Everything Old Is New Again
I don’t think Paul Allen had Infinity in mind back in the 70’s, but he was absolutely talking about N4 when he wrote the song, Everything Old Is New Again. Jon and I recently discussed Infinity N4 and our first game of it on Late Night Wargames. To save the ears of our listeners, and to get to bed at a reasonable time though, we really didn’t get deep into the myriad of profile changes.
Cultivating a Beginners Mind
An exercise that’s good to become skilled in, is the ability to look at something with fresh eyes. It’s a skill I’ve practiced for years as a UX Designer, but it’s something which all of us can benefit from. When approaching Infinity N4, especially unit profiles, you really have to do so with a fresh perspective. Fortunately the mechanics of the game haven’t shifted so much that your previous skill and knowledge is useless, but it has changed enough that some of your previous assumptions might be wrong. An easy example of this is the change to Total Immunity, now Immunity (Total). In N4, it changes all Ammo Types to Normal, similar to what it did in N3, though what constitutes an ammo type is very different, Plasma is not an ammo type, and neither is Viral. Weapons also now have both an Ammo Type, and a Saving Attribute, Breaker is AP Ammo Type and has the BTS Saving Attribute, which mechanically works much like it did before, but now units with have Immunity (Total) will still take the save on their BTS, since Immunity (Total) does nothing about the Saving Attribute.
That’s just one example, and really there’s a ton of them, which is why this practice is important. So how do you do it? I’ve found the easiest way to do it is just to say “I don’t know.” It might sound silly, but many of us nerds have a very hard time admitting when they don’t know something, and we’re prone to provide nerd-splainations based on our best assumptions. Since there are a lot of the rules have undergone minor changes, there’s a good chance our assumption is wrong. To really get used to the rules this edition, just look it up, look up things you already think you know to validate your assumption, or to find ways things have changed.
This is going to slow down your first few games, but you’ll quickly patch your knowledge and move on. As it stands, our first game of N4 was still completed in about 2 hours. After looking up tons of rules we thought we knew, we were right most of the time, but also wrong plenty of times. One nice effect of the N4 rules is that they actually play CLOSER to how people were actually playing N3, instead of different. That sounds weird right? Here’s a quick example: I-kohl. In N3 it didn’t work against troops with STR, and it also worked if you declared engage or dodge, if you were in, or it could get you into, combat. In N4 however, it’s just a flat penalty to the opponent’s CC mod, which is all that most people remembered in N3 anyhow. They’ve got rid of a lot of small exceptions and minor use cases, which are going to smooth things out dramatically.
So yeah, at this point, you are probably thinking, great, we should do that, but how? And it’s really down to a few simple rules:
Let go of preconceptions of “how things work”
Eliminate expectations about what will happen
Fill yourself with curiosity to understand things more deeply
Open yourself up to new possibilities
Ask simple questions.
This is actually something I learned long before I was a UX Designer, it’s a concept called Shoshin, from Zen Buddhism. Whaaaat?! Yeah, philosophy can make you a better Infinity player, who’d have known Instead of me regurgitating information which is already readily available, I suggest you take a look at this article:
Let’s Talk Profiles!
Okay, back on track, you came here to read about Infinity, not to have a discussion on buddhism. If you haven't yet, you really need to check out the N4 Army Builder. Just like the edition before, Corvus Belli has been hard at work providing us with a free tool to create our army lists with, and also like N3, it’s the best place to start wrapping your head around what your various armies do.
Personally, I play Combined (all sectorials), Bakunin, Military Orders, Druze, Dahshat, Ikari, USAriadna, White Banner, and Steel Phalanx, plus I’ll probably do Starmada. As you can imagine, I’ve got a lot of homework to do.
When I’m looking at an army, the first thing I generally do is figure out my Lieutenant, then infiltrating specialists and big guns, then support troops, corner guards, warbands and filler. This is a great way to approach seeing the changes in your own army as well. Instead of whole hog reading through the army builder in one go, filter by what you need when making a list, and read those profiles. This is a great way of breaking down the huge amounts of information into smaller chunks that you can more easily digest.
Sorting by Lieutenant in Combined quickly revealed some nice surprises. First off, Umbra Legates have been buffed significantly, and are all NCO, so even when not my Lieutenant, they’re going to be using that Lieutenant order. Hot damn, they also picked up shock immunity and an extra 4” of Forward Deployment (putting them at +8”). If I was reading the whole list at once, it would have been easy to miss some of those details. When looking for a good HMG I came across the trusty Suryat, which may look familiar, but now they’re immune to AP weapons, letting them effectively be ARM7 in cover against almost all attacks, with tactical awareness, and a Tinbot Firewall (-3), that’s going to be tough to dig out, and probably not a unit I’d have considered previously.
Take It Slow
There’s definitely a part of all of us (at least in me) that wants to know it all now, and consume as much information as possible. Doing this though is going to make you miss a lot of the nuance of the new edition, and not having a strong grasp of the minor changes, means you’re going to make a lot of mistakes.
We Warcors often give advice to new players to look at what models they think are cool, read their profiles in the army builder, and read their special rules in the Wiki/Rulebook. That advice now applies more than ever to veterans as well.
Good luck, and welcome to Infinity N4!