Infinity Battle Report - Yu Jing vs Nomads (Frontline)

Armies: Vanilla Yu Jing vs Vanilla Nomads
Scenario: Frontline (ITS14)
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[@zephyrrrr4813]

I'd also love to hear a discussion about how you use coordinated orders and generally about command tokens

[@yuarthur455]

More infinity!

[@AdamDundon]

Was reserving the liberto a deployment mistake by your opponent? Wouldn't Knauf have been a better reserve? You could have deployed with all of your HI heads down, but that's probably worth it by itself.

[@R0bertShepherd]

This is something we talked about after the game, and my conclusion was the same - knauf should almost certainly have been the reserve (even though the libertos did some quite serviceable damage). Not only would it have forced me to seriously reconsider the aggressive ARO deployment, but if I had positioned the way I did, Knauf could feasibly have set up to take some very long rang engagements.

[@wargamin6625]

How would the obligatory two Morans changed the outcome of this game? My experience against Nomads is most likely that HI are useless because of the Repeaters (shot with pitchers next to my DZ). I find myself clearing repeaters with KuangShi / Libertos takes too much out of my turns. So I reverted back to playing only one HI (the YanHuo for the same reasons you mentioned). The LongYa HSG to attack Tohaa and the YeMao AP Spitfire to attack lists with a lot of hacking. Still have to try out Bixie.

[@R0bertShepherd]

Well to begin with, two obligatory morans would have made the list 17 models, 7 SWC and 334pts, which would have been a bit of an uphill struggle to play into! :P If we consider what would have to be cut to include them, Mary is the first obvious choice, with maybe the EVO hacker coming out to afford the rest of the SWC. With the points saved you can then afford another puppet if you downgrade the jaguar to a morlock. That change presents a stronger defence also means that the AP marksman rifle puppetbot doesn’t have the marksmanship that lets it win the face to face roll with the long ya’s panzerfaust on the first turn - and Mary was the biggest roadblock for my own turn one attack thanks to her ability to dodge shotguns and mimetism -6 surviving a lot of rounds downrange from the yan huo. Just considering the problems of morans in isolation, though, you’re right that you generally do just need to pay the troll toll on turn one and clear them off (taking a bit over 10% of your opponent’s army down in the process). The libertos is quite good at this as you note, and Shaolin Monks are also in my list for this purpose in particular. More recently though, the addition of Bixie has added a potentially very powerful anti-Moran tool. She doesn’t want to get into CC with them (she’ll get bricked when she breaks stealth) - instead she wants to find a spot where she can shoot them with her rifle. It can take some finagling, but she opens up some interesting options depending on how the enemy Morans are deployed. Sometimes, though, you can genuinely ignore them or bypass them. The Mowang & Su Jian duo can be surprisingly capable of penetrating a Moran network thanks to the Mowang’s stealth and Su Jian’s ability to cautious move 8” (you can cautious move through a ZOC, you just can’t begin or end in it). Much more often it’s the deployment zone repeaters that stall out a heavy infantry attack, and my opponent had those in spades, which is why I never hit his DZ with anything hackable. If your opponent is relying on Morans and hasn’t taken the same quantity of deployment zone repeaters, though (unlikely as Nomads tend to have them by default, but worth considering) you can just slam past the midfield repeaters and hit them in the DZ directly. Pitcher repeaters are another matter and impetuous orders are your friend here. The pitcher that piwell placed to brick the Su Jian got cleaned off for free by a shaolin impetuous order this game, for example.

[@zephyrrrr4813]

How does balancing the 4 active hi order expenditure in g1 work? Like obviously NCO helps alot but you've got some very order hungry pieces there. And what's the logic of the Super disposable group 2 instead of say the Yan huo in g2

[@R0bertShepherd]

Good question. The simplest answer is that I’ve played both configurations and the heavier group one has consistently worked better for Yu Jing in practice, in comparison with other factions like Nomads and Combined where I have much more success with fire support in group two. I *think*, though, that it’s down to the kuang shi. Because they all need to be in the same combat group, you effectively have this big cheerleader presence all in one place (you can attack with kuang shi but it’s not something I go out of my way to do). As a result, it’s critical that their combat group always have a strong way to spend those orders, so you’re not caught in a trap where it’s all cheerleaders just spending their orders on themselves. And the group effectively having twelve orders means I usually can accomplish two offensive actions in a turn even when the Yan Huo has to spool up. If I was going to rejig the combat groups, I think I’d actually keep the Yan Huo in group one but move the Mowang to group two (possibly cutting the Su Jian just as an experiment). Splitting the NCOs across two groups opens up a lot of flexibility that could be worth exploring.

[@zephyrrrr4813]

@@R0bertShepherd ok that makes alot of sense and on a second look g2 is full of disposable agressive/defensive pieces that are either forward deploying or impetuous so they'll still meaningfully contribute to spend their orders