Infinity N5 - Initial Plans and Vibes

 

The new edition of Infinity, N5, released earlier this week. There's a lot to absorb as a player, and its going to take a while before I think I've got there. Now, I own quite a lot of factions, so I had a bit of a think about what I'm going to do first...

Our club has an escalation league starting up, and after writing one test list, I've decided to start N5 with my Shasvastii. There's not a huge amount of changes, but one of the more powerful profiles, the Speculo, has had some of its rules made a little less powerful, while half a dozen less used profiles have all had an overhaul. Seeing how a familiar faction has changed will be a good way for me to get a handle on the new edition.

I do want to shuffle into vanilla Combined Army in the future too. I'll have more models to paint up for that faction so it'll be Shasvastii first. However, we're still in the first few days and there may be some errors - the fireteams in particular look a bit odd, so I'm waiting to hear back if they can take a Haris team or not.

So, the Combined Army will likely be a bit of a painting project coming up. I've got some half finished bits to finish up first, and will likely get some Shasvastii profiles done to round them out after that. So it's probably a next year thing, but it shouldn't be too hard to get the basics knocked out pretty quickly.

I had a test game of N4 Druze and they seemed pretty good. I don't think much has got worse for them. They'd be fun to run out for six months or so at some point, and I don't need anything painted for them. A few profiles have changed or got a nudge up, which is a bit of a theme, really. I miss Druze, it'd be good to get back to them. There's a bunch of their N4 upgrades I've not gotten to trying out properly yet.

A lot of the Dahshat staples have suffered a bit in the new edition. Their loss of Ghulam snipers hurts a core part of the N4 build I was using for them, and fireteams getting downgraded on top of that is rough. McMurrough isn't as tough, either. There's only a Cateran sniper to be added model wise, and that's not really going to hold me up from giving them a go.

Ikari are sitting in the "some time in the future" box right now. I basically have them due to a big crossover of the models from Druze, and some discounted models. I ran them on a whim once at an N3 tournament without any practice and got absolutely ruined, and they do deserve better.

Qapu Khalqi also need a few bits before I can get them going, but I think they're ahead of Ikari in my brain. I like Haqqislam as a faction, and "QK" have picked up a few new and interesting profiles. Another future project, but one I think I could really put some time into and have fun with.

I've been playing my White Company for a good bit at the end of N4. There's a bunch of new character models that have been added to the faction, which I'll need to get painted up. I'm going to take a break from them, but I expect I'll start to miss them in a bit and want to come back to them soon.

Nomads are the faction I really want to get back to at some point. I want to get them painted first and that's been the real blocker so far. I think they're pretty much queued up after I get vanilla Combined Army done, but that might be a while. So, one for the future...

Infinity Tournament: Red Star Blues - The Anniversary

 

Back in March, HATE hosted another "Red Star Blues" tournament. The first mission was Resilience Operations, and I was drawn against Heshore who was running Tohaa.

I discarded a card that required me to hold the centre of the field as I felt like two capture territory cards had too much of a risk of being very swingy. I also needed to target HVTs and kill points of my opponent's force.

The early attack from the Tohaa game from Jaan Staar, a special character Impersonator. Heshore was proxying a lot of the Tohaa with Combined Army models as the Tohaa have been out of production for a while now. The proxies were well thought out and pretty obvious as to what was what.

Jaan went on a bit of a rampage, going after my Lieutenant, but fortunately hitting the decoy, not the real one. I eventually managed to take him down before he did too much damage.

It was a very cagey, back and forth game, and we ended up ending the game not knowing who'd pulled off the win! Once we compared objectives and added up points, it turned out it was a 5-5 tie, which felt very fair in the circumstances.

The second game was the old mission Hunting Party, and I was up against Jimrod, running Star Co. Hunting Party is a mission from a previous tournament season that's about immobilising and isolating specialists and Lieutenants.

There was a big core Riot Grrl link team running around pushing buttons and being a terrifying threat...

Unfortunately for Jimrod, I'd taken the Heckler with E/Marat - a large E/M template weapon. I ran him up to them and managed to drop a big template over most of them, but some key models had managed to set up around the corner so weren't caught in the blast...

I spent my third turn running Pi-Well up to drop an E/Marat template over the first Lieutenant who had been knocked unconscious in a previous round. This isolated them and meant I'd "hunted down" more Lieutenants.

Fiddler managed to fight through to get a shot on my Lieutenant, but on the last dice roll of the game, she wasn't immobilised. This meant I won the game 6-5, but if I hadn't won that roll, I'd have lost instead. Another close fought, cagey game that was great fun.

For my final game, it was Supplies against Alicat. It was a punchy looking Tunguska list with a Szalamandra, and I was pretty glad to have won the Lieutenant roll and chosen to go first...

I ran my Heckler up, and had it deploy a Fast Panda, covering both Mary Problems and the Szalamandra. I had Jazz Trinity Mary Problems and take her out, before taking a swing at the Szalamandra...

And I managed to possess the Szalamandra, and in turn, had it walk backwards and shoot up the Interventor who, it turned out, was the Lieutenant.

This was a pretty rough turn for Alicat, but things got much worst! She had two of her back up attack pieces try and take out my Reaktion Zond, and due to a terrifing run of critical hits on my part, both went down...

At this point, you'd think the game was done . . . but no.

On Alicat's second turn, she ran her Vertigo Zond up, and managed to find quite a few creative angles across the table . . . and basically took out every major attack piece I had with area effect missiles catching them in the blast of someone else.

With me having very little left on my third turn, I couldn't get much done, and Alicat was able to get up to capture some boxes and pull a 5-0 win out of the bag, despite an absolutely catastrophicfirst turn!

Overall, I finished 10th out of 18 players - which you'd kind of expect with a win, a loss and a draw. I once more managed to keep my record of comfortable mid-table mediocrity!

Infinity League: Last Launch - Nomads vs Invincible Army

 

For the second round of the HATE Infinity League, I was up against Invincible Army. The mission was Last Launch, one of the new missions in this season. I've never played it, either, so I was a bit nervous. The mission is about getting points and specialists evacuated, so I chose three expensive specialists - Mary Problems, Mother Agatha and Zoe, on top of Jazz as a primary Hacker. For firepower, I was relying on an Intruder sniper and a Hellcat with Spitfire.

My opponent won the Initiative roll and chose to go first. He had a chunky heavy infantry link led by a (proxied) Shang Ji HMG with all the tools. On the closed table, it was able to clear out the one ARO piece that could see the box, have a specialist take three ID tokens to escape, handing them around the team.

Two models then headed up into space, with the missile launcher staying behind to provide some AROs. I ran up my Heckler and tried to Jammer the Shang Ji HMG, but he passed his save. Someone then managed to take the Missile Launcher out, all the way to dead so he wasn't getting back up again.

Mary Problems had started heading up the table to push a button and got very lucky avoiding the Shang Ji HMG in ARO. Mimetism -6 turned out to be clutch in this case. The Shang Ji then ducked back inside to protect the box.

So, there was still a special character engineer on the ID dispenser, and a Shang Ji HMG guarding the room. How was I going to clear this?

I dropped in my Hellcat Spitfire, scored my classified with him, and shot someone who was protecting the engineer, before going out for the engineer.

Unluckily, I didn't manage to land a useful shot on the Engineer and he failed guts out of my line of sight, and I didn't have the orders to chase him down.

I then mercilessly bullied the Shang Ji HMG. He got Isolated, Targeted, and shot unconscious. A Pan O Paramedic managed to get a shot to medi-kit him back up again, and now I still had a problem! 

Agatha ran up to the box, shot at the special character until he ducked, but ended up having to spend a turn holding on the box...

The Morlock dropped smoke on himself and got a lucky high roll meaning a Total Reaction remote couldn't beat the roll. This gave Zoe a clear run for the box.

The Chimera dropped Eclipse smoke to cover the box, and the Shang Ji dropped a chain colt, killing the Chimera who'd gotten a little too close. Two Uberfall smacked him about, but he passed all four armour saves and survived the game!

Agatha and Mary Problems were able to evacuate the room, swinging the mission score from a 3-5 loss for me to a 9-1 win for me! So a very good score, but it didn't reflect how close the game was in practice.

My opponent is now assembling and painting his actual Shang Ji HMG model in honour of this brave soldier who survived all sorts of Nomad awfulness to hold the room. A true hero of the people!

Infinity Game: Nomads vs Yu-Jing: Acquisition

 

Popped down to the club last week for a pick up game of Infinity. My friend was running his Yu Jing, and we randomly selected Acquisition as the mission. I threw a basic list together including the Gator, won the Lieutenant roll and chose the deployment edge, meaning I got to go second.

My left flank was effectively and brutally rolled up, and a Shaolin made a run for the backfield, getting hit by an E/M mine laid by Billie to end his rampage.

I was deeply worried about my opponent's Hac Tao, and tried to use a Heckler Jammer to deal with it. The Heckler failed and was quickly shot to bits, and I saw at the weekend my opponent is now assembling a Tian Gou with Jammer after finding out how amazing they are.

So yeah, sorry locals, that one is on me.

I sent the Gator out to clear a Total Reaction remote, but he could only draw a bead on it when outside of cover. He messed up twice, and on the second go, failed two armour saves and spent the rest of the game hiding.

A Lu Duan made an offensive run up the board, dropped a deployable repeater to inhibit the Gator, then found Jazz and took her out with a Heavy Flamethrower.

Things were going badly enough on my second turn that I brought my Tomcat Doctor on to heal up a couple of models just to mean I had some orders in my third turn...

But it wasn't enough, and the Hac Tao secured the central tech coffin to win the game. I was thoroughly outplayed here, with a pretty well tuned Yu Jing list (that I think I've just helped tune up even more). I'm still pottering through different unit picks in Nomads, and haven't truly gelled with a build just yet. I definitely still love the faction and am enjoying playing them, but I haven't found the build or models that really bring me joy. There's some little elements I'm definitely getting on with and I'm liking some bits and pieces, but I'm still on the search for the That Thing I Love...

HATE Infinity League: Supremacy vs O12

 

My local wargaming club, HATE, has started a new Infinity League. I'm running Nomads for it, and the first mission was Supremacy. I drew against O-12 for this round.

I lost the Lieutenant roll, and my opponent chose to go first. I picked deployment and set up defensively. I ran a Kriza Boracs, Jazz and Billie, the Uberfallkommando, a bunch of mid-field camo and support units.

I built most of my deployment decisions off placing the Uberfallkommando opposite the QAZ creature my opponent placed as a violent warband is the quickest and easiest way of clearing them.

My opponent ran a Gamma HMG up the right flank, protecting it with Team Sirius and a Varangian Guard.

The Epsilon took advantage of some smoke to clear out the Reaktion Zond. The O-12 player completed the first turn with two buttons pressed.

The Uberfallkommando headed up the table and one of the Pupniks hit and cleared out the QAZ creature.

My Libertos then attacked the Varangian and the Sirius remote, getting injured by the Gamma and going Dogged. I was keen to get rid of the Repeater on the Sirius remote to let me move Robin Hook up so her Repeater would hold the Gamma at bay.

I hid the Pupniks and Robin Hook around one of the consoles to hold things up. A Raveneye came up to try and take out Robin Hook, but was unable to target her from cover, meaning she was able to take the Raveneye Officer out.

My Kriza headed up the right flank and took out one of the Madtraps, before going into suppressive fire.

A Delta with Boarding Shotgun then came on behind the Kriza and managed to cause it a wound but walked into range of a Heckler with a Jammer, and ended up isolated.

My Sombra had revealed to do some hacking, and a Gangbuster then opened fire on it, when it failed a guts check and had to fall back into the line of fire of the Epsilon sniper. Fortunately for me the Epsilon didn't have any orders left to take advantage...

The Sirius snuck up on Robin Hook and took it out, but it took a whole bunch of orders to do so.

The Pupniks then counter-attacked and took out the Sirius trooper, freeing up the Chimera to throw an Eclipse Grenade between the Epsilon and the Sombra to let it move freely. I could have moved one of the Pupniks to trigger a remaining Madtrap, but decided not to.

The Sombra then moved up to flip the switch on one of the consoles on the O-12 side of the board. I had misjudged the distance and ended up Immobilised as a result.

The Sombra then survived two rounds of shooting while Immobilised before getting lucky and managing to break out of the glue. He then managed to take out a Bluecoat, switching the control of the quadrant to Nomad control.

In the end, we tied on quadrants for all three turns. I took two consoles to O-12's one, and also scored my classified, with an extra point for the type of classified it was. This meant I ended up with a 7-4 win.

A lot of this was down to luck - the Sombra really shouldn't have survived, and it won me the game. I've picked up a few more practical tips around using Nomads, with plenty more still to learn...