Inching around corners to avoid multiple AROs

This is something that soldiers are trained to do in combat situations, it is known as "slicing the pie". Infinity also assumes that all the troopers are connected by an infonet with access to high altitude drone/satellite imagery, quantronic surveillance, pheremonal analysis and detection, and other such Sci-fi technowizardry so soldiers can deliberately not expose themselves to threat unnecessarily.

It's very much an accepted practice in most areas. A majority of people play by intent, so you would declare "Trooper A moves far enough to see B, but remain out of LoF from the other enemies"

Ways to avoid this are to stack the troopers vertically, usually in different floors of a building, use a Hidden Deployment trooper to the left of Trooper B so A exposes themselves to both, or not deploy in a nice neat line so that the enemy can't pick your troopers off one by one.

If B-E are up cheap disposable troopers this can also be inefficient. If they're 3 Puppetbots and a Warcor you could be spending most of your turn taking out 4 relatively unimportant units and not completing your objectives or thinning out your opponent's order pool

 

Well, IRL that seems to be what they call "cutting a pie" / "pieing a corner". Thing you absolutely do in a Close Quarters Battle situation to stay alive. Actually, take four of your friends, and try to recreate this situation with imaginary guns - you'll see how it works. To really cover this corner, you'd rather have two or threee folks set behind one another (IRL one flat on the ground, one kneeling, perhaps one more standing. And you'd want them behind some cover. In-game, one prone, one standing behind the first one, as to not block your line of sight).

Keep in mind that in-game, the active model is going to need to spend 4 Orders (minumum) to deal with these 4 models (and if they;re staying there in the open, and not even one of them is in Suppressive Fire, that's bad for them!). The active model is advancing carefully and in Cover, so that's good for him!

In short, I don't see why it would be considered unfair in a game...

@colbrook beat me to it :)

 

Yes. Its accepted. Its not "jerky" by any means. You can see that as trading (at least) 4 orders for safer FtF rolls.

 

Hah, it reminded me about the whole INTENT dramas that were going on here in past from time to time. One of the long threads about it was started by me after a big tournament in which one guy really abused the Intent and Slicing The Pie idea.
And in my opinion it can be jerky. Definitely. But it depends on the situation.

One of the most important things about Infinity is AROs and making them less valuable is IMHO bad.

In real life military no one is slicing a pie by walking inch in cover close to corner. It can't be done like that. That's how you do it:


So you have to walk away to get the neccessary angle:


But in the game nobody wants to leave the cover - that's one of the reasons that makes slicing the pie in Infinity a bit jerky.
The other one is if it's made from far away. Because sure, in your examples it's rather close and easy to accomplish. It gets tricky if you want to do this with your HMG against some Panzerfaust and sniper at 30 inches. If they are close together, the difference in position of the active unit is impossible to obtain at the tabletop level. I checked it. And in my humble opinion it shouldn't be done.

I play the game over 10 years and had really different and funny experiences, one of the extremes being a guy who claimed he will take out my two AROs standing diagonally one over the other with a difference in the thickness of a wall, 3-4 mm? And he wanted to hit them one by one with a HMG from a far distance. I didn't wanted to waste time finding some logic in that and let him - as it sometimes happen - the luck can be fair and the first guy he wanted to shot rolled a crit.

So, to conclude - I'd play it simple - if it can be done with miniatures on the table, then OK, do it. Show it with silhouettes. It's okay. But if the active player have to deploy a unit with an accuracy of a robot and can't show it on the table - then just be a man, take tougher units instead of SPAM of weak ones, go against the two AROs and just play the game, instead of theorizing.


PozdRawiam

 

That's the generally accepted standard way to play Infinity.

The other option is having an argument every time a model attempts to shoot from a corner. People who value their sanity just agree on playing with intent and slice the pie and move on with the game.

Actually you absolutely can, it's just geometry. The angle doesn't change whether you are 1cm or 1m away from the corner.

The reason you don't IRL stand next to the corner as you attempt to clear it has nothing to do with being able to see around the corner, it's don't stand next to the piece of cover and put your gun/body in grabbing range of an enemy.

Additionally you have better sight to the corner if you stand back from it. If you stand right at the corner and someone is laying on the floor (or there is a trap like an explosive) as you attempt to go around it you might not notice them. But LOF in Infinity is more abstract than this, models have perfect vision based on a cylinder which isn't realistic.

 

It can easily be shown to work with the laser lines we all carry, in virtually every situation where the opponent hasn't deliberately stacked aros to double guard a specific corner. 3mm is more than enough to easily demonstrate a position where you only see the first model.

Intent has nothing to do with it. The position exists either way. If for some reason you decided not to use intent, you'd just have to take longer to ensure you'd put the mini in the exact position. You can pie slice either way.

 

I've done it in real life plenty of times and is standard in every game i've played. You just have to prepare for it.

 

Just remember: If you have a very prominent corner point that you’re lining up to guard, you line up in a line with that corner point, not in single file in tangent. :)

You get sliced in single file, you don’t get sliced shoulder to shoulder in line with the only approach.

 

Is the reverse also true? I can declare that two troopers (one prone and one standing) have exactly the same firelane towards a certain corner making it impossible to pie slice one of them?

 

That's already been mentioned as a tactic a few times in this thread, if you have a laser line that can help with deploying then in the correct fashion.

 

Is it legal to check LOF before(!) moving model? I mean placing silhouette marker at supposed position and precisely cheking to be completely sure that you don't get unwanted ARO?

 

Strictly speaking no.

A silhouette has precisely defined dimensions and this would allow you to pre-measure. But from my experience people cheat on pre-measuring as long a it's not too obvious.

 

Looking at Order Expenditure Sequence I don't see any "LOF check" before step 2... isn't that an argument?
Unfortunately, I can’t find what exactly is considered a "LOF check"...

 

@Qwerinaga you can effectively do it if you place the silhouette, then bump it tiny bits at a time to avoid going past where you want to, checking it each time to see if you have achieved the desired LoF. Just keep track of where your maximum move distance and your point of origin were.

It takes forever though, so to speed up play most opponents will let you say “I want to advance just far enough to see this guy, but not that guy.” Then you can place the mini, bumping it back if you went too far.

Some opponents are not okay with the just-declare-and-place method, so just check before you do it. If they are not okay with it, the are signing themselves up to wait while you super-precisely move your mini. They can then “gotcha” if you move your mini too far, which while technically doable as well, produces more bad feelings usually.

Either way you can do it and it’s part of the game. It’s just a matter of whether your opponent is willing to make it a fast part of the game or not.

 

Isn't it a "LOF check" which is forbiden a this step?

 

Is looking where you are placing a miniature a “LoF check”? If so, should we just place them with our eyes closed?

 

Well. I can see a noticeable difference between looking down from my height and aiming a laser pointer through a silhouette....

 

Oh God, remember that guy who decided it's cheating to bend over the table? That was awesome. Let's have more of that.

 

Was it about silhouette and laser pointer?