discussion), played all the different armies, would some be like playing hard mode vs easy vs average strength? Thought another way, (play along and humour me here) if you had to pick 1-2 armies to stake your life on (that after having had time to play/learn them over a year etc), and then play in a “hunger games” tourney type style battle to the death (where the winner moved on and the loser lost his head in a guillotine or whatever) , which armies would you choose??? (which do you think would give you the best chance, all other things considered). Also, no one would have a clue which scenario/missions would be played at this battle to the death (imaginary) tourney, maybe it would be a random draw the day before etc, lol. Hope that helps clarify things a bit... in a fun way!
We had a tournament in which we tracked crits and rewarded the player with most of them. Next tournament we rewarded the player with fewest crits. It's interesting to see how my dice did their best to avoid giving me any undue rewards.
When I played 40k, the guy running the tournaments always included a 'broken dice award' for the guy with the worst dice luck in the tournament. 'Prize' was a set of new dice, usually a dozen d6s. Lots cheaper in Infinity... Too bad the Maow Miniatures Monster Dice don't seem to be in production anymore, it'd be fun to use a set of those to make Broken Dice trophies. I may need to pester a friend to sculpt some. While I have no GS skills, Josh does.
If you're looking at ITS as a whole you should absolutely not add filters to the data. Just take it as it comes and then start wondering later. To get a perspective at what is odd and what not, you'd then simply take several years of ITS Data and put them together so cross check if RNG or a few very good and very active players had a big impact on specific Sectorials. I'm dead certain that for the more popular Factions the stats should be pretty accurate of the factin's capability anyway. Faction performance as a whole, for top 25% and for bottom 25% are three different metrics, all of them interesting to take apart. We had an MVP award last tournament (Most Violent Player) that tracked army points killed and Crits rolled. Turns out running Achilles was in favour of that metric as B2 CC24 gives you easy crits. Heck I was trying to farm crits with left over Orders because I had nothing left to do with them. Didn't actually get more than 1 or two crits out of that over 5 games, but still got the MVP with 30 Crits total. Game one had 10 alone, thanks to beating up loads of Remotes and Kuang Shi in CC. Another tournament had "Infinity bingo" with boxes to track negative events like "fail a WIP roll to claim an Objective". Interesting secondary tournament goals add a lot and are something to keep playing for other than winning. MVP isn't ideal for that as it probably only rewards another player at the top for the second time.
Battlefield-Berlin.de seem to still sell them, or at least have them in stock. The manufacturer only makes and sell to customers in France and rely on retailers externally. CoolMiniOrNot doesn't seem to carry the dice. Looks lovely, too bad they're D6, though, I'd love to get my hands on D20 versions as gag-prices for Nordic Masters or our more local tournaments :/ Mayybeee I should snag some for future Necromunda purposes. Hrmm... anyway, off topic.
I had to include Druze and StarCo, as anything with linkable x-visor LGLs is just stupidly unfun and kills the whole INFINITY IS A GAME WHERE IT'S ALWAYS YOUR TURN spiel. Will be interesting to see this after some more votes.
