How to Pain Train

Have you tried Starco? They allow you to bring the pain train at a discount so you can easily hit 15 orders as well.

The turning point for me with the use of aggressive links was to learn to accept a few shots. Usually with a link, I'm very cautious to ensure only the link leader is visible to avoid un-opposed shots on the other members. With the MB, there will be a few times per game when you need to throw caution to the wind and spread them out to get past a building bottleneck or something like that - if you don't it's too easy to get clumped in and stuck. Unless you're up against a missile launcher, trust the armor and wounds to shrug off a stray ARO on those times and before you know it - you'll have a few angry Brigada at mid-board, ready to break the link and go suppressive!

 

The two boarding shotguns can't suppressive fire so you're looking at 3 orders if you fully commit to that plan. Realistically you would probably only need one or two on suppressive fire to guard the flanks. Unless it's a key tactical moment like your team being surrounded, I wouldn't do this.

Suppressive fire will give the opponent -3 BS which is nice, but you'll have shorter range and are guaranteed a +0/-3 range band with B3. Compared to keeping the link active you'd have B2 with +3BS +range mods. Suppressive fire is most useful in tight cover where your combi rifles and boarding shotguns already shine, so I'd save the command tokens for reforming the link after the leader drops.

Another option is to straight up drop someone from the link to leave them guarding an objective or fire lane while the rest of the team rolls on. You lose that beloved +3 BS but gaining board control is a good trade.

Keep in mind Massacre has Eclipse grenades. Even if your opponent has an MSV2 sniper you can still blind them and sneak the paintrain through exposed ground.

 

Usually I'll bleed off a multi-rifle brigada or HMG and pair him with a couple Morans for a command token suppressive fire. The rest of the Brigada (hopefully there's still 3 left) might then wait out for the next active turn with only the missile launcher poking out.

 

I agree with this, you have to man up and take hits sometimes. You pay ton of points for that 4 ARM, so make it sing.

You can go into suppressive fire as part of a co-ordinated order, so one order will cover it. The pain train has command tokens to spare, so it's OK.

You have a Daktari as #10 but I would seriously consider replacing her with an engineer of some sort. You wrote about what a joy it was to E/M grenade a Su-jian, but think about what E/M grenades would do to you. It's one thing for a brigada to go down fighting, but it really sucks to have them all jacked up by jammers or blitzens or AHD's.

 

I don't know if always or even usually breaking the link apart is a good idea but it's something to be aware of.

You shouldn't advance the link unless it progresses the mission. For example in Annihilation putting them closer to your opponent can just make them easier to target.

In a territory hold mission where it is a per turn score you might want to do it ASAP, but if it scores at the end you don't want to expose yourself until you get an advantage for doing so.

There's no "you play them this way in this mission" because it depends on how your opponent acts.

You need to play them a lot to develop an instinct of what to do when, but for now just keep objectives in mind and work towards them.

 

Here's a bunch of battle reports from when I was trying this experiment myself, all with 5-man Pain Trains, in chronological order from oldest to newest:

• Pain Train Leaves the Station
• Intruder Banana Earns His Keep
• Corregidor Blitzkreig

Unfortunately the games are from a SpecOps tournament, so I took a infiltrating engineer minelayer as my SpecOps. I agree with what everyone else has been saying about doctors versus engineers. If you can only fit one, take the engineer. It's harder to kill the Brigada outright than it is to E/M, Isolate, Jam, etc etc them so having an engineer handy is really great.

Long story short, you basically just smash them into your opponents face repeatedly until they stop moving. Support to taste with more guns (Intruder HMG), Jag Haris, or tricksy stuff like Bandits/Tomcats/Hellcats. The Tomcat engineer or Carlota herself is a great option, just make sure you run the Brigada up a flank within a quick move order of the table edge so the Tomcat can help out.

Like @loricus says, don't just blindly advance them like I did in my games. It worked out because my opponents saw red and spent entire turns dealing with the link instead of doing the mission. In general you always just want to play to the objective. Before you do anything, especially move a clunky link around, have a plan! In general I find 5-man cores very difficult to maneuver. You'll often have members out of cover in weird spots to keep link coherency.

If you want an example of when to run a Mobile Brigada link up the field, here's a Biotechvore batrep:

• Adepticon 2018 Biotechvore Showdown

In this case, the mission is "go that way, don't die." Brigada are pretty good at both, especially with support from all the smoke Corregidor can bring nowadays. I've taken the Brigada in a 3-man core before and been...satisfied. I don't think I'll play Corregidor with a 5-man pain train all that often unless I'm going to be playing Biotechvore again. It's a bit too much of a direct playstyle for me, and I prefer a more lateral movement style of problem solving. I'll do it as a palette cleanser from time to time, I imagine.

I've got a few games in with the StarCo variant of the Pain Train, and I find it to be better, period, on the metrics I care about. Yes, you lose in durability, but you can mitigate that with positioning. You get a reasonable but not ridiculous discount and three very important tools that Brigada don't have 1) CC specialist, 2) smoke in the link, and 3) a doctor specialist. E/M grenades are just an added bonus. The Dak is bargain replacement for the Hacker as a specialist and doesn't lose anything in button pushing capability (aside from the wound). I favor toolbox access over pretty much any other consideration, which is why I like the StarCo link more.

Anyway, have a read and decide for yourself:

• StarCo Rescue Mission
• April Betrayal Tournament Report
  
  

 

@herod1204 Yeah, links are really hard to deploy and maneuver effectively. You're always going to do something that's suboptimal. Every time I go back to playing a vanilla faction I immediately feel less stressed out in the deployment phase because I can put everything exactly where I want it.

Links make me really uncomfortable still. I feel really dumb and imprecise when moving them around, and I never have enough orders to fix my link's placement it by the end of the turn because I'm too busy fixing actual problems like pushing buttons or killing TR bots. I've been working on it slowly to improve my game, and here's what I've come up with:

1. When shooting, do the "I move out to see you, then back into total cover" thing. This is applicable to everything, not just links. This ensures that when you run out of orders you're not just sticking your face out to get shot.
2. Have a vision for where you want you link to be when you're done with it. The StarCo game against Morats in my tournament posting above is a good example. I wanted my two Missile Launchers covering a roof. This is a really hard one, because you need to have a good idea of how far your blob of tiny soldiers can move each order and keep it all straight while trying to not get all of them shot and get your important gun-toting trooper in the right place.
3. Try to keep everyone within an 8" radius of each other. This is especially important when moving up the field because I'll often switch tools. Massacre to throw smoke to cover a fire lane, HMG to murder something, and if I switch the link leader and everyone's not within 8" of everyone else, models start falling out of the link.

@loricus has mentioned this before in the old forums (or maybe the new ones, who knows) that high order lists are difficult to deploy because there's simply not enough room in the deployment zone to get good spots for everyone. Links are sort of that problem in microcosm. Every order.

All of that above is too much to keep in my head every game, in addition to all the other crap you have to think about when playing this game, so basically I just try to reduce it to one rule in my head: "When I spend an order on my link, assume that it's the last order I can spend on them this turn so put them in a not stupid place!" Of course I break it all the time, but I at least try.

 

Yeah! I lose my Lunokhod all the time because its butt sticks out from behind cover in a way I didn't see during deployment and a TAG or something lights it up from outside 24" so I'm forced to dodge.

It's interesting that you call out Duos as problematic, but I suspect as you said, that it's mostly due to them being S5. Infinity is a game of managing your own cognitive load. I prepped for the full 5-Brigada Pain Train by running a 3-Brigada core with a Wildcat or Jag Haris a few times, just to remind myself how to move links around. I think the increase in cognitive load versus number of models in the link is superlinear, i.e. it gets much harder the more guys you have, so this helped me a bunch.

I still prefer moving a 3-model link around over a 5-model link. The middle model provides natural pivot point to move around, and it's much easier to visualize and retain coherency. I've sorta been cheating and treating the two extra models in a 5-man link as buddies for one of the other models, i.e. pretend I have a haris, but two of the models in the haris have another guy glued to them. This is also a natural fit to how I often build links: 3 important profiles, 2 filler.

And I really really like Duos now, especially after piloting the Emily/Uhahu Duo. There's nothing quite like it, except perhaps out of Druze (LGL + AHD). You just move them up, alternating who gets the second short skill to do something useful with their toolkits. A Taskmaster Duo is less subtle and toolboxy than that though. I haven't piloted one before, but it definitely seems like: "Red Fury drags <other profile> up the board and kills a bunch of the stuff on the way, then they're annoying together in the midfield." Similar to Geckos, I'd imagine, but I've only got one of those built.

But yeah, back on topic. TL;DR: pretend your 5-man is a haris, but two of the models in the haris have buddies glued to their butts.

 

Haha, yes.

 

That's why part of my strategy is to bend the rules and force my opponent to catch me, thus offloading as much of that cognitive load to my opponent as possible in the hopes they make a mistake /s

 

There's all sorts of powerful harassment strats! Convincing them they're underpowered when anything bad happens makes them act stupid for the rest of the game.

(Please practice stellar sportsmanship)

 

So you admit that you cheat in games. Just like school in the summertime...no class...

 

How else are we supposed to beat the artichokes ;-)

 

I agree with this.

I've played a lot of JSA in the past (including 5xHI+TAG with only 3 specialists), and I've found that the EM weapons are a terrible threat to an HI link team (or TAG). As soon as I saw your list, I said "Blitzen and EM 'nade central!"