No offense intended... Personally, I have voted Druze. It's not like they are that weak... it's just that when I open the Army app and I look at them and then I look at Ikari, I really donot see the point of choosing Druze over Ikari.
I thing about Yuan Yuan is that losing both BS and CC gives them a really low kill rate unless you get LSG/Combi/Grenade.
Is that the opinion of the community at large or you personally? Because I don't think that any of these are notably more powerful than, say, NCA or Hassassins or StarCo or whatever.
You could reasonable use a Yuan Yuan to kill three or four times it's own points value with 2-3 orders, including it's own impetuous one. Like, airdrop in or walk on, sweep around the corner, chain rifle some stuff. 8pts each! I'd take three with an EVO and just open the game with potentially getting two dudes sat outside of someone's DZ, ready to walk in and catch several things under a template without even spending any orders, except I would feel pretty fucking disgusting doing so!
Now look at the Fireteams, and how 'fragile' a lot of them are in Ikari due to not being able to reform them if the wrong trooper dies. Keisotsu are the only unit in the whole of Ikari that can form a Fireteam: Core without restrictions. Druze themselves being a case in point, if the Fireteam breaks during the game, you can't reform it without the TankÅ and exactly four Druze. Given that you can't get three different players to agree on the same top three factions/Sectorials, it would have to be personal opinion. ;-)
Statistically it takes 2-3 orders to kill an Alguacil, if I remove cover. I'm not really worried about the Yuan Yuan's cost I'm worried about spending orders. Don't get me wrong I love Yuan Yuan but I mostly use them for smoke or reactive. People imagine it's like dropping a Morlock but they're significantly weaker.
I have problems with the question, what is the best or worst faction in Infinity. I haven't played all faction yet and, more I portend, often enough to make a statement. The only statement I could give, is, what faction seems to be a little big stronger than other. But luckily Infinity is not this kind of game, where you have an op faction. Some make winning a little bit easier when your opponent don't know how to handle your list, but that's all
That's mostly what I've observed and heard from players how are much better at ITS than I am. NCA is like... two lists. They're two really good lists, but only two. Vanilla Haaq can do pretty much anything Hassassins can but has much more flexibility (Consider that Hassassins can take 2 Fidays and an Al-Djabel, and 4 Mutts -- the only thing vanilla loses out of that is a single Fiday.) StarCo is good, but not as good as the other armies I listed. I would say of the above, most high-ranked ITS players would agree that ISS, Tohaa and Vanilla Ariadna are three of the top five. No one is going to universally agree on every single one, but I would be that most players would have those three towards the top. It's ridiculous to say that some factions aren't stronger than others or that there aren't real issues with balance just because not every single player has exactly the same three factions as their top three. (As some poor evidence, consider none of those factions have a single vote as of me writing this.)
StarCo is absolutely as good as those other armies. Raoul and Emily both have super easy attack vectors that will brutalise pretty much anything (alright cool I spec fire your tridents with crazy cheap and accurate LGL and sweet you've lost half your orders end of turn one) but hey even without those, you can make a list of Alguaciles, Brawlers, Irmandinos, the Camo stuff... light troops basically, and deal with anything you encounter. Like that's where I feel I have a disconnect with people here, they're talking about some factions being "better" than others, but I don't even feel that's true at all. None of them are better. All of them are 100% playable and 100% capable of thrashing the crap out of any other faction in the hands of a decent player, and not even a case of "because they know how to build a good list," list building is a thing in Infinity, but it's actually more just that most stuff in Infinity is pretty good and even when some stuff is more or less efficient, the curve is really flat you know? And also, not even in a case of "a good player can overcome the shortcomings in a faction and beat a "better" faction in the hands of a less experienced player." I don't think it's even that, it's "in Infinity a good player can beat a bad player and it doesn't really matter what either of them take as a list outside what they personally like and feel comfortable playing, and have experience with." People are saying there are tiers, and better, and worse etc. I don't think that's even a thing. If you put a gun to my head and said "name the worst and best factions in Infinity or I'll repaint your walls brain matter grey" I'd say that Tohaa have the most egregiously irritating rules to play against (fucking Symbiomates) and that Shasvastii are pretty limited and scheduled a big redesign which they need pretty badly to make them interesting. But if someone said to me "Tohaa vs Shas, who wins?" I dunno man, who's playing? I can't call that based on perceived strengths and weaknesses. You could make a Shas list that could thrash the shit out of the most chiselled Tohaa list if you know what you're doing on the table. I'll happily do it, if asked. So with that in mind, yeah I reject the idea that any faction is better or worse in this game. I'll play anyone with anything, and if I win or lose then it'll be what I do on the board. Which is, incidentally, why I think that wargamers are often quick to point at imbalance. I once observed that nobody has ever been beaten fairly or squarely in a game of War Machine at my flgs, they always lost because their list/the matchup/the scenario/the terrain/the dice/whatever. Bruised egos aside (seriously...), the game apparently was hugely dependent on a massive variety of stuff outside player skill. In Infinity? If you lost, they probably just played better than you.
I'm multi-quoting because I feel like a lot of your points deserve individual rebuttals. Sure you can do this, but any vanilla army can also do this except like PanO. Starco is really good -- it's like a better Corregidor, but ultimately one list you're playing Emily spec fire, and the other is Corregidor+. The fact that good players can beat bad players doesn't mean that some armies can't be stronger than others. One of the best local melee players to me when I was in that scene was a Yoshi player. Yoshi is not a high tiered character. But he was incredible and won tournament after tournament with the character. That didn't make Yoshi a good character, it made him a good player. That didn't eliminate Yoshi's weaknesses, it just meant he was the best at playing around them. Infinity has the same thing. Because the community is relatively small, player skill tends to outweigh army power level -- and that's fine! It means that balance is about as tight as it needs to be. But that doesn't mean CB shouldn't try to work out things that have issues. I mean, what else will you call it on? And some of it isn't just perceived. Some of it is stuff that armies are straight up without. Sure, and I return to my point about community size and how relative balance is pretty okay. Sure you probably got outplayed. But that doesn't automatically mean that there isn't stuff that is unbalanced.
Im sorry but community size has nothing to do with relative balance. Its not like with an extra 100k players some magic balance will break down and dominant list will emerge. There are MANY people in this community who have run numbers to try and pull out power lists, and they just don't really exit.
This indicates a misunderstanding of my position. I'm arguing that community size has a huge impact on how quickly optimal strategies can be determined, not on them existing. In many cases, I feel like infinity has a lot of balance cases where things just can't be tested on the table -- due to the number of possible matchups, not every matchup can be tested, and due to variety of matchups, not every play out of every matchup can be tested. And since ITS is mission based, it's not like every matchup can be tested in every mission. But consider, for example, what if you and 8 of your buddies played magic, and never consulted outside resources for things like strategies or deckbuilding? The meta you build will not be as strong or rigorous as a community with 50 players. And that won't be as rigorous as a group of 1000 players. The more data you have about more matchups, the clearer ideal strategies become. The other facet of my argument is about relative skill level. When communities are small, the disparity in skill is less pronounced. Consider pro level DotA play. It was a small niche community. And now, almost ten years later, pretty much any player in the 99th percentile today could beat a pro in their DotA 1 days. As player count increases, the skill level at the highest end begins to tighten because there are diminishing returns for increases to player skill at a point. As for power lists, it's really clear that some armies suffer from a lack of viable listbuilding options. At the same time, it's not a very defensible position to say that because some subset of players decided to try to powergame listbuilding, that powerful lists can't exist.
Having played MtG through the Dojo period and seen exactly this change, I think you're misunderstanding where Infinity is. The point you're describing has already been reached. The ideal strategies in Infinity aren't as clear as in MtG due to fundamental differences in the games.
Strategy isn't the most Important factor, its tactics and application of resources. Putting the same list in various player hands will yield different results because of the difference in decision making and how each player uses the available resources to slow a given problem and advance towards a scenarios win condition.