We all knew Mission Selection would play a big part in the enjoyment of the Reinforcements optional extra so with that in mind which Missions from ITS season 15 would you say play well in a Reinforcements Event and which missions if they were selected for a Reinforcements Event would give you immediate feels bad?
Supplies seems to have the best consensus for good playability, because you have a couple of turns to run off with the crates and then the reinforcements have a last ditch chance to go after them. I think firefight is also okay. Most tournament organizers aren't going to really understand the difference between missions suitable for reinforcements or not, though. You will find yourself in some situations where you want to play the upcoming tournament, a few locals want to run their exrah etc so reinforcements has to be a thing, and the person organizing it just nonchalantly decides to throw in acquisition and frontline. You might not have the most satisfying competition with missions like those in the lineup.
I bet some of you are gonna hate this, buuuut... On consideration, I think there's some merit to assuming that Reinforcements will actually work OK for most missions, but that the optimal Reinforcements group will vary...which was already true for every mission anyway, as a list tailored for Firefight might not be an ideal fit for Countermeasures or Biotechvore. The fact that Reinforcements can't start over the midline and therefore can't advance without AROs into the far side of the table means that they can only be counted on to be fait accompli points in a zone in quadrant scoring missions for the two quadrants closest to their DZ...meaning Supremacy and Superiority, which both score per round, not end of game. They can't drop into the Frostbyte exclusion zone directly. They can't drop directly into the Panic Room, Launching Tower, or Armory to dominate them automagically. I agree that Acquisition is likely to be a pain, but. In a 300+ pt game a Reinforcements drop can't contact all three centerline objectives without provoking AROs—terrain and trooper placements notwithstanding—and they aren't allowed to deploy in contact with Objectives (main rulebook p. 22, second bullet of Deployment Rules) so they'll still provoke AROs and mines when they move to try and touch things. It's not that much worse than needing to take measures to stop a hidden ninja KHD from touching the tech coffin in a normal game, and if you're going first you will hopefully be able to park your own Reinforcements in suppression staring at every spot that might let your opponent advance a Reinforcements trooper to an objective. I'm not sure about Frontline, but I expect mainly that it'll be hard to pull out a 10-0 going first unless you just steamroll your opponent super hard from the get-go. Having not played it a bunch of times with Reinforcements, I don't think I really want to speculate further. It's almost a guarantee that the player going second will try to score at least 3 points in Power Pack by dropping prone troops nearly in contact with their own console and out of view, or just trying to bum rush their own console with several guys in a coordinated order despite a hail of bullets...but again, you can already do that if you have access to a HD infiltrator in your faction, and it won't cost 100 points. For missions with an exclusion zone, I think most factions have at least some Reinforcement profiles that are OK dropping closer to their own DZ, and those profiles will make more sense to bring if you know you aren't going to be dropping within 8 inches of the midline.
But just around the corner, ready to go in with templates, shotguns, smoke and/or CC specialst. If you did not secure the room very well with mines, hacking areas etc. it is easy to wipe the defenders from the room. But okay I only had one game of Panik Room with RF and my Deabaks were well suited for CQB.
For what it's worth, we chose to play these missions with reinforcement for our next satellite : - Evacuation - Mindwipe - Firefight - Supply - Unmasking None of these give a huge advantage to being the second player and allow an auto win just dropping reinforcement. We also hesitate to add Counter mesure or Decapitation which work with this mod also.
I played evacuation yesterday, admittedly with many errors, but seems to work well with reinforcements.
Countermeasures is just a badly designed mission that reinforcements then takes the worst aspects of and dials them to 11.
That may be your opinion but in my community most people tend to like it for a fun and swingy infinity game. It may be frustrating sometimes but with a well designed list it's more often than not an interesting and entertaining experience.
"Bad" in this case referring to its design in regards to balance and competitiveness, i.e. for inclusion in an official tournament packet. It has no business being in the ITS packet.
Probably not much chance of you playing Resilience Operations game mode then if you think random cards unbalances the game.
It depends on how the scoring system works, you can have random card elements in a mission and players can reasonably be expected to work around them if they are simply part of the mission rather than the entire mission. However that isn't the case for countermeasures, one player getting a stellar/awful flip for them can end a game there and then. Reinforcements doubles down on that sheer randomness because if you get a flip conducive to your selected reinforcements the turn they arrive and your opponent did not it causes a massive swing in the game state in your favour. This is the opposite effect reinforcements has on other missions, such as Mindwipe, where reinforcements improves the mission by blunting the more random aspects of the mission and giving the player a tool to counter the effects while allowing random game mechanics to create a dynamic mission. Ultimately countermeasures isn't suitably balanced for a competitive environment. Casual games? Sure thing, but it's not balanced well enough for a tournament packet.
I will accept that if one hates randomness Countermeasures is not a good mission for them, but it seems to be a really popular mission. It has its uses especially if the tournament organizer wants to mess up the rankings in the middle of a long tournament, or if the tournament is more casual, or for a challenge type tournament, but I will agree that for a straight up serious tournament it is usually not well suited.
Countermeasures is great and fits the setting of "competitive" Infinity well. Infinity is a -narrative- game composed of a great number of elements added over decades... so extreme symmetry and balance boiled down to a chess-like setup is both highly unlikely and expressly not the creators' goal. It's a dice game with wildly-varying types of toy soldiers. The core mechanics of Infinity are plenty swingy in the first place, and there's no taking that out. Attempting to strangle it to death with boring missions is a pointless exercise. ITS missions are -more- symmetrical than other ways to play Infinity, sure. It's balanced enough to be fun, but leaves in enough of the narrative and swinginess to keep it thrilling. That's been "competitive" enough to make us all feel like we have a fair shot when meeting 10 other nerds for a few games... but no one in their right mind thinks this is a perfect game where we all start with equal forces and win/lose based only on skill. Countermeasures fits the spirit and play of that sort of game more than "Let Us Touch Another Three Buttons, YAY" version 15... IMO. In Countermeasures one's goals change fluidly throughout the game, which is unique and interesting. That's a refreshing form of play balanced against preorddained-button-touching or slaughterfests. Otherwise we'd be playing Toy Space Soldiers by Reiner Knizia on some ugly-ass cardboard we bought at Essen Spiel. Or maybe Advanced Squad Leader, which I loved but always left me wanting something more fluid and spontaneous, even at the cost of perfect balance.
In the case of these types of events, the custom mission slot exists for a reason (one of the best ideas CB has had in a while for the ITS). Countermeasures should be removed as TOs are able to add them back if they so desire. Instead of countermeasures wasting oxygen in the tournament pack for absolutely no good reason we should have a new mission. I am particularly interested in testing evacuation and last launch. I disagree on that entirely given that we have had actually interesting additions to the mission packet like Frostbyte, and Panic Room is an improvement on Biotechvore. Mindwipe is another example of a decent narrative addition to the ITS packet, and I think Last Launch and Evacuation have the potential to be the same this season. It's entirely possible to craft a dynamic narrative mission without it being unbalanced as shit, countermeasures just isn't up to that standard unfortunately.
That’s one of the reasons I’m excited for Resilience Operations. Different objectives for each player? Yes please!
Fortunately it's not an either/or. Countermeasures and those other missions make a nice counterpoint to each other. They go well in the packet together, and Countermeasures is the mission suggested or requested in both tourney or casual play in our local meta about 20% of the time I'd estimate (and we have some very skilled players around here). Again, it's a dice game with hundreds of highly varied unit profiles. It's not chess. Having a slider on the degree of whacky and immediate change is a nice thing, and some of us like that slider set high sometimes, low at others. [I'm also not convinced that Countermeasures is that imbalanced over 3 rounds, when you know it's coming and have built for it, but that is a discussion for another thread.] I happen to hate playing against Tohaa, as they have quite a few seriously abusable or overly-advantaged features (also I still have Old SymbioMate PTSD, tbh). To the point that I got rid of a free Tohaa army despite knowing they'd be a very useful club in the bag. But I'm not going to claim that Tohaa are unbalanced enough that they stand out from a frankly pretty random-ass game enough to merit removal. And I'm definitely not going to neg Tohaa on forums and propose that no one play them. Back on-topic: I'll test out Countermeasures for my next game of Reinforcements. I think you're right @Triumph that the Reinforcements format plays better at high points, so it'll be 400, with maybe a few other small tweaks. I'm very much looking forward to seeing what random-ass missions my opponent and I get from the asymmetrical requirements in the Objective Deck.
Given the ITS pack is used both as a tournament pack and a guide for casual/ pick up games there is need for such scenarios to be included, same goes with direct action a category of scenarios I personally play only if they show up on random selection, the fact I do not play them does not mean they have no right to exist in the ITS pack. @Savnock 400 have me in mixed feelings the main section feels more like a normal game list but the (usually 16) model cap makes a big paradigm shift on the structure of the main list, the gameplay time seems to be increased, but I am unsure by how much so far I have equal comments on the I like it/ I hate it from locals, but the tournament we have in two weeks is in 400 points so I will have more data then. It remains to be seen if 400/8 (300/6+100/2) works well against 350/7
If CB provided support for narrative play I'd be over the moon. Unfortunately all they seem to support is ITS.
There is a narrative online campaign every year + some.nareative mission in each supplement (not enough imo, there should be 2 or 3 at the end of each chapter, like faction specific narrative mission) but there are "some" narrative missions. Edit : take a look at a Bolt Action supplement for exemple. Some story and a couple mission at the end of the chapter to recreate that. There could be two bakunin themed mission, two hassassin themed mission and same for the greek.
