Infinity by Corvus Belli (Infinity Universe Official Site) is a very popular sci-fi skirmish game. I discovered this game maybe three or four years ago, I had a look at the models which I quickly decided I liked.
I set about trying to find someone to teach me the game after having a skim read of the rules for N4. I eventually found someone at a local club who was willing to show me the game.
We played a few games with the first covering the basic rules. I proxied some models as JSA (maybe not the best faction to start with), the first game went as expected from playing a game for the first time, it was confusing and I made a lot of bad decisions.
The next few games I kept proxying various models as JSA against Haqqislam. I generally enjoyed the basic system however I was unable to enjoy the game fully. Despite these issues I found the basic system, how attacks and such work, I just found these issues to affect the game enough to make me not want to play against, Which is unfortunate as I really wanted to like the game, maybe make it a main game to play.
First of all was the number of special rules, it was hard to remember them all causing me to often forget something vital to how the unit works or get a rules interaction wrong that made me lose a fight I would have otherwise won. Now this is something that would be solved with experience, but it doesn’t help to the onboarding to the game.
I also found AROs to take away much of the fun for me. Now this maybe due to my inexperience or maybe we had a bad terrain layout, but I found reactions to make even the smallest mistake incredibly punishing. You move a model slightly too far and now you have five enemy models shooting at you, potentially all five shooting twice. What happened to me multiple times is that a heavy machine set up in the right place just makes it impossible for an opponent to move past a certain point.
My opponent had a machine gun set up (in multiple games) in a way that I could not move any model without it being shot twice trying to get to the objective, without being able to shoot back. This often resulted in my models dying trying to do basically anything except just stand in the deployment zone. This didn’t help to create a particularly encouraging experience as to the rest of the game.
I generally found the game to be unnecessarily difficult and punishing towards even minor mistakes.
I also found reactions made getting into melee almost impossible, especially as you don’t get a free fight action for coming into base contact like a lot of skirmish games do. You need at least two turns to set up a charge and then the Haqqislam soldier you charge pulls out a flamethrower (that they all have apparently). If this is what its like all the time I find that to be bad game design, it basically forces you into long range shooting offering little to no variety.
Secondly, I found smoke to work very differently to how I expected. Usually something like smoke blocks all line of sight through it or at least has a negative to hit in some way. As far as I remember (It’s been a few years) and understand you only get cover from smoke if a model is in base contact with the (3 inch?) radius of the centre or withing that circle. My opponent spent a lot of time making sure to place their smoke in the best place. If this is the correct way to use smoke, I found it hard to use to near useless.
Thirdly I find just find skirmish games work better as alternating activations. I know Infinity tries to balance it with reactions, I just don’t think reactions work, every model gets too many reactions and too many can react to a model’s action. It also slows the game down a lot however I have yet to find a game that does reactions well.
I generally find alternating activations gives you enough to react to an enemy that doesn’t require out of turn reactions.
The last thing I want to talk about is action order/when an action is completed. What my opponent often did was make a move first out of cover, stop and then shoot before moving back behind cover as the move can be completed at any point in the models activation. I found this very annoying to play against as well as making counter play to that unit near impossible. I often see people talking about counter play and not being able to counter a unit to be unfun (indirect in 40k for example) does no one else find this to be a similar situation? you can be attacked repeatedly without being able to do anything.
Although thinking about it now the attacked model could have reacted however I seem to remember they always had a shorter range.
Unfortunately this first experience has pushed me away from the game, not inspiring me to wanting to try it again despite finding the models interesting. Should I give the game second try? now that N5 is released and I have more experience with non Games Workshop Games.
Did we play it right and I just had a bad first experience or maybe its just not a game for me? Or did we play it wrong?
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