You know what, there is another way for CB to avoid that inconsistency of being a skirmish game in a total war setting: bring in larger units, bigger TAGs, create more missions that would reflect the total war scenario. Add ATVs, tanks, agravs airstrikes, even bigger and dumber Brigador-style mech suits. Retain the skirmish gameplay and rules but make the inclusion of larger vehicles and mechanized troops even more affordable than before by expanding the points limitation while retaining the 15-model limit. I was wondering how a more large-scale Infinity tech looks like anyway, so if you are trying to tell the epic story about a war where thousands upon thousands die you might as well reflect that in the newer, bigger models (I mean, we already got the Megalodron). Make it a separate playing mode, like Code One. But honestly, it would take much less money and effort to simply change/update the lore of your CA vs. Human Sphere conflict. A simple "our fleets are equally matched in terms of power so on the large-scale conflicts we are at the stalemate, which allows us to play cold war with each other, but the alien fuckers have also started infiltrating us" explanation would be enough to keep us on board with it.
I really like the idea that someone mentioned upthread where the EI was this outside force raiding into the human sphere via temporary wormholes. You have Shasvastii infiltrators who are sending info back home about what the humans are doing, then a strike team of Morats warps in above a planet, drops, attacks some corporations' headquarters, downloads something off of their CEO's computer, blows the place up, then hops back in their dropship and goes back through the wormhole. Keep their goals mysterious (at least to the humans in the setting) so they're this boogieman; also it makes it much more plausible that people on NeoTerra etc just don't believe the CA threat is serious. "Nah man, that shit ain't real, that's made up to justify the Patriot Act!" (or whatever the PanO equivalent is.) "Aleph claims it can predict Combined Army attacks, how convenient that we have to give it control over where and when to deploy our military, it's trying to take over the Sphere!" etc. The problem is a lot of these story beats I think were decided by Gutier's rpg group back in the day, and stuff that would work for the medium of a tabletop rpg group doesn't work for a tabletop wargaming setting.
There are lots of different sci-fi inspirations for Infinity but tbh I never thought the CA were Mutant Chronicles (who definitely didn't come up with the idea either). In fact the CA remind me largely of the Amplitur from The Damned, if I am honest. But anyway. Point is; I think I can appreciate where people are coming from with the "but the CA always win!" thing, personally I don't mind the CA being relatively implacable as they do need to be in order to be a credible threat, I would say that the CA repeatedly pushing everyone back is not hugely interesting after a few goes, so I hope that the Sphere gets a credible win as well if only because it would mix things up a bit. Incidentally I do think that Infinity works fine as a black-ops/squad skirmish game in a total war setting as actually there are a lot of squad skirmishes going on and indeed even in a total war environment that happens a lot; Band of Brothers always taught me that, for a total war it sure did involve a lot of aggressive patrols coming into contact on a section or platoon level. Anyway I think that the Shas got played up a lot as a threat cos they recently came out and were big in Defiance. That's fine. At some point a credible anti-Shas campaign would be nice. They got any more creches for us to nuke?
