I can attest to these being gorgeous.

Two-part combo phasing bracing expansive weapons with one 60" and one 30" flat range brackets, IIRC.

You don't have to let your opponent know what Augmentations you're using, but he is entitled to check out your weapons, etc., so he'd know - if he thought of it - whether that weapon was going to rain death. IMO you should continue to try hard to abuse the rules. Defiance has a lot of scope for entertaining weapons.

I think..... think that you can have "0" as the minimum quantity of a frame in a mixed-frames squad, but I'm not at all sure. All the official lists have a minimum quantity "1" of the frames in mixed-frame squads, but the squad design rules don't mention it.

Still, you can have 15 standard squads. I would always have APCs as a standard squad - yes, minimum unit size is 2. It's not hard even assuming you can't have "0-2" or "0-6" to still have a selection of vehicle squads that cover what you see as the most versatile and common deployments.

Well Fast Attack lets you get your mid-close range guys roughly 1 turn's movement further in, so would be good if they were all mid-close range types.

Yeah, Steave's squad was lethal, and he didn't even use the rule to full advantage. Full advantage would have been move-fire-move into cover. With his punishing selection of frankly pretty awesome specialised weapons he could pretty much stitch up both flanks indefinitely with the mere threat of Reserves.

However, Defiance rolls like that. Like the time I lost a whole squad to a Thug war-bike with a flamer? Or that time I landed a K-Pulse missile in the middle of your squad of SI and turned them all to raspberry jam? Heh heh heh heh.

Now if he'd just keep his army list static for two or more games in a row so I could tell what was working, what was deadly, and what was pure fluke. He's a builder junkie and Defiance is high-grade heroin.

I think the quickest solution is to play without IF in a match-up with your themed armies. I'd be perfectly happy to, and I think this was how our last fight on the city table worked out?

I can't really say if I think IF is outright overpowered in a straight-out competitive fight where the armies are EITHER less tightly bound OR keep to a semi-modern or realist theme.

I have a few suggestions, though, either tactics or tricks:

Artillery jammers cause extra scatter, and vehicles can carry Point Defence weapons. After Blast can enhance your laser rifles etc. to aid in shredding IF lobbing squads, whilst maintaining some degree of thematic purity. PD works against IF and DF AOE.

Of course, heavier armour has to help.

Be fanatical about spreading your troops out (this can be a real problem if you have lots of cheap troops).

A cheap APC renders the squad within totally immune to to AOE, and gives you more room to spread your other troops out.

Consider the "Reserves" advantage, it can get you places and keeps a squad out of the maelstrom.

Consider weapons and troops for the role of highly maneuverable, independent sniper, for eliminating high-value targets and, being just one figure, big AOE templates are totally wasted on them. Phase weaponry lets you ignore terrain depth and blocking terrain that might otherwise shelter IF lobbing troops. Elite squads can act like 10 independent snipers and they ignore unit perimeter so they can spread out regardless of other squads.

I've always assumed a template of the listed size, centered on the firer. There are a few areas where Defiance isn't perfectly clear on this OR I have misread it. I've always followed the convention that ranges are measured from the figure's head, which usually is about the center of the base, figure's head facing determines figure facing, more or less. That means variable figure scales and basing aren't messing with ranges. For 25-30 mm scale, 1cm isn't going to make much difference either way.

OTOH I can recall measuring come weapons from the edge of the firer's base, but with a CDW that's going to take time and have strange results, like wide, flat vehicles being deadlier when deploying CDW's than narrow, upright vehicles.

So what I'm thinking of going with is this: place a marker for your IF impact point, then roll D5-1 scatter. That means a 1/5 chance of a perfect hit, then scatter of 1,2,3 or 4 inches, with an average scatter of 2 inches, which comes into the equation here:

One way of treating a miss would be to scatter D5-1 then D5, but there's a reasonable chance the second scatter will make the first less severe. So, we make the "miss" scatter D5+2 and D10+2 respectively. Maybe +1 would suffice?  That would make a minimum scatter of 2 inches.