55 minutes ago, lologrelol said:

That terrain is really nice, but honestly still a little too open.

While map 1 has some really great big pieces, a lot of the board is still very open, and the terrain is placed in a way that allows big diagonal firing lanes. Which makes it hard to hide.

Map 2 has more medium terrain, but there's windows and holes in all of the buildings, so there's very few places to hide.

Both tables need more medium sized terrain in the middle-ish sections of the boards to allow units to move up.

Both of these tables fall well within, if not over, the advised amount of terrain according to the tournament guidelines?



The one thing we typically lack is area terrain, which wouldn't prevent either of those things.


Map 1 had firing lanes, but part of the problem is players take turns placing terrain, when a clone player gets to place 50% of the terrain, it can be very difficult to prevent that without going well over the 25%-35% coverage rules and violating the beyond range 1 placement advice. Even this map below which had 2 extra pieces of terrain still managed to create firing lanes?



Other than installing literal walls every game similar to:


You can't really expect to prevent this from happening. Even if you brought these specific walls every game, the clone player could place them in irrelevant areas. (The only reason it didn't happen here is the opponent wanted to break up what my Tank could see and I wanted places to hide GG and B1s lol)

In map 2 the medium terrain you reference has solid walls on at least one side of each building. To give a better idea of the LoS situation from the mini perspective:

(I apologize for the lighting the power went out mid game, it was limited vis anyways so we thought it was thematic lol)

With this terrain type we've tried deeming the windows LoS blocking on multiple occasions too. It didn't help.

I respect your input, but I do not think this is the right train of thought.


If I have to tell players to bring, or provide myself (as a large portion of this terrain was purchased and provided by me), extra terrain above the 35% max, or very specific terrain types (above the tournament recommended amount) just to counter clones, outside what the tournament regulation advises, I'd venture to say the terrain isn't the problem.

LoS blocking terrain makes it even easier to know where to place your clones for fire support because it funnels your opponent down certain paths. Depending on the objective the opponent is either screwed or they have no choice but to hide the entire game then make a mad dash for the objectives. That type of game is not fun.

While I agree terrain isnt the problem. I do think the objectives dont exactly help the situation. I wish there were faction-based secondary objectives. Which are tailored to each specific faction. I think that would help with the fact some objectives clearly favor certain factions over others.

And of course I still think fire support itself needs some changes.

As a new player, that is still a little unsure if I want to get into this game, I think this discussion is fascinating. My first time using the clones I didn't end up using Fire Support at all. I didn't think it was good. I approached it from the perspective of action efficiency. You are sacrificing an action, an activation, and the need to issue an order to a corps (limiting activation control), in exchange for a single more powerful attack. That didn't strike me a great trade-off, more like something that is very niche that may be occasionally useful (I also didn't understand the clone token sharing so I thought they were weak in comparison to other factions corps units and wondering how Fire Support facilitated the sharing I had heard about). Having read this thread (and plenty of the rules reference) and watched the video in the OP I understand now I was very wrong in my assessment. Both describe what I hadn't grasped initially how forcing the niche nature of Fire Support being useful to come up more often could in turn make it very powerful despite the costs.

So with that said here is the 2 cents of a new relative outsider on the issue. I think the logical first step to toning it down would be the checking for panic as described a few times in this thread (probably in the form having to perform the rally step when being declared for fire support but before rolling). That just makes thematic sense (rules that thematic that also help achieve balance are the best kind). If that isn't enough I am not sure what you do next though. Fire Support (or the general cross support nature for clones) feels like a good mechanical theme for their story theme, and it seems like it would be easy to nerf Fire Support into uselessness given all of the drawbacks listed above already connected to it. I think any kind of dice cap is just going to change the specific upgrades and squads used in tandem with it, instead of addressing the real issue.

The next best idea I can come up with (if the panic change isn't enough), is what if you tied Fire Support to a using a standby token? Instead of it consuming an active issued order, instead it required spending a standby token for the unit to provide Fire Support? That way you remove some of the inherent weaknesses of Fire Support in exchange for building a fix to the issue of being immune to panic and at the same time providing more counter play to the opponent since you would have to get the standby token in the first place (and it's easier to remove for the opponent).

6 hours ago, GeneralVryth said:

My first time using the clones I didn't end up using Fire Support at all. I didn't think it was good. I approached it from the perspective of action efficiency. You are sacrificing an action, an activation, and the need to issue an order to a corps (limiting activation control), in exchange for a single more powerful attack. That didn't strike me a great trade-off, more like something that is very niche that may be occasionally useful

Your assessment is not completely wrong. You lose actions and can't move the supporting unit at all, where moving is the single most important action for scoring objectives.

I don't think right now that fire support is a huge problem on high competitive level. It is hard to set up, you lose actions and mobility for scoring and it is predictable for the opponent and can be played around.

I do see it leading to bad play experience for casual play and especially for new players (like the demo game somebody mentioned above). That can be very frustrating and that alone might be a reason to change something to the rules here. But with the update just dropped, the structural change and next to no real games played it will take a while until the next update drops.

This stream really generated a lot of discussion! You might want to join Griffin LIVE tonight at 5 PM Central for his next episode of Legion List Building. He'll be looking at Imperial Armor!

http://youtube.com/c/TeamRelentless/live

Hang on.

All this has been available to clones right from the get go, and never really taken off. Activations have always been seen as more important.

Until they got phase 2s with overwatch and standby sharing abuse, clones werent seen as competitive by any of the leading players. Once phase 2 standby abuse became available, everyone switched straight to it. Still very little fire support occuring.

Now that standby abuse is banned, maybe we will see fire support looked at again, but it still conflicts with activations. Fives is great, but that means hes hogging a crucial order that a tank or padme or anskin or obi probly needed a lot of the time.

By all means, if in 6 months the data shows hes way too good then give him a price hike. But theres a few things working against him too.