I think there's two kinds of "Gotcha". I'll keep the examples simple and obvious. Out-gaming your opponent - by setting up a model with their back towards a particular corner, you lure your enemy to over-extend, leaving that flank open to your counter-attack next turn by using Airborne Infiltration with a particularly hardy trooper. Withholding information - moving forward, the active player asks the opponent what AROs they have, knowing there's an enemy trooper they want to kill that the opponent seems to have forgotten about. The reactive player says "no, I don't think so" and the active player responds with "in that case, I'll shoot that trooper over there on normal rolls!" One is welcome, the other less so.
Just a minor point: everybody (except Ariadna and Tohaa) now has access to Impersonation via Cybermask on Killer Hacking Devices.
Yeah, but that doesn't come with IMP-1 state nor, more importantly, the ability to infiltrate into the opponent's DZ.
Tohaa ────────────────────────────────────────────────── 1 HATAIL AELIS KEESAN Viral Combi Rifle, Nanopulser, Flash Pulse, D-Charges / Pistol, Knife. (0 | 30) 0 SWC | 30 Points Open in Infinity Army She has KHD.
I'm aware. However, it goes to the point that it's a limited rule. Until KHD it was limited to a few forces, now everybody has it, and so the rule needs to be understood. Further there are KHDs with Infiltration, so it's possible to get pretty close.
So, let me get this straight, @DaRedOne. It is a "gotcha" if a model with Stealth behaves like every other model in the game? It is a "gotcha" if an optional skill is... optional? I don't know if that is a great example. It seems like much more persnickety knowledge of the rules to say that I get to ARO CC your Stealth model because I did not have an opportunity to declare an ARO until your model was in BtB contact than to point out that Stealth is an Optional skill, and I'd rather limit you to a Change Face than get stabbed in the face. I mean, come on. In this situation you already got out played by allowing a CC specialist to come at your model from behind. And this is my point. These "messy" rules interactions are mostly edge cases, and it often happens because someone got out played on the core rules anyway. You want to get butt hurt about not getting a Normal Roll CC attack on a Ninja that surprised your mans from behind? (I don't mean you, specifically, just a rhetorical 'you') "ACTUALLY, sir, this model has Martial Arts, and so it has Stealth, which means I was NOT, in fact, required to declare Dodge: Change Face because your Stealth skill means your model did not generate an ARO UNTIL it was base to base with my model, so I get to ARO CC attack." "ACTUALLY, Stealth is an Optional, skill, so my model didn't use it and the only ARO your model could have declared was Dodge: Change Face." "You didn't say you weren't using Stealth." "I didn't say I WAS." That is not a "gotcha" situation. That's two nerds arguing over the finer points of a rules interaction in order to gain a marginal advantage, and one of them being demonstrably wrong. In the really real world of gameplay (and incidentally the one we are talking about in this thread, i.e. casual/new player experiences), that Ninja rolls up on your mans back and you take your lumps. 'Oh, you're in BtB with my guy. Uhhh... I guess I'll CC attack.' 'You can't do that because your only ARO option is Dodge: Change Face.' 'Doesn't Stealth mean your model doesn't generate that ARO?' 'Yea, but the skill is optional, so I'm not going to use it here because I'd really prefer that you don't get a free CC attack on my model. Plus, if it didn't work like that I'd just Idle on my second Short Skill and move into BtB with the first Short Skill of my next Order.' 'Sure, that makes sense. What's your next Order?' 'I'm activating this model again, first Short Skill is Idle. AROs?' 'Uhhhh... What's your dude's CC skill?' '21, and he's got MA 4.' 'I'll Dodge.' 'Cool, second Short Skill is CC attack with MA 4 for Burst 2.' 'Great, I'm 1 die on 12.' 'I'm two on 21s.' You can point at messy rules all you like, and CB would really help itself and the game out by cleaning those up, but this is how most interactions in an actual Infinity game happen.
@MindwormGames That seems about how I see people play things most of the time, but if you are starting in the engaged state remember that you cannot declare Idle as your first skill. In that case the active player must declare their CC Attack (including modifiers and skills) first.
That's right. Yea, Engaged limits your skill declarations and does not include Idle. One could point at this and say, "Oh, see, here's an example of the game being too complicated." But it just doesn't matter. So what if you play it wrong? The other player gets a bit shafted because they declare ARO without knowing what your declaration is. But was it a mystery anyway? Yea, you wouldn't know the MA level or the CC weapon. Yea, you would be at a marginal disadvantage, and that's technically wrong and not fair. But this mistake of mine is a shining example of the 'who F'ing cares' nature of little mistakes or misinterpretations or whatever playing Infinity. It just doesn't matter. And if it matters to you that much, learn the rules and remind people! If we were playing, doubtless @toadchild would just say, "You can't declare Idle while Engaged" and I'd say, "My bad, CC attack with DA CCW and MA 4." And in all probability, I've created an asymmetrical FF roll anyway, so it just doesn't matter. My guy at CC 20+ is WAAAAAAAY probably going to destroy your dude, which is a situation created by outplaying you on the core rules. So who cares?
Some people care. While I agree wholeheartedly with you, the fact that people can, will, and have had discussions ove these minutiae of the game can't be understated, because it can make or break the experience for some people. If we're both seasoned veterans it might be something that's solved with a shrug of the shoulders, or it might take 1 hour of reading and checking rules (I've been on both sides of the spectrum). However, for newcomers, having an experience like this can be devastating. The person can feel played, or cheated, even if they weren't. We don't want this to happen, that's the whole point of this conversation. And as I said before, and others have said too, it comes down to player etiquette. To how each of us treats the other players in the table, to how we behave. Sure, the rules need to be more clear, but we can't just shrug and say 'eh, fuck it' every time we run into an annoying situation, or one that feels gamey.
Can't agree with this more. I almost quit the game before I got really into it. The reason was simple things like smoke grenades on warbands killing all my USAriadians game after game until I switched up how I played. It wasn't even something gamey like the stealth stuff (though I did find it gamey that for some reason my stealth AD guys forget how to sneak when approaching the table but suddenly becomes sneaky again though in hindsight I'm guessing its a balance thing). Even explaining cover in this game to new players creates a bad taste until they get over it since you can shoot someone in the open who has everything blocked from line of sight besides that tiny head sized square and yet it is as easy as if their whole body is visible just cause they aren't in contact with something. When I first read the rules I thought they were decent, the longer I've been playing the more odd ball and awkward things I find. Sure they don't impact the game 99% of the time but even today I get caught out in something since there are so many interactions to remember (say EM grenades on an unhackable Minuteman, what are his fatigues made of metal...). Today I won't quit the game over these situations and my group has house rules for a lot of them. I still get pissed off mid game when some tiny thing bites me hard and it ruins the experience for the rest of that game, though thankfully that is very rare. Point is these kinds of rules gotchas are different from HD or hidden information in general. I fully understand that an invisible guy can wreck my day. Having a guy engaged to the wall or the previous confusion over dismounting or any of those things Hecaton brings up that make people rolls their eyes but are in fact written as poorly as he says are the things that cause people to quit the game. Its not too complicated, its bloated and in need of a good Spanish to English editor.
I do. The simple truth is that the people who want to play a bit loose can do so just as easily with a tight rule set as with one with some wiggle in it. The converse is not possible. So there is every reason to tight up and fix interactions if possible, since the guys who don't care still won't care, but the people who do will be happy about it.
Personally, I think you’re missing the point @DaRedOne. Those little minutia should only really matter to someone seriously invested in the minutia of the rules. I mean, I’m a rules guy. I’m a professional game designer. I very much care about the rules and the way they work. I read the Infinity rules forum mostly out of morbid curiosity. Drill down deep enough and the infinity rules are a $@&? show. In many games, a little mistake like the one I made would be a big deal. But Infinity (N3 at least) has a strange alchemy. You can find all sorts of weird edge cases and holes in the rules, but the game barrels on because it washes out. The crit system itself makes marginal mistakes pale in comparison to the probability that you lose a FtF roll to a crit. That’s WAY more likely than the adverse impact of some persnickety rules misapplication. So from an experience perspective it washes out. Bad things happen in Infinity. Models die. You lose your rockstars. And the Game. Keeps. Going. You can win a game on OP after having every one of your models killed! You can always find a creative way to do SOMETHING useful in Infinity. When things get hairy, you are forced to make increasingly risky plays. Move Move instead of dodging and tank those armor rolls! This creates memorable, cinematic moments. This keeps you engaged in the game. This makes sure you always have a fighting chance to do SOMETHING useful. This reminds me a bit of Blood Bowl (terrible game, but lots of fun, like most GW spec games). I remember lining up my models in a game I was winning handily. My opponent’s lineup looked strange, and I asked what sort of play he was running. He said “It’s the kill your star player play.” He was going to lose the game, but there was still something for him to do, both for game effect and story: try to kill my star player to hurt my chances of winning the season. Useful, and also very in the Blood Bowl spirt! The abhorrently convoluted nature of some of the Infinity rules is straight up not important. Because it doesn’t meaningfully impact the game. Neither the gameplay experience, nor the outcome. It might for you, and that’s a shame. But for a new player, I would say that there is going to be some weird stuff, there is going to be some confusing stuff. You are going to play some stuff wrong, but play through it and look it up later if you feel like it because even if you’re wrong, it doesn’t really change the game. Again, it’s crazy to say that! Crazy. The rules of the game don’t matter?!? But it’s true. That minority of weird rules interactions isn’t meaningful in the grand scheme. And most of the time there is a RAW answer. It might not be an answer you like, but there is an answer. (Read: Stealth is Optional ;) ) A lot of times the answers are logical. And where the IS a legit hole in the rules, it’s something that would only come up in a perfect storm of weirdness. And if you find yourself in that situation, make something up and move on, because you can trust that it isn’t the thing that decided the game. If you lose Infinity, it is because you got out played, not because you forgot something or played something wrong or didn’t understand something. You got out played. You moved badly, deployed badly, took unnecessary risks, spent Orders inefficiently, didn’t play to the mission, etc. etc. And it is easy to learn how to do that well. Easy enough for my 7 year old yo give me a good game without pulling my punches. So people can say Infinity is too complicated. But the biggest issue my kid has with it is reading the text of unit profiles.
I'll go you one better. In a lot of cases the profiles don't matter either. People want to make big deal out of how "bad" PanO doctors, with their WIP12 are, but they're not significantly worse than most of the other basic doctors, WIP13/14 is only +5/10%. Often times when I don't know the exactly number on a profile I'll just tell my opponent to go ahead, and we'll look it up if it matters. Stuff like guts checks, here there's a band of 4-5 results where is matters, but the rest of the time low results pass, high results fail. For the most part a lot of the profiles in the game are interchangeable, and the big differentiators are weapons, skills, and equipment.
That was awfully personal. Mate, I've been playing this game for 3 years. I've ran demo games every two months for the last year and all the way till July this year because my local club has run into a location problem and so we stopped doing demos. I ain't talking about myself, I'm talking about the many, many people I've run demos to, and the experiences I've discussed with them. I know people that don't play infinity because they still remember that one time they got ganked by a TO camo out of hidden deployment because nobody explained to them how that works. I know people who hate TAGs because they weren't explained how hacking works when they put their monsters on the table. Those weren't mistakes on the rules, those were mistakes on the people teaching them. And don't say the community is better off not having these "casual" players, like some people have said in this thread, because those guys are awesome painters and converters who were put off awesome great game because they got "got". I'm not advocating a dumbing down of the rules like what happened to 40k. But I will defend: A) the rules need ad strong revision to be more clear and easy to understand; B) badly written rules do not excuse bad behavior from players. The community doesn't grow if we act like only "hardcore" players are allowed. And I will repeat: this is based on experience, not my individual plays, but also the community I play with and am trying to help grow.
Absolutely. And this is where CB can do a lot to streamline and clean up the rules. There doesn’t need to be so many little differences. Especially not in a game with probability mechanics as complex as Infinity, in the sense that it is very difficult to know the actual probability of a given outcome. You can ballpark it, but the game has lots of distinctions that only come into play in certain circumstances and then only modify probabilities well within the margin of on the fly guesstimating. And the crit system, like I said before, is so impactful that it washes out these little variances. That is, a player is going to notice and feel and experience crits far, far more than the difference between a molotoch and a spitfire (or whatever an apropos example is). So I very much agree with what you and others are saying in this thread. If the question was “Is Infinity getting too messy” I would say it was too messy years ago, and it is getting progressively worse every day. But the question here is whether Infinity is getting too complicated, specifically with regard to turning off new or prospective or casual players. My answer to that is an emphatic “No.” There are a bazillion stupid weapons in Infinity that don’t need to exist, and that can be intimidating on its face if a new player looks at the chart and sees 100 weapons and each with a different color coded range band with a bunch of numbers. It looks INSANE. And that’s a problem, sure. That can turn people off. God knows I gave Infinity the cold shoulder for years just because it looked like a nightmarish mess on paper. But 30 minutes of gameplay clears that up. In practical gameplay things easily boil down to the generalities that SHOULD BE the ruleset. There’s close quarters weapons, midfield weapons, and long range weapons. And then there’s a few special ammo types that matter: AP, Shock, Fire, Explosive, Viral, etc. So yes, the game is overly complicated, but it doesn’t play like it is. CB could easily clean up the system and the profiles, but I’m not going to cry in my cereal if they don’t, because it doesn’t stop me from enjoying the game and introducing new players.
Dude, disagreeing with you doesn’t equal a personal attack. I think you are missing my point. I think we are talking past each other. That doesn’t mean I’m attacking you, and I’m sorry if it felt that way to you. No offense intended. I don’t think player behavior has anything to do with game rules and the complexity thereof. If a game has ‘exploits’, that’s a problem with the ruleset, and it has nothing to do with the cultural issue of opinions regarding how, why, and in what context such ‘exploits’ should be used in gameplay. By and large, Infinity doesn’t have many ‘exploits’ in the sense of unbalanced manipulations of the rules. TO cammo is pretty well balanced, for example. It has a use, it has an impact, it has a cost, and all of that is pretty fair and balanced. TO cammo does not make the game too complicated. And it arguably isn’t imbalanced, which is an entirely separate question from complexity, BTW. And if players use TO cammo to ‘get one over’ on new players, well then that sucks, but it is a cultural issue that has zero to do with whether the game is too complicated. TO cammo is reasonably easy to learn. I pick a spot on the table where the model is. I secretly record that location. The model is not on the table for any purposes but I can spend an Order on the model or declare a valid ARO as if the model was on the table in the secretly recorded location, at which point I place the model on the table and resolve. Pretty straightforward. It is also a general rule that is broadly accessible to most players. So it is something all players should know about. It’s like saying there’s Deep Strike in 40K, or Tank Shock in Flames of War, or Nodes in WarmaHordes. So Hidden Deployment is a thing in Infinity. It works in a straightforward way, but like most of Infinity there are some weird rules interactions when you drill down, such as what to do if you reveal a Hidden Deployment model that is in the same spot as another model, or how to handle the Optional tag on the skill. My point was that those types of issues are simply not issues for new players. They come up rarely, if ever, and when they do their impact on the game is minimal. As I said before, if those types of deep, persnickety, and nigh meaningless issues are driving players away from the game, that is a shame, but I would be incredibly surprised if that was a widespread phenomenon. If the fact that Hidden Deployment is a thing in Infinity is driving away new players, well then that doesn’t have anything to do with complexity. That’s just the nature of the game. Personally, I don’t think Hidden Deployment is a “gotcha”, because you can explain how it works once, and that applies to all factions and all models with the rules, and you can also point out the models a player has access to that can use the skill. So you can give as good as you get if you like. If you don’t like Hidden Deployment, then don’t play Infinity. It’s very simple. That has nothing whatsoever to do with casual play vs competitive play or rules complexity. As a casual player, I’m never going to tell my buddy not to use his Ninjas. I might tell him that if Ninjas were incredibly unbalanced and game breaking and consequently not any fun to play against, but they aren’t. And if he rolls up to the table with a 100 point hole in his deployed units, I’m gonna be on the lookout for Hidden Deployment or AD troops, because that’s the game. If you don’t like that experience, you really shouldn’t be playing Infinity because you’d have much more fun playing a different wargame.
@Cry of the Wind for the record Minutemen are supposed to be wearing lightweight powered exoskeletons under their armor.
Actually, ALL the Ariadnan HI are wearing those exos, it's the fluff reason that they're HI and therefore vulnerable to EM attacks, even if not hackable.
Interesting, not meaning to derail this anymore than already has been but where is that in the fluff? Is it an older thing since I don't remember reading that in the current books (fully admit I may have missed it, be awhile since I read them). Annoying that the dossiers and models don't seem to reflect that. Only the Vet Kazak and Mormaers actually look like semi powered suits. The rest of the Ariadna non power armour HI look like they are wearing fatigues with extra plates on them. More on topic, I don't think there is anything so complex about this game that it can't be a beer and pretzel game once you get the hang of it. The learning curve is steep at first but levels off considerably once you notice the trend of stats for the different types of units means you don't need to know everything in the game, just the big core rules they use. Tournament play isn't that different from casual play with my group, just have to play faster (which is a bigger issue than rules for us most of the time).
