Personally I'd just like to see an end to pure cheerleading and the over-effectiveness of target saturation as a defense, as well as reducing the sheer number of soft counters needed to deal with likely enemy lists. Countering mass camo alone pretty much requires MSV1+ and either 2-3 Sensor/Sniffer bots or antipodes, eating up a third of the slots a player going for Limited Insertion-legal lists will have. Jammers, Warbands, super-Fireteams, TAGs, Speculative spam, E/M, TO ambush, AD and a million other things all need to be dealt with and that naturally drives up model count- IA's not considered bad for it's lack of options or order supply, just that you can only afford to counter about three big threats per list. Combine that with spammed cheap AROs wasting time and orders, then returning with a full group's order supply to counterattack, and smaller lists have real trouble competing. Making units in general a bit more toolboxy would help with this problem a lot by both reducing the number of models dedicated to counter duty and by making low-stat cheerleader chaff a bit more inefficient with the new skills and equipment they would bring driving up the cost relative to high-stat competitors. Ariadna would probably keep current order counts through this since they lack most of the tricks and counters other factions would add, restoring some of their distinct playstyle.
I'd kind of like to see how the game would handle having groups no larger than 5. It'd put some very artificial damping on the viability of Kuang Shi for sure, but also would make for some pretty hefty punishment to Extreme Impetuous troops as well as slow down solo rampagers like McMurrough or Saito Togan (these two tend to need around 4 to 6 orders to get to where they need to go in order to start doing damage). Not as standard play, but as an extreme gameplay variant similar to Limited Insertion or Tactical Window. I think it's a bit of a huge over-reaction, to be honest. Many units exists only on the merit that they are regular and I think the game needs these units to act as cannon fodder minions for order-tactical reasons. Without it, you'll force everyone to play as if they are Haqq with irregular warbands, irregular skirmishers and regular strong units only and you'd see a lot of your miniatures artificially crammed into those roles or become invalidated.
Troopers below 10 points probably should be buffed to increase their costs (ideally by deleting impetuous). It is a serious killer for diversity in this game that lists have high AVA troopers who cost less than wargear upgrades.
I think deleting Impetuous actually removes an interesting feature. I think you can manage it better by increasing the base cost of an order by 1-2 pts and reducing the cost of all weapons that cost as much or more than a BSG down by the same amount. IE a Combi Alg would still cost 10pts but Jags would cost ~1-2pts more. All other things being equal.
That the most plentiful troops each bring an extra order to the turn, and that order being potentially weird to execute, is bad design. If weapons end up too cheap overall then you will only see the most expensive weapons as opposed to now where you only see the cheapest. I think this can only be corrected by widening the difference in cost between men and gear. At the moment it costs more than a shaolin with a chain rifle to give a shaolin with a chain rifle a combi rifle that he can't fuckin hit with (BS 9 lol). Price reducing mechanics are an unbalanced mess, and fury is the worst offender.
It might be better to keep the limit at 10 for single combat groups, but lower it to 8 if you have two (11-16 troopers). You could even lower it further as you added more groups, which would put a limit on the maximum number of troops you can take. Eg. If you had it decrease by 1 for each further group, you would be limited to 25 (5 groups of 5). Or/and you could institute some kind of command friction rule. Something like, during the order count you have to give up an order for each additional combat group, otherwise they become irregular as if they were in LoL.
The problem isn't quite the number of Command Groups. I hardly ever see 3 Command Groups except when I make a particularly weird list, and I hardly ever do. What's become standard is 18 group slots with the extreme being 20 and it's not homogeneous enough to pin point specific command structure features outside of "very close to 20 group slots" - the LT isn't necessarily a line trooper, the LT is hardly ever below 13 WIP, it's common to have at least a couple of heavy troops that may or may not be heavy infantry, and it is common for a bunch of orders to be irregular. Many solutions I've seen proposed tend to risk unevenly punishing lists in the 12-13 unit bracket, and while 10-unit lists are in more dire need to support if they are to remain viable, the tiny-second-group style lists should not be punished for something that 20-orders lists causes. Even capping regular order generation at LT's WIP (which effectively explains LOL - if you don't have an LT you have 0 WIP and 0 regular orders) has fairly low impact on the high-spam lists because they tend to have a lot of irregular orders. -- @the huanglong I think a first step in testing process is to make sure that all of those units you describe (the traditional warbands) have a proper gun. Most of them would rather be as cheap as possible so they can get maximum trade potential out of their Chain Rifle, so adding a Light Shotgun, SMG or Assault Pistol to them wouldn't actually help as much as be a small tax on them. I think pushing them up over 10 points is a bit foolhardy, but making sure they hover around the 7-9 bracket is fair. Generally speaking, I also think it's important to make sure that they do not have Boarding Shotguns or Combi Rifles unless they are actual Light Infantry (which I would propose to be a small first step at addressing Muttawiahs - change the 5 point profile to be a ~10 point with a Rifle+Chain Rifle or Rifle+Light Shotgun)
That's actually really interesting. It's worth noting that it's what you see on Varangian Guard. Looking just at Nomad Warbands. LSG on all 'just CR' Morlocks really reduces you to 4 profiles: 8pt CRAP AP Morlock 9pt CR, LSG DA Morlock 9pt CR, LSG EM Morlock 14pt/1SWC Combi+EM LGL Morlock You probably add an SMG to the CR Jag. Leaving you with: 13pt LSG EM Jag 13pt/0.5 SWC ADHL/Panzerfaust DA Jag 14pt SMG, Chain Rifle DA Jag Uberfalls remain unchanged. You can probably also leave certain units as outliers (Mushashi is an obvious option to 'break the mold' with). The issues are Antipodes, Hungries and Taighas. But you can equally manage them as 'special cases'. I see an argument for these sorts of 'dumb' creatures ONLY generating an Impetuous order.
My experience with tactical window is very limited, but I would like to bring it here. What I've seen is that the LI (mine or my rival) lists still didn't work against 15 orders, the gap is still there, and nobody goes 12-or 13 orders, people go LI or max avaiable. Also, slow people (sometimes I am one of those) is slow, be it with 10, 15 or whatever orders they have. With that, as an extra, I like it, but as "the standard", I think this would only benefit some already top factions.
Tactical Window is already de facto default in our meta - I think we only had 1 event this season out of around 8 or 9 in the full format and that situation is here to stay. So far the only people who dislike it are Hassassin Bahram and Haqqislam players, since 4 Mutts is a massive crutch to any meta-approved gameplan. But I sorta agree only on HB side since their pricier units are not that good - going all in on Fidays and Asawiras seems like the only option and Asawiras are borrringgg. Vanilla at the same time has a lot of good options to fill out the points - units from Ramah especially. Sure, no Daylami spam but most armies are going to skip on Warcor too, so nobody can drown the map in cheap direct ARO anymore. Most of all I love that it lets people take unit choices unpopular in big format that are too expensive for spammy lists, like croc men, spektrs, intruder LTs/hackers (Countermeasures champion!) and even TAGs (since there are way less flashpulses to be afraid of). It also makes SoF a bit more tolerable (still hate it), since max Yuan Yuans are not viable unless you are in Inspiring Leadership army - and those cant run bullshit lists in TW.
