Right, so I already agreed that forces like this are going to have issues. However, they're the outliers, not the norm. Right, 1-2 orders, get there, shoot the repeater from the pitcher. You should be able to cover a good chuck of the board with a couple of Rifle armed LI. 16" rifle range around the LI gives you decent odds the pitcher is going to be in range of one of them.
No, because that makes sense, and invalidates Mahtamori's argument, therefore there is No True Counter to the unbeatable (and mostly absent) hacker of DOOOOOoooooommmmm!
You just said you couldn't put Pitchers that far forward. Try putting them on your side of the table in your good range spending a minimum amount of orders... ...and don't be an idiot about it. You're seriously coming across as whining that hacking doesn't work against Ariadna (and Ariadna-style forces) so we should totally invalidate all forms of HI from the game
I do think it's an issue that it's so easy to just opt out of hacking entirely, and most armies lose very little by doing so.
Was even worse in N1, when you only deviated 1" per failure category (instead of 2.5" per FC in N2). You could need a 12, roll a 14, and still hit. Hey, now, you had a ~50% chance of swatting the GML with your hacker, and your TAG had an additional 25% chance of making the GML miss your TAG due to ECM. But yeah, you never played a game of N2 without at least one hacker. At least not more than once. First time I ever took a list without a hacker was the time my opponent busted out the Zoe+Piwell Nomad GMLspam. god, that was horrible. Maybe. If your army even has a KHD. MO didn't, for example, and their new Santiago(?) KHD option is something like 42|0.5 New MO, Invincible Army, and JSA would like to talk to both of you. YJ in general has issues opting out of hacking.
Yep, definitely not all armies. But a lot of them. Ariadna and Tohaa basically lose nothing. Most other vanilla factions can do fine, and many sectorials. In fact, when you look at IA and MO, or HI, REM, or TAG heavy lists in other factions, weakness to hacking is routinely raised as a reason that they're considered subpar to other builds such as camo or large numbers of cheap orders.
And I'm disagreeing that MO and IA are not the norm (or intended to be the norm). CB obviously wants HI-heavy lists to be a thing. A usable, competitive thing. We're probably going to see a large number of new players picking up MO and IA. I may be coming on a bit harsh on this, considering that I play YJ and JSA, and want to play MO now. So from my POV, all my armies have great difficulty opting out of hacking. And that's one issue. The hacking vulnerability problem is a whole different one. Hopefully IA gets a relatively cheap KHD or two, and/or a decent repeater network. At least Deflector still works against KHDs, so that the IA's hackers aren't totally screwed as long as they're in a Tinbot'd fireteam.
No no, @Section9 , @toadchild is on point. The issue with hacking is the armies that can opt out. It's important to remember that factions or lists that have to opt in heavily are punished by even basic hackers so simply just buffing hacking or making it cheap enough to be readily available is not a good idea, however, which was what I was trying to point out before getting bogged down in minutea. Making more hacking able to target factions opting out is not a bad idea. More supportware specifically for units forced to opt in isn't bad either* * but I fear some particularly potent skill combinations that have certain drawbacks negated in sectorials may become too good.
@Section9 @Mahtamori said what I was trying to say better. Given that many armies can opt out easily, armies or builds that do include at least a moderate number of hackable models are inordinately punished. If HI, REMs, and TAGs were disproportionately strong for their point costs, then hacking as a counter would be justified. Not taking a hacker would be giving mechanised lists free reign to trample all over you. (I overstate for effect...) Instead, what we have is that many players consider troops that cost over, say, 30 points to be inherently points-inefficient, plus a decent number of them come with a built-in weakness that's hard to counter. The easiest way to keep the enemy from hacking your HI is to simply not bring any HI.
Yeah, adding something to the game that actually make high tech armies have an advantage over low tech armies would be good. As communication is represented in the game by the Isolated state (and perhaps a new state, which is partway to Isolated, making the unit Irregular but not cutting them off from other Regular orders?) that seems like the way to go.
OK, now I follow what you're getting at! I like that hacking is finally an important part of the game. I really don't like that you can opt out easily.
Hacking to me all too often seems a waste, as in a setting where you do not know what faction you will face, there is a chance it will do sweet F all. My dream is to see low-tech factions be represented as such, not as "haha! we have super armor that is better than your for...reasons! Thanks for wasting points". Perhaps say non-hackable HI dropping back down to 4-2 move as in the days of old, rather than being "like human sphere HI, but better"?
That should have been done on non-Hackable HI anyway. (it's not gonna happen now). However, it would still not solve the Hacking issue. We need Hacking to be able to do something against non-Hackable units, and more importantly, do something against them in AROs so that you need not spend huge numbers of Orders.
In times where lots of models have some kind of e/m weapon for dirt cheaap points AHD is just wasted effort. Same as fieldieng heavy units. And somehoww CB decided to introduce even more equipment and units with cheap e/m stuff... Yeah.
"Because kirantbots will mean people stop complaining about Ghzais!", went the logic somewhere in CB HQ, between two siestas...
Random, possibly insane thought: let Markers other than Impersonation be targeted with Spotlight or Forward Observer and have that act as Discover as well as normal effect of Targeted. Would help make those skills more useful, and would allow for more order efficiency on GMLs, which would then finally let U-Turn see the light of day. And just make the damn Ariadnan suits Hackable. The high-tech versions could be turned off just as easy, and I know it for a fact that Infinity's powered armour would be more complicated than the best robotics avaiable today. Modern cars have been shown for a fact to be hackable through their communications equipment to the point that they can be remote controlled. There is no reason Ariadnan suits shouldn't have the same vulnerabilities, and it would let the Wardriver see a lot more table time. I'm honestly fine with Tohaa opting out of hacking, because they can't opt in yet either, and they're meant to be weird. They should get fire weakness back in a bigger way to balance that, though- maybe set ARM to 0, K1-style, against Fire, and they'd be fair.
Random thought: "Tactical Uplink" supportware that grants (hackable) TAGs and HIs Sixth Sense. Grasping at straws, but it's an attempt to avoid giving linked HI benefits as much as possible while giving some benefit to being Hackable Another thought is that heavy infantry are meant to have these fancy medical equipment installed. What if a hacker were able to trigger those to act as a Medikit-style roll? @SpectralOwl not sure about how I feel about targeting marker state stuff directly, but having a Claw-1 that acts as a Discover would be interesting to say the least. Since it can act through Repeaters and would also ignore Cover and Camo negatives it could be an interesting trade-off compared to normal Discovers' long range capacity.
Then Tech in 150 is really shit if it needs hacker on side to trigger such equipment ;P (not bad idea game-wise, but it is not great from fluff :P)
