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A thread to chat about N4, all about N4. This way we do not clog up the N&R thread...well clog it up too much, eh?

Me, consolidate a lot of the hacking programs, or eliminate many of them. Same for weapons and ammo. Return Infnity to the idea of covert ops, black ops. it is creeping into military skirmish territory with the larger order pools. Make TAGs worthwhile.

There's more, but I'll let y'all say it.

Great idea!

I'll second the consolidation of hacking programs.

For me, I'd like to see a reduced ability to punish multiple command group lists. That a list of 11 models can have two orders stripped on the first turn is unduly harsh IMO.

And.....someone has to say it..... crits. I don't think they should be removed entirely, but the auto wound is too much of a gotcha in a game with limited resources like orders. Perhaps an auto win that still requires an armour roll.

I'd also like to see a simplification of fire teams. Thisis a personal desire, and one I know not everyone has, but having a fire team of five widly different models of varying stypes and abilities just seems.... silly.

And following on from the last point, I have the feeling that all of the new factions / sectorials all ahve the same make up. You haev the lin troops, you have the fire power HI, the HI with a trick, the S5 monster, the generic jump troop, the camo specialist, the sneaky sneaky TO camo hacker, and the Duo and haris options all around. I miss when each faction had its own thing going on - Triads were limited to Tohaa, Fire team Enormous Tacos with SP, and so on.

Yes, I'm old, get off my lawn. It has mines.

Crits should honestly just be on 1s rolled. There's pretty much no reason why it should be matching modified skill.

Consolidate and eliminate a whole lot of things. All the different infiltration methods should just be a base infiltration rule with modifiers added on instead of giant new text blocks.

Fireteams. Fold them into the game proper and clean up their interactions. Give everyone access to them, but sectorials maybe get some for free or a better one. Or. just leave them out and find some other way to make fodder units useful without such weird interactions.

I actually want it to be less complicated. It plays well, but sometimes I think there are one too many rules about that don't serve too much purpose, or are powerful but complicate things a lot.

One of the major things that needs, needs, needs to happen in regards to Hacking?

Hacking Devices as standard on TAGs.

How about manned TAGs cannot be hacked.

 .Mikes. wrote:


For me, I'd like to see a reduced ability to punish multiple command group lists. That a list of 11 models can have two orders stripped on the first turn is unduly harsh IMO.

IMO, the command group limit should be increased. Or done away with entirely. Or give each faction its own command group limits.

 Red Harvest wrote:
Return Infinity to the idea of covert ops, black ops, it is creeping into military skirmish territory with the larger order pools. Make TAGs worthwhile.

Those are somewhat contradictory desires. TAGs scream a real skirmish has broken out. They might be able to be sneaky, but once they start shooting its hardly a subtle tool.

But even if you have a game with 20-30 models per side, that is still well within Black Ops sizes. Real world Covert and Black Ops might have close to 100 troops on the ground. Not to mention all the support personnel.


Anyway, aside from a general rebalance and streamlining of Hacking, I think we really just need all of the old profiles to get polished and brought up to date. There are too many old profiles that are simply languishing without any ability to compete.

For example, why would anybody take an Azrail when you can take a Al Fasid for only a couple points more? Give old models a purpose.




Back to command limits, I think having each faction(and maybe each sectorial) have its own Command Group limit would be interesting. You could balance out a faction that has powerful units by giving them a smaller pool, while a faction that relied more on numbers could have larger pools to compensate for having poorer stats and abilities.

The same could be done with Fireteams. Give each Sectorial and main faction its own Fireteam limits rather than having a limit that applies for everybody.

Mostly I want to see some standardization of the good ideas we've seen in the last year or two. I think there's a good number of experimental abilities that could really help TAGs; notably, I think NCO would be a fantastic addition to them.

There's definitely things that would be great to see reorganized in the skillsets. Most of the melee stuff could be reworked a bit and there are a lot of niche versions of Veteran and Camo that could be consolidated. There are definitely hacking programs that could be cut/consolidated as well, though I think the more important thing would to just reorganize them into lists of their respective hacking devices. Half of the confusion I find is just that people seem unaware of which programs are available to each device.

Finding a way to clean up who Fireteams are listed would also be a big bonus. The new mixed designs are a lot more interesting than the old ones, but their rules are kind of messy. Rewriting them into a cleaner design would be a big help.

Oh, also no nested skills.

 .Mikes. wrote:
Oh, also no nested skills.

Ehh. Nested skills are fine, as long as it actually makes sense and is a space saver.

Veteran Level 2 giving you Courage, V: NWI, and Sixth Sense is good.

Martial Arts giving Surprise Attack is bad because its useless.


Otherwise, a lot of units would have a ridiculous list of special rules. So having a special rule that gives other special rules is fine, as long as it is used correctly. So basically, clean them up a bit for sure. but don't necessarily get rid of them entirely.

I don't want my Vet Kazak's list of special rules to be any longer than it already is.

Only warning people, stay on topic and remain polite.

Nested skills are fine, they just need to be more clearly marked and ideally, have an option in Army to show-all/expand out the nested skills.

Unrelated to nested skills, one of the things I've always hated is how LTs work. N3 made it far less punishing than N2 to lose one, but the whole "hide the LT, guess the LT" portion of the game has NEVER been very fun or interesting and if you play a lot then there's a lot of armies where an experienced player will just know who the enemy LT is. There's a bunch of repeated profiles in the Armybuilder and they're all over the place as to what costs an extra SWC. I say ditch it, that's some streamlining I'd like to see, LT profiles to just go away completely.

Instead, make LTs just a model you nominate during army construction as open info and he provides an extra regular order so long as he's alive. Open info is important here, lose him and you've lost both his normal order and the extra LT order. No loss of LT, no nominating a new LT or playing hidden info games around who it may or may not be, especially since experienced players will already practically know that for many of the games anyways. There's still incentive to kill the enemy LT, you cost them 2 orders for losing a single model, and incentive to keep them safe for the same reason, but it's not some magic meta game like it is now

LT lvl2, NCO, Exec Order and Chain of Command would all need to be adjusted but that's easy enough to do, same for the special abilities you get for Joan of Arc or Sun Tze being your LT

It could be interesting, but it would require a huge change to a lot of rules, and not just those specific Lt related rules you mentioned. You'd also need to change Veteran, Morat, and Religious.

I do think they should streamline the Lt mechanics, as well as Retreat.

IMO, they should completely eliminate Retreat. It just doesn't make sense for a Skirmish game. Likewise, Loss of Lt is too punishing. Your entire army becoming irregular for 1/3 of the whole game is too much of a draw back. And its led to the profusion of armies that take tons of models that can just ignore Loss of Lt. Entire armies of Veteran, Religious, and Morat troops just don't care about loss of Lt. Or just take a model with CoC. Perhaps change the penalty to "All figures in the army under Loss of Lt suffer -1 to their Wip and BS characteristics while effected by LoL"

I think there should still be a penalty to LoL, as I find it an interesting thing to have a game where the commander is important, but it should be significantly less. Perhaps instead of making LoL a straight penalty, they should focus more on making keeping the Lt alive a good thing because he provides active buffs. Like let the Lt perform some actions by spending the Lt order to give several units on the field a buff of some kind.

Something like,

Entire Order Skill: Fire on my Target: This skill may only be performed by the Lt by spending the special Lt order. The controlling player may nominate one of the figures in his army. The next BS attack that figure makes has a +3 modifier.

I think the Lt mechanic is fairly important. It gives a lot of weight to scalpel units and provides alternative tactic that's pretty iconic to the setting. I think skills that interact with it like Chain of Command make the mechanic far more interesting and I think we need to see some proliferation of these kinds of skills to make the most of it. I could also see something done to soften it a bit like when you nominate your new Lt they can spend the Lt order (revealing themselves) to bring everything in their ZoC back to a regular order.

I overall like the mechanic, but I have to admit its a lot more fun when you have Chain to make a cooler model the Lt and take advantage of the order.

Interestingly, the rules booklet included in the 1st edition starter sets allowed you to freely pick who was your lieutenant. Mind you, that was only six sets with four profiles each (three in the case of PanOceania).

“Nested” skills only benefit is to save space on a profile. Otherwise I think they should just list each one explicitly.

Retreat needs work, but eliminating it is a terrible idea if you’ve got any interest in verisimilitude. Perhaps a revision of morale in general, including Loss of Lieutenant, Guts checks, Impetuous and Retreat, is worthwhile. And pigs will fly, I suppose. Some of the problem is the shrinking of the game to three turns; losing a turn to LoL is much worse now than it was in 1st and 2nd editions.

I’d like the rules for terrain and cover to be looked at to make the use of non-urban settings easier to implement.

The rules for Fireteams could do with being looked at and simplified, I think. And consider if the core factions should be allowed them.

 AndrewGPaul wrote:

I’d like the rules for terrain and cover to be looked at to make the use of non-urban settings easier to implement.

I think this is caused by one thing and one thing only. MSV2 seeing through trees with no penalty.

If a grove of trees actually blocked line of sight for everybody I think we could see a lot more non urban tables.

We could go the route most other games take and have some set linear distance of 'trees' provide total cover, rather than saying that trees are a Zero Visibility Zone(which MSV2 conveniently ignores).

All they'd need to do is to add a new type of zone which stated that no model could draw line of sight through more than X" of that zone. This would better represent a real forest, as you could see through a small amount of the forest, but once you got deep enough into it your line of sight would be blocked by both leaves and solid tree trunks, and no fancy visor is going to give you vision through a tree trunk. You're not Super Man with his Xray vision.

The actual wording should probably be something like "Models whose bases are completely within a Forest zone are always considered to have Partial Cover. If line of sight is drawn through more than X" of a Forest zone, the model is considered to have total cover from the model attempting to draw Line of sight."

As for the actual distance, I would say that 3" of forest would probably be a fair distance. Enough that you can see partially through a forest, thus simulating reality. The forest gives Partial Cover by default, so even if you can't get more than 3" between you and them you still have some benefit, and you can retreat deep into the woods to get full cover.

I think I have on occasion used that old WFB rule for LOS through woods (over 2” of woods blocks LOS, you can’t see right through a wood even if it’s less than 2”across) in many different games over the years.

I like the idea of forests acting as a saturation zone. I'll be honest, I have literally no idea how they actually work now.

They already are. The problem is that isn't good enough. An MSV2 sniper doesn't care about saturation when he is ARO'ing. And well, -1 burst isn't bad on active turn either when your target is going to be at -6 to shoot back(probably -9 minimum because you'll have cover).

Forests need to at least conditionally block line of sight from all models.

Sure, I'm cool with that.

On a similar note, I kind of wish that Mimetism wasn't used as "moves real fast" defense for similar visor related reasons.

Mimetism isn't "moves real fast". Its "can blend into the background". Not with the totality of Camo, but enough to disrupt attempts to shoot at you.

I see it as the difference between a soldier wearing BDUs and a soldier wearing a Ghilie suit. The BDUs give Mimetism. The Ghilie suit gives Camo. And Harry Potter's invisibility cloak gives TO camo

Right, I don't mean that visors shouldn't ignore Mimetism, but that Mimetism is used to simulate Bikes constantly moving and being harder to hit.

The only bikes I know of that has Mimetism is the Montessa and the Japanese Aragato. None of the bikes in Ariadna or the Kum have Mimetism. Yojimbo and Penthelisa don't have it either. The Montessa and Aragato have it independent of the bike. You'll note they have it even on the dismounted profile.

The skill that represents the speed and maneuverability of bikes is the fact they all have Kinematika.

Fair enough. The Zondnautica has it as well and I mostly play Nomads and JSA