Your take on N4 balance?

Personally, I don't find pitchers+missilebots problematic. In order to pull off a succesful guidebot alpha strike, the following things need to happen:

1) Win iniative roll, or lose deployment and mindgame your opponent to select deployment
2) Despite not getting deployment, still get a table edge where there is plenty of room to advance with your pitcher in relative safety
3) Spend a cmd-point so that you can deploy your guidebot and pitcher last, so that your opponent doesn't hide his valuable models to the other side of table. A smart opponent will probably see the pitchering from a mile away, because you are playing a pitcher faction.
4) Opponent will remove 2 orders either from pitcher or from your guidebot combat group, usually this means that you are stuck with 3 order missilebot
5) The pitcher will have navigate terrain, avoiding cheap camos, hidden deployment models or ARO models.
6) Pitcher need to succeed on pitcher BS roll.
7) Hacker needs to succeed on spotlight (1xWIP13-15). Depending on where the repeater is deployed, the opponent may try to dodge out of hacking area instead of reseting. You may need a lot of orders (or coordinated hacking attacks) to pull this off.
8) Missilebot shoots the target. You probably need to 1-hit the target, because if you don't the opponent has an over 50% to clear spotlight with his Reset ARO.
9) You manage to kill the target. Congratulation are in order. Hopefully it's an important and/or expensive model, because you have probably used all of your orders to do that.

 

I'm of the opinion that running more than one MBT is a skew list. If you can do that whlist having countermeasures to hacking, that's great. But otherwise complaining that ramming more heavy metal into the game element that is most explicity intended to prevent it from running away seems futile.

I have a hard time understanding your point about pitchers and the hacking device + as many factions besides nomads have access to these. Somtimes on the same unit. Besides, the HD+ does not offer great advantages over a hacking device in terms of board control. It mostly enables self defense and manoeuvre.

 

Agreed, but I'm not complaining about MBTs at all. Quite the opposite, actually, I think in a healthy game the power-curve of MBTs is self-correcting. Might not apply to all MBTs, but the ones that don't have the traditional stuff that skews a unit's power like MSV2 or Camo should work similar to my experience with Guijia/BlueWolf

It's not all Nomads, no, but there's relatively few factions that have a full set of hacking tools (and the fact that pitchers are B1 BS Weapons also means that the number of factions that can use them extensively is limited further). My point is that hacking is one of few aspects of the game that's still hard limited for most factions - and I'm kind of also saying that playing against the factions that can play heavily into hacking isn't very fun.
I'm not saying that HD+ is making hacking gameplay oppressive or disruptive, I'm bringing HD+ up as an example of equipment with key abilities that most factions don't have.

 

So to be clear, by factions do you mean sectorials rather than vanillas? I think every vanilla, other than tohaa and ariadna for obvious design reasons can project hacking well. Some have a greater variety of tools to do so, but they all can well.

Where I do agree there is a divergence is sectorials, but to me that's just part of the devil's bargain you make when you opt into a sectiorial. Even then, these factions can still take advantage of the hacking game using models like Camo inflitrators to project aggression or a solo Li hacker who can defend the DZ using REMS. That can be pushed forward to control zones later.

 

No it's not about sectorials versus non-sectorials, it's all about who what and where.

"Projecting hacking" isn't quite the same as what I'm talking about. Most factions (there's 43 last I counted) have to make hard choices when it comes to projecting hacking. Yu Jing (WB, IA, WC) has a middle-ground kind of projection in that they have the kinda-faction-unique minelayer and Deployable Repeater combination that most don't have and it's a very nice middle ground where I can say "I want to be strong in hacking here".

Then you have the kinda-meh factions like Aleph or most Pan-O where they either have a Pandas* on a meh profile or pitcher on a profile where it's a hard choice whether it's worth spending an order to on a single 15-or-lower roll to put a Repeater roughly where you want it. I wouldn't go so far as to say these factions are good at projecting their hacking area as it is generally speaking unreliable or order-inefficient. Typically you'll see them use these tools if they happen to have them available (which isn't necessarily a conscious choice) if they end up in a situation due to the game's shifting to need them.
To be clear, this kind of hacking projection is the kind I adore as a game design. Use the tool if the situation necessitates it, not just crap stuff out so you can force the issue. I would argue that Pitchers are priced according to this design, where they are used to give a critical bit of extra reach rather than area denial.

And then there's Combined, Onyx, Nomads, Hassassin, Druze, etc. A few. Somewhere between 5 and 10 factions. They just say "screw you and your so called 'gaming table'" if they want to and just crap out pitchers wherever they want. Either through Pandas* on profiles that can start well positioned or through pitchers in links or through Bit and Kiss who can spew out B3 Pitchers.

The issue with this is that as soon as a Repeater is involved the hacking game becomes a volume game because you either have your hacker in a position where they can't hack or you have them in a position where they get AROed by all of the enemy hackers, that basically only Anathematic can handle.

I also have a small peevee brewing against deployable repeaters. They're so horribly difficult to make order efficient. To me they kind of are bad but from the other side of the perspective. It wouldn't be outlandish to test a game where Pitchers and DepReps both became Drop Bears But For Repeaters and see how that shakes things up.
Oh, and either have Deactivator have No LOF trait or have them be B2 or B3.

* I realise I wrote Parrot earlier. I meant Pandas. Pandas are quirky in that you can put them in really obnoxious places while Pitchers generally end up where the opponent at least have an opportunity to waste as many or more orders shooting them as you spent putting them down.

P.s. still think that direct hacking should have better odds than going through a repeater, though.

 

I'm actually kinda keen to get back into infinity once I get my second vaccine dose taken care of, I only got to play a couple games before we hit super lockdown where I live and I'm not really into TTS.

What I did play seemed to suggest that my Kosmoflot played a lot like my old Caledonia lists, but a bit more elite.

I'm curious to see how well Ariadna still stacks up these days.

 

Having at least 1 game per week under the belt for N4 with different factions/sectorials I would put my current game concerns as follows:

Rules:
- In general the rules are fine with some wonky interactions (Hidden Deployment ARO Idle, Discover + Shoot in link teams) and bad changes from N3 (Jump movement paths).
- Targeted State: A little overcorrected from N3 (Applyable in ARO, no -3 on Spotlight, Unlimited duration, -3 on Reset). There should be a change to revert it back a little bit (eliminate reset MOD, 1 player turn duration, max 1 active spotlight per hacker, etc.)
- Repeater: Let Repeater generate AROs when they are used to hack through. It feels so annoying that the enemy can shot a Pitcher in LoS of half of my army and start hacking through it and none is able to react to the repeater to remove this threat. This would open the option for counterplay to reapeaters through deployment and make the setup of the repeater network more of a tactical challange.
- Deactivator: Give it a Sensor like Area of effect ability, as in it current implementation it is pretty useless and order inefficient compared to simply shooting at deployables.
- Hacking: I agree with RobertShepherd that Oblivion is slightly to strong. The DAM 14 change is a easy solution I would agree with.

Army composition:
- I find the 15 Model limit is a good change, as more different profiles are taken compared to the order maximised lists from before. That also reduced turn duration to allow for faster games.
- As an alternative they also could have raised the points cost to get a body on the table that has offensive capabilities (For example the base cost could be something like 5 points, so a Morlock would be 10 and a Moderator would be 14).
- In addition they should rebalance the cheap weapons (Chain Rifle/Colt, Light shotgun, SMG, etc.) as they are currently punch far above their weight. Either they become more expensive or reduce their DAM to 11 or something.
- Also the Vanilla/Sectorial balance should be improved. Currently vanilla has general better list building options that have to be balanced out by more and more complex and strong Link team options. Instead they should use more Sectorial only units and profiles (like the new MO) to make sectorials more attractive outside of only the link teams. They also could reduce the AVA of most units in Vanilla to 1 besides some core units.

Not a complete list and it would still need some tampering, but just as some ideas for the discussion.

 

I'm still down on the 15 order cap. 1: I like playing with larger groups. 2: Its not a 15 order cap. Armies that get heavy access to Lt2, NCO, Tac Aware get a boost in orders that I think breaks balance.

 

I will lock this thread too and I welcome you back the the original thread in a couple of days original tread