I love Infinity. I played multiple games of Infinity every week throughout the entire period of N3. When N4 was announced I was excited; new editions are times of change and renewal, and I was looking forwards to seeing how this would shake up a game that had started to feel increasingly solved. Reinforcements was on the horizon and Code One promised an easy onboarding process for new players. It seemed like a golden age was starting.
Instead it was a period of what felt to me like utter stagnation. Nothing happened through the entire edition. The rules changes felt more like a big FAQ than a shakeup. New restrictions on listbuilding shrank the possibility space rather than expanding it. The majority of new models were modernizations of old sculpts. The game finally, finally got to a point where its lore caught up to the reality of the average game but that was it for new developments. I kept looking for something to get my teeth into, something that would inspire me to play a game or paint a model, or even buy a model, but all we got was a trickle of updated sculpts for existing factions. I don’t know if it was related but even the import company that sold Infinity models locally went under during this period putting me back on the wrong end of international shipping. I went all in on Song of Ice and Fire, and then Conquest, because there was fundamentally nothing left for me to say about Infinity.
So what the fuck was that?
The Shrinking of the Gamespace
The big thing that did my head in was the slow, painful reduction of options when it came to building lists. Not many wargames get to experience this; wargaming bloat tends to mean endlessly increasing complexity as new models constantly arrive and expand options outwards. We certainly got that in Infinity – the endless scroll of the vanilla factions increasingly edging out their more limited sectorials – but we were unlucky to see its inverse: the systematic annihilation of certain playstyles.
The first big move in this space was the hard cap of fifteen units to a list. And honestly, good change. Brutal change – there were almost certainly more elegant ways to achieve the goal – but it took my 20 order tournament winning Yu Jing list behind the shed and executed it and that list deserved it. In a way this was kind of a relief because it had gotten to the point where if I wasn’t playing two full combat groups I felt sure I’d get run over by someone who was.
But then they came for the link teams.
As part of a big rationalization of what had become an unwieldy system of wildcards and exceptions, Corvus Belli decided to apply what I’ve always struggled to see as anything other than an incomprehensible nerf to four and five trooper mixed links. These links would lose +3 discover and +2 BS, leaving mixed 3-troop links untouched. It feels like a blow intended for the heydays of the Kamau Sniper but that was technology that was nearing obsolescence by the end of N3[1]. Instead this came as a hammer blow to one of Infinity’s few alternative playstyles.
[1] There was a default of every sectorial running a five man link, four plebs and an elite, often a sniper or missile launcher up on overwatch. I would argue that this was not actually a problem that needed solving. That was a powerful arrangement but it was a limited, clunky thing, extremely difficult to maneuver and extremely vulnerable to being disassembled piece by piece. Vanilla was already edging out sectorials even when sectorials had access to these powerful defensive links and this put in the boot.
The Pain Train is a style where you run five of your heaviest infantry in a big Core link; a ten order list where over two-thirds of your points go into this five-troop kill squad. I love the Pain Train. My first games of Infinity were using this approach and it’s absurdly fun. It condenses Infinity into its most pure, desperate decision making – you can frequently wind up in a situation where you only possess five orders after the enemy kills everything that’s not in the Pain Train, making each move an act of brutal compromise. Soldiers running directly through mines without dodging because you can’t afford to slow down. Breaking your Link rather than letting your precious LT order go to waste. It’s exciting, a condensed experience, and getting the right balance of gun, resilience, and preparedness for weird situations was a delight in list building.
And it was a delight – with the N4 list composition rules there were so many options in so many sectorials. 3 Orc troops, Shona and an Aquilia Guard made an excellent NCA Pain Train, with Shona giving melee defense and the Aquilia giving a unique capability in MSV3 making this version uniquely suited to midfield clearing. You could add a Hulang Shocktrooper to an Invincibles core, giving a versatile close quarters package including D-charges, E/M grenades and double SMGs[2]. There were even more exotic things that I was trying out, like OSS built around a Yadu/Asura core. It was a fascinating area, and one that felt like an under-explored B side compared to the common understanding of list building.
[2] This blow was subsequently softened by the addition of Bixie as close-quarters defense, but that just goes to underline my point that a heavy link needs a close combat/MSV character in order to not get immediately killed by a single smoke grenade – and I’d still prefer the Hulang most of the time in the role.
Also relevantly, I never thought the Pain Train was a particularly powerful playstyle, especially after the Limited Insertion rule left. The powerful playstyle would be The List; the same The List that every faction ran in one form or another, the formless flavourless soup of the most efficient vanilla profiles you could reach plus the omnipresent Libertos. The Pain Train was, then, only viable at the margins before catching a deeply undeserved nerf that pushed it over the edge into meme build.
See, the big limitation of a Heavy Infantry link was always hacking. What made a faction good or bad at running a Pain Train was its ability to add hacking resilience to its link. Previously, many factions could do this – a Tinbot with Firewall could give you just enough BTS to chance an Oblivion hit in an emergency. Suddenly, that’s gone – that Firewall now costs you your Link bonuses. Aquilia Guard leading an Orc Squad, out. Santiago Knight assisting a Hospitalier Team, out[3]. Invincibles team, butchered by the inability to add close combat defense. Veteran Kazaks were perfect but they caught an unrelated 4 point rise and were AVA4 meaning you couldn’t fill out a link by themselves. My beautiful, beautiful Starmada Hector All-Star link? Trashed. The only faction that could still run a Pain Train at full potential was Morats, and I really didn’t want to play Morats.
[3] You could in theory put De Fersen into a Hospitalier team as hacking defense, but he’s categorically worse in the position than the Santiago Knight. De Fersen didn’t bring a tinbot or d-charges and is 11 points more expensive. The Tinbot is the real operative loss there; it is trivial for a hacker to find an angle on the Knights link where some/all of the knights are threatened but De Fersen himself is not, at which point your link is now doing unmodified resets before getting Oblivioned one by one. The addition of the Santiago’s tinbot was critical in making the classic Knightly Pain Train survivable at all on a modern battlefield where guided missiles could rain from the sky at any second.[4][5]
[4] You could theoretically put an EVO hacking device in the list for Firewall but that A) costs a precious, precious order and B) does nothing to help you if you lose initiative and immediately have to deal with a repeater landing next to your link.
[5] Guided missiles were fine overall though, you big babies.
And so in order to write a good list I had to turn my eyes again and again towards that terrible monolith, Vanilla.
The Bloating of the Gamespace
Vanilla factions suck. They’ve always sucked. They’ve always been the worst part of Infinity, an ever increasing mountain of garbage, mercenaries, random one-off character models that were adapted from a thirty-year-old tabletop roleplaying game. This pile of stuff gave players the ability to pick and choose the most efficient profiles in the game. You show a new player the Vanilla faction and they’ll scroll, and scroll, and get increasingly and visibly nervous as their scrolling doesn’t seem to move the bar. “I have to learn all this?” Yeah, bro. It’s that or be bad.
Corvus Belli seemed to be aware of this. Refusing to add the Gwailos to Vanilla Combined Army was an early sign of what was to come, and very few new profiles entered the game at all over the course of N4, with most attention being given to updating existing sculpts. But reducing the rate of Shit Mountain’s expansion is a very different proposition to actually dealing with Shit Mountain, and without link teams as a selling point for Sectorials, Vanilla’s all-consuming maw distended so that it could devour the entire possibility space.
I mentioned the The List before. A The List is a featureless, flavourless place that every single faction can end up in: 1x Big Gun, 1x Overwatch Sniper, 1xWarband Module, 1xCheerleader Squad, 1xLibertos and later in the edition, 1x Guided Missile package. You just pop out and slot in whichever profile is 1% more efficient in each role from your faction. There’s a terrible gravity to The List; any time you don’t have one of the required modules it feels like a mistake and you go in and shuffle it around until you realize you’ve just returned to The List but your Guilang is now a minelayer. You suppose that this is what you run in a scenario that doesn’t need specialists.
So now in N5 the Vanilla factions have each lost 30+ profiles. That’s insanely good. That’s the best thing that could have ever happened to the game and it’s two editions overdue.
Reinforcements Have Arrived, If You Agree to This Optional Game Mode
Reinforcements were meant to be the big shakeup to this status quo. The fantasy of having your backup team dropping in from orbit to salvage a desparate situation was a great one, and the potential to use this to launch an entirely new range of miniatures for every faction was great. Everyone was excited for Reinforcements right up until the grav-chute failed to deploy and instead we got a delivery of squished meat.
What went wrong? It feels like two things. One; the rules team never seemed to believe in Reinforcements – it felt like they’d been pushed into it by sales/marketing and they resented it. Reinforcements were confined to an optional game mode and that game mode was not pushed at all in official tournament material. Two, the rules for Reinforcements themselves seemed to lead to a brief, symmetrical exchange of gunfire in the midfield as both teams deployed in close proximity and immediately shot each other to bits.
Robert Shepherd who played Reinforcements more extensively than I did had this to say:
> I felt the play pattern was immediately and irrevocably established by the third time you played it and then you never had a new experience with Reinforcements ever again.
Most people locally seemed to have tried it for a tournament or two and then kind of dropped it.
So it was a highly experimental idea, weakly pushed and seemingly swiftly abandoned by a rules team that knew that it was half baked and didn’t want to pin the entire game on it. Also this is just me but I couldn’t get the fucking app to list Reinforcement troopers anywhere despite going so far as to reinstall it so I couldn’t even have fun listbuilding for it.
The Paralysis Edition
So that was N4 for me. An edition where Corvus Belli had become aware of the problems and contradictions that many years of Wargaming Bloat had resulted in, but were unprepared to deal with them. What they gave us was more of, and somehow, less of, N3. Every wargame at some point teeters under a pile of ancient SKUs; a towering heap of rules debt owed to legacy miniatures, an inability to move forwards due to obligations to the past, and for a company that needs to keep selling new miniatures in order to stay in business this process can be terminal. I legitimately thought that Infinity was dying as a result of N4.
Already in the announcements for N5 more has happened than in the entire life cycle of N4. Vanilla is dead at last, cut down to something more closely resembling a Sectorial list, and thank goodness for that. Finally factions have limitations again, and can therefore be interestingly bound by those limitations. Narratively, Achilles defecting to the Combined army is something to cheer for. I’m excited to buy the Evil Achilles hit squad and run them in Onyx; that’s an extremely fun painting challenge and breath of life into a sectorial that didn’t have much going for it. I hope they’re a classic Pain Train. I’ll have so much fun if they are.
These two things are radical changes for a game that desperately needed them. I was actually deeply demoralized when Corvus Belli used the phrase ‘Polishing the diamond’ in the leadup to N5. That made me think that they had just frozen in place, so in love with the design of Infinity as it currently existed that they couldn’t see the gradually widening cracks. Instead, at last, they seemed willing to move things forwards – to finally break the tyranny of Vanilla and to have the story influence the wargame in a way beyond briefly reading the half-page of text at the top of an ITC season packet.
These things alone are enough to make N5 exciting again. I’m definitely excited! I’d love to return to this world, even just to run my five power-armoured idiots directly through the template of a Noctifier’s missile launcher.
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