Depends what your criteria for popularity is. If you want to know what everyone is playing CB's popularity stats reflect that. If you want to know what factions are highly represented at say convention sized events like Adepticon or Satellite tournaments CB's stats are fucking useless because they're simply taking data from every single ITS event that gets registered. Maybe Vanilla Haqq does over represent at those types of events or maybe they don't, but those stats they posted don't answer that question one way or another.
But that information has also been collected and reviewed by others. @HeadChime's video does have that breakdown: . Vanilla Haqqislam is not shown to be very popular in the general or top ranks. They are in the middle.
What do you mean "given"? We pay for this game. Fundamentally the outlook you're talking about betrays an inability to think critically, evaluate different possibilities, and imagine hypotheticals.
Nah, when people were complaining about Tohaa going back to N3 and the "make it work" crowd was saying that Tohaa weren't powerful, they were proven wrong.
I am listening to your explanation, provided you can be respectful and polite in what you write. As for the others, I do not get what you are talking about? regardless of paying or not, an army is a set of tools given to you to create an army list containing some of those tools to do a task, winning the mission, under the framework that is the game system of course.
And we can evaluate the efficacy of one set of tools compared to another, and make judgments as to whether or not one set of tools is worse than the others. This isn't rocket science.
And comparing one “army” to another, focusing only specific tools and comparing those, rather than looking at each army as its own thing, and how it set out to accomplish each task, is a fool’s errand. It’s immaterial to the efficacy of PanO what tools YJ brings to the table. It’s merely a matter of looking at, “what does PanO do well, what tools shine in that, and how then do I leverage and support those tools to the best I can?”
If all tools are equally viable in given situations, then sure. There is no complaint to be had. What I believe we have come to is that: 1.not all tools are created equally for all tasks. 2.counters to said tools are not as equally viable. 3.tools and their counters are not well distributed. 1. This is fine. This keeps the game interesting as there are multiple ways to interact with each other and the game. 2. This is fine too to some extent. Some counters may counter several issues and probably should be penalized or limited in some way to represent that. In a way, shooting is this general tool that counters many aspects, but its also one that there have been a growing myriad of ways to engage with and counter. It is essentially a thing that every faction can bring to the table albeit with various dimensions. 3. This is the rub. PanO in some ways has evolved since N2 along with the game in general, in some serious ways, its stayed the same. For a long time in N3 PanO was flagging behind badly. Varuna came along and injected fresh air into the faction as things felt a bit broader, tools showed up and some really aggressive links came into existence with kamau wildcards. Things progressed, other sectorials got some fireteam love and a little sprucing up. MO got reworked and basically came about the same strength in some respects and worse in others. Overall, PanO opened up a bit, gained some hacking in NCA and Acon thanks to borrowed profiles, got some nice tools with Varuna. The community backlash to Varuna was pretty harsh as I think Varuna wound up being 5th or 6th in terms of overall strength on release and petering out overtime. This seems to directly impact the design of winterfor. Right at the end we get winterfor and it reads as a direct reaction to the Varuna release. We get a few neat profiles like the Vargar, we get some mobility with a bunch of climbing and super jump showing up and the powerhouse of the unlinkable karhu. We also get a half a dozen repeat profiles, expensive links multiple, multiple overlapping units and just plain duds like the boyg and gunnar. Layer that with a complete lack of any isometric information, coc, or new rules/equipment. Its shining example was the karhu which was strong with its initial release. Its not hard to argue that initial winterfor was a dud of a sectorial with a handful of useful pieces N4 hits. We see all the hacking we just got basically disappear and get replaced with shoot harder in NCA. Acon more or less stays the same. Varuna takes it with nerfs to jammer and helots and profiles losing stealth. MO loses stealth all over the place. Winterfor decides to supercharge the karhu which was already a really solid piece into what I believe is unhealthy levels as it picks up wildcard and NCO. Profiles that were struggling basically stay struggling. MO get reworked again and again manages to stay about the same powerlevel still relying more on the TO order sgts than ever, now calling them trinitarians. This was a big shrink to our play style overall. The fireteam rework comes around and it overall rather hurt PanO more than helping it. The marginal aid to profiles that were trying to leverage raw BS came at the expense of our own links. We have dearth of counts as fireteam composition. While I find line trooper cores making their way into my list, I'm not seeing a lot of appeal in the more expensive links I used to run as they lose out on our "faction defininition" of shooting better instead relegating them to haris options. In a vacuum, thats fine, but some of the strongest factions already didnt care about fireteams to begin with. In addition, some factions have a glut of counts as flexibility allowing them to power up their guns with much better compositions. This really needs to be touched up some more so the distribution is more fair between sectorials. We are far from the only faction that this is currently hurting. Other factions have been creeping up on our ability to shoot, bit by bit. Msv + mimetism on a BS 12 or 13 isn't as rare these days as it was in N2. And thats honestly where the bulk of our shooting power is. We have a handful or pieces that are ahead of this: Swiss guard, aquilla guard, cutter and tik. These have their own limitations, sectorials, counters that aren't shooting and cost a good chunk of your list. We can look around the other factions and see they have super shooter pieces as well like the Avatar, charontid, the Marut, hac tao, hsien, omega, Atlanta and Kusanagi. If you dont have a super shooter, you can normally get the job done with a quality shooter, or a link. You don't need an overwhelming amount of gun power to clear the board most of the time and after a point, it becomes extravagant. But none of these factions sacrifice half as much as PanO to get the moderate advantage in shoot outs. I think it should be clear here, that we're not saying PanO needs to be the best at everything or needs to get everything, but that it is lacking a lot. And what it lacks limits how it can approach situations. It forces us down more narrow paths towards solutions for the game that are often inferior to what is available in the game overall. We have the most sectorials but have one of the lowest profile counts. Our vanilla pales in comparison to the power of other vanilla. This is because our sectorials tend to repeat profiles or archetypes frequently. We come back to fine theory, but application means we really aren't that diverse in approach and that we really aren't accessing tools, counters and solutions in optimal ways compared to much of the game.
No, we're looking at the faction holistically, seeing that it both underperforms in terms of power level and on fun/feel, and then dialing in to why that is on a more granular level. We have explained this to you repeatedly, and your disingenuous assertions to the contrary merely show you to be a fundamentally dishonest person. Which, I guess, tracks.
This is completely incorrect. My opponent's capabilities impact my own strategy as much as the mission or my own tools. It actually lies at the heart of the problem here, in that several (not all, not most, but enough) factions can evade and/or counter all of the PanO standout units, leaving you in a situation where you need to take a list filled with subpar tools and playing a game style your faction doesn't support just to stand a chance. I actually believe PanO would see a sharp drop in tournament representation without ITS' two-list structure, due solely to how difficult it is to fill the game's various "gear checks" with the faction while still having enough points left over for fun. To provide an example of how opponent capabilities can affect gameplan, let's look at the matchup of Vanilla Ariadna against NCA in the Looting and Sabotaging scenario. Most Skirmishers and Warbands in Ariadna can score in this scenario, while NCA has only TAG melee, Shona and certain Locust profiles. This means the NCA player will likely be on the defensive; they can't realistically kill all the enemy's scoring pieces so they'll have to slow down the opponent and waste orders. On the other hand, the Ariadnan player can be aggressive, because if they kill the one or two troops in the NCA list that can hurt the AC2 they can stop defending and focus effort elsewhere. As a result, NCA has to put up long-range ARO to spot Markers and shoot Warbands before they can get close, watch board edges for Van Zant or M5, and keep their scoring piece central and well-protected. They can't count on Flash Pulse for any of these defenses due to TI. They'll most likely only get one shot on the objective in Turn 3, after Auxilia and midfield Fireteams have dug through the minefields, but have to expend several troops guarding the AC2 throughout the game- this attrition really pushes you to use Shona, because you can't spare any Orders on failed attempts. That above example is just one matchup, out of dozens that have to be considered for each scenario, and already the gear checks are apparent- need hard ARO since you can't trade, Flash Pulse can't be counted on so no Warcors or Fugazi doing that job, need a specialised melee profile just to hurt the objective. And that's without considering Antipodes, Polaris, Spetznaz... It can be really, really hard to make a list that can handle all comers in most PanO armies. I personally consider an army to be in a good place if you can freely select tournament lists by scenario instead of by matchup, out of my armies that's Vanilla Yu Jing and my Nomads. My NCA requires a tailored list to not suck against heavy Hacking, and MRRF weirdly needs a special list to handle heavy armour.
All this talk about Pano have make me willing to try the task of using them in the next ITS tournament, the valencia Nanonacional Satellite, asking my Pano friends at the local meta to share me their armies to make this happen. Which Pano sectorial do you consider is the one in the worst situation at an ITS event? Or it is vanilla Pano the one at the worst situation?
Kinda depends a bit on the mission selection. Of the 3 in production I'd say that varuna has some of the larger issues with missions where as MO can have worse match issues.
Sval actually gets far more interesting at 400 points because they're the only Pan-O sectorial that can do HI+MI pure fireteams. Vargs actually have a bunch of really spicy profiles that are ripe for exploitation if you can have them lead by a couple of strong frontline units like a pair of ORCs who benefit immensely from being BS17. It presents an actual legitimate alternative to just sticking Karhu into fireteams, but you can't really afford to run that fireteam at 300 points because it's a very limited format.
At my upcoming Satellite event PanO is actually the most represented Vanilla faction. The mission sets are very "kill things" focused however. Will be interesting to see how they do as I personally believe Vanilla PanO is in a pretty good place.
Thanks for the answers. So it seems that since SWF is the one with the most issues for an ITS (if I have understand properly from your answers) then I shall try them at next Satellite?
SVF has some issues with certain troops being...not good. But it can also crutch on the amazing Karhu. The issue is that having to crutch on something feels bad, and it leads to dull list building and so forth.
