Yeah, I guess I'll have to Eclipse my way to the opponent's face so I can wreck it the old fashioned way.
Is the easiest to counter... Just need some MSV2 and your blurry odd worths nothing But ey! I really love the theme and if you can counter the msv2, plenty of eclipse...., You have a quite well rounded force Enviado desde mi Mi A1 mediante Tapatalk
I am in love with theme too. but game changed alot and they dont seem to me competitive. 2 links max without bonuses doesnt help at all. any infiltrator with template weapons can crush SP easilly. ruishi in dashdat link with marksmanship can ruin everything in a few turns. in SP you are always paying so many taxes for even standart units since all units have martial arts. you have to march forward and use orders in active turn and you are still not deadly like any 5man link in the game. Both in defence and attack , SP seems weak. Even the Andromeda which is getting bad comments always seems me nice idea in this big problem. In the early days of the game NWI was a thing, but shock ammo increase... any buffed rem is a serious threat now. single buffed ruishi can kill everything Sp has. and SP has no defence in mid table to counter that.
Sorry, do you even play Steel Phallanx? These linkteams with ODD can also have Eclipse grenades. Visors are not "job done" for stopping them. There is no way to stop them closing, the best you can hope for is delay. It takes two orders max to close to most teams' best effective range, which is also a worse range for the linked snipers. They have a few weaknesses in long-range gunfighting, but once they close Hector will wreck anything. As for "max 2 teams", you seem to have missed how Enomotarchos no longer requires expensive leaders. You can now field a Steel Phallanx horde with few characters that you simply couldn't by rules before."
The last couple games I've played I've been running 3 links with points leftover for external units. Can be done rather easily. A linked spitfire Myrm still wrecks most things, and we're more well rounded than ever. We're far from the weakest faction. Not the best, but solid nevertheless.
unfortunetly yes. I have played them since N2. They were strong those days. I won many tournaments with SP. any good player can still play them well. but... their situation is not like before. there were no command tokens in N2. Now they can take 2 orders from you to leave 8 orders to you. to march forward you spend these easilly. most of the time eclipse works, but this makes you use more orders to march forward. there is no sensor in the links. you may need to take daleth and use more orders on. hidden camo markers just stay where they are, finally you are out of orders and they can easily reach you.
Sensor access don't really make or break a viable army imo. Unless your meta consists of a million camo tokens I suppose. 6th sense from link bonus ignores surprise shot, and we have good willpower on several guys to discover with. Orders taken turn 1 is something everyone suffers from, and SP is not the army that suffers the most from that. We're pretty order efficient I feel.
What @Iver said. What issues Steel phalanx has in N4 are shared by several other sectorials. Hell, JSA has the same problems without linked ODD shooters, decent ranged ARO, or more than 2 links (but with TO infiltrators and cheap HI to compensate of course).
N4 Marksmanship from Assisted Fire no longer adds shock to the weapon, it just ignores the negative mod from partial cover. An assisted fire rem is not the danger it was in N3. Also, while they did add shock ammo weapons to several units, they also made all the named SP characters shock immune, so those heroes can take the hit and keep coming.
Hippolyta, Diomedes and Drakios are the only exceptions among our NWI characters. The rest have shock immune.
With Hector and Acmon you basically have 2 more orders. The main pieces have received shock immunity and you have more options. Atalanta is an excellent shooter. Of course they are not the best but you can win many games, having played tournaments you know very well that whoever makes the best choices wins;)
Hector gives +2 orders by himself. ;) After playing N4 Steel a bit now, I think they're incredibly competitive. I'm more excited to play them than just about any other army I own. They really got worse in no way at all, plus got tons of free upgrades... Just look at how Forward Deploy Ajax is the same cost as old Ajax. What you have to do now is make more choices in list building... because they've made more of the units viable, and that's terrific news.
I am interested that so many people think SP is a competitive faction. I am really excited about playing them. They've been really fun so far, but competitively, they just seem ok to me. I think it's probably a matter of play style. Hopefully CB will release another one of those win % tables for all factions at the end of ITS12 so we can see where they stack up.
@TheDiceAbide newly-buffed Ajax can almost surely take out a Bearpode in CC. Terrifying. Can't think of much in the game that can beat him in CC. REally looking forward to seeing that on the table over Xmas-break games!
A lot comes down to a play-style match, and the missions you're playing. Not all Sectorials are great at all missions, Steel Phalanx has very few options for mid-field specialists, which is certainly a problem if you're used to using those to win games. That said, some scenarios have exclusion zones which mitigate that quite a bit right out the gate, so it's a bit of a wash on those missions. If you're the type of who is used to, and prefers fighting your way to objectives, then Steel is a good fit and can be played that way competitively.
Natural Born Warrior on Ajax negates the Domaru’s CCW skills. That’s a lot of why he’ll be a top dog in CCW. Unless it’s a link of Domaru and Tankos and they get fairly lucky, my money’s still on Ajax.
Senor Massacre and Ajax are pretty close to 50/50. Basically whoever looses a roll is likely to be dead (massacre) or immobilized (Ajax).
