My group had a lot of success with @prophet of doom's 20 x 20 Mission System, and I highly recommend it to reduce (undesirable) complexity in the game. The missions are really good for narrative games and including restrictive terrain, and we found it very accessible for beginning players. Spoiler: 20:20 Alien Artifact with Canal This was our table for Alien Artifact, with buildings and stairways by Plastcraft, and playmat and scatter terrain by MicroArt Studio. The alien artifact is represented by the tripod formation of (MAS) consoles in the centre of the picture. We stuck blue shrink-wrap tape onto the table to make a pretty decent-looking canal that bisected the battlefield, applying Aquatic Terrain (Difficult) rules and making Deployment choices more interesting. The smoke template represents a Nimbus Zone generated by a game event. We left the table set up like this for a month, and played the most entertaining games of the year. We settled on loose lists of 150/3 to 200/4 pts based on Starter Boxes plus 1 model, (accommodates Ice Storm sets, etc.) and rounding up to 8 Orders to include beginning players, but the more experienced players enjoyed it too. We all liked that the games weren't necessarily restricted to 3 turns. Discussion thread for 20 x 20 Mission System by @prophet of doom
Thanks man- this is the kind of content that makes me happy to stay on the forums :) I'll give 20 x 20 a look this evening!
Interestingly enough, my local meta generally sees this as a non-issue since noone seems to be bothered by "shooting into the back from the front" at all, and stick-to-the-wall thing is considered too niche (I guess it's because of local consensus on how to interpret that) to worry about.
Let's see. The LOS you're talking about is a clarification of how the rules are written and it does make the game harder to play defensively. Okay, I'll accept that this one makes it hard to play, but on the other hand it seems like they don't want you to be able to guard both the corner to your left and the one to your right, which leaves only the verticality as the real issue as it were. Engage stick to wall hasn't been FAQed yet, the only FAQ on that I'm aware of is the one where Palanka ruled that a model incapable of climbing would not be able to Engage a model that uses Climbing+ to get on a wall for their second short skill. While that's somewhat inconsistent with a few things and raises a few questions, it does go a small amount of way towards sanity when it comes to Engage. If anything I'd say the problem here is a lack of FAQ, not the contents of FAQ we have.
So...you took all that time to agree that it's an issue? Are you being argumentative, or merely long-winded? I honestly can't figure it out. You can add a clause explicitly killing that 180 degree guard two approaches thing, instead of making the mess that exists now. Especially if your meta uses "I move here and shoot you where you can't shoot back...let's not waste time measuring this since we know its possible" (NOTE: plz do not nuke me mods I am not trying to necro the PBI issue!) So again, something caused by an FAQ ruling what it meant to be in base-to-base (for CC on stairs being the example as I recall), with as close as we can get to an answer without an FAQ saying this jank exists....and yet you seem to try and say it's not an issue? Or that it is, but it's an issue caused by a different issue meaning...it's still an issue? Color me confused, my dude.
Colour me even more confused. Wouldn't it be argumentative if I'm disagreeing where we both think there is an issue? Wasn't your argument that there's problems caused by FAQs? Both of your examples are of problems where there FAQs were partial, solving only one part of the problem; one more than the other. It's not that either of these situations would have been better off without those FAQs at all. (P.s. no, you can't add a special case for guarding corners, because it's enough that the walls aren't exactly straight lines or that the buildings aren't exactly perfectly flat and you're back to square 1. The rules are a physics engine and you have to make sure that down is down whether you're on land or on a bridge)
I can feel some heat emanating from the recent posts. Calm down please, the more heated a conversation become, the less useful it become. I don't actually know how the player base is sporting, but if i had to guess, it's probably shrinking, as pretty much any hobby game except 40k right know. Infinity might be a bit of an exception because it is so niche to begin with, but it also means there is only so much people interested in playing the game to begin with. I don't know if talking about the competition is allowed, ill edit this part if it's not. The 8th edition of the game combine with an aggressive licensing policy from gw gave 40k and battle a tremendous visibility in the mainstream "geek" community, pretty much in a same way d&d 5th edition shone a light upon tabletop rpg. Now i hope that such a surge in attention to a hobby game will translate in a progressive transfer of players to other games but i doubt it. I honestly don't understand why 40k is such a success right now, it got me to the hobby over 20 years ago and i was drawn to it's dark and uncompromising universe, but despite the relative improvements from 7th to 8th edition, the fluff is incredibly bad (a 3rd ed vibe to me), the price tag is horrendous, the models are mostly meh (with some exceptions but the visual style went from gothic to baroque to badly executed rococo), and games workshop is litteraly killing the industry. Each year passing see less and less hobby shop still open because they make everything possible to kill outside reseller. Meanwhile it's harder and harder to convince people to tryout infinity while they invest the fucking GDP of estonia in a 40k army. Envoyé de mon LG-H815 en utilisant Tapatalk
I'm not getting into hair splitting with you. A poor FAQ and a lack of new FAQ are both FAQ related. Whether or not they fixed more than they broke is debatable, and I argue it made things worse. The rules are rules and an abstraction, so I don't get you saying what can and can't be done, given the aforementioned interactions appear to break what the devs intended. Split hairs with others - it may be your hobby, but it ain't mine.
Because it has a low barrier to entry with multiple start collecting and battleforce boxes that when doubled up on give a "plug in and play" option? Because they are super active on YT with start-to-finish content from sprue to dice rolling? For most, that tends to make up for the god-awful balance. I still buy because I do like the fluff and aesthetic.
If that's how you feel about it, then okay. My hobby isn't splitting hairs, but taking rules apart and looking at them. The FAQs have been nothing but clarifying to me but it's very annoying that they're slow in coming, but even so it's been progress towards clarity and consistency overall. There's been a few surprises, and to be perfectly honest the non-linear process that is an Infinity order makes for some FAQs where literally any answer would ruffle feathers, making the ZoC 180 an unenviable decision to have to make. I'm just very, very, surprised to see someone actually considering the FAQs to be a bad thing. (Caveat: actually putting the FAQs and erratas in the rules pdf would be better than leaving them in separate documents and a myriad of forum posts, but hey...) (Additional caveat: can't say the same about ITS considering how much I despise the Xenotech)
SInce we're on the subject of Xenotech, I think ITS has put too many special rules in this season and CB should decide whether they want some of them to be part of the base game or not. Sounds like a moot question until you play a non-ITS game with less than 10 Orders and the other guy takes away two Orders from you when you thought you were safe.
This. By the way, some players at my local club only play Infinity from time to time. They have to remember the rules, AND the ITS rules. I know that ITS is a living test ground and I'm OK with that, but this season is a bit too much. I think Reduced Combat Groups, Ironclad and Long Service should be in the general rules. And I love Landing Assistance. Datatracker is a good thing, but Xenotech is totally meh.
Having to take care of both the Data Tracker and Xenotech is a bit much. I feel like Xenotech should be a separate mission rather than an add on to existing ones. Bravery has to go. It's a rather slapdash attempt at making MI more interesting and all it does it makes already good MI better while meh MI remains meh. You'd think Reduced Combat Groups would be the better solution. Or just recycle all "generic" MI into specialized troops in one way or another rather than leaving guys like Bolts overpriced Fusiliers. Black Friar or Prowler have special role, but what is the role of Bolts or Wildcats? Arguably the latter are more of an assault unit than Bolts, who are as schizophrenic as they come.
Wait are we trashing Wildcats now? Really? They were like one of the only core MI links you would ever take as a core before all of the mix-linking happened...
As @Barrogh says, how different players feel about difficult rules will change a lot between locales, but wherever there’s any difficulty at all, I think freely house ruling is the most intelligent approach. Sure, we can argue what the correct game is supposed to be, or what the best game might be, but if we’re not playing the same game then we’re hardly playing at all. Making house rules helps us find that common game. We always need to make them with respect to some fixed position, which ideally is the rulebook so we can say "The rules clearly say A, B, C and not D, but in this game/club/tournament we want to play B, C, D and not A”. But even if rules are hard to understand or hotly disputed, we can still take a notional position on what’s written to provide context and say “We're not sure what the rules mean by X, Y and Z, but we’re house ruling for Y, Z and not X”. This is so straightforward that you'd think people would house-rule more often, but they don't because Infinity is so complex, emotive, intense and confrontational that it's easily overwhelming - unless you have the bollocks of a Spanish bull, of course! So instead of dealing with that head-on, very anxious or controlling players find indirect ways to manage the unforeseeable and otherwise stressful elements of the game and, since that also manages statistical risk, also appeals to very competitive players too. Which would be fine if they house-ruled it, but both these sorts of players also commonly engage in strenuous arguments for a supposedly rules-legal basis for their styles so's to persuade others they must play along. All of which should be a worrying sign. Because if they're compelled to bully others into their play style, then they're not also likely to manage all the usual challenges of tabletop games like parallax problems for measurement, scenery getting misplaced and dice crashing into their models... By contrast, people who commonly house-rule situations are demonstrating a desirable equanimity towards the game, and we should all welcome this, make house-rules freely, and accept them as a normal part of casual games.
