Is This Thing On? Running an Infinity Tournament

On Sunday, I ran a small Infinity tournament online using Tabletop Simulator. We just had four players, but that was fine to get a good understanding of how everything works without too much being at stake.

We didn't have too many issues, but getting in three games in a single day online was hard work! I gave people two and a half hours per game, which worked fine. No-one really went over time at all.

I've had a long weekend booked off for a cancelled event which I decided to take anyway. The plan was to get a ton of painting done, but it seems like I mostly ended up sorting things out around the flat. And, you know, running a tournament.

It was surprisingly tiring! I wandered into different games to keep track of what was happening, and it turns out watching Infinity can be as mentally draining as playing... It was good fun, though, and I'll definitely organise some more in future.

HATE Isolation League Round 4: Firefight vs Combined Army

For Round 4 of the League, I was up against my Combined Army Nemesis. I think I ended up drafting 12 lists before I settled on how I was going to play it. Firefight is a pretty straight forward mission, but I know my opponent likes bringing some of Combined's heavy hitters, including the Avatar, Sphinx, Charontid and Anathematic, supported by swarms of effective warbands.

We were playing on one of the White Noise tables, which has a lot of water at ground level and a lot of elevated gantries and building rat runs. It felt to me a lot like one of those laser tag venues where if you know the layout you get a massive advantage.

Fortunately, neither of us knew what on earth we were doing.

First up was the right flank, where a Zerat Red Fury was sitting right by one of the Panoplies, and needed to get killed rather than letting it go on a rampage. My Heckler ran up, tried to kill it, and died to an unlucky shot. Mary Problems then came up and quickly gunned down the Zerat, but in it's dying breath it laid a mine. I ran a servant remote up and made a play to heal the Heckler, but while I the healing worked, the mine killed him stone dead.

I then ran my Puppetactica up to the alley on the left flank I was pretty sure that the assorted angry impetuous warbands would come down.

I was right, and the first puppet took an angry clawed beastie to the face that then died to a hail of bullets from the other puppets. This was super convenient as I had a classified objective to repair something, so I ambled up the repair remote and stuck the puppet back together.

The puppets then wandered up and did some light murdering of warbands, but they didn't quite have the orders and the dice to kill the Sogarat with Feuerbach. The counter attack put a big hole in them. In the midfield, I tried to push a Reaktion Zond up, but again, the shortage of orders meant that while it caused a little damage, it was quickly put out of commission.

Going into my last turn, it was time for a Cunning Plan. I ran my Killer Hacker up the field under Cybermask (which I always think of as broadcasting fake signals for the advanced Friend / Foe systems in the far future). Once she found a spot out of sight of the Noctifer covering that fire lane, she unleashed her Fast Panda, which ran forward next to the Sogarat, before stopping and becoming a happy little hacking node. Mary Problems them hacked through the Fast Panda to freeze the Sogarat in place, before the newly healed Grenzer Missile Launcher fired a missile right into it's chest.

Of course, at this point, my opponent simply passed their Reset in reaction to being shot at, unfreezing themself, and refused to roll anything lower than a 15 on their armour save. And I was out of orders to do anything about it.

I still had a pretty good defensive . . . oh, no, wait. He still had a drop troop. I think it was actually a Morat Diplomatic Division, but we didn't have a representative of the model. But yeah, it dropped down and murdered the missile launcher and the doctor, and a few other people . . . but it was plenty to give the win to the Combined Army.

So, a 7-2 loss in the end. My nemesis swears blind I've beaten him at some point, but I genuinely don't remember doing so. The good news was that the list was good, the game felt close, and my opponent reported being pretty terrified of the list's potential for most of the game. It's likely to be a strong basis for Tunguska when I start playing them competitively, but for now I'm staying pretty casual with a new edition coming.

HATE Isolation League Round 3: Supplies vs Onyx Contact Force

For game three of our Isolation League, I was down at the bottom of the table after two major losses, and up against Onyx Contact Force, who'd been having some similar luck. The mission was Supplies, where you try an retrieve crates from boxes in the middle of the table. I decided to run the Hollow Man fire team for this game. They're fast moving robots who are tough and can jump ridiculous distances.

I also love their background. They're the heavy security for Tunguska's banks. To make sure they stay loyal, they're actually piloted by people who are now basically brains in jars kept in the bank's vaults to ensure their loyalty.

The link advanced up the table and happily murdered everything that got in their way. I also got to use Pitchers successfully, which pleased me. The Hollow Man team fired a Repeater into the building where Bit was hiding out, and my Interventor Killer Hacker then hacked through it to target Bit and melt her brain.

Ko Dali went to clear one of the boxes, but ran up against a Heckler with a boarding shotgun who had other ideas. The Onyx Contact Force were rapidly running out of hit pieces! A Noctifer Missile Launcher made another valiant attempt to cause damage, but while it was super hard to hit, the Hollow Men took the "quantity has a quality all of it's own" approach and put so many bullets in the Noctifer's general direction that one took it out.

A final brave attempt by a Malignos could dislodge the link team. The Noctifer Lieutenant did manage to gun down the random specialist holding the third box, but then died trying to kill a second box holder to bring the game back to a draw...

Not too many lessons to learn from this game at this point other than "That Hollow Man fire team is a bit good, isn't it?"

HATE Isolation League Round 2 - Hunting Party: Tunguska vs Varuna

In Round 2 of our TTS Isolation League, I was up against the new hotness - Varuna. The mission was Hunting Party, where you try and stun and immobilise the opponent's lieutenant and specialists, with a side helping of secret objectives and pushing buttons.

Varuna's two strong points are a brutal defensive MSV2 Sniper in a link, and Camouflaged Jammers. To address this, I took a Securitate link team with the new Spec Ops Veteran with a Sensor for the Jammers, and a Kriza Boracs HMG along with an Interventor friend to deal with the MSV2 Sniper.

I then deployed the Securitate link opposite the Sniper and the Kriza Boracs opposite the camo markers. Mostly because I was panicked about the amount of cover on the left flank.

I weathered the first turn fine, then brought on Raoul Spector to take out the Sniper. I successfully hit the Trauma Doc, then threw a "Drop Bear" (a throwable mine) before turning the corner to shoot the sniper . . . 

The sniper was just out of the area effect of the mine, and easily gunned down Raoul at his bad ranges. This was not going well for me.

A Croc Man Hacker then came up and tried to hack my Lieutenant Kriza Boracs into being immobilised. He succeeded, but due to a misunderstanding of how the mission scored, he unfortunately used a programme that wore off before it forced me to change Lieutenant. This would have provided him more scoring options, but fortunately (for him) this didn't really change the outcome of the game.

The Kriza unstuck, shot the Hacker, and then shot up a whole bunch of the reaction / guard pieces.

My Heckler then made a heroic run down field, threading between various guard pieces to place a massive E/Marat template down in a speculative attack on his Lieutenant. It succeeded! I was momentarily in the lead! The Hecker survived to the start of my opponent's next turn, at which point he swiftly reduced the pesky meddler to a fine red mist.

I could feel my opponent nearly going 'on tilt', but he paused, thought about it, and came back swinging. He was well ahead in terms of game positioning - he just needed to get the score back to match how everything else was going!

In the end, he swung it to the point where I couldn't fix things. He glued specialists, glued my Kriza properly this time, completed a classified and pressed a button. While I managed to bring the specialists back to evens, swinging two points back to me, my Engineer simply couldn't make the run to the Lieutenant to free him and save the game, and Varuna firmly took a well deserved win.

HATE Infinity Isolation League Round 1 - Frontline: Tunguska vs Vanilla Nomads

With no-one getting out to socialise yet, Hackney Area Tabletop Enthusiasts have set up a small Tabletop Simulator Infinity League because we could. We'll be playing a round every couple of weeks while we can't get in to the club.

I decided to run Tunguska as I've been interested in them as a Sectorial for quite a while but never played a game with them. It turns out that Tabletop Simulator lets you get going on a force much quicker without having to invest a ton of money in the models!

Having signed up to run Tunguska, I then spent a week and a half writing list after list and having horrible trouble with them. I'm used to running high model count lists, which Tunguska . . . just can't do. They're a relatively elite army, lacking large numbers of cheap troops to power the heavy hitters.

In the end, I snapped, took the Szalamandra TAG, and built a simple ten order list to support it.

The first mission was Frontline, to keep things nice and simple. As the mission has a Liaison Officer I wanted to take the Grenzer Forward Observer, which made me trend towards a Grenzer link on the grounds that it could use Forward Deployment to start in the scoring zones and save me orders moving it up.

I was up against a member of the club who is moving out of Bakunin and into vanilla Nomads. My main plan was to not worry too closely about all the clever tricks and just shoot everything with a really big gun.

My opponent had placed his Liaison Officer - a Moran Forward Observer - prone on a rooftop in the centre of the building. I decided the first thing to do was to address that. I climbed the Szalamandra up a shipping container, then moved up and opened fire. There was a fine red mist where the Moran used to be, but he'd managed to put his Crazy Koalas on Standby when he saw me climbing up.

My Zondnautica then advanced up the other side of the building and took a shot at the Interventor who'd dodged a little too far away from the Szalamandra and into her line of sight, but the Interventor got lucky and managed to dodge again into a very very small blind spot I couldn't see from either side.

I started to advance my Szalamandra up, but was unfortunately hit by a lucky Flash Pulse, stunning it for the rest of the turn. I moved it back as far as I could and pushed the link up to provide as much ARO cover as they could manage.

I started to realise my mistake as various Morlocks started running forward under their own orders to start building a line of smoke up to my Szalamandra. And then the Uberfallkommando started moving up.

They charged out of the smoke and swarmed onto the TAG. Hoping to survive one round of beating, I reacted with the heavy flamethower... But there were just too many hits with the Viral close combat and the TAG was removed. The Pupniks all burned to a crisp, but the Chimera survived.

And to add some extra injury to the injury, one of the Morlocks managed to run up and dropped a Chain Rifle template over the link, taking out the Hacker.

I spent a boring turn running the doctor and their remote around to heal up enough of the link to get back in the game, and advanced models into the scoring zones. Weirdly, everyone was looking at the Chimera's hidey-hole, so when she ran around the corner she was blown off the board.

My Grenzers were able to take out an advancing Tysklon Spitfire, but the Nomad player still had plenty of orders left to recover from some bad luck with the dice.

I ended the turn with most of the link down, another Morlock who'd advanced under smoke covering most of my surviving models, and very little I could do to recover. I made a short but valiant attempt to turn the tide, but I didn't have a lot of orders to do it in.

The Nomad Taskmaster then switched into the main group, activated as Lieutenant and went on a spree of gunning down surviving models. I had nothing left to resist with, leaving me with an 8-1 loss with only 45 points left on the table while my opponent had a solid 239 left up.

If I was to run a limited insertion list again, I think I'd want both a Total Reaction remote and probably also a Heckler Jammer covering the approaches to the TAG to make sure it didn't get destroyed by warbands.

I suspect warbands are going to be something I'm going to continue to struggle with...

Infinity Code One Battle Report - Supplies: Combined Army vs Yu Jing (Tabletop Simulator)

Corvus Belli recently released "Code One", a simpler set of rules for Infinity to help people get into the game in a more accessible way. They've made four armies available with these rules to start off with, based on the two most recent introductory sets. The rules are available to download for free, and there's an online army builder as well.

Experienced players have been looking at Code One thoughtfully because we know that the fourth edition of Infinity is coming in August 2020. Code One has been written with fourth edition (N4) in mind, so we expect quite a few of the rules changes to similarly apply to N4.

To see how it played, we decided to have a friendly game of Supplies using Tabletop Simulator. I took Combined Army, while my opponent brought Yu Jing. We chose to play the game at 30 points.

I took the forward deploying version of Ko Dali, and sent her hunting camouflage markers. The first target was a Guilang Skirmisher. It turned out to be a Hacker, and used an ARO action as Ko Dali approached to Spotlight her. The extra bonus proved super useful as the Guilang crit Ko Dali and killed her stone dead.

Total Reaction Remotes turn out to be really rather good. I advanced mine onto a side building and shot down one of the Yu Jing ARO pieces (I think a Ye Mao Missile Launcher).

Then came the Yu Jing first turn. A Tiger Soldier Spitfire arrived in a rather inconvenient spot. He shot Umbra Samaritan Nourkias in the back, then started heading down the back line, destroying Slave Drone on the way!

The rampage comes to a sudden halt when a combi rifle remote gets a lucky hit, while the Gwailo manages to only take a single wound from having been shot in the back.

The Malignos Hacker murders a Guilang dead, then grabs a box and runs away.

Meanwhile the Guilang in the centre grabs a box and bundles back into the building. I send Agent Dukash to run and try and take it back but I don't quite have the orders left and he can't quite make it.

The new Yu Jing spec op then runs up, stabs up my Malignos and grabs the box back, securing a Yu Jing win.

I had a ton of fun with this. I've got a lot of thoughts about Code One that I'll try and sort into coherent order at some point in the future.

Trying Tabletop Simulator to play Infinity

I gave Tabletop Simulator a go the other day. It is what it says on the tin - a programme designed to emulate tabletop and board games. It has a pretty good Infinity mod, which is what I was trying out.

Tabletop Simulator itself is a teensy bit clunky, but serviceable. I have enough players locally that normally I wouldn't bother with it, but with in person gaming out of the question, I thought I'd give it a go.

One of the HATE club, Yashar, offered to give me a demo game and talk me through using it. His advice was that it was broadly OK to use but you needed to be more collaborative with your opponent on things like checking sight lines and so on.

And, more or less, I agree.

We had a Limited Insertion game of Frontline that wasn't much to write home about, as Yashar is a more consistent player than me usually, and my dice were utter garbage on top of that. But it was about the learning experience, and it definitely taught me that getting games in was entirely feasible.

I might manage to get a battle report or two done, depending on how we do. We've got a little league going to get some games in while we're all cooped up indoors, but it's already a pretty slow process. Adding making notes and taking screen shots might be a step too far.

That said, I'll see what I can do.