September>December 2024: Nuclear winter has struck, leaving room for the N5

I would be interested in how flying vehicles will interact with hacking. I assume they will just be able to fly over the Zone of Control of Repeaters and Carbonite will just freeze them in place (no falling).

Basically, how do you keep them from a powerful Alpha Strike?

 

Hard ARO? None of them seem to be too heavily armed, and an S7 rushing up the board will draw attacks from multiple units. And frankly, hard ARO has been really underutilised throughout N4 with the exception of the fanciest Fireteams, so seeing it come back as a valid option is my hope.

 

Flyers like that are likely to be glass cannons. I'd expect them to have some heavy weapons but little durability and no way to hide themselves. The motorcycles are already faster, nastier warbands, and they don't dominate the game, even Montesa. And hacking area always stretched out vertically as well, I doubt they'll be able to simply fly over it

 

I don't recall this in the leaks previously, but O-12 looses access to Le Muet (who was working for them/in their custody during Endsong), Saladdin (who is a liaison officer), Casanova even... Oh, yeah, also Hector. Essentially some of their most fitting characters in lore and some of their key characters. Really surprising and honestly, O-12 was not bloated significantly anyways.

PS. Also Bronzes? What did Bronzes do to you, CB?

 

I'm pretty sure Saladin will stay in Starmada, where he was located since Starmada became a thing.
Unless, of course, there's a big shift in characters...

Edit: also, the roster is 47 entries, which is pretty much in line with other vanillas shown so far.

 

They've heavily cut down Characters in Vanilla pretty much across the board, especially any they aren't selling a model for or any Mercenaries.

For Bronzes, there's a chance they split them off so they could buff them in Starmada. Or they just didn't sell or see use in ITS enough in Vanilla.

 

The problem is they cut characters in factions, which are connected to that faction. Like vanilla nomads not getting Kusanagi or Bran, and now Casanova outside of vanilla O-12.

 

They do, true.

But why is that a problem?

As of now (N4) vanilla Nomads have 19 enttries in their list that are labelled as "characters". It is, of course, debatable how many of them are Nomad in nature, and who are merely named mercenaries.

N4 vanilla O-12 has 18 character entires.

N5 vanillas (those we know about) are between 43 (JSA) and 52 (CA) entries total. And guess we can all agree that 1. devoting well over a 3rd (close to a half, if we check it against JSA) to characters is excessive, and 2. N4 armies are too reliant on out-of-faction mercs.

N5 O-12, let me remind you, is 47 entries. No way one could fit 18 characters there.

 

Bronzes models are either the Multi-rifle one, sold in the Starmada Action Pack, or the Red fury, sold in the Nyoka box. And there is another Bronze model sold in the reinforcemt box beta.

So pretty much everyone who has Starmada as a sectorial have either one or two (or five as in my case) Bronze models. So I presume they actually sold well.

But actually seing table use? Not a lot.

So splitting them away for Starmada stand alone unit is a good thing in my book. As it may allow them to buff them and let them shine.

Models look rad as hell by the way. Currently painting a multirifle one and a red fury one. I will let my two customized ones with Heavy Shot Guns later until NOV 18th to see if there is still a HSG profile for them.

 

All good, not actually an O12 player myself- gave it a look, I even quite like models like the Bronzes or Lynxes, but the fact I couldn't actually get any of the units that interested me without picking up half a box of stuff I didn't like turned me off it. I'm honestly not sure what I'll be doing in N5 myself... a collection consisting of MRRF, NCA, old-school Moderators-and-Morlocks Bakunin and a Yu Jing army that predates the Uprising has somewhat limited my options. Hell, my most WYSIWYG army come N5 may well be WhiteCo, which I have played once in TTS and never particularly liked.

 

Model availability gets awkward indeed. In vanilla nomads, for example generic zeros are in, but Bran is not. And sin eaters are in, but they only come in the Bakunin box, which is not.

1. Flavour and coolness. You can't bring units that have both flashy models and have been part of the army forever. Even in the QSR nomads are illustrated with a moira, but now moiras are only in Bakunin now. This has impact on both new players (many of which tend to pick based on coolness factor) and on narrative-driven games.

2. The vast majority of the nearly 20 characters we've seen in the vanilla armies are mercenaries, that should find a home faction indeed. The one that they fit the most in. Except we're seeing it going the opposite way around. Characters are loosing availability in their native sectorials in favour of various shifts elsewhere.

 

As others said, restricting units - including characters - to sectorials actually allows to balance them more easily. It also makes vanilla easier to handle. And I'd argue that N4 had actually too much flashiness; anecdotal, but it was a major factor which made me take a sabbatical. I prefer a wargame over rpg analog

 

Re: model availability - you're qoting N4 -era packages (or, perhaps, in some cases even older ones) in the context of N5 army lists. I'm sorry, but it has more or less always been the case.

re: sectorial composition (regarding characters) - have we seen any Nomad or O-12 sectorials yet? I recall only seeing one JSA (the shindenbutai) and one PanO (Kestrel). The rest of the sectorials and their composition remain, IIRC, to be seen.
I fully expect Casanova, for example ,to remain available in Starmada, albeit we have to wait for Starmada lsit to be released to confirm or dismiss it.


To sum it up: don't take this personally, please, but I have a feeling you're paying too much attention to a really minor issue here.

 

Casanova wasn't always on vanilla anyway, he was a starmada exclusive for quite some times.

Aside from that I'm mostly ok with N5 vanilla roster for O-12. Mostly. Because now our Action Pack is rendered "useless" as you can't play all the minis inside it either in Vanilla (9 out of 10) or Starmada (at max 7 out of 10). And O-12 was already the best vanilla of all, since it was what a vanilla was supposed to be: exclusive troops to many sectorials, and even vanilla exclusive troops not possible to play in any sectorials.

 

It's always going to be a difficult one when cutting profiles as there'll always be some folks happy and some not.
Personally for nomads I'd have preferred to see characters stay who weren't just basically auto picks to change things up a bit. But, I expect that would have caused a lot more people to be disappointed.

Of course changes to profiles will likely have the same effect anyway

 

I have a feeling it was being desingend, pretty much, with N5 in mind :)

 

Some people were unhappy with the quantity of characters in Infinity and the gravitation in the last years of the game towars a Hero Game instead of "Ma boys doin' things"

 

Maybe the "Soldiers of Fortune" will become popular in casual games? Then you can field the various charismatic characters.

 

Fully agreed. O12 and Starmada were too much the same and to me always boiled down to a simple binomial thinking:

“are the Lynx, Gangbusters, Alpha, Sirius, Razor, Diggers and Beasthunters more valuable in this mission than being able to form a Kappa fireteam or to field 3 Crushers?”

And typically the answer was: “yes”

However…

Should the answer to this be to nerf O12 by stripping it of models that are only available in Starmada?

I think I’m safe to say: “definitely not”

Granted, Starmada had a LOT of buffs through N4 (in terms of model and FT composition), but still insufficient imho to make it stand out from vO12. So if CB decided to strip down vO12, I really hope that they are going to make Starmada more appealing than what it is now.

I’m positive it will, with more reasons for example to field Bronzes via pure Duos, but to be seen

 

I have the other threads to be salty about cuts, so I'll use this one to be positive about them. I think overall the cuts to vanilla to remove cruft will be good overall for balance and for new players as there is less choices between same-y profiles and load outs. I predict this is a half-way step on CB's way to making Vanilla a full fledged sectorial.

On the specific subject of cool models, weak rules like Bronzes. Bostria mentioned CB is looking to the competitive community for future balancing, and I hope and expect this will big step up from just the inhouse rules and design people trying to guess at what is powerful. This is great because I think one of the loudest voices in the community, VaulSC, was very adamant that CB don't just look at the player data from army, but actually engage with what competitive players are saying in terms of balance.

Since CB sells the models in much bigger packs now, I'll use the Starmada action pack as an example.



Let's say the very worst case scenario: CB continues to use only the in house team and basically does the weakest balancing it can. So the rules team looks at player data and sees the bluecoat is over represented and the bronze is basically not played at all. They could nerf the bluecoat and buff the bronze. You literally lose nothing of value here because a cool model you use all the time, the bluecoat, will go into your storage for a bit, while a cool model you never take, the bronze, will finally get some play time.

In the best case scenario, Corvus Belli is truly invested in the long term health of infinity and communicates with players on balancing so that maybe if O-12 is low tier, instead of nerfing along with buffs, we get some buffs to bring them closer to the middle. If Corvus Belli is truly invested in cutting down on bloat, we could see a lot more tweaks to the models we already own so they finally get table time (looking at you Jayths and Chaksa Longarms). Good for a healthy community when new players see a lot of diversity in the existing line of models, it means you don't have to live on boom-bust style FOMO of constantly creating and removing minis from the game.