Infinity: Just Two Noobs Trying to Learn N3
Or: “We make the mistakes so you don’t have to.” Jump on in here new Infinity players!
This series of articles will chronicle the experiences of John and I as we learn N3 pretty much from scratch. It assumes you know at least something about the game. It’s for other Noobs like us or maybe for experienced players to have a chuckle at. If you know nothing about the game a lot of this won’t make sense. Check out the rules for yourself here.
John and I played our first game of N3 this week with almost no experience with the game and no one around to teach us. John was quick to point out the foolishness of me trying to bring a 300 point list for our first game. The few V2 games I played back in 2013 were at 300, so I had built the army without thinking. Duh. I cut my PanO force in half and was left with three combi fusiliers, a Spitfire Father Knight and a Swiss Guard with an ML. John had a Maghariba Guard, and four rifle Ghulams.
That First Game
We’d both heard Infinity requires a lot of terrain, so we started shovelling it onto the board. It was a sad mix of LGS terrain: some fantasy cottages and mausoleums arranged alongside urban ruins so we could get enough. I put my “cheerleaders” completely behind the one small piece of cover I had. “If he kills them I’ll lose order tokens,” I thought to myself. My heavy hitters ended up in only partial cover. “I want them to get AROs.”
This proved to be a mistake. John managed to march his giant tag up the field in such a way that he kept the Swiss Guard out of sight even though he was still able to see the Father Knight, minimizing my AROs. I still managed to damage it once. Eventually it walked in sight of the Swiss Guard too, and a missile shot ARO dealt it another point. But John’s initial ARM rolls were bad, and once he’d shaken off the poor luck and found some cover his tag murdered my two best soldiers. Out of orders, it killed my fusiliers one at a time with AROs as they emerged from cover.
While that might make for an awful battle report, the experience was already getting us more familiar with the basics. And since we’d had a good time we decided to go for another game. I noticed my Swiss Guard had TO camoulflage. I’d completely neglected to use it the first game. After a few minutes spent trying to figure out how it worked John had another good idea: just swap him out for different models with easier rules. The Swiss Guard was replaced with a Multi Rifle Orc and a Neoterra Bolt.
John and I agreed the table needed even more terrain, so the board got even thicker with it. Having learned a valuable lesson, none of my models were deployed out of complete cover. But I still underestimated how fast that TAG was. By his second order, John was already drawing a bead to my Father Knight (yes he rolled first turn again). This time I tried Dodging as my ARO. The Father Knight dodged one shot, was hit by a second and watched the rest whiz past. Unfortunately I hadn’t properly read up on his kinematika ability and only moved him 2″ with the dodge. The extra inch would have gotten him safe. The second HMG burst finished him off and John spent his last two orders firing ineffectively at my Orc.
It was time for my army to activate and my Orc almost managed to finish off the TAG with his AP ammo before I ran out of orders. He died swiftly in John’s turn, and John decided to move up the rest of his army rather than hunt my cowering cheerleaders with his TAG. Clearly insulted, the first Fusilier I activated took out the TAG with a critical hit.
That was about the best I would do though. John’s decision to move his Ghulams up to cover fire lanes was a good one because it meant I couldn’t move anyone out of cover without them taking multiple ARO shots. I tried to maneuver a bit to do the same, and on his turn the tide almost turned when I managed to ARO one of his Ghulams with my Bolt. I was able to place the impact template from her Light Shotgun over a second Ghulam, but John defiantly rolled an 18 and 19 for his ARM rolls, and everything was downhill after that.
Lessons learned:
- Use even more terrain. If you don’t have multiple decent hiding places at the start of the game you can get in big trouble.
- We did shooting a bit wrong and weren’t cancelling hits during shooting Face to Face rolls, just assigning them in order highest to lowest.
- We completely forgot about Guts Rolls. Probably other stuff too.
- Knowing range bands is super important. All models have a sweet spot where their weapons work best. You need to work to make sure they’re in it. For example, in my first game I deployed my ML too close to really take advantage of the long range that makes it special.
- Scenarios will probably be super important in the future since they will make sure no one plays too cowardly. It would have been easy for me to position my Fusiliers to try to make John come to me at the end of the second game. This could have led to both of us just refusing to move. Fortunately we’ve known each other too long to pull that kind of crap, but it’s theoretically a possibility.
The important thing is I think we both ended up with a good understanding of the basics and we’ll be in a good spot to learn more next week.
Here’s John’s Take:
“I had played a couple of demo games at Texas Games Con a few years back and really enjoyed the quick pace and high level tactics the game seems to offer. (I haven’t personally played it at a high level yet.) It took us a little while to figure out how to set up the game and how we wanted to play this first game but the quick start guide is very helpful and gives you a simple version of the game to figure out the basics.I got lucky and won the Initiate roll, not knowing at first if my Maghariba Guard (Haquislam’s TAG) got cover or not I had deployed him fairly stupidly out in the open but since I was going first I was hoping that would not be a problem. Not having played the game except for the few demos two years ago made me go for the whole let’s roll dice and try to kill things approach. I saw Ben had hidden two of his models in a building in front of me and decided I would start by trying the “super soldier” tactic and send my TAG forward and shoot, shoot, shoot. I got super luck and was able to kill both of his guys not even know what they were of if they were anything good. When Ben’s turn started and he marched out the troops from hiding and I picked them off one at a time I quickly realized I had pretty handily won this first exchange through pure luck.
This was a very quick game, but still showed us a ton of things we did wrong and right. We re-racked and went at it again. I was under the impression we had a ton of terrain on the field but realized just how wrong we were. Because the average trooper moves about 4” I would make sure you always have terrain with in 4” of each other or at least away to daisy chain it. I won the Initiative and chose to go first that seems to me at least without scenarios to be a very strong advantage. It allows me to spread out my troops and line them up for AROs. I actually from my vantage point didn’t even see Bens Father Knight but when I moved up he fired off an ARO shot after my second move of the order. My TAG proceeded to get mad and mow down his Father Knight quite skillfully. I still had some left over orders so tried to kill Ben’s Orc but the dice giveth and also taketh away so it was not to be.
During Bens turn I found out what Ap Ammo is and ouch. AP really diminishes the tags high armor value. I got lucky though and managed to roll extremely well on the ARM checks for most of the shots and was able to squeak by and survive with one STR left. Ben had hidden all of his grunts where I could not shoot them so I repositioned a few my Ghulams to get them in the fight as well.During Ben’s turn he got a crit potshot off on my TAG and bam down it went. The fighting got was very balanced at this point after losing my Tag but I felt like my Ghulams did a tad better. We started exchanging fire but because I could bring multiple troopers to bear it allowed me to dodge with the one being shot at and shoot back with the others, making it very tough for Ben to kill off my guys. When Ben busted out a surprise shot gun I thought I was in trouble but managed to shrug it off with some good rolls and pull out the win the second time as well. I enjoyed both games we played it was fun rolling the dice and how quick the game plays.”
Lessons Learned:
- After our first game I realized how limiting it was not having terrain pieces with in about 4-5 Inches of other piece because it made it very difficult for your troopers to move and stay in cover.
- We missed a lot of rules and kept them out to keep our first game simple. I am looking forward to adding doctors and engineers next so that way I can keep my tag alive longer.
- I want to know what the scenarios are because Ben could have waited me out or I could have waited him out in either game and that would have made for a very negative play experience.
- Mistakes were made but our made up version and the most vanilla run through of the game was still incredibly fun the Active and Inactive turns keeps you engage through the whole game so you’re not groaning waiting for your opponent to finish his turn so you can go.
- I love seeing how much depth there is to the game although there seems to be almost way too many special rules I cannot wait to dig in and add some of the advanced game play like hacking and jamming.
~That’s it for now. If there are any infinity vets reading this do you have any advice? Does it look like there was anything else we did wrong?
