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Still in the state of "will most likely start up some infinity, but dont know anything about it".

I found the Shavaasti starter box look fun and different. And has taken a liking to the sneakier aliens of the CA.
But looking around, the combined army appear to be trixy and rely on special stuff and rules.

Also, a quick look around here show just 2 tactic threads about CA on the first 2 pages, none of them got any replys.
Is CA a hard faction to play (especially for a beginner), or is it just that the Human factions are more popular?

In truth, I already got some Shaavasti and the Anathematic, just to paint up, but has now started to think about getting another faction to start playing with.
Infinity looks so confusing, and its really hard for a newb to make sense of it all.

There are a lot of special rules for every army. You can absolutely do Combined on the easy - Morats have very few special rules and are pretty buff in combat. That said, they aren't sneaky per se.

IMO, use the units you're comfortable with and work your way up in terms of complexity. For example, I'd save close combat-heavy units and hacking for when you have a better understanding of the basic ruleset.

 NuggzTheNinja wrote:
There are a lot of special rules for every army. You can absolutely do Combined on the easy - Morats have very few special rules and are pretty buff in combat. That said, they aren't sneaky per se.

IMO, use the units you're comfortable with and work your way up in terms of complexity. For example, I'd save close combat-heavy units and hacking for when you have a better understanding of the basic ruleset.

Thanks for the reply -I feel much more confident that the shaavasti can find a useful spot in my tactics now. But in the end I probably wont go full sneaky anyway.

Just throw yourself into it would be my recommendation. I've been playing since N3 came out and I sill feel like I've only just scratched the surface rules wise. Trust me, getting into this game will be one of the best decisions you've ever made. I like Morats myself, but Shaavasti are pretty sweet too.

It used to be a problem; not so much for the special rules, but because the Combined Army starter pack cost so many more points than the rest (182 vs about 100-125 for the human forces) thanks to the massively expensive Charontid. The new starter is still pricey, but not to the same extent.

Avoid shavastii right now they're being remodeled and updated - the noctifiers are safe and the Sphinx, also they have the worst sectoral line troops and their fire teams are meh. If you want firepower and some tricks go morat or vanilla. The new onxy contact sectoral is almost here - still missing some remotes and tags but is looking nasty and allows you to make link teams out of tags and/or umbras all of which are nasty but will make you stretch your points. Ikadron batdroids are good for any army with baggage a repeater built in and twin light flamers for only 9pts. Yaogats are pretty good and maakrep trackers because of msv2 so you can shoot trough smoke and they have great weapon options, the charontid is a beast as well and skiavoros is great for your lt as he gives strategies 2 and g:nemonica which means you will never be in loss of lt. But if you run a lot of morats they never become irregular due to losing lt and don't fall back in retreat. Umbra hacker is a great tool as well - he can neuter other msv units with white noise so movement will be no problem if you run him and some daturazis with smoke grenades or an oznat with 0 swc light smoke grenade launcher. Also in hs evo remotes become hackers with amazing tricks that benefit the whole army. And don't forget the total reaction hmg remotes - they're pretty annoying.

Whatever stats are published in 3rd edition Human Sphere will be the stats for a while yet, I imagine. There's no indication of a release date for the next book, so for the foreseeable future, there'll be no further change. As for new miniatures, well, if you like them as they are now, you might as well buy them.

Shasvastii will be undergoing revisions, so I would not get too deeply into that, but the rest of CA is more or less solidified. There is a new sectorial ( a sub-faction) coming with the new book. The shasvastii sectorial revision will be sometime in the future. They are playable in the main CA faction though, so go ahead and have fun.

For good reading on CA tactics, http://www.data-sphere.net/tag/combined-army/ and these threads on the official forums, http://infinitytheforums.com/forum/forum/20-combined-army/

As far as confusing goes, yeah, everyone gets that at first. You really have to play the game to understand it. Believe me, everything makes sense fairly quickly once you actually start a game, rather than just reading the rules.

The "sneaky" abilities - Camouflage, Thermo-Optic Camouflage and Impersonation - aren't really difficult. All they do is add an extra stage (or two) before the enemy can shoot at you