That's N3 buddy, he was much better in N3. He's an ass and a total liability in N4. Lost the ability to control deployment. Strategos got kicked in the dick to prevent the situation for a player to being first and have the optimal position for Alpha Strike pieces to be placed to inflict maximum damage. Player 2 always has the final say in positioning and potential counter unit placements now. I don't actually disagree with this happening, it kinda needed to be reigned in to stop Impersonators and Strat 3 from being so toxic together but unfortunately Sun Tze got hit in the cross fire. Sun Tze's durability went down, waaaaaaaaaaaay down. I frequently used him in N3 as a very, very, annoying ARO piece to deal with. He's not tough enough to get away with that anymore. Total Immunity getting split in half hurt Sun Tze badly as that was the big thing he was actually bringing combat wise to the table. He shoots like MEH and is armed with MEH weapons for this cost. His drawcard was being tough as nuts and feeling like a total waste of time to engage in a F2F during your opponent's turn. Now he's mediocre shit in both your active and your reactive turns. That's not a good deal when he costs a fuckload like he does. Think about it like this, Sun Tze not having the Bioimmunity N4 effects of TI actually means compared to his N3 profile his N4 profile finds getting hit by a regular HMG almost as damaging as if he could be affected by AP ammo. He's now ARM4 instead of ARM6 like he was in N3. Sun Tze's weakness got a massive buff. Oblivion now being burst 2 and 3 on different units and gaining AP is a massive liability for Sun Tze. Simply being WIP 17 isn't good enough to protect him. And to top it all off he still costs like he didn't get hit over the head by a nerf bat.
I'd say he's on the list for possible worst units in the game at this point. There might be troopers out there that possibly do less than him, but few can end up being such a handicap.
I convert and customize miniatures, not profiles. I don't know why so many people in the forum seem to think that spending a whole edition lobbying for changes to their perceived worst units is worthwhile. It rarely achieves anything, as CB doesn't pay much attention to this stuff. (The Jinwei is a big exception to this for me, as it's a creative exercise in unit concept and design, rather than whining about what some faction is "entitled" to and "unplayable" without. CB doesn't owe us the Jinwei, but it's damn cool in its own right.) I *play* infinity and designing it is someone else's job. I enjoy looking creatively at the profiles we have available and noting what potential they have. Then, when I come to breaking down the missions and meta for an event I may be able to make a combination of units that hits the target for a particular reason. Sun Tze may not be unique in the game, but he's certainly a pretty unique option in ISS. I'm not sure of his value versus all the great LT options in vanilla Yu Jing, but in ISS there are definitely missions when having a fast and very tough lieutenant who contributes an extra order and command token will pay off. His high cost will even be a feature in some scoring situations, for instance flipping an objective room and being very hard to shift. If you also have a mission plan where going first or second is important to you, his WIP gives you a chance to stack those odds too. He's always going to be an odd choice and take some practice to play well, but I'm convinced he's not as bad as everyone here seems to think and I'll give him a try again once I can play more regularly.
I don't really know why you rate him as "very tough" he's not that tough anymore. He's dropped from being about as tough as a TAG to bring down to being on par with the Mowang. Sun Tze went from being ARM9 in cover to ARM7 in cover, that's it. A Mowang is ARM8 in cover vs normal weapons and ARM6 vs AP weapons. The Su Jian is the same. If your average HMG or Spitfire toting attack piece starts shooting at him Sun Tze has weaker armour than several of our other attack HI pieces. Also despite your praise Sun Tze is straight up terrible for the two objective room missions. Even setting aside that's just asking for an Oblivion to the face and being in LoL. At ARM4 he is also extremely vulnerable to just getting clobbered by DTWs and warbands. Shotguns in link teams will straight up end his existence. A BS11 linked Ghulam with its shitty LSG, which is about as low as that bar gets, is 63% to stick a wound vs a dodging Sun Tze and he absolutely must fucking dodge. If he doesn't dodge he's 83% to take a wound, 43% for two, and 9% to die outright. And this is to a shitty line infantry with a shitty light shotgun. If something like an ORC or Brigada or an actual attack piece with a boarding shotgun or better takes a run at him you'll definitely be scraping him off the objective room walls.
The OP of the thread was asking about how to fix Sun Tze. This is the second time I've read a post in this subforum suggesting you shouldn't propose ideas without making a Jinwei first in as many days and it's a noxious idea that should leave straight away. The person who made the Jinwei concept you're fawning over just posted in this very thread that Sun Tze is shit. Sun Tze is shit. Everyone knows this. I know this. He's been in my collection for six and half years. He's the first model I painted well. Just looking at it made me excited to play Infinity. He was in most of my lists as I learned to play, and as I learned to play he ended up in less and less. Now every reason not to take him has been magnified and the reasons to take him greatly curtailed. He is now a big orange button that if your opponent leans on slightly, you lose. If CB insists on selling non-viable options like this and Chaksa Longarms I wouldn't be surprised if the next code one booster packs are blind randomized.
Just in case my post was the first one, I'd like to clarify that hoping to get anywhere and be part of the creative process is hubris if you're just airing ideas on the forums, and that hubris was what the person in the other thread was showing. If you're suggesting stuff, it should be for the sake of the discussion and not to expect to affect change over someone else' business venture.
This much is also true. Discussion of concepts should be open to anyone willing to argue in good faith and for the sake of exploration of those concepts. The YJ forum may I did the Jingwei for me, first and foremost, it is not meant to set the standard for anything.
This is the OP’s question. And of course everyone has jumped down the rabbit hole of redesigning the profile. I’m more interested in the *other* question. Yes he’s difficult to use, but situationally a great choice and won a lot of games for me in N3. He won’t pull his weight if you take him in every list or for every mission. If you develop a list around him and play him in the right mission he can be pretty great. The simple “no he’s shit” riposte is really not addressing anything I said. I’ve used HI Sun Tze with ISS in a lot of games where he was a great fit for the mission. His relative power level has suffered a bit in N4, but his mov has boosted and he will still work at the things he’s good at if you want to make him work. Having a fast moving 3 W model with total immunity and mimetism start sweeping the board in turn 3 can be a real surprise. Sure he’d be better with ODD, a 15 pt discount and an HRMC, but I’ll leave you guys to worry about that. Anyone who says he’s been shit for six years needs to know when a glass is half full... Infinity is always about the mission. There is no right LT choice, just the right one for a mission. If you haven’t tried thinking about taking Sun Tze in biotechvore, maybe you should.
I can only think of two match ups that really threaten Sun Tze with Oblivion unless you run him straight into an enemy repeater net. Nomads and CA, who can pretty easily lob pitchers right into your DZ. For a tournament you could address that by dealing with those matchups with your second list.
It's actually quite common these days. Anything that links and packs a pitcher can hurl them across the table with relative reliability. Druze, WhiteCo, FoCo, StarCo, Dahshat, Haqq all off the top of my head.
And Hassassin, but it's probably easier to just waltz up with a Fiday and shank him a few times. (And of course all Nomad sectorials as well as OCF are all good at chucking repeaters as well) Buuuut... that's an issue for any LT without Marker state, or we'd see Qiang and Crane Mehmut more often. My primary concern about Sun Tze is the effect that the points cost has on the list in general and how little is gained from it now that even ISS has more ways of compressing orders into a single combat group, even if ISS has woken up from the N3 hangover and found itself to be one of the least order dense sectorials. Put simply, Sun due to cost occupies a premium unit slot but doesn't have the skills nor incentives to be used as a premium unit. He's not at all like the more dangerous, cheap, and sturdy Karakuri. So. He's just too expensive. The core function is fine.
Being able to join a link would probably help him out a lot. It wouldn't fix all of his or ISS' issues, but it'd be a really nice start.
A mimetism HI in a link would have been overpowered in a link by the standards of early N3. Now we have Kriza Boracs with burst 6, as well as Hulang and Raoul with ODD running around the place so that's not really true. His flash pulse would get very gross with link team modifiers though, burst two on 23 in good range bands with mimetism, though not without counters as anything with total immunity could just walk through it. For armies without access to Total Immunity he could be extremely irritating though. Having his own mini-me Sun Tze tinbot-B would be an easier way to buff him without so many random side effects. I generally protected against Fiday by placing a couple of Kuang Shi so a Fiday wouldn't be able to walk into base contact with Sun Tze. If they're forced to use a light shotgun they will eat a chain rifle in response even if Sun Tze doesn't flash pulse them. Madtraps also work well and ST is great at discovering impersonators, so they weren't an awful threat. Duroc on the other hand is immune to flash pulses and has the resilience to weather an ARO or two and still chew Sun Tze apart... he can be pretty mean.
That's a good point... I guess making Sun Tze a wildcard would be interesting. A haris of him with a wu-ming tinbot and an hmg would be a very fun 3-man team. Most ISS lts are pretty prone to the pitcher & oblivion combo, so what are people taking? Hsien Tinbot & multi-marksman seems like one of the best options to deal with that, with or without a haris. I would guess a Sophotect is pretty much mandatory to stop your HI getting isolated at range even if they're not your LT.
I get around it by not taking ISS anymore. In all seriousness though, I'll consider jumping back into my favourite faction once it becomes less of a chore to actually play. I've got four Cranes just begging for the day they'll get to see a table again.
Yeah, he does seem to be in a tough place, though I'd still want to make him work sometimes. ISS do have kuang shi, which makes it relatively easy to take 15 bodies, Sun Tze and a Su Jian for instance. Sun Tze is still the only ways to get 11 orders in a group and spend it on whatever you want. Given the lack of NCO, LT2 on a hsien and tac aware on a pheasant force you to use those models, which may not always advance the mission. If you want to power a Su-Jian or Rui Shi with 11 orders, ST works. Going first or choosing the table side can still swing some missions. Biotechvore is a pretty great example of this - if your opponent really wants to muck around with pitchers and oblivion instead of dealing with your ARO traps and moving all their guys out of their DZ they may end up losing the game on the first turn. You can also reserve ST to make getting a pitcher near him order intensive, if your opponent is relying on linked pitchers to catch him they can't deploy the pitcher-chucking link as a reserve.
ISS being garbage and lacking alot of what the rest of the faction gets isn't really an argument in his favour. This is the second time you've tried to use biotechvore to present Sun Tze as viable. Nobody takes biotechvore seriously, the mission is heavily unbalanced and more or less kills any vanilla list on it. Pitcher chucking links don't find throwing pitchers around the table order intensive. That's what's such a pain in the ass about them. Druze and Nomads put their pitchers at 40" on uncontested 12s. Even the rest of the pack at the shittiest option available when linked puts them out at B2 on uncontested 8s, which is a 64% success rate. That is the worst case scenario, it's entirely possible a single MOV-MOV order could bring them into 24" of their desired range (which gives them a 32" threat projection on top of having moved 8-12" meaning they've basically threatened the entire table) which means they're at 11s and an 80% success rate. I am frequently on the receiving end of this shit. You can't run from it and you have to be as prepared as you can to tank it and fight on. Sun Tze aside, ISS in general is woefully equipped to handle this type of aggression.
