Nina / Babylon Zero, Ouch…
I enjoy playing the Therians but do have a small problem with how Babylon Zero works. For those that haven’t encountered this unit yet be thankful. Essentially it gets 4 nucleus cannon 2.0 sniper shots while still being able to move. This means that in one turn it can pretty much kill any AFV on the board.
I recently played a game against the UNA where they were using Stark in his Copperhead. The UNA must deploy Stark first on the board and is a big juicy target for Babylon zero. I killed him on Babylon’s activation in one volley because I could re roll my failed damage tests. His cover was ignored. Now I could see zero fire being more balanced if you were required to use the “sniper” profile of the nucleus cannon 2.0 (only 1 shot instead of 2) but as it stands it seems extremely over powered.
I won the first game very easily but the UNA player came back with a good strategy. Using a morning star list, and Col. Stark on foot he took a good number of missile teams and laser guns. This put an end to Babylon Zero, but not before she had taken out a cobra snake, again with 1 attack.
Herein lies the problem though. This unit essentially is forcing a very specific build on everyone that faces Therians because if they are not equipped to handle Babylon Zero with overwhelming firepower they are going to get melted. Red Blok faces an even greater problem than the UNA, at least the UNA missiles ignore cover, practically the only option for the Blok is to go heavy Dragonov At-Gauss.
Infantry heavy lists seem to be the key to beating her, but I don’t think that anyone should be forced into a single cookie cutter list to just counter one unit. There is an interesting discussion over on the at-43 forums it is about cheese in general but a good portion is devoted to Babz.
