Hi, I'm an ALEPH/PanO player. I came here here looking to be jealous about Invincible Army, and perhaps make a bunch of irrational purchase decisions... I mean, reading "from the PanO" side of things, it felt like YJ could make a "13 orders list" out of one combat group, and play a good all HI game. So why is there a 61 pages "post-mortem" thread a week before the sectorial is even released? (My wallet doesn't want IA to be good, but I do. ;) )
Have you heard about something called "Uprising"? Basically CB are very incompetent when it comes to community management, made some bad faith moves damaging customer relations, failed to address complaints, threw gas on the fire, let that shit simmer all year, then released what is a flawed and pretty mediocre to garbage profile as a teaser.... And here we are today. Now we have a completely fractured community with pissed off players on one side and CB fanboys on the other that argue endlessly over the situation.
To sum it up in the most objective way possible: The uprising book came out, took the JSA stuff out of Vanilla and the fluff in the book described YJ as being some evil/incompetent asssholes. committing genocide and being general dicks. people felt cheated that some of their models were invalidated and the backstory to their once favorite units were now immoral douchebags. A lot of YJ players were turned off by this, but hoped that IA would be a representation of the very best that the faction had to offer. Some profiles were dropped and many felt as though they weren't very special and now fear that YJ will get the shaft fluff-wise again in the Third Offensive book.
The JSA wanted independence, so YJ decided to kill them all indiscriminately, citizens and soldiers alike. The day was ultimately saved by awesome PanO who sold weapons to JSA right under the oblivious eye of YJ. JSA ultimately ran off to Dawn and set up base there.
Hello! You're a bit early, come back the 30th and you'll have some actual information. A a Pan-O player, imagine next week when Third Offensive comes out and instead of a Varuna release like you were expecting, Aconticimiento explodes and the remnant Acon join Military Orders in becoming a new NA2 faction called Templars, thus both sectorials (and all their unique units) leaving Pan-O permanently and with Pan-O having only NCA left as a sectorial.
CB took about a third of YJ's units away from them, and they were the ones that defined alot of the faction character and traits. YJ pays alot of extra points for extra CC stats. On alot of models, it's a fucking pointless waste of points. However, on many of the units that were removed it was actually good. Good to the point where it defined Yu Jing as one of the best, if not the top dog at melee as a faction. Then they removed those units that were unique within the faction and irreplaceable with other units, such as the Raiden, Aragoto, and Oniwabans. Leaving Yu Jing down on units, and without direction. They're now a faction that pays alot of extra points for shitty CC15-16 stats and normal CCWs for absoutely no fucking sane reason anyone can come up with, see the Liu Xing as an example of a profile with stupid stats and gear and should be 3-5pts cheaper than it is. That's a pretty good way to put it. And don't forget when this pisses players off, you laugh at them, and then don't do anything to try and resolve the situation. And then you wonder why a portion of your customer base thinks you're idiots and takes the piss out of you. We didn't even get an apology for the Shikami. Releasing a brand new model and then deleting it not even 6 months later was a dick move.
Fluff wise it’s as Trash said. The JSA rebelled, they made YJ look like idiots at best. Rule-wise, they took away many of our troops and didn’t make up for it at all through the year. They could have at least given us better AVA for our one choice for Doctor and Engineer! Instead they gave new rules to Merovingia, announced Tunguska as the next sectoral and proceeded to give them really good troops. Then recently came out with profiles for troops that are not horrible but not fantastic either. But they do come out with previews of really good troops for PanO.
Wasn't the general dickishness against the Japanese in YJ pretty well on display? Keisotsu got segregated in the military and sent to meat grinder operations with high casualty rates, the Karakuri basically got developed by the Japanese, seized by the empire, and then pirated to make the Su-Jian? The O-Yoroi and most of their other tech was described as rare, second-rate tech that they had to improve basically without help from the StateEmpire? The propaganda to bring in more Haramaki, Aragoto etc basically stating outright "Go ye heroes, go and die for your Emperor" because the life expectancy was so low? And...I am legit sorry, but genocide from the faction that uses *brainwashed political prisoners as living bombs* doesn't strike me as a huge stretch - the Imperial Service has always been heavily directed by horrible people in service to a fascist state. Not all are horrible, naturally, but all serve a system that is itself willing to bleed its own citizenry trying to strive greater than their rivals. Them being described as "the baddies" isn't out of the realm of possibility any more than the crap the Hexahedron pulls, the Sanctioned Piracy and terror ops of the QK/Hassassin, or the deeply imbedded criminal families and radically unethical science of the Nomads. I mean it's not 40k dark, but it's still not exactly shiny happy heroism. From a rules standpoint, I will say I absolutely get the frustration from YJ players, and I'm still personally trying to figure out how to use the Haramaki box and Spitfire Raiden I have half-painted. I'd love to see YJ get a good balancing factor in the rules to make up for the significant gutting of their lists.
The genocide wasn't the problem so much as instead of suppressing the information about it, they actively broadcasted it like fucking retards. China is actively committing this kind of shit right now in the present day. How much do you know about the Uyghurs? Fuck all I bet, and that's not a jab at you few people do have much of an idea of what's going on over there and that's because China is doing their best to hide the shit out of it and pretend they're clean and above board. That is the logical move, that is what they should've been doing during uprising instead of the antics of PsychoCrane and the Yun Duan or whatever name the stupid CBLs had..
I've actually been following the Uighur situation on NPR, it's horrifying stuff and I KNOW I'm not getting all of the information.
All good points. For me it was a bit of a final straw. I stopped playing ISS in not small part due to the story. I was hoping that they would grow past the currently BS that China does. Sort of like they did with Haqqislam. Instead the doubled down on it. Changing out Uyghurs for Japanese.
Also you add the fact Yu Jing were not only evil but utterly stupid too, the Dick Dastardly of Infinity.
Not really that bad. The Japanese tech industry stood for a significant portion of the Yu Jing R&D and several Japanese industrialists enjoyed positions of extremely elevated personal wealth and freedoms. The development of military materiel being sent off to be further developed in other projects isn't something that can be described as a dick-move since it is all in-house development. And not to mention that Keisotsu were regularly sent into the meat grinder at the behest of the JSA generals whom were nearly all Japanese former Samurai caste and were the ones who enacted Uprising and benefited the most from it, meaning the outlook for Keisotsu haven't changed one bit. Hell, the JSA wasn't even a thing at first with Japense citizens fully integrated in the regular banner armies during service, the JSA was formed as a PR push trying to cater to the nationalistic parts of the Japanese society. Most of the curtailed freedoms of the Japanese came into being due to the efforts of the Kempeitai and the other subway-bombing terrorists that I forget the name of, because operatives from them were always Japanese ethnic attempting to spread terror among non-Japanese ethnics. The Japanese actually started out as first-grade citizens with complete and undisputed full rights, but the actions of the Kempeitai and the Kuge took that away successively. The Yu Jing being nominally the most evil of the evils that are the Infinity factions isn't per se a blotch on our pride as much as being the worst at being an oppressive regime, if you catch my drift. I mean, it should be possible to describe a faction as being pretty evil without having them eat babies and tripping over their own feet. Just look at 40k Grim Dark where the shining beacon of hope of the least evil and most good faction, actually defacto eats babies #falseemperor #theemperoreatsbabies . It's not actually at that level, and Infinity shouldn't really need to go there.
Okay, good deal; glad to get more perspective there. I am aware of the radical militant nationalist groups in Japan even today, and it's not like Japan's relationship with China isn't fraught to begin with (*COUGH COUGH MANCHUKUO COUGH*). I still love YJ's heavy infantry, the Zuyong are still my favorite "good guy" unit and my recently-painted Hsien and Daofei are two of the favorite figs I've worked on in a while.
Yeah, the biggest nail here isn't ''Yu Jing did some war crimes.'' It's ''Yu Jing did some war crimes and was dumb enough not to try to cover it up in the slightest.'' I'm perfectly fine with playing the evil despotic bad guys who brain-wash political opponents into suicide-bombers. The issue is I'd like them to at least be competent at all that evil stuff. Execute the entire PanOceanian colony that strayed too far to Yu Jing space, just do it competently and DO NOT stream it to your friends of whatever-the-Infinity-equivalent-of-Facebook is.
Maya. It's all you need. Well, it's all you should need. And if you aren't there, then you're non-existant. Maybe some new troops will have very similar looks? Yeah, some may argue that CB was lazy using old (but redesigned) designs for new troops, but that at least would be a little compensation to those who bought them (in good faith)! Are all new designs out yet? Haramaki seems too JSAish to me, but Raiden might work.
Exactly. That is an epic failure of counterinsurgency warfare. It directly gave ammunition to the insurgents and got the rest of the Sphere on their side. Don't get me wrong, counter-insurgency warfare is hard. You cannot follow your immediate instincts, you must actually do the exact opposite of what your instincts tell you. But the Kanren Counterinsurgency Group is part of the Imperial SS. And somehow did everything the exact opposite of how they should be trained to operate. The Yanjing, the intelligence agency so badass that they made PanO completely scrap their old intelligence agencies and create the Hexahedron somehow did not see the ONE individual who was meeting with everyone to set up the support for the Uprising. We get told, "wait and see" about the fluff or new units in the Uprising. The fluff keeps getting worse and worse. Someone blew up a fucking dam and flooded out an entire city, killing most of the civilian population. PanO stopping YJ military flights over YJ territory. The terrible losses taken by Keisotsu units go from being the racism of Chinese officers to the utter don't-give-a-damn-about-losses ethnic Japanese officers. YJ High Command orders the destruction of one of their own Consulates and everyone there to destroy a Nomad ship berthed there. "Wait and see" about the Shield Division for the Closed Battle Lists. OMFG, the Yuandun Division's fluff is explicitly War Crimes, killing non-resisting civilians. While the unit mixing is interesting, the fluff makes me want to puke. And I play Russians, Japanese, and even SS in WW2 games, so my tolerance for 'ethical violations' is a bit wider. And after all that, the leaked 'Heavy Infantry Sectorial' models don't have 2W on their profiles. They have all the disadvantages of 2W HI (hackable, EM immobilizing, etc) and the model that starts in the middle of the table with all the AP mines and SMGs isn't even Shock Immune. Plus, we find out that CB was dead serious about not putting the Daofei, the Tactical Section of the Invincible Army, into the Invincible Army sectorial . Oh, and we also found out that CB lied about Tiger Soldiers being in the Invincible Army sectorial, too (Tiger dossier released with Red Veil explicitly said 'Invincible Army'). So the guys who like YJ for the fluff of having (mostly) put all that racism between the different nations aside are very unhappy about the bait&switch we got served. Assuming that you play JSA, the Spitfire Raiden makes a decent Kempeitai Spitfire proxy (in fact, I'm pretty sure that's why the Kempeitai got the spitfire profile!). The Haramaki are rather tiny compared to the current Domaru, but you could just say that they are Keisotsu wearing helmets.
The Raiden as Kempeitai did stand out as an option; I also noticed the Tanko supposedly have the same silhouette rating as the Keisotsu, so I can still use the Haramaki as Tanko who just still have their old armor. Just, well, now I need to fill out a JSA list. :P
In summary people don't like change. And yu Jing underwent a particularly rough change with JSA leaving. There hasn't been anything new for yu Jing since so there's a bit of anxiousness for IA. You can definitely use the old JSA figs for profiles in either a new JSA force, the ikari or proxy within yu Jing forces. Vanilla yu Jing as it is, is still playable but some profiles are showing their age, and with the removal of profiles, variety has taken a hit. I'm optimistic the invincible army will add some interesting units. I'm already excited to put the Zhencha on the table and it fits really well into lists I like to run.
