Here's the thing...

I love Ariadna. In fact, I love it so much that it is my adopted homeland. Every time I take to the field with my low-tech tough-guys (and gals), I get a little more confident that Ariadna is a faction for the skilled and the gutsy.

That said, I absolutely can't wait to play another faction in Campaign Paradiso. Argh.

Corvus Belli has done a great job of making sure that we want to take previously-unused loadouts and models, specialists and baggage-bots, in the campaign. This seems really cool until you realize that the distribution of these fancy toys isn't quite as even across the table as you'd think. Infiltrating Hackers, for instance, are available to every other faction except Tohaa. Combined Army and Yu Jing even get three, while Haqqislam (our low-tech buddy) gets two. AD Hackers are available to every other army as well (barring Tohaa), and in some cases the drop-troop hacker is a real badass like the Ragik or the Tiger.

That's just one wrinkle in the campaign fabric. I'm feeling very frustrated with Mission 301 at the moment, as it's basically begging to take an infiltrating specialist - and hey, Forward Observers (that thing we have so much of) don't count this time. AD can't be used in this mission, of course, but that doesn't stop almost every other faction from having at least one infiltrating hacker (if not more, with AVA 2+) to do the job for them. Some factions even benefit from infiltrating specialists with more than one wound, just in case of accident (Yu Jing's Daofei, Aleph's Dasyu).

It's not all bad for us. We do have Uxia O'Neill, Covert Action version. She's a Specialist with Superior Infiltration, which seems tremendously handy for missions like these. Here's the catch, though: she's rolling at what an Engineer normally rolls -3, and if the Engineer has a penalty (as in Mission 301), you're probably going to be spending a lot of orders getting the job even remotely done. And orders you spend on getting the job done are orders you're not spending saving Uxia's life afterwards. This last bit is especially bad for our local group's campaign, which is being done hardcore-style: just like Spec Ops models, named characters can die and be brought back with MEDEVAC and CUBEVAC. In other words, unless Uxia is lucky enough to not die, she's going to blow up along with the ship and everything on it. That, or - in another mission - my opponent will put the final round in her to finish the job. Now you see the reason for my earlier argh.

Things aren't all bad, though. Ariadna has a few advantages that I've really grown fond of, and they help make Paradiso a lot of fun. That's a topic for next time, though. If you've got any stories about faction woes that you'd like to share, post them up and we can commiserate together!