I love Yujing because: Because Chinese culture feels ancient and exotic Because it's duality Social-Comunism and judicial-empire Because 1st premise of yujing is to protect with Heavy Armor the citicens serving the military who are sent to the frontlines. I love Heavy Infantry Because It has a bite on almost every cake (we miss good hackers, we miss G:sincronized troops, we miss Motorbikes,... but we have a bit of everything else) Because lots of people makes fun of them until they're stomped by them After the last 2 years CB efforts, we have the most updated and gorgeous catalog of sculpts of the game
Been a mini gamer for many years but also in martial arts for almost as long, Tai Chi Chuan, Baguazhang, Arnis (Filipino stick fighting), and more. So I have had a interest in Chinese culture and philosophy for a long time. When I first came upon the figures at my LFGS and saw Shaolin in space! I had to play it! This was at the very beginning of them having figures in the US. The amazing figures and Asian aesthetic had me sold. I also liked that the story had, at that time, a more positive and progressive story for future China.
Yu Jing has the best unit designs, mostly sculpted by the best sculptor working for Corvus Belli, and painted in the most pleasing of all the studio schemes. It's not even close.
I always liked the 3d sculpted looks of Yu-Jing. ISS stuff was rad when it got released. I done some quests for CB and got a TAG of my choice in return - choose Guijia - the best looking TAG in the game. It was the first piece of the domino for me. Now I can't stop collecting Yu-Jing minis, even though I already painted over 200 of them. Joy to look at, joy to paint.
Guijia and the Hac tao. Made a terrible list with 9 orders but it looked sweet. Gameplay wise they have basically everything: A HI for every situation (I absolutely love playing IA) A midfield camo game where it's not obviously an ARM 1 guy who will make a poor piece trade with a chainrifle WB Mowangs Fast hard hitting units like the Rui shi and the Sui jian Holo projector shell games (yes that hisien MULTI rifle is hackable... reveals as Kanren KHD, yes that does leave me with points for a hac tao.)
I started YJ because of the YanHuo sculpt and the orange paint scheme. No regrets since then. I like the overall versatility of the faction.
In short, it is this, yes. Long Version: I am a bit asian affin. Maybe a former friend of mine is to blame for this, because he feed me with asia movies Jet Li etc. But the real reason I started YJ was in the beginning of N3 were two friends and I started the paradiso campaign. We need a fourth player, but havent any, so we use YJ army of one of my friends as a dummy. It turns out, that the dummy perfomed very well and I start to like ISS, especially Wu Ming, Celestial Guards and Hsien. So at some point I also start to collect YJ, but striktly only ISS ... but then I won a Yan Huo on a turnament and the Guijia came out. I can´t resitst. So I need to have an army around these guys. I started Vanilla YJ. As I hear about Invincible Army, I was not so much exited. But after I saw the sculpts I was in. Yeah, Kaldstrom strikes me cold, Winter Zhanshis, Jujak, Hundun ... so nice!
The looks, mainly... the Hsien, the ShanJi, the HacTao, all the HI really. Even back in N2 I think the YJ starter was the first I bought. Then I played mostly Nomads because YJ has so many options I felt lost. With IA I finally started playing YJ lists (I don´t really like ISS due to the Zanshis...). I love the straightforward amazing cool gorgeous lists IA allows you to play. To the fluff, I honestly do not see them as "bad". They are a shade darker of grey in a grey, grey setting. Go learn about Ateks and then tell me about the Japanese.
Hey. I'm a primarily PanO player (PanO number one! :p) whose dopoing his toes into White Banner, White Company, and a bit of Vanilla YJ after purchasing Kaldstrøm. In anticipation if the above I've been giving YJ a more thorough lookover and a few things have really opened my eyes to the faction as a whole and drawn me in to make a bigger investment than I thought I would. - The aesthetics. There are some truly gorgeous and unique models in YJ. Mostly HI, which look significantly distinct. Cranes, Yan Hao, Hac Tao, Hsien, Tiger Soldiers, etc. Really attractive stuff. - Variety in vanilla. YJ really has access to a looooot of stuff in vanilla and some very cool unique pieces. Kanren, the Su Jian, Hulang, Dao Fei, Tiger Soldiers, Doa Ying. This stuff just looks like a lot of fun. - Krit Kokram. The sheer amount of hatred this man recieves makes me want to play him so badly. I don't really get all the hatred (something about him getting mistaken for Tei Sheng and his profile being more expensive than its worth I gather). His sculpt is great, his backstory is cool, and his profile is... definitely interesting at the least. Like I'm going to take him and poop out mines, fix broken stuff, unglue my dudes, press buttons, and shoot people in the face with dual heavy pistols because its badass and I don't care if he's a maligned stepchild. I'ma so my best to make Krit feel like a hero because he really deserves it after all the caca he has to deal with! :P P.S. Thanks to Wes-o-matic for starting this thread! When I first perused the YJ area of the forum I was almost put off by how vitriolic some of the posts on here are, but there are some legit cool dudes and its nice to see some chill discussion of the faction as a whole. Keep on being an pretty cool guy!
People have been talking about braids a lot lately and it's been making me nostalgic for when I started playing ISS (back when they were objectively the worst sectorial in game and so very much worse shape than any current faction is) and how they made them look so immensely sci-fi. Don't get me wrong, I like the sleek brutalist militarist aesthetic of Invincible Army, but there's just something about ISS heavy infantry that takes everything one step further and goes into the future in a way that no other miniatures in the Infinity range does. It's not just the braids, it's also the mixing of impractical cloth on top of air-conditioned power armour and the emblems of power that are not derived from mundane religious iconography, but which instead helps sell the story of the faction - so it's not like the Military Orders even comes close to doing the same (they'd need corporate sponsor logos to replace their crucifixes and what not to have the same effect! What wouldn't be more emblematic of the capitalist hyper-power than Nike of the Holy Sepulchre?) As for JSA which very much was part of the YJ I started playing; cyber ninjas, mechanized Samurai and government sponsored yakuza? Sure, I'm in. Apart from the Oniwaban and Ninja, I never got JSA to work well in Yu Jing (though made extensive/abusive use of the 10 point Keisotsu FO for orders) and the Samurai sculpts didn't really enthuse unfortunately. The hakama, however, again really made that cyberpunk aesthetic come to life. I'm a teeeny tiny bit miffed that they've let JSA almost become GITS The Homage Sectorial, but I'll get over it. JSA is now my 4th or 5th army, however, so I rarely play them. What I think was most lost, now that I think about it, was that the strong dividers between ISS's braids and JSA's hakama was the sense that this is the pan-Asian smelting pot. The Yu Jing miniatures don't really have strong ethnic identifiers any more and for Yu Jing that makes sense given how they've had a very light touch when it comes to integration compared to Pan-O or Haqq (integration and subjugation are two different things).
I Came to Infinity for the minis. But among all them ISS hoy my eye. That bright colours, the chinesse style clothes over the armor. And for once, the asian style was not mainly japanese. Later i knew about the JSA and their history with the empire. My army is growing too fast... no regrets
Yu Jing had the techy human faction feel, but not quite as clean and... I dunno, 'generic good guy' feeling as PanOceania. I loved that they had melee units, and that they had some cheap and efficient HI designs (not the profiles, the aesthetics). I also liked that they were more morally grey or even villainous. But I think most of all, I love the slightly gritty "cyber asia" aesthetic from Ghost in the Shell, and Yu Jing gave me a form of that. A little less so without JSA, but when you look at some of the art in the art book, much of it is still there. Dark cityscapes with neon lights and the glowing eyes of some power armoured secret policeman leering out of the darkness. So sweet So mostly for aesthetic and flavor concepts. Never really enjoyed their rules, but N4 has patched their ARO game in a big way and reduced pure spam armies, and so they will likely gel with my playstyle a lot more now.
Where do I even begin...? This, for starters. Zuyong have a great aesthetic, and they're mechanically awesome. So much versatility in that one unit. IRL, I love martial arts in general and swordsmanship in particular, so it's no surprise that I took to Yu Jing so strongly. Something about knowing that my factions (I still play JSA as my main) are the best in CC is deeply satisfying to me, even though I only engage in CC in one out of every two games, at most. The general armor and weapon design across pretty much the entire faction is top-notch. It's the perfect combination of sleek and powerful. I originally bought into the faction to get a mini for a Shadowrun game because it looked so good. The faction is a fantastic toolbox in play. You might not be able to bring every tool in every list, but you can cover a lot of ground, and the faction feels like it has almost endless depth. I really respect this aspect of the faction as well. I wouldn't want to be a citizen of Yu Jing, but I respect that they're a believable kind of bad guys who do some evil stuff but have reasons for it. That's way easier to swallow for me than them just being undeniably evil because they know they're the villains (like most of the evil factions in Warmachine, which I used to play). Everything about the Crane Agents is rad as hell. They're martial artists who are also secret investigators with a bunch of cool tech. Their armor is gorgeous. And they carry swords like the one I own, which is pretty cool. I even love their goofy little coats. The Su-Jian, besides being powerful, is also a fantastic-looking model. Tiger Soldiers. Just the fact that Invincible Army exists. I love power armor. Guilang Skirmishers are super fun. I think that's enough for now, though I'll probably remember something later that I'll wish I had included.
I just like Heavy Infantry a lot. When I first started Infinity, local players tried to explain to me that is it a very slow, tactical game and that I should bring lists that focus on making things harder for the enemy whilst minimizing risks of my own. What ended up happening instead is the spawning of one of those "if your list isn't at least 50% Heavy Armour, is it even a list at all?" players. Because playing the game wrong is very fun. There's a certain joy in bringing a brick for bludgeoning to a tactical black ops encounter. And Yu Jing is quite the brick house in that sense.
Like beefy efficient HI, simple as. I have this strange compulsion that even when I started in late N3, I couldn't generally bring myself to take more than one combat group. Its not the best, or even really a good strategy in a lot of cases, but it just felt so... odd to do. I like Voltroning too much, linking up stuff in one brick to throw through the enemy's window. And Yu Jing fits that. Well, IA does. Need to look into WB. Got an amusing idea for that too.
I have to confess that I had never been attracted to playing with Yu Jing, but after the launch of the White Company I am discovering some of the units they have and I must admit that they are surprising me.
I've gained renewed interest in Yu Jing (by renewed, I mean since JSA parted ways) with some of the newer models. I appreciate arms and armour as well as eastern martial arts, so with the new Liang Kai Ltd Ed and Jing Qo miniatures (and Guijia!), I knew I had to start a collection. It's funny, but when I look back at models I've appreciated over the years, it does include a number of Yu Jing minis - so it could also be an aesthetic thing. I've always wanted the Hac Tao HMG model since it was first released, now I've finally dived into the supporting cast of models to warrant owning one. Lastly, paint schemes can sometimes make or break a miniature on first looks, having spent a little time checking other colour variations, more of the models I previously had no interest really start to stand out :)
Ain't nothing wrong with that. I myself have never really went beyond a single combat group, felt a tad too thin and I liked not losing orders to command tokens ( IDK if that's still a thing in N4 though, that single group lists can't have two orders removed on the first turn. Just recently tried to keep up with the news. ). If you know your stuff you can go farther with a single group than most admit.
