Why ISS doesn't work...

...and how this guy made a list of clickbait titles that doctors hate.

The problem is sectorial design.

To preface the entire post we need to look at how sectorials and even factions are designed in Infinity. Generally speaking, you will have a certain set of units that are over-designed inside each faction. They embody what the faction is about and lists built around making these units tick is how the faction has been balanced, to a greater or lesser degree.
For example, while you can make a Dahshat list without Rui Shi in a link and without McMurrough, you will be playing at a disadvantage and with a list that looks like another sectorial without the benefits from that sectorial. Or take Varuna and don't use Helots as speed bumps and forgo the Kamau sniper. Viable, but not as strong, you might do this due to a specific mission design but it's not going to be optimal. Basically the sectorial's "power graph" will have a bell curve around these units.
There is two exceptions, in my opinion, to this and that's IA and ISS.
In IA is basically designed to have a flatter curve where all units are competent without any unit going to the extremes. To some degree I think this works, it's harder to design for and balance for, but IA manages to land somewhere in the acceptable power range among sectorials - not ailing and not dominating.
The other exception is ISS which has an inverse power curve compared to most sectorials. While for IA the N4 changes lifted the sectorial up by making everything cheaper and making hacking a big problem for everyone, for ISS instead the anchoring units such as they were all had their strength taken away at a systems level.

Core sectorial design in the rear-view mirror.

During N3 ITS asked you to make a list of 3 Combat Groups, later 2 Combat Groups, which proved to be more than ample space for units. ISS due to how it was designed could easily fill with large amounts of orders and as was exposed in the data analysis written by Ieldin Soecr (if memory serves) here's two interesting facts about ISS;
1. The bottom 66% of players under performed very hard with ISS while the top 33% overperformed
2. The average orders for the top 33% was over 19 out of a max of 20, more than any other sectorial but Caledonia (if memory serves)

The strength of ISS in N3 was a plenitude of orders to use on high quality troopers, high quality troopers that because of the cheap orders didn't need to be optimally designed, and high quality troopers that were experts at bullying light units

The game has changed, but ISS hasn't.

Now in N4, ISS still relies on getting large amounts of orders to spend on sub-optimally designed elite units, however, the game has changed. You can no longer get excessive amounts of orders in your list through the means of dirt cheap regular troopers, the only means of getting extreme amounts of orders is to use elite troopers with special skills that basically do not exist in ISS. Second of all, because most sectorials have been redesigned with this intent, IA is no longer the only sectorial with easy access to this technique meaning that the number of opponents that ISS will face that have a better order economy than them has increased.
To add insult to injury, this also means that the likelihood of facing an opponent that's also got a better order quality than ISS has also increased because the core design of ISS units haven't changed; they're all still mostly specialised at bullying light units.
Add to this that most sectorials have seen an increase in Multispectral Visor L2 or at least have gotten their MSV1 upgraded on a systemic level, the old strength of having increased MSV over other sectorials have gotten less pronounced or disappeared - albeit the old complaint that there's significant overlap among the MSV2 troopers is still there with one more profile that is designed to operate in the 0-24" range band.

To put it in another way, ISS is outnumbered and outgunned by design.

The lack of strength.

Taking a bird's eye view on ISS we see that the melee units are fairly plentiful, but they're also fairly mediocre. Martial Arts 1 is as common as Martial Arts 3, Natural Born Warrior is limited to a mercenary that can't link and has no Marker state or forward deployment, and the sectorial's highlight is a Martial Arts 2 unit.
We also see that predictable for sectorials that focus on melee, ISS has very few heavy machine guns, but unlike those sectorials ISS also doesn't have very many forward deploying units and are quite limited in Camouflage or Impersonation (Marker states that prevent attacks).
We can also see that ISS is for Yu Jing, or indeed for being a sectorial, very low on Tactical Awareness and NCO and that it's one of few remaining sectorials without a TAG quality trooper, which also partially explains Tactical Awareness' absence.
The sectorial also has an above average units with +1 SWC or more, but since they are expensive it's very difficult to use this benefit since the number of decent units with SWC weapons and a low cost makes the bonus kind of disappear - and that's not really because of excessive SWC discounting, either.

As such, the sectorial has no obvious strength.

The old problem units remain unfixed.

A long standing complaint about ISS has been the Pheasant and the Bao.

The Pheasant has always been very expensive for what they do. CB has made several attempts at redesigning the unit so that it gets more attractive, but each time it seems like they make a decent attempt but it never get there by being the cost of at least Chain of Command too expensive.

Meanwhile Bao have a long standing issue where the unit have stats that are optimised for a specialist but doesn't have any specialist profiles, instead it's a gun fighter that tries to compete with the faster, cheaper, and buffable Rui Shi (that's also got a Spitfire instead of a Combi). They also had the issue where in order to get them to be properly buffed through a Fireteam Core you'd need to bring a bunch of expensive units that you didn't really want to fill a link with - but that was solved by removing Fireteam Core as an option...

But what works?

Here's the rub. Everything works, nothing is terribly designed if you view it in a vacuum because it's fine for units to be sub-optimised if they have unique redeeming qualities (such as being the only unit with MSV2). Problem is, ISS is made up of almost exclusively these secondary units or units and with very few that are designed to take advantage of how N4 works.

So what can be done?

At the moment I think this sectorial is the least functional sectorial in the game. It's got very few redeeming units and very few reasons to play compared to vanilla. The best units are either form other factions and work better in their home factions or they are ISS troops that work almost equally well in vanilla.

Essentially the sectorial needs an overhaul and not a small one.

If the sectorial is meant to be designed like most other sectorials, CB need to decide on a couple of units that's meant to be the defining features of this sectorial and design them to the point where it's simple and efficient to bring them in the list.
The most common means of doing this is to give the units in question Frenzy and thus a hefty points discount with a drawback that can be prevented by links. Obvious candidates for this are the Crane and Hsien whom if they were 10 to 15 points cheaper with Frenzy, got Tactical Awareness and/or NCO on select profiles, and both were Wildcards would cement the nature of the sectorial quite thoroughly.

If the sectorial is meant to have a more even power curve similar to IA, CB needs to address the bugbears. They need to smooth the curve to the point where the Hsien or Adil Mediumuht doesn't stand out, and that also means smoothing it out compared to other sectorials. Here's a laundry list of things that could smooth things out a bit:
* Give Bao the Pheasant's profile and gear, but with MSV2 and BioV instead of CoC.
* Tone the Phesants down a bit and give them Holomask and Wildcard so they can hide where CoC is
* Give Kanren Impersonation (IMP-2) instead of Holoprojector
* Remake Sun Tze; he just doesn't work at this price
* Integrate the mercenaries better - f.ex. allow the CSU and ABH to form a Core
* Let Ninjas have smoke grenades
* Improve AVA on both Ninjas
* Give Wu Ming TacAware on a couple of profiles
* Introduce a TAG with AP weaponry.

Or reinvent the sectorial's identity completely and redesign the units inside. This could include things like drastically increasing the number of MSV profiles, increasing the hacking presence with devices that have upgrades, or maybe have it start a bit closer on the contrived reason that Infinity tends to take place in urban or semi-urban environments where a law enforcement team could conceivably pre-deploy like a military one couldn't.
Or maybe even go so far as to take that "Secret" that people like to put into the abbreviation and make Holomask and Camouflage really common in ISS so that people get to play the fun game of "is it a Hsien, Crane or just a Celestial Guard - who knows?!"

 

Anyways, those are my opinions and my pitch for why I think ISS badly needs a redesign. Obviously they might not be shared by you or you may have a different take on what's the problem. I'll just have to note that it's extremely difficult putting into word why I think a particular sectorial isn't performing well when it's not obvious like it was with IA.

Here's a bit of a challenge just to illustrate how I think and feel about ISS:
Make an ISS list for an ITS mission and I'll attempt to make a better list* that works similarly to yours using Hassassin Bahram and/or JSA. For obvious reasons, Su-Jian is a cop out.

* as defined by "more options, fewer weaknesses, or more orders"

 

Yeah, Fiday and Shinobu can serve a similar role, but while I think a Su-Jian is much worse in actual assassination it can switch to a brawler role a lot better if needed.

I've had some fun in a small ITS tournament playing Hassassin Bahram; only played one list with three Fiday and a mixed Fireteam very similar to a Celestial Guard + Crane style, but instead of costing 150/3 and having MadTraps and a Sensor, it cost 120/3 and having an AP Spitfire, NCO, a sniper and a Doctor+ embedded. Not to mention how 28 points of Pheasant is terrible compared to 28 points of Farzan CoC (which is why neither Crane is LT)...
HB is an amazing reduction of what ISS felt like playing in my earlier days of Infinity.

(Edit: I do think the Su-Jian is fine. Not sectorial-saving-great, and somewhat poorly adapted to the edition, but it would be a good tool if the arsenal was up to date with the current edition)

 

Actually, yes I do, tbh. Not all profiles necessairly, though...

 

It is not snark, to be honest. Feel free to read it as snark, but it's all honest opinion. I think ISS is the game's only F-tier sectorial and the post details why.

Hate? I love all three of them (though the political lean on JSA is a bit closer to grim dark than I like). I'm just sad that playing ISS would be handicapping myself and I'm not a good enough player that handicapping myself for our tournaments is necessary nor fun.

And since it's apparently not obvious; the Su-Jian doesn't have anything resembling a counter-part in either JSA or HB so I can't make a list using those sectorials that functions similarly, it's as simple as that. You assuming this has to do with my ego tells me you've personally invested into this in a maligned way, but if you're willing to accept that it has nothing to do with me then we can have a conversation about what the Su-Jian does for the sectorial, but first I'd like to establish whether and to what extent it is possible to replicate the qualities of an ISS list first. I'm convinced it's possible; convince me otherwise?