Gore-Soaked Lunatic Witchhunter
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It's been a while since I've sat down and really dug into writing up an overlong "quick guide" to something! Faction characteristics (disclaimer: the below represents my opinions based on personal experience with...like...two thirds of these, and I'm not a very competitive player):
PanOceania: Brute force. Tend to be strong in direct confrontation; their BS is usually a point higher than it ought to be, combine with a strong selection of weapons and a good range of other tools (visors, etc.) and if you get into a straight slugging match with them they'll do a good job of coming out on top. Lots of TAGs, all big, nasty, and well-armed. Weaknesses: High costs and few hidden options leave them predictable and easily outmaneuvered if you're not careful. You may not have that many camo/airborne tools, but you still need to know how to use them to position to counter them. Willpower stats are usually low, which makes hackers, specialists, and scenario play weaker.
---Acontecimento: Older models, many out of production. A more generalist approach to PanO, they supplement a strong core of bonkers PanO statlines and one of the nastier medium infantry core links around with some borrowed Aleph specialists/camo troops.
---Military Orders: High risk, high reward. Faction-wide Religious Troop makes you very difficult to keep pinned down, lots of Frenzy and Impetuous gives you some very cheap heavy infantry for their capabilities, but if you pick the wrong fights both of those rules can leave your forces with their asses hanging out to get killed where another force might be able to pull back and regroup. Your models all have swords, but the lack of smoke makes melee a defensive/secondary role for you, your Knights are still BS14 heavy infantry, use that.
---Neoterra: Another legacy force. Generally plays similarly to basic PanO, using their high-tech brute force tools to hit people really hard in the face, and borrows some Aleph toys to give them stronger specialists than PanO usually gets.
---Varuna: Similar unit selection to Acontecimento, but newer sculpts; also a more generalist approach to PanO but with more emphasis on camouflage.
---Svaralheima: The Code One army. Designed to show off a broad selection of what PanO does, and is also a lot more mobile than other sub-factions with lots of Terrain (Total) and some Climbing Plus and Super-Jump. To get all this they have no paratroopers at all and they have almost no Camouflage, so in many ways they're even more predictable than the core army.
Yu Jing: Generalist. They don't have every piece of equipment or the strongest stats around, but they can do a huge variety of things and have easy access to some otherwise quite unusual tools. A Yu Jing unit will rarely be the pinnacle of stats and kit for its role, but it will always be good at it.
---Imperial Service: An older faction, but they were the pioneers of the more flexible fireteams we see in N4 armies so they often don't feel their age. Visors and Sensors make them very difficult to sneak up on, while their holoprojectors let them keep the opposition guessing.
---Invincible Army: An experiment in doing a sub-faction limited by unit type; the force is built entirely around Heavy Infantry and lists could easily be all 2-Wound models. Unusually the Invincible Army has 1-Wound HI with No Wound Incapacitation (2 hit points, but when you run out you're dead, you don't get an unconscious state in which people can still revive you), which gives them access to sub-40pt specialists, drop troops, and camo troops with heavy infantry statlines. In general tough to crack, but high costs leave most lists somewhat brittle; Zhanshi remain in the list to give you some order flexibility.
---White Banner: The Code One army, and similarly to PanO's they're built to be a good introductory subset of the whole faction. Lots of solid middle-of-the-road units with good-but-not-the-best tech (Visor 1, Mimetism -3, that kind of thing), with some solid camouflage units.
Ariadna: "Low-tech", which means few to no hackers, few to no hackable units, 1W heavy infantry, lots of cheap dudes, and some hilariously brute-force solutions; absent hackers, for instance, Ariadna makes a lot of use of adhesive weapons (read: riot control glue guns) to pin down enemy heavy units. Generally slightly higher Physical and CC stats than you'd expect, which makes both melee and getting them into melee a little easier than for most armies, even before factoring in all the smoke. Often glass cannons, especially with their better-than-usual access to special ammo on heavy weapons. Also: Werewolves!
---Caledonia: The Kamikaze Scotsmen! Old, sure, but 5pt 45th Rifles running about with Berserk, Dogged, and smoke grenades lets them do threat saturation like few others; Caledonia is one of the reasons Limited Insertion (one command group only) exists. They have a lot of units in common with Kosmoflot if you'd like to paint tartan but also want in-production stuff.
---Force de Reponse Rapide Merovingienne (FRR): The French. Very old, very spammy, very no-frills. Infinity on hard mode, lots of your stuff likes doing one thing at one range so if you know exactly where you need to be when you will triumph, but not very forgiving for new players.
---USAriadna Ranger Force: The prototype for the newer-style sectorials that followed. Abandons some of Ariadna's old identity of "like everyone else, only worse and cheaper" in favor of a more "just because it looks clunky doesn't mean it doesn't work" aesthetic; still no hackers outside of an AVA1 mercenary, but hackable 2W heavy infantry, cheap Armor 3 grunts, and a plethora of motorcycles give them more than enough toys to play around with. And they are still Ariadna, after all; lots of camo, lots of smoke, no visors, and werewolves.
---Tartary Army Corps: The Russians are the newest straight-up Ariadna sub-faction, but like the Americans they're very much out to demonstrate that simplistic brutality does not have to mean no fun toys. They're still brittle, they're still glass cannons, but a Veteran Kazak can trade fire with anyone's heavy infantry without feeling embarassed about his statline, the camo-spam is very much here to stay, and while most TAK units don't have strong melee stats they can deploy a silly number of werewolves and antipodes for a furry attack squad if necessary.
---Kosmoflot: Represents Ariadna being dragged kicking and screaming into the 22nd century; Kosmoflot combines a mix of units from the other sub-factions, and while they still don't have their own hackers some of their heavy infantry is hackable, they have some visors on non-unique units now, and they have their own TAG! The usual Ariadna mix of spammable camo, good cheap statlines, and aggressive melee units are backed up here by some of the toughest heavy infantry around, generally strong all-rounders.
Haqqislam: Weaker heavy infantry and TAGs than the higher tech human factions and focuses more on skilled light infantry, a bit more like Ariadna, occupying kind of a niche between. Haqqislam units tend to have quite good Willpower for their role so their specialists are strong, and they have some thoroughly nasty skill combinations that make their units more dangerous than their statline would suggest.
---Hassassin Bahram: The other main reason Limited Insertion exists; even with their newfound limited AVA the cheap Dogged E/M attacks from Muttawi'ah are terrible to behold. Tougher than they were once with the addition of new heavy infantry, Hassassins' huge variety of hidden deployment options excel at keeping enemy positions and lanes of fire disrupted and isolated so the main force can pick them off piecemeal.
---Qapu Khalqi: Almost a mercenary force rather than a Haqqislam force, mixing in some Nomad units. Spoiled for choice in strong medium infantry links, with a surprising amount of holoprojectors to keep the enemy guessing about which units are were.
---Ramah Taskforce: The newest and most "regular" Haqqislam force. Their big guns are limited in their BS, but Tuareg and a huge variety of loadouts on the Khawarij give them solid forward play.
Nomads: The other 'generalist' faction; Nomads do a huge number of things, most of them quite well, and are rarely the best at any given thing. They tend to have more and shinier remotes and TAGs than most factions, so the hacking game is more important for them to shut down threats early, and accordingly they have a lot of good options for getting hackers where they need to be; this also makes them quite strong on scenario play.
---Jurisdictional Command of Corregidor: The most generalist generalists of the generalist faction. Solid line profiles, three TAG options, solid camo units, smoke skirmishers, multiple paratroopers, decent mixed fireteams, good visor selection...there are no holes in the lineup and the lineup does all the right things. In a straight fight against specialists, however, their lower BS/WP and relatively basic guns does put you at a disadvantage, so make use of that flexibility.
---Jurisdictional Command of Bakunin: Many of the same weaknesses as Nomads generally, lower base stats, lots of hackable units, but compounded by Religious Troop, a weaker forward deployment selection, and poor visor selection. Why play Bakunin, you may ask? Mimetism on nearly everything. If your hackers can keep enemy visors suppressed you can waltz around the table, win firefights with things way above your weight, and generally be irritating; it's kind of a brittle battle plan, but if you know how to make it work then it works very well.
---Jurisdictional Command of Tunguska: The higher-quality subset of Nomads; they lose some of the flexibility of Corregidor and Bakunin's melee units for a more focused list built around the Nomads' core battle plan: put repeaters in obnoxious places, suppress the enemy's fancy toys with hackers, and then send in the robotic legions.
Combined Army: One of two alien factions in the game, CA don't really mess around with the basic assumptions of the game but they do have some weird stuff other factions don't. In general they combine extremely high-quality leaders with weird specialist alien chaff, glass cannons, and unusual combinations of stuff. Do note, here, that the EI Aspects are one of a very few units that exists in the generic faction and is in no sectorial, so playing generic non-sectorial Combined Army is much more common than it is for other factions.
---Morat Aggression Force: One of the most brute-force teams around. No camouflage, though they do have a few paratroopers; their BS is often mediocre, but they take big guns on cost-effective bodies with good-enough defenses and run them at you anyway. In many ways they are kind of like the Ariadna of the Combined Army, they don't have the fanciest stats or the fanciest toys, but they have a hammer, and boy, do you look like a nail.
---Shasvastii Expeditionary Force: A team loaded with nasty tricks. On paper they are extremely fragile with poor BS, but the size of their toolbox and their ability to put everything exactly where it needs to be makes them a terror in the hands of a skilled player as they win rock-paper-scissors match after rock-paper-scissors match. Also between the Caliban, the Speculo Killers, and the Taigha one of a few armies that is genuinely quite good at melee.
---Onyx Contact Force: A mishmash of Combined Army units; OCF mixes Shasvastii, Morat, and Tohaa defectors with Combined Army robots and the Umbra. They can be brittle, some of their most iconic and expensive units rolling in with 1W, but they're also highly mobile and overloaded with fancy toys.
Aleph: The AI that assists (or controls?) the Human Sphere. In some ways Aleph is a bizarro Combined Army; their basic riflemen are robots, they have hacking and tech not readily available to the mere mortals of the Human Sphere, and they have posthuman capabilities to survive the death of one body and carry on in another, but where the Combined Army goes for tools first and statline second Aleph often has a tremendous statline and fewer toys. Generally the most elite army; expensive, high-quality, flexible, and durable, using posthuman soldiers more than capable of performing well in multiple areas as its melee troops rather than the Combined Army's expendable attack dogs.
---Steel Phalanx: Posthuman androids cosplaying as the cast of the Illiad. No, but seriously. A mobile close-quarters force with a wealth of named characters, tremendous statlines, lots of smoke, not a lot of heavy guns but when you're being stabbed in the face by Achilles you'd wish you'd been hit by a missile launcher instead.
---Operations Subsection: The rest of Aleph. Expensive, nasty medium and heavy infantry, robotic light troops, and strong camouflage options; often expensive and you'll find yourself working hard to fit all the fanciest toys into a list (protip: Asuras or Maruts...), but you will never be lacking in tools for any situation.
O-12: The newest faction, space U.N. peacekeepers released at the start of N4. They were sort of set up as a learning faction, so they have a very broad range of units, often with less cluttered profiles than other factions. You wouldn't be wrong to accuse them of being bland; they have good statlines, basic weapons, and the special rules necessary to function in their role, but they've also got some concessions to their theme as space police and a few weird units.
---Starmada: The space space police. Mostly just a smaller subset of O-12 with fireteams, but they gain a couple of units from other factions and a camouflage specialist unique to them, so...different!
Tohaa: The other alien faction, and quite weird. Most of the time you're looking at a relatively middle-of-the-road statline, but the heavy infantry and quite a lot of the medium infantry get to stay up and keep going with a weaker statline once you 'kill' them, so they've effectively got one more Wound per model than pretty much anyone else, which is really cool...until you run into fire ammo, which keeps burning you until you pass your armor save. The main strength of classic Tohaa is the Triad, where you can mix arbitrary models into as many three-model fireteams as you like; they also have a few outright unique mechanics, more than any other faction. In general a Tohaa army will be tough and flexible, but won't set the world on fire with individual specialists doing one thing super well.
---Spiral Corps: Technically a mercenary army, rather than a Tohaa sectorial, but a lot of the older Tohaa models are out of production so the Spiral Corps does sort of represent what Tohaa are still in production. A lot of the Tohaa stuff still applies here; Spiral Corps is a little smaller, a little more limited, with more access to human mercenaries, but has many of the same strengths.
Japanese Secessionist Army: Once part of Yu Jing, but then Japan rebelled and is independent. Cheap heavy infantry, strong camo game, generally played very aggressively due to the lack of good BS or heavy weapons.
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