@RobertShepherd made this wonderful video below on YouTube discussing why he sees Infinity as a game of Risk Management: I think this is a wonderful piece to start discussion and is why certain factions are viewed as powerful. For me, I can see people viewing Tohaa as naturally powerful since it has a lot of tools to mitigate risk or at least avoid catastrophic failures. The way the army plays can make it resilient to failures and let it recover. Factions that have to rely on single wound models or limited sources of a tool (e.g. smoke, MSV, infiltrators, etc.) probably have a much higher level of severity if a failure occurs. One of the interesting thing he mentions that he sees a lot risk aversion in some players in Infinity. I definitely can feel that sometimes. For instance, it feels clear that many people in forum value NWI and 2+ wound models as they can decrease the severity of failure. Versus, their is a general wariness to expensive one wound models, even if they can decrease the likelihood of a failure. What are everyone's thoughts?
That's certainly one of the benefits of NWI/2W, but I'm not sure it's the primary one. In the active turn, the big benefit I see of two wounds on an attack piece is the ability to trade one of them partway through your attack run. You can get past a corner guard with a DTW, or a mine, and still keep going to do more damage. (This is why Dogged is so good - on an attack piece it's basically as good as 2W, and it's so much cheaper). Being able to lose an unlucky F2F is a secondary benefit. And in the reactive turn, having 2W often means it takes your opponent an extra order to get past your trooper, which is huge (but again not about risk mitigation - the trooper is dying either way). But I haven't watched the video. Does Youtube generate transcripts these days? I'd like to read what RobertShepherd has to say, but I'm allergic to sitting through videos.
I have not watched the video still, but I do agree that Infinity is a risk management game. Like Blood Bowl. And it is also a game where controlling your frustation will provide you more wins consistently. Like Blood Bowl too.
I really like the use of a process hazards analysis-style liklihood and severity table. That's a smart way to visualize risk in the game. I agree that risk management is part of Infinity. I disagree that it is not a resource management game. I think to be good at Infinity, you have to have a good grasp of both: - Risk (what is likelyhood of failure and the consequences if that occurs) - Efficiency (what is the liklihood of success and what is the least resource-intense way to achieve that) Efficiency is important primarily because in the active turn, you generally want to minimize the interactions that result in null outcomes. AROs are all about maximizing null outcomes. The relationship to what I call "efficiency" is combined with risk mitigation tools to make certain units/tactics powerful. Units that have tools that allow them to create FtF situations where the chance of them succeeding is high coupled with tools them minimize the effects of failure are powerful. A TAG with Mim-6 has lots of tools to win a FtF, and also generally doesn't die when said FtF's go wrong. Really good video, I think it does a good job of representing one piece of the puzzle.
They do, but it is really a power point presentation. You could ask @RobertShepherd if he would be willing to post the slides to this thread, though.
The slides are linked in the video description. Reposting the link here via phone is being a bit finicky but this should work. If not, the link in the video will. https://docs.google.com/presentatio...6Vofvg2qbZIVG1KqBLYyOVmPT7jLdhU/mobilepresent
Thank you. I’m sharing this on the Bakunin which although an infinity rpg centre does need some good explanation of the theory.
It is a nice video and I thoroughly enjoyed it, as I did the recent ones. I still believe Infinity has a resource management in its core system, but I do think it is tied to the risk management quite well, I also like the fact the presentation touched that the core of Infinity is designed on the risk reward, and the fact players are rewarded for taking risks (if they succeed).
Because CB removed autowound crits and 30 trooper lists and upped the lethality of the game with infowar changes, the N4 Infinity is more of a risk management game than resource management one. Basically, you want to remove all risk from your side and maximize the risk on the opponents side. This is precisely the reason why GML is such a popular alpha strike move. In N3 you would never use GML but instead used the two fishdudes to plow though everything with 20 orders.
30 and 40 troops lists added their own oppressive and game breaking problems in Infinity and to be honest they were far worse than a guided missile bot. I am glad they are gone.
I think it boils down to how many points/orders (% of total points/orders) can you kill with alpha strike. I could make an argument that (pandemic perfected) GML and total immune warband/impersonator alpha strike in N4 can be as crippling as 20-30 trooper alpha strike in N3. The biggest problem with 20-30 troopers was that it took forever to play the game.
I would argue that this is just a phase, I have seen the GML raise from obscurity to absolute superweapon and then fall again down to obscurity in each edition, in some editions the circle has been repeated two times. The pandemic (and the necessary resort to TTS) has raised a particular way of playing and a particular meta (and conclusions) that is not repeatable in the real world at least in my opinion.
Well, "Infinity is not a resource management game. It's a risk management game." is just one line in the slideshow. Perhaps that line overstates the case. Especially given the later line that Impersonators are powerful because they use few orders, "limiting risk to your order pool," which is maybe just recasting resources as risk. That said, it's worth noting that although Infinity is certainly about maximizing the impact of your orders, other than that you can't do much to "manage" orders as a resource. You can barely gain orders (doctor on T1 is a very limited case), or reallocate orders. You have a bit of control over total order count at the list-building stage, but really you'll almost always have between around 12-20 orders available for each turn, less what your opponent kills. So I'd suggest that the two core goals are (1) make every order use as impactful as possible and (2) keep the number of orders your opponent kills low, i.e. make your opponent's orders as low-impact as possible. It's less about managing resources than it is about taking an essentially known finite quantity of a resource and using it with precision. One thing I would add to the slides is that often you're not assessing the risk of a single order, but rather of a line of play. Do I rambo with my warband (risk: spend a bunch of orders without doing enough damage), rambo with my expensive attack piece (risk: spend a bunch of orders and lose the expensive piece without doing enough damage), pitcher and GML (risk: spend too many orders - contrary to Internet whining, GML is NOT risk-free!), do a more moderate attack and pull back (risk: not do enough damage)...?
GML alpha is extremely order effective and risk free if done properly and if the opponents list doesn't have the tools to counter it. Effective anti-GML counters - Going 1st (not always possible) - All 20+ point troopers are in camo or total immune - Friendly impersonator is deployed next to important ARO or mission critical piece
There are other effective counters that can just be done through good general deployment practices. Mr. Shepherd has a really good video on that too. You can't always guarantee that a particular unit won't get got but you can make it so that it's hard to take other units with it. This is a good point, it may just be a different way of expressing a similar understanding/sentiment. One thing I'm really trying to work on in my own play as I get back into N4 (discovering how smooth TTS play is has really reignited my love for this game) is understanding how good my chances of success need to be to justify pursuing a line of action involving opposition. I'd be curious to know if good players do that more by feel or by sitting down with a spreadsheet and making rules like "ok I'm only gonna take a gunfight when my burst is at least X and my BS is at least Y." I'm definitely the latter.
iirc in another video @RobertShepherd said to not count the order you lost but the entirety of potential orders you lost by loosing a model, So a model lost on your first active turn is two potential orders lost, a model lost in the first turn but you went second is three orders lost, this gives a greater perspective on the risk assessment and recourse management.
I love how N3 balance got thrown under the buss to protect N4. I'm sure that when N5 drops, people here will do the same for N4.
To me, N4 balance feels a lot better than N3. TAGs are viable, armor seems fairly priced, and hacking has a bigger role in game. The change to the crits really helped a lot of forces and feels more fair. Also the limit to 15 slots made the game feel more compact.
The big problem is that they put in the 15 order limit but didn't reassess some factions that really banked on having cheap units as a defining feature (USARF for instance) or were made to field a lot of Irregulars. It was done, a cursory lookover was done, and that was that.
There are more factors to the reasons why GMLs are more popular now than what you're considering Spotlight got buffed in N4 Defensive hacking was severely weakened in N4, KHDs are a much weaker threat and putting a pitcher in your opponent's DZ isn't asking to get attacked by a particularly annoyed KHD user next turn. Army list compositions changed significantly. GMLs were not particularly effective against quantity over quality armies as they were denied high value targets. N4 lists gravitate to higher quality hero units that are prime targets to be deleted by a missile.
