nope. it is not a good idea. actually it all started with multi wounds troops suffer more from fire when you had compared with 1w symbiont troops things. If you bring fire vulnerability for mates, no one would take gorgos-ectros and neema any more. there is very hard, delicate balance problem there. corvus belli calculates troops with increasing cost in multiplying way and not summing things together. symbiont is something that increases the cost of the things alittle when they have 1 wound but more when they have multiwounds. that makes 1 wound troops much more powerful when you compare with multi wound troops. if sukuel hmg is 37 points, i would take it still, is sakiel fo was 22 points i would take it again, but if gorgos was 77 points, i would not direcly put into my lists. 1 wound troops dont care about fire at all. so there is no fire weakness for them any more. but still this risk is valid for multi wound troops. i believe the first thing is to change the multiplier points to change with wounds the unit has. lets say for one wound multiplying factor is 1.3, then has to be 1.2 for 2 wounds and 1.1 for 3 wounds. because risk gets more as much as there are more wounds. so idea is increasing the costs of 1 wound troopers but decreasing 2 wound 3 wound troopers. What would you say for a gorgos at 70 points for instance ? After loosing 16 points in cost, would you feel "oh my god it must be auto include". i think no. on the opposite side, no tohaa player would riot if the sukuel hmg was 38 points. Gorgos is highly depended on other troops. Can not be healed at all. it has wounds not structure points. symbiont and fire sensitivity is a nice fluffy thing. maybe they can eliminate fire hit eliminating on 1w troops only and keep the costs similar like now.
Well, easy rebalancing the fire vulnerability (which still wouldn't change the Symbiomate problem but would solve fire) is to make them behve as they are higher damage versus Symbiont Armour. Any Fire hit is treated as being at Damage +2 versus Symbiont Armour. Simple, easy, hits all Symbiont Armour while still leaving multiwounders valuable comparatively. It stll leaves Symbiont Armour as too cheap. Most played troopers loose minimum of stats and skills when they loose Symbiont, while still being Shock immune and having all the benefits of an extra wound.
I don't think having next to no armour while having 2 wounds is cheap. While our Symbiont-clad troops do tend to live a little longer than troops of other armies, they lose a considerable part of fun tools that make them strong when their Symbiont dies. Sukeul loses her Mimetism, Kotail can no longer Super-Jump or project decoys, Rasail loses their Nanoscreen.. Not even mentioning the stat drop. We are basically a race of glass cannons wearing Guyver suits. Kill the suit and suddenly we're not OP.
Symbiont Armour costs significantly less than No Wound Incapacitation. And while you do lose armour, most troopers that lose skills are not played. Sure, Sukeul loses Mimetism which is a hit but not a huge one. Rasail loses Nanoscreen which while a disadvantage isn't that huge. On the other hand, Geo Rael only loses ARM, BTS and a point of PH while actually improving its move, while Nikoul and Saiel lose only ARM and BTS (in both cases, very low numbers anyway). As for troops that actually lose significantly when losing profiles - Kotail, Neema, Ectors are played exceedingly rarely. There is a reason Sakiels and Geo Raels are found in vast majority of Tohaa lists. I play Tohaa, I know all our "vulnerabilities". Good, experienced player can take us, even at equal skill levels, but he cannot make major mistakes and dice have to be equal, much more so than against any other faction (except maybe Ariadna, but that's a different discussion). But even so and more importantly, those games will not be fun. It's just slogging through mates and wounds and crits due to large number of dice being thrown. Tohaa are not glass cannons, they are the very opposite of glass cannons. Everybody else in Infinity is a glass cannon compared to Tohaa.
That may heavily depend on the meta in your playgroup. In mine, I usually end up on the losing side because I am still quite a noob, but also because we have real issues against full Core Fireteams and TAGs, which is what I am usually playing against in my meta. And given our rather light armour (the highest being 3 on our HI, not considering TAGs, this being the reason I say we're glass cannons), if we didn't have the Symbionts, we would either need to be really lucky, or depend heavily on Eclipse smoke shenanigans, which sometimes may seem a bit bland if repeated too often.
Rasail without nanoscreen means no partial cover, its one of his main selling points and mimetism is also great so these hits are not small, sure they are still useful but get way easier to kill
In Infinity, ARM means fairly little, especially differences between 0 and 2-3, or 2-3 and 5. Tohaa has high firepower thanks to links and an unmatched ability to absorb loads of damage thanks to cheap Symbiont Armour. Furthermore, it comes with the cheapest TO Camo and widely available Eclipse smoke, meaning it's easy to avoid things it doesn't want to fight. Problem isn't Tohaa having Symbiont, it's having super-cheap Symbiont with Fireteam availabilty AND Symbiomates on top of all that.
Yes, Symbiont Armour is insanely cheap, just like PostHumans. This is because CB balances Factions on a whole, so comparitions between models of different factions don't work. For example, we cannot buff our Chaksas. But thankfully, most of the time we just ignore hacking. On the one hand we don't get über-powerful-profiles, neither 4/5 man fireteams or heavy armour; on the other hand we get cheaper wounds and Symbiomates (resilency), and infinite mixed fireteams. We have way less profiles than the other 7 main factions, but most of our profiles are optimized for one task and different troopers don't overlap / are redundant. We get hight burst in half of our list thank to fireteams, but we cannot go higher than CD13 (and we get that only in a couple of profiles) (*). By the way, Gao-Raels are found in many lists because it's the only MSV2 we can get; ignoring smoke and DDO is such a huge bonus against many factions... (*) I know, I'm ignoring the Gorgos. Just like everyone else :p P.S.: Combi Clipsos is as cheap as Combi Noctifier, and both are more expensive than Posthuman Mk2 Hacker.
I think you're misunderstanding this game. Infinity is meant to be played by choosing the right opportunity to act, and this is usually achieved by stacking a lot of MODs so the situation is most advantageous to you and most disadvantageous for your adversary. Sure, that 2-3 ARM is not much on its own, but add a Partial Cover MOD, and you have a twice better chance to shrug off that hit from a Sniper Rifle. Use Mimetism on its own -- and it's just a -3 to opponent's BS. Stay behind cover, and it multiplies that penalty by 2. Throw a Nimbus Plus Grenade, and the penalty grows to ridiculous -12. Whole, as they say, is greater than just a sum of its parts. Symbiont Armour may be cheap on its own, but we have a lot of handicaps too, mentioned by @Abrilete, @ChoTimberwolf and others. And if I got to choose a TO Nikoul or a Symbiont Armour Nikoul I would choose the former each and every time. Not getting hit at all is much better than risking that dice roll. I guess people are really just not used to play against Tohaa and thus may play a little less efficiently when playing against us. Otherwise I would be winning every my game :D
Never said otherwise, in fact, I often make the same point. But unlike Posthumans, which you can take 1 order / 3 limited selection bodies, you can take Symbiont Armour on half the army. So unless they allow up to 4 Posthumans, it's a false start. Not that I mentioned Posthumans at all, or other factions come to that. Oh yes, you can't buff Chaksas, and they only have B1 in Active turn. But then they ignore Hacking. And very importantly, can go Prone and Dodge on 12s instead of 7s! Which is extremely useful when enemy tries to -12 you (okay, 9s if they use Surprise Shot, but then it's compared to 4s). Tohaa also get multiple freely mixed Fireteams, insanely cheap wounds and Symbiomates. And almost faction-wide immunity to Hacking - as you mention, HI and TAG are extremely rarely taken in Tohaa. So what? This is a completely unrelated issue. There is not a situation Tohaa cannot cover, even if Tohaa only has a single unit access to something. Go cry in PanO forum how Tohaa only have access to regular Smoke in one trooper. So whats your point? High BS is nice, but hardly critical in Infinity. High Burst is almost always better and there no-one can compete with Tohaa. While technically yes, the more important note is that he is extremely good for what he provides. Just being the only MSV2 is not sufficient enough, especially since Tohaa can get cheaply large number of direct template troopers - another favourite way of dealing with camo and ODD. Those same troopers which also provide Eclipse in abundance. Yup. Hm, I thought we should not compare across factions? While also true, Noctifier does not start at half the table, and Hacker is awesome, but only one available and more importantly, does not bring his own Order. I have no idea what this Infinity-how-to is supposed to point out? I have some small idea how to play the game, thank you very much. No, SOME Tohaa units have the drawbacks. Many do not, or the drawbacks are minor compared to all the benefits. Almost no-one plays Kotail because it loses so much with Symbiont Armour. But Geo Rael? Sakiel? Even Rasail? Remember, Rasail loses Nanoscreen with the armour, but that only matters it needs to be a bit more careful and get Partial Cover just like every other model in the game. There are other explanations for your situation ^^
Oh, I was just explaining that you shouldn't be playing around just one big bright neon-light-lit "I HAVE ARM3, LOOK AT YE MIGHTY AND DESPAIR" display board. Instead, you ought to combine MODs, positioning and other factors in order to make your opponent face some hard choices while figuring out how to counteract on your maneuvers. Anyway, I think this discussion has spread too much out of topic and is slowly turning into another "Tohaa OP" shitpost.
And then you have to count in that that 10 point Posthuman brings at best 1/3 of an Order and 1/3 of an ARO. And yes, Aleph may be getting a small faction-wide discount from Posthumans, given that it pays 4-5 points for NWI. Compared to 1-2 points for a 1W Symbiont Armour (I'm not kidding, calculations were done). Symbiomates? 3 per one. I would absolutely trade it. I mean, sure, buffing the TR Drone is nice, but having the ability to go Prone or just Dodge on 12s - without spending an Order first? In a minute. So what if it is predictable? Most times when I see opponents army, I know exactly what'n'where. You can talk about not carrying extra luggage, but so what? You can just bring 2 of each. Also, really, oh, I see a Symbiomate, I know Tohaa brought CoC? You seriously consider this a drawback? O_o Guess what; most factions don't really want their MSV2s exposed as they'll die in 1 Order. Geo Rael with 2W, Fireteam for that extra Burst and a Symbiomate? The best at what it does. Yes, well, before they couldn't, but now they could. So what's the point? You can do that on top of Symbiont Armour. Yeah, I know. Told you, play Tohaa, and I play a lot against Tohaa. But Tohaa does well against strong troops too, you just have to work a bit. ^^ Like everyone else. *sigh* Never Friendly games? Tohaa is essentially banned from friendly games around in my meta. Not because they are OP, but because they are not FUN TO PLAY AGAINST. Yes. Read my statements. Good players can deal with Tohaa. But it's not fun for them at all, and for anyone not experienced or practiced enough, playing against Tohaa is a nightmare. I do think Tohaa is a bit OP, but only a bit; not enough to seriously throw results. I don't even consider it the OP-est faction in the game right now - that title I still award to vanilla Ariadna in a hands of a great player. But Tohaa is seriously unfun to play against - it's just rolling dice and hoping you don't get screwed by the dice gods.
Thank you, but no need, it's quite a healthy and enjoyable one. I'm leaving it soon and I feel quite sad - awesome people, great games; I learned so much. Excellent and tough opponents of all types and options. :)
The issue is that the FO Clipsos is an extremely cheap infiltrating FO specialist. Noctifers do not infiltrate and their specialist option is much more expensive. Comparing the two is disingenuous.
The Chaksas also have MOV 4-4 and our "TR Drone" has Neurokinetics. Im loving my Flamer Chaksas but they cost 10 points (compared to other factions with 8 point bots (yeah they suck compared to Chaksa but mostly I want cheap orders when I take them)). I rarely took the other profiles. The other factions have a FO bot with 6-4 MOV and we comensate this with mixed link Teams My regular opponents were crying about Tohaa being OP but recently they stated they arent, they have to think around them and use our weaknesses (duh)
