Infinity at 400 points

I meant to make this post discussing core game play issues with Infinity at 300 points and the benefits that moving to 400 points has alot sooner but things got busy and I kept pushing it back.

Firstly for context until December 2021 I had the luxury of being in a covid free area meaning when N4 released in September 2020 I had the benefit of being in one of the very few gaming communities that got to play on a regular basis with no interruptions.

• Between September 2020 when N4 released and about mid June 2021 we played at 300 points. During this period we had 2 local tournaments run in the state, one of which I organised and the other was run by someone else so I got to participate. We played 300 points standard for a bit over 8 months.

• From approximately mid June 2021 to the present we've been playing at 400 points. We didn't get to play much during December or January because of Covid returning and causing restrictions. We've had a bit over 6 months playtime in total using 400 points and I've run two local events at that points level so far.

We started playing 400 points not for serious reasons. One player felt things were a bit stale and wanted to try some 400 point games just for the meme value, so we collectively decided to humour him. I did not expect to be here arguing it's a legitimately better way to play Infinity.

Two big issues that Infinity has at 300 points:

• It is very difficult to adequately meet mission demands while also building a list that can meet a checklist of other things it requires. ARO defenses, Attack pieces, supportive units, relevant order count, counters to enemy issues such as Impersonation/hacking/Guided Missiles/linked MSV AROs. List building is heavily railroaded by this and leaves little room for flexibility. This is further exacerbated the more complex ITS missions get, 300 points puts a heavy limitation on how interesting mission design can get due to metagame influences that need to be addressed in list construction first. Particularly for sectorials with limited mixed fireteam options building lists with adequate mission redundancy can be punishingly difficult in some cases. All in all lists are frequently stretched thin barely or often failing to meet requirements.

• The meta for Infinity at 300 points is heavily slanted towards gaining momentum by delivering a crushing alpha strike in the first turn then riding that momentum through the following two turns. Sniping important units with guided missiles, assassinating important units with impersonators, hammering an opponent with their own TAG, gutting someone's lines with a drop troop or McMurder, or unleashing an Avatar or fireteam with 14 orders to stick the boot into them. It didn't really matter we found games were largely being decided by what happened on turn 1 and how well people built lists to attack hard and/or avoid being hit hard. There was very little room for a comeback baring catastrophic dice or a terrible unforced error once one player gained a solid momentum advantage on the first turn, and the missions almost always tended to be an afterthought.

For our most competitively minded player, who plays a very wide selection of factions and sectorials, this condensed into The Mission Does Not Matter. MURDER WINS. His modus operandi regardless of what army he was playing on a given day was to focus on alpha striking the shit out of his opponent to remove either their ability to fight back with adequate attack pieces or sufficient orders (or both).

When we started playing 400 points he went from easily winning almost all of his games to straight up struggling and losing alot of them. We had a conversation about what was going on and the conclusion reached was that his strategy of a total focus on alpha striking was actively hurting him at 400 points.

Part of the reason was opponents just in general had a slightly higher ARO presence. Sometimes an extra TR bot here, another mine there. It did usually take him just a little bit more effort to hit his opponent as hard as he was used to. The main reason though, was increased list rendudancy. I talked about this in the Yu Jing forum but adding 100 points and 2 SWC was doubling my HI counts for Invincible Army. More armour, more wounds to chew through, and most importantly more combat effective models.

He was finding that his attempts to rush down the opponent were no longer leaving them in a crippled state. He'd get a good kill or two as usual, then find his main attack pieces over extended against an opponent who was still combat effective and could kick his teeth in without having to waste orders running across the table or often worrying about burning orders on trash AROs like flash pulses. In the case of first turn pitchers and guided missiles, it simply wasn't order efficient to go after one or two high priority targets anymore and trying to do so was leaving him with an under developed board state his opponent, no longer crippled by an alpha strike, exploited against him in their turn.

In a nutshell his games weren't being reliably decided by turn 1 killing momentum anymore.

My personal experience playing at 300 points has lined up with this also. My lists were built largely without mission parameters in mind and were built to fight and cripple the enemy as quickly as possible or to avoid an alpha strike as much as possible. It came to the point where I took the same two lists I entered in a tournament, both of which I built to fight player archetypes rather than any mission focus, and then played them for 10 weeks straight through a rotation of missions. I didn't need to make changes, simply focusing on killing my opponent was an optimal way to play. Frankly the game was becoming stale for me at this point as I was unfortunately finding list building was largely in a solved state and cookie cutter lists were actually becoming a thing.

Since switching to 400 points I've found Infinity has benefited from:

• Stronger list redundancy. It's so much harder to cripple a list from an alpha strike and lists tend to have a better variety of tools available to make sure they can solve problems.

• List variety is so much greater, there is more room for traditionally less cut throat optimised unit profiles to see the field. Units like TR Baggage bots, or the Zencha Hacker are two examples of profiles that have never made my 300 point lists but often show up in my 400 point ones because I start upgrading units with left over points because I'm at the 15 unit cap.

• Playing the mission actually matters because there's less emphasis on alpha striking.

• An extra 100 points and 2SWC disproportionately affects armies. We have found that while top end contenders such as Avatar based lists definitely benefit from it, mid tier and weaker armies, particularly the less brutally point and SWC efficient ones tend to get much greater value out of it. I've made a point of how much it helps White Banner in other threads.

On that last point that's not to say this is a silver bullet, USARF, MRRF, and ISS are all examples of armies with deeply ingrained metagame issues that need to be addressed. In the case of USARF and MRRF it's largely their tiny and dated unit rosters that need expansion and a total overhaul. All three are examples of armies that were heavily designed around when cheap unit spam was king in the metagame and to lean into that, and all need a total rework to get out of that rut.

 

Yes

It might be intentional but I don't think it's healthy for the game. I've certainly found myself in the situation where I had to choose between putting in a mission oriented unit, or putting in a unit that can counter a Grenzer MSR so I don't get shut out of the game by a BS19 sniper. Facilitating murder has won out by a large margin every time. Needing to make choices is a good thing, needing to make choices because otherwise you'll get donkey punched by your opponent isn't.

List building at 300 points is too cut throat right now which leads to the issue of favouring hyper optimised units and creating cookie cutter lists and list variety stagnation.

It also has a limiting factor on how interesting or narrative focused you can make ITS missions. Take Mindwipe for example. We tested that when it first came out and we were playing it at 300 points. We found the mission was too difficult for many factions to reliably have enough combat effective assets in a competitive list that could threaten the objectives on turn 2 and 3. We were discussing the need to bring the servers further up the field to make it easier to complete the mission objectives at one point.

We revisited it at 400 points and came to the conclusion that (in conjunction the Uberhacker errata) the mission was actually fine balance wise. At 400 points there was sufficient list redundancy that losing 1 or 2 models wouldn't suddenly put the game in an unwinnable state.

 

USARF has a tiny roster and is in dire need of a wider selection of units, but the quickest, dirtiest fix you could make to get them combat effective is make Minutemen a Vet Kazak equivalent and allow Marauders to link with them.

USARF as they stand are a prime example of an army that gets utterly crippled by an alpha strike, Guided missile or otherwise. Their main brute force projection revolves around a 1W minuteman with an AP HMG and the Unknown Ranger. Those units get picked off before they get to do anything or (or die to a stray crit) their list falls down like a house of cards.

 

If you follow the links I put in the first post they'll take you to some more in depth discussions about some of my specific 400pt lists, including one that was a reworked version of a failed 300pt list.

He doesn't use the forums unfortunately. He has played WhiteCo at two events and won both of them at 300 and 400 points. I don't have the 300pt lists because he didn't upload them, but I do have the two 400 point ones here and here. I have played into his WhiteCo alot and from memory I can pretty much recount his standard list at 300 basically downgrades alot of those secondary threats like the Haris team, the Hawkwoods, Nokken etc into cheaper hyper cost efficient filler alternatives like a Peacemaker and Fugazi, and the Jujaks turn into Fusiliers. His lists at 300 is pretty much a Danavas, Clipper, Fusi/Orc/Valerya core plus Guilang, Peacemaker and then what little room is left is filler and maybe a Karhu.

He actually complained alot about WhiteCo being a solved army when we were playing at 300 points. There was so little room for truly effective variation over what he was already playing.

You can still play ISS, USARF, etc in 400 points. They're just as shit though it doesn't really do anything to fix their problems.

It vastly improves other armies particularly those that struggle with SWC and have less efficient link options. I believe that the format has a marked improvement on armies such as CHA, which at 300 has a definite problem with getting overrun by all out aggression. At 400 points it is much harder to simply run at them because they now have the SWC and points to actually leverage a greater AVA of Scotsguard which means you can't ignore camo markers anymore to rush down their fragile link teams or you might cop a missile launcher to the side of the face.

Obviously our local scene doesn't have enough data for me to make definitive claims for every faction in the game but I can say from personal experience as I said in the post about White Banner I linked it immensely improves their strength. At 300 points White Banner is not worth playing, at 400 points they're actually a good sectorial that I place on par with Invincibles and Vanilla.

In terms of a "new" archetype? I wrote about my experiments with a recursion archetype and trying to make that work. I first tried this at 300 points and while I could create a list representing the archetype I couldn't get it to function in reality. The main issue was it was hamstrung by the usual issue that 300 points brings, there was only enough room for 1 attack piece the Shang Ji and the whole list folded like a house of cards if it died or got shut out from doing work, there wasn't enough diversity in active turn pieces to make the list function reliably.

At best this wound up being a meme at 300. Amusing when it worked, but far from reliable.

At 400 points though recursion very much works. Although in practice 3 Husong tended to be overkill, 1-2 Husong plus two TR Baggage bots was more than sufficient and the extra points funneled into active turn killers kept enough heat off Kokram to let him focus on just continiously fixing REMs and dropping area denial.

Let's be real here. Getting crippled by a hard alpha strike is only fun for one person at most, and from my experience, I don't find it particularly fun either way. Those alpha strike based 300pt Invincible Army lists I played at a local event? Well I won the event in a pretty boring way. All three of my games were decided on turn 1.

Game 1 I played into MAF. I went first and turn 1 I killed his Raicho with guided missiles.

Game 2 I played against WinterFo. Went first, brute forced through my opponent with a core link fighting its way into his DZ through all of his AROs and gutted his army. The Shang Ji handled the things that could see Lei Gong, who then ran through all of the Karhu with his Albedo.

Game 3 I played against TJC. Went second, opponent's alpha strike killed my Son Bae but failed to down my Shang Ji. I brute forced my way into his DZ and gutted his army including his LT.

The common factor there in all those games is turn 1 was a battle for momentum. I secured momentum in all three games and there was no strategic decisions my opponents could make to come back from there. The closest I got to losing was to some god awful dice in game three allowing a Spektr to outlive almost an entire turn's worth of shooting at it.

Yes, games are way more interesting at 400 points from my experience. With alpha striking being less efficient at 400 points it promotes more focus on playing the mission, which in turn leads to more swings in game state with players skirmishing over objectives and attempting to score instead of just securing momentum turn 1 and maintaining an iron grip on the game from there.

Back and forth makes a game stay interesting whereas one player curb stomping from turn one isn't really much fun for either player.

For the same reason @WiT? says the game is more fun when both players have the tools to play the game and don't instantly lose to a failed gear check.

Yes, outside of the SSS tier ARO links, active turn absolutely maintains an advantage nothing changes there. The difference is players are greater incentivised to spend orders to play mission objectives rather than just trying to curbstomp their opponent turn 1 because as discussed this tends to lead to an over extension that neither scores nor actually successfully cripples an opponent. Obviously, this is only applicable if the mission allows for it but I've also been fairly vocal about fixing missions so they don't just play as annihilation by a different name. You may have noticed Frontline had some changes this season.

 

At 300 it's a meme, at 400 it works great.

I've actually found that frequently I want fewer Husong and more Pango TR. I try to cover fewer DZ to DZ lines and more lines reaching out to about the center of the table. This makes it harder for the opponent to pick at the TR bots to open up movement for skirmishers with minimal order investment, they often need to commit 2-3 orders to bring a desired gun to bear on the target then further orders to shoot at it to bring it down versus my considerably fewer orders to repair them.

The concept is make the opponent need to spend more orders bringing them down than I do picking them up, plus it's more likely to cause an attack piece to leave their DZ and wind up in a more vulnerable location that I can exploit. Local Haqq player does a similar thing with Al Fasid, puts them in "shortstop" locations where head on they have limited directly forward range but they have long oblique angles, tries to force an over extension to come and deal with them.

Why is it an issue in N4 when it wasn't as bad in N3? Power creep, as many people have noticed playing around an alpha strike is stronger in N4 than it was in N3. Avatar with more orders than before, Guided missiles are more prevalent and hacking defenses were weakened considerably (I can't defend myself with a KHD that puts a -9 on my opponent anymore and Trinity sucks compared to Redrum as an ARO deterrent), link teams got bigger and badder and it's easier to funnel more orders through them in many cases.

Moving to 400 points as I said puts more combat effective resources on the table without in most cases driving up the order count to insane levels. I mentioned WhiteCo have in my meta been heavily abused in this fashion to focus purely on alpha striking the opponent. 100 extra points doesn't help them gain more orders, the damage they can inflict is still more or less capped at what it was before while their opponent has more resources to now weather that attack.