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

Yep. The change to Albedo opens so many more options. Vargar should become more competitive against Karhu (I love the profiles and the models). Black Friars and Gwailos too.

 

And that's before any other changes these units might see

 

I agree about the price being reasonable for Firefly's. Albedo is cheap because it only works against a small percentage of troops. And now, it seems, msv troops actually get a shot, whereas before they got nothing. Also mostly short ranges.

 

Yep, SMGs only having shock in N5 (tentatively) makes them strictly worse combirifles against most targets at range. I feel that SMGs changes (as we know currently) in N5 make them actually in line with their discount.

 

I have a lot of thoughts on the changes to lineups for n5, but for now I just wanted to pop in briefly to point out that the vanilla rosters themselves do a fair bit to poke holes in the “CB is prioritizing recent releases over older models to make money” theory. Atalanta, Machaon, Acmon, and the Lizard are all fairly recent models, and none of them are in vanilla rosters. Samsa was just released and he’s barely anywhere. I think a lot of the choices being made are informed by designers trying to cut down on redundancy in vanilla.

Aleph has a lot of sniper options, but now those are trimmed down somewhat and mostly have distinctions that matter. Agemas are hidden deployment missile launchers in addition to snipers. Dasyus and Nagas have a lot of profile picks that make them not primarily sniper units in the first place. Dakinis are line troops before being snipers. That leaves posthuman mk2 snipers for a default sniper choice, and Knauf as your option for an active turn fire superiority msv1 sniper. If you need that msv2 sniper you can pull the Agema off missile duty.

I do think vanilla PanO has been handled a bit weird, since it’s almost “Kestrel and friends” now, but that’s not quite the same pattern we’re seeing elsewhere in vanilla lists.

 

I can agree with this point, but it must be said that whenever they're cutting anything it's almost always the classic models that are being removed even if it's a beloved staple and the replacement is barely used. This is probably shown best in VPano, as while the faction did have a problem with lots of units having the same battlefield role they haven't really expanded into new ones with Kestrel- and subsequently replaced nearly everything in PanO with the Kestrel version, at the loss of much flexibility.

 

I think at this point we can claim that vanilla armies were handled in rather different ways. PanO became Kestrel+consolation profiles, while CA and Nomads got trimmed to their most played profiles competitively and Aleph saw the wipe of half their vanilla roster, while Haqqislam received mostly a bit of tightening up and remained otherwise unscathed.

 

I guess someone could compare the Haqq changes to what was used tournament-wise.

On the other hand, I feel like what went away from Haqq were either mercs, or models that would have stronger sectorial Haqq idenitity, a number of them being characters.

What did the CB think designing vanilla changes for various armies, remains a mystery.
But all in all, I'm not overly interested in unraveling that mystery. My sole vanilla (Haqq) is there, I would like to see the changes to the rest of my armies (6 sectorials, one of which - StarCo - is not going to be there at launch). But I could wait till 18th for that, too.

 

vHaqq is hands down the best managed change. And I won't don't be surprised if StarCo gets folded into Corregidor.

 

I'll be down one sectorial, then (I do play Corregidor anyways).

Out of the 35 non-ITS entries in StarCo list, 19 entries do not show up in the Corregidor list.
Corregidor list is 30 entires, so fully transferring N4 StarCo to N4 Corregidor would mean bloating Corregidor to 49 entries.

Which is quite sizeable by N5 vanilla standard, and way oversized compared to the two sectorials we've seen so far.
Therefore, I find it unrealistic to expect the whole StarCo range to be present in Corregidor. The troops that were originally part of the Corregidor lineup - sure. Maybe a handful others, too. But that's going to be it.
some of them will, ofcourse, return to their original sectoials (eg. al'Hawwa are most likely stay in QK). I wonder what will happen to thers, who do not have such a well-defined "home turf".


I'm sticking to what I've been saying so far: I'll wait and see.

 

Obviously I don't mean the entire list but mostly the characters

 

It can be done less painful than for example the Aleph and PanO massacre. Reworking 'cats to work a bit more like brawlers, morans instead of hawwa, geckos instead of triphammers, abduct some hardcases on the mothership and add the characters.

 

Honestly, I'm not convinced.

But still - I'll wait and see. On the 18th, regarding the Corregidor, and heavens know when (and if) regarding StarCo*.

* which may turn up as a legacy army later. Or not in the forseeable future.

 

I hope we'll see tanuki profile this week, like firefly last time. (Please be engineer, pls pls pls)

 

The way I had hoped they would do them. 2 MR and 1 Storm. The MR are not what I was expecting at all, but I like! Maybe because they look a little retro scifi. I love old scifi like Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, etc. But they look like the should be on a bigger base than 25mm.

 

Cute Moonrakers indeed.

 

Moonrakers are technically well executed and crafted, but feel too ‘chibi’ for me to really like them personally. Glad to see others like them!