Boarding action game where you control the craft that deploys your small Infinity list. Infinity but on hexes, like Aristeia. Tear in the fabric of the universe makes magic a thing. Bam, Infinity the Fantasy Game. Rules for military style level combat on a 6x4. Lists now have 30-80 minis. Miniature stock/distribution crisis ensues. Year long narrative campaigns with monthly/bi-weekly map updates. Vanilla is kill. Sectorials only. Narrative shakeup has factions ally very closely, adding a "faction" akin to NA2 called JOA, Joint Operations Armies. Comprised of buddy sectorials with heavy faction overlap. That's all I got so far.
I didn't say remove a race. :-) There's a lot about the CA we don't know. They could handicap the CA and smuggle in another faction by introducing a rebellion by a heretofore unexplored race (or group of races) presently under the CA's umbrella. They could have the Sygmaa turn out to be a Tohaa fifth column! There are options here that don't involve taking away the Shasvastii or Morats. Hell, maybe the Exrah are making a comeback? Anyway, it's just an idea! I tend to think it's far more likely that the great big whatever is actually neither that great nor that big, and will be met by a collective, "oh, so that's what's happening!" rather than excited shrieks or anguished cries.
I speculate we won't stop speculating. Wild speculation is a hobby unto itself! I really hope we don't see mass combat with infinity figures. 32mm is too large a scale to do mass combat in. That and the infinity figures stand out on their own well, and wouldn't make good cohesive squads. Not to mention the price! Doing mass combat with individual figures instead of squads would just be insane. Spaceship combat sounds fun, but it either looks cool or feels realistic but I have never seen both. Now I know Infinity looks cool, but requires a few disbelief blinders to work, but space combat would be a whole order of magnitude more dissonant. I wouldn't mind an N4. I mean, even though they are nice we don't have to buy the books because CB gives away the rules for free. N3 has started to feel a little 'bloaty' Some streamlining would be welcome. I wildly speculate it will be a storyline adjustment. The Combined Army sepestorizes Aleph herself. The not yet realeased OSS becomes a Combined Army sectorial. The independent Greeks go rogue and are shifted into NA2. Because of their reliance on Aleph operatives. Neoterra, and the Imperial Service are also rolled into Combined Army sectorials. The official forums crash in the resulting nerd wars.
Ooh, yes please. Eh, mebbe I'd rather a fantasy with all new settings etc. Plz no, Apocalypse was half of what ruined 40k. Ooh, yes please. Plz no, Vanilla factions still serve a good place. Could be interesting but a more conventional alliance system a la Soldier of Fortune could be easier: Pay 1SWC for up to 75pts of Mercs OR up to half the points limit on troops from an allied army/sectorial that MUST be a separate combat group? And that allied army can't have a fireteam core/has limits on Triad and Enomotarchos?
If we're going the Joint Ops Armies route, let's just bring back the N2 Mercenary Company rules (which were explicitly not ITS legal): Choose up to 3 factions. Halve the AVA of units, round down. AVA:Total becomes AVA4, AVA1 becomes AVA0, where you can have a single AVA0 model per full 200 points of Army. You cannot have a second AVA0 model until you are playing a 400pt game.
I do think a "Joint Svalarheima Defense Force" consisting of a teamup between Svalarheima-based units of PanO and Yu Jing would be fun. Shaolin supporting Nisse sniper shenanigans, hospitalers leading Zhanshi fireteams, Jotums, Daofei and Guilang...
Can't link to them since they aren't affiliates, but got it from Wargame Model Mods in the UK. Terrain is mostly geared towards 40k, so be warned that the inside of their buildings is where you put LED-lights and not miniatures during games, but I kind of fell in love with the idea of making a Fallout Vault.
What about a completely new Faction? The Blue Ns have all been Sectorials so far so that could be an indicator.
Well, it's possible, but unlikely. We could see Shas, Merovingia, or O12. Otherwise, I don't have any ideas for what it could be.
@Mahtamori plugging BPLaser for if you need a big MDF vault door and matching corridors. re: new faction, only real possibility there is new NA2 armies and/or O-12 as a fighting force - tho frankly i think O-12 is more likely to appear as a set of CBLs at first.
I remember what happened in the warmahordes world when they announced their first new faction while existing 'main' factions were so undercooked. For Infinity, if a new faction, especially of alien origin is announced, I can only imagine the sea of salt that will flow out from the Tohaa community... That being said, I've been thinking a lot about this lately in terms of CB's future from a business management perspective. They need to release new toys for us to buy and new sculpts but at what point do they focus on releasing new stuff for existing sectorials instead of just churning out new sectorials? As in, at what point in time does adding a new sectorial, create FAR more challenges for playtesting and balancing? Would it be easier to simply have a new faction at that point in time so you're just planning for external balance and don't have to worry about new sectorials eclipsing older ones? But even then, they'd need to give love to existing sectorials and factions love constantly to keep players happy as we're not going to start a new damn army every year. They need to keep us buying but excessive balance testing increases development costs on them and risks their 'competitive game'/ITS marketing angle. How can they sustainable manage the growth of this game while ensuring positive cash-flow and growth for their business? Maybe the easiest answer is to add more products so they're less reliant on the one line. Aristeia is doing OK it seems and from some comments I read, the success of it seemed to indicate that CB will do something else not core Infinity (the big black N?). OK, shower thoughts finished...
That is assuming that none of the blue N's are Tohaa related. There is over a year of releases from now until the big N is scheduled.
Two of those are Sectorials though. O12 is as mentioned elsewhere, likely to be CBLs before anything else. I would suspect mixed units ala the NA2 Mercs. If the rest of the year is focused towards "cosmic" events it really could be anything if a new full faction.
I posit that Aristeia's success definitely proved (to everyone, but particularly to CB themselves) that Corvus Belli can support simultaneous development of Infinity and a parallel game line, though admittedly the second line in this case involves less releases than the 'core' game. It really does open the field of possibilities up... REM Racing/bike circuit, 15mm large-scale wargame, space combat game, fantasy game, the earlier options fit more with the 'we can do another Aristeia' mindset, the later ones 'if we could do Aristeia we could do one step bigger, another core game'. But do we trust @Bostria ? Because in addition to all the could-be-hyperbole about it being amazing and impossible to predict he did seem to say it isnt a new edition, and it will change the way we play Infinity. What meaning do we parse from that? Edition-esque rules update would change the way we play. Acheron Falls/N3 Paradiso with campaign and experience rules woulds to. But both of those are definitely things we can predict. A new faction, O-12 or alien or otherwise, is harder to predict but does it change the way we play the game? Maybe, I suppose, if they assume every player jumps onto a new faction, but i'm not sure it fits, unless O-12 includes options for mixing units from other Human Sphere factions together. There are some out-there options that fit the bill, but who knows... taking CB's efforts towards more narrative changes to the game and in ITS one step further and giving us all armies that gain xp and powers each ITS game? Leveraging scale and Aristeia experience to start producing Infinity minis in plastic instead of metal?
A general points rebalance has been mentioned as well. It's not the most exciting thing in the world but it could be
