Upir's comments and suggestions

So, the campaign is now over and I thought I'd share here are my general impressions from it, with the preamble that this is my second campaign after Durgama and I did have a lot of fun. However, I do believe that there are some aspects that can be improved or twitched a bit, in order to rope in more Infinity players and maybe more players to Infinity in general:

1. Having less locations worked well and created some more interactions between the factions, however, the weird paradox that it is best not to interact with the enemy faction stays. In my opinion we should move from holding the territory to doing something in a territory. The only objective being basically number of victories in a zone feels rather distanced from the concept of black ops, sabotage and false flags.

Now I know that a) I suggested the same last year and b) this means some changes in the interface, however, I'll claim that these changes are minimal. Essentially what I suggest is to keep the control of the zones only one of the aspects and give each faction a separate objective to track - kill HVTs, kill lieutenants, pillage panoplies, hack TAGs and remotes etc... What this will change is just needing to track two more variables for each battle report - ownObjectiveAchieved and enemyObjectiveAchieved, which will then have their own graphs.

This, along with dynamic goal targets will allow factions with smaller number of players - NA2, Tohaa etc. to also have achievable goals and be relevant for the plot. Another thing that can be done is allowing the mercenary companies be actually mercenaries and pick in the beginning of the campaign, or even of the phase, who they want to fight for. Furthermore one can also come up with complex criteria whether some event happens, such as combined requirements for achieved objectives, failed objectives and territorial control. Speaking of territorial control, more abstract locations will allow for better narrative flexibility. This was achieved rather well this campaign, because the QAZ is a zone of "everything can exist and anything can happen", but you can't do this every time. So more stuff like "satellite constellations" or "energy infrastructure" and less things like "that one yacht club in particular" imho will be better.


2. The campaign was led by essentially the epic efforts of a single guy. Hats down!!! The analyses that he wrote for every missions were an enormous task on their own, not to mention all the fluff and the compilation of user-generated content. Co-opting the community was a great idea, and should probably be kept. People had a blast. Getting some content creators to make content in advance however (and maybe bribing them a bit with a TAG) can be another approach to balance the work load. Send them the missions in advance, so they can analyze the special conditions, or drop them the fluff a bit before, so they can make an intro clip... Such stuff. Heck, this year someone made a v-tuber video.


3. Sadly, we continue seeing the numbers drop. Less games played might be due to more games being played offline (offline games take more time due to travel) and I myself saw this when I could not find online opponents a few times, but we also see less players. Furthermore, the distribution between the faction numbers is not significantly different, which means that there wasn't an influx from the latest releases (Hassassins, Steel Phalanx, Bakunin). And we know from previous CB mentions that they sold well. The argument that people bought the miniatures for other purposes and did not jump into the game itself is certainly valid for a portion of the sales, but not big enough to explain the lack of any increase. Because for example we saw increased activities of newbies in Nomads, Aleph and Haqq in the discord servers. Thus we can conclude that the event was not too newbie friendly, which is eh, kind of reasonable, given that it came with no Code One rules I'd suggest simplified Code One rules at least for some of the missions next time.


4. CB is doing promo bundles now. Yay! How about a promo bundle for next campaign? Now that more of the games are played offline, it might be prudent to stimulate the local game stores to organise something locally and people enjoy promotions. Nothing drastic, but for example blisters of the units that you get for free in some missions, like the monstrucker. James Workshop (that bastard!) occasionally treats his stores with an "only in store" offers. Announcing these bundles in advance and providing the materials early to local event organisers can help significantly. While the early announcement this year was enough for players to plan, it was not enough for events to be planned.


5. The interface, yeah... It's sadly aging and I saw numerous people referring to writing the reports as "doing the homework". We need better way to write the battle report, at this point even Google Docs is more convenient for writing stuff up than the portal. Some kind of markup language and more dynamic options for uploading images will be extremely welcome. Unfortunately, this costs money, but web sites and apps age fast, by their very nature. And unfortunately failing to maintain them to a somewhat current level of UX can and will significantly affect the number of users.