Trying to mitigate dice rolls...

In general terms, there's a few things you can do.

The immediate and most unhelpful piece of advice is 'get really good at risk assessment'. I'm not going to go into this a lot because, y'know, no duh getting better is good. But just broadly, it's worth developing a good eye for odds, keeping track of what your consequences for failure are (an attack with good odds but a terrible consequence for failure might not be a good attack), and sometimes going back after games and using a dice calculator to see just how unlucky you actually were. Getting better at assessing risk in the game won't necessarily keep you from being run over by really truly awful dice, but it can help weed out things that you think were terrible luck but maybe actually weren't. I've had more than a few games against players who are in the intermediate stage of learning the game and were convinced that they'd gotten terribly unlucky when a face to face roll with, say, a 50% chance of success went against them.

The next thing is to try to set up engagements where you have no catastrophic failure outcome. Ok, what's a catastrophic failure outcome? It's one where the worst case scenario is some loss that can't be recovered from (which might be as simple as 'a model goes unconscious that I can't revive'). This isn't always something you can engineer, but some examples include;

• shooting someone in the back so they can't ARO or can only ARO with change facing
• any time you can force the enemy to dodge in ARO, e.g. skirmishers that placed a mine first, or models with powerful template weapons like sepsitors, or any time MODs are stacked in your favour enough to force the dodge
• engaging using a model that can be easily recovered if it takes wounds, like a mechanical model with Ghost that you can reroll repairs on, so your worst-case scenario is having to spend orders to fix them back up rather than losing them entirely
• getting into close combat with close combat experts (a true CC expert has a vanishingly small chance of actually getting screwed by dice if you stack everything their way; Combined have a few models that can leverage this - but be aware, Daturazi aren't among them)

You obviously can't always rely on these and sometimes the only way to take a fight is just a straight up exchange of fire, but look for things like the above whenever you can.

And then finally, plan for worst-case scenarios from the start. This is a leaf literally out of Australian player Daboarder's book; he recently picked up first place at our biggest event and one of his primary principles in list building was to have lists that were prepped to play assuming he didn't get the lieutenant roll he wanted (so, lists with powerful reactive play in scenarios where you want to go first, and lists with powerful aggressive options in scenarios where you want to go second). This won't work for every army at all times, but Combined is versatile enough that it offers a good way to help insure against being on the back foot from the first roll.

 

Play the odds by rolling lots of dice. Few dice rolls are more susceptible to bad luck.

 

Sort of? How many dice you're rolling is just one of the contributing elements that determine your likelihood of success, and more importantly they offer diminishing returns.

It's never bad advice to say that more dice is better than fewer dice, but it's also only of marginal value if the problem is not engineering high probability success / low probability failure engagements, but instead is that those engagements are consistently coming up failures despite your best efforts.

 

Okay mate, that looks like a horrible dice luck there. However, can you show which lists you used and which missions did you play? Dice will only screw you every once in a while, and there's usually stuff you can improve that's not just rolling more dice. Although shooting at people from the back is always a great idea.

 

Really well written post, +10.

@Romulas It's tough to add anything beyond the above without very specific details from the tournament. I understand you feel let down by the dice but it's hard to gauge how much is down to luck vs decision making.

Regarding possible lists or tactics to minimize luck, I don't even know what sectorial/faction you're playing.

 

Only winning 4 FtF rolls in one game implies really bad luck you couldn't control at all so this advice my come off sour to you, but I'm never satisfied with a loss if I cannot identify something I could have done differently. I bitch about dice all the time, but I try very hard not to abdicate responsibility for my losing to things I cannot change in future games.

My suggestion is to use the infinity dice calculator tool: http://inf-dice.ghostlords.com/n3/

Go back over the rolls you thought you should have won and see how statistically likely they were. Identify the one's where your chances were less than you expected. Think hard about the ones where the ARO had a high chance of wounding your active turn model. In general get a better idea about how infinity odds work by seeing them post game, and seeing how fringe the results you experienced in your game actually were.

Infinity is a game about positioning long before it's about dice. Movements that don't need FtF rolls can be much more productive than attacking. Play the scenario and move the units who can score into position to do so with few orders later on. Position to create favorable ARO odds, setup multiple/overlapping AROs on likely approaches, or setup stalling tactics with AP mines and camo tokens for your opponent's active turn before you move into unnecessary FtF rolls.

I have won more games by moving several specialists into positions to be able score efficiently on turn two or turn three than I have by inflicting massive damage on turn one. Move your units who don't have to take dice rolls early when you still have the orders to get them where they need to be.

 

I don't have much to add, but the first, most obvious, thing is to not let your entire game plan hinge on 1 die roll, no matter the odds. Always have a contingency plan.

To that end, there is one caveat I would put in place regarding @jfunkd 's advice... if using all of your order moving people into position leaves you with no orders left to recover from a bad roll, then perhaps leave a couple more. This is something I learned the hard way in BloodBowl. The prevailing advice (and mostly true) was to move all your players that didn't require any dice rolls (read: no risk) first. In more than one game for me, however, that was a trap, because I didn't consider where I needed them to be if I started failing my rolls and caused a turnover. It's a fine balancing act.

Infinity is far more tactically complex than BloodBowl, for sure, and easier to recover from a truly devastating die roll (imagine infinity with turnovers, lol), but I think it's an important point in both games: make your least risky moves first, but also make sure those moves don't leave you with no way to claw back when the dice don't go your way.

It seems like this may not apply to you (hard to tell without more information), but I imagine newer players cursing their dice might find this thread.

 

Wouldn't your example of the turnover suggest making your most important or vital move first, irrespective of the odds or risk involved?

Make the move that has the greatest impact on the strategy. In other words, if the strategy hinges on one face to face roll, make that FTF roll first. The risk and odds do not matter. Those should've been considered when deciding on the strategy. So when that vital FTF roll is lost and there are no more available resources to spare, it's time to move on to plan B.

It's not really about the risk or odds of any one individual move. Make the move that is the most vital first. When there's more than one vital move, make the one that costs the fewest resources first. That way, if the plan ever fails, you'll have the maximum number of resources left to execute plan B.

When it comes to always having a backup plan, that's not always an option. At some point resources/orders are going to run out.

 

That's the problem (difference?) with BB, though. If you fail that roll, your turn is literally over. You have no more resources.

All I was getting at was that there is more nuance than either "Do all your least risky moves first." or "Do all of your high impact moves first."

 

Trying to hold someone in their DZ with ARO is a really risky strategy, and it's not surprising you lost FTF rolls. You're always going to have bad dice and lots of failures in the reactive turn... you have an opponent who is setting shitty situations up for you. In this case, you're watching his side of the board, so he can efficiently bring up whoever to kill your dudes. Basically, you put up your guys and let him choose his challengers the way he likes. This is Bad.

You should consider defending a smaller area. When you play like this, your opponent has to spend orders sending guys forward to fight. Then, the shoe is on the other foot... you see what he invested in and respond accordingly. It's a stronger way to play.

 

@helsbecter remember that in this case he was playing Biotechvore. In that very specific scenario there's a good argument for trying to bracket the enemy into their deployment zone since every order they don't spend trying to escape can translate directly into casualties for them at the end of turn, which can be worthwhile even if to costs you troops as well.

Your advice for more general application is very good, though, and in this case also serves to illustrate the risk @Romulas took and what the consequences of that risk materialising were.

 

Play Tohaa.

 

Unless you're particularly sensitive to reactive crits.