I personally don't have an issue with the general concept of this, it's the nature of player 1 controlling the initiative in the game while player 2 has the final say over scoring in certain missions. That's something player 1 must take into account when playing a mission, if it can be easily swung by a final turn of a player pushing a smoke grenade into position and moving a specialist, then they should be using the initiative to either outright prevent that game state from being achievable or to make it difficult to achieve. This may mean their victory condition involves not controlling an objective itself with AROs, but the table area past the objective to prevent such a set up, or by hunting down specific opponent pieces that would facilitate such a move. That I think is a very good thing because it means terrain and table set up matters alot and helps vary the required execution of a mission each time you play it. There is still a factor of game design from mission to mission basis whether certain scoring in this fashion is too easy to achieve and needs to be considered, but the general concept is fine in my opinion and it's part of what makes Infinity a good system.
I think that overall noninteractive gameplay in Infinity is too encouraged. These should be fringe cases with higher costs.
If there is sufficient ability for the player with turn initiative to make enact a strategy to prevent that from happening though, it's not really non interactive. I agree if there isn't sufficient ability to counterplay it then yeah it's definitely a problem, but I think in most cases the missions haven't really run into this issue I can't really point a finger at one that on its own is the problem. What you are saying can definitely be an issue though but it's not just mission design that can be at fault. For example Supremacy is a mission where player 2 can potentially just shuffle units around zones, particularly with camo, without engaging enemy targets to do as you describe score points to win via non interaction. The counterplay to that is the player with turn initiative should be executing aggressive seek and destroy on targets to prevent that from being a viable strategy for player 2 to execute. If done, this means both players are interacting and the non interaction issue doesn't come up. However. A player I know traveled interstate for a large tournament and unfortunately played Supremacy on a fucking horrifically designed table. The issue was it was a Brutal Cities brand table that had alot of extremely tall buildings with no easy access to rooftops. In his words, he basically lost from the start of the game because his camo spam opponent simply placed camo markers all over roof tops that he had absolutely no reasonable ability to clear while his forces stuck on the ground level got whittled away. In this case, fairly easy non interactive win like you describe but the bigger factor at fault was terrible terrain and the players not coming to an agreement to not place stuff on inaccessible rooftops rather than the mission design being at fault.
not gonna lie, a "horribly design table" can win a mission by its own. That`s maybe to some part the mission design, but more or less the fault of the one building the table (especially with an opponent favoring an easy win over a fair game). If someone thinks a 3 inch fence in front of the whole deployment zone is a good idea, then maybe its not the missions fault. Without any units with SJ oder C+ having access to high rooftops is a very risky and expensive thing to achive. But non-interaktive gameplay based on a badly design table is not that much of the games fault, but a lack of experience in terms of building a "balanced" or at least playable table. ofcourse would it be amazing, when no matter how the table is build everyone has a fair chance to play the mission, but thats the problem with a complex gaming system like infinity. It´s not a football field with 3 ruins and a tree on a 72´´ x 48´´ field
Terrain is something that is outside the control of the game system, at this point it is up to the players to create a viable game table or the tournament organizers responsibility to solve such game breaking issues.
