I know this is an unrealistic scenario, but I think it would lead to more interesting answers. Hypothetically, you turn up and you have every mini you could want on-hand. You know in advance what mission you will be playing, what faction/sectorial your opponent is playing, what the table looks like, etc. You know everything in advance before you choose your sectorial, let alone craft a list. Under which scenarios would you choose to play Vanilla, Bakunin, Corregidor, StarCo, or Tunguska over the others?
Well each of those sectorials and Vanilla Nomads have their own strengths and weaknesses. None of them are really better than the other against different opponents. The main reason for choosing a sectorial is to make use of link teams, (not what your opponent is playing) or for thematic reasons, or because you want to play a specific model that is not available in the other sectorials/Vanilla. The last reason to pick a sectorial over Vanilla Nomads is for when you are playing a scenario such as Biotecvore or Panic Room where you need to exit the Biotechvore zone. Link teams are better at this due to the order efficiency for moving a link team compared to a single model in Vanilla.
I dunno. Having just finished running Morats into that Vaulsc event, the effect of knowing a table, mission and opponent faction beforehand seems substantial enough to build around for me. I think you'd look at mission and table more than opponent. I mean sometimes, you know that this is the TAG faction with lots of TAGs so hackers are good or whatever, but mostly board and mission. Other armies might look at Nomads as the hacker or missile faction and tailor around that, but I feel that Nomads is less inclined to need to tailor in return. Board mostly determines how useful an ARO castle link is going to be. Mission can be quite a big impact on inflexible armies (like Morats) but less so on flexible ones (like Nomads). You might want a Riot Girl faction on a mission where you need to leg it across the table, and might want to avoid Corregidor on the zone control missions where a TO infiltrator on T3 is a huge deal. Things like that. We had situations like, "Supplies on open map against JSA means they are going to smoke the middle and take boxes, so I want to deploy a good MSV ARO sectorial to that board". I could see certain sectorials taking priority in a similar instance.
