Thursday, May 3, 2012

Infinity, still the best game I've ever played.

  I've been playing infinity on and off for about a year now, I've posted about the beginnings of my force before. But this game still holds the same initial excitement now after a year that it did when I first got into it and was under the influence of new game enthusiasm, and that's saying something.

  Since the VICC's I've been putting off updating in the hopes I'd organise a proper photo op for my grey knights, sadly this hasn't happened yet, but given the amount of stuff Ive gotten done in the mean time I figured I'd better update.
  Warhammer fantasy is basically 100% off the table for me now, mostly due to the absolute (to keep it family friendly) "dick" attitude that alot of the "hardcore" fantasy players at my club adopt towards list writing and game play. The final straw for me was an ogre army with bonus movement banners entirely so it could move sideways along the back board edge, never engage in combat all the while shooting with 2 cannons and magic...fun game. Seeing that game made me pack up my fantasy and it hasn't seen the table since, nor do I have any intention for it to any time soon, which makes me sad, but it was either that or seeing how many ogre models I could fit under a car tire at once
  Since then I've taken up warmachine, a game I was fairly "anti" when it first started showing up everywhere, and I've got to say I was pleasantly surprised with the gameplay depth, it didn't feel childish and dumbed down like warhammer fantasy has started to, which was a pleasant surprise. More on my Circle Orboros force soon I hope.. only have 6 models painted so far.
  But the game I've come back to in force has been Infinity, and god damn if it isn't the most tactical in-depth exciting and enjoyable game I've ever played. It feels like I picked it up again at exactly the right time, there was a boom in play at another store in Melbourne, Realm Of Legends, with literally dozens of people picking up the game. It started showing up in a lot of local stores for sale, and theres even a tournament organised for later this month.

  My crazy enthusiasm (and general winning smile) has also convinced about a dozen guys at my club to pick up, or dig out their infinity stuff. So I'm getting 2 or 3 games in weekly now, which is a huge motivation to get stuff painted, so that's exactly what I've been working on .

  The tournament coming up is an interesting prospect, very different to anything I've entered having only ever entered tournaments playing GW games. This tourny you're expected to rock up with 3 lists (same faction or sectorial list being the only limiting factor here) so they can be identical if you only have enough models for 1 list or vastly different. Since I have about 40 models so far (the average list runs 8 to 10 at this list size-250 points) I've gone 3 different lists. This gives me lots of tactical options in the tournament, but it also means I have more models to paint, with only 4 or 5 models that overlap lists.


  First up I've painted a couple Kuang shi, lobotomised political prisoners, with bombs strapped to them and given a chain rifle (giant scatter gun) and basically sent forward as cannon fodder. I envision them to be the screaming bomb guys from Serious Sam. Sorry that all these pics are phone pics, under fairly poor lighting, hopefully better pics soon.

Attempted to paint the serious sam bomb on their backpacks, but Im not that good a painter.

Next up is my engineer, complete with purple anime hair. She basically deals with repairs on any of the Remotes or TAG's I run (robots and mechs basically)  as well as being able to repair any gear or weaponry disabled by EM weaponry.







Next up was a couple of what are basically the cutest running bombs in any game ever, Crazy Koalas. These little bastards are basically reactive mines, and react to anything activating within their Zone of control, run directly at it and go for a hug, then blow up.



   These guys cant be bought for a force without a controlling unit, and in my force that is limited to 1 model, being the japanese TAG, big piloted mech basically, I really love the aesthetic of this guy, he's got the appleseed crossed with evangelion vibe going on. This TAG is designed as a lighter but more agile variant than a lot of others, doesn't come quite as heavily armed, but its cheaper and comes with 2 koalas to cover any approaches.

This is obviously still WIP, just the basic colours having gone down so far.
Next up i made some tokens, wound counters some other misceleanous markers and cammo markers. Infinity is unique (in games Ive played at least) in that troops with the ability to cammo dont get deployed as a model, but are instead deployed as a cammo marker, basically a blip on the enemies radar but with no more data for them. Even more specialist troops have "thermo optical cammo" where they dont get deployed as even a marker, and are instead deployed completely invisably, just writing down where they are. This adds a whole new level of tactics to the game, because at deployment you may see nothing on the table, or all cammo markers, or a mix of anything.

 After Ispent ages cutting out those flame and smoke templates I found out that they were actually too small, and that the print out had been shrunk by the printer... pretty disappointed. Probably just end up buying some of the micro arts studio templates as a cop -out now.
 Some more WIP pics, my Tiger soldiers , they are Advanced deployment troops, with the ability to Combat jump, basically deep strike, but they can also come on from the flanks instead. Along with them is their special named leutenant tiger soldier "Ko - Dali" she grants them the ability to come on from any board edge including the enemies deployment zone. This tactic for me is one of those high risk high reward tactics, If you get it to work you can have 4 guys in the enemies deployment zone in your turn one, but if you do it badly they're exposed, cut off and when they die you're at Loss of Leutenant in game (pretty bad situation to be in)


Another WIP pic, left to right is a heavy machine gun (hmg) combi rifle, and then Ko-Dali.


I've also been trying to decide how to paint the bases, the original paint job i did a year ago on my starter figures was yellow sand, but I'm not 100% sold on it so I've tried a couple other sand colours, the next best was this white sand version. Still haven't made my decision yet.

Next up is a pic of a few of the models that are just at the start of the WIP process for the tourny in a week and a half. Here we have in the front row a Hac tao (heavy infantry with TO- cammo and a missile launcher, basically the heaviest thing I can get in my force) then a minelaying infiltrator, and then on the right is the Dao -Fei, my favourite heavy infantry, shes unique to Yu-Jing, in that shes a heavy infantry, but has cammo and infiltrate, so you can get an HMG into a pretty commanding position early on, and has amazing survivability. Behind them in silver is a Su-Jian, a robot heavy infantry, and a hsien, another HMG toting heavy infantry, only this time with a visor that lets her see through cammo and smoke effects.



Here's a pic of a few of the finished models so far, note the bases aren't finished because i haven't decided what colours they're going to be yet.


   So with the Infinity tournament coming up in a week and a half, expect plenty more infinity related updates. I'll be running a campaign at my club as well in the near future, as well as building alot of infinity specific terrain, and just generally gushing about this amazing game.

2 comments:

  1. Soooo many models Ive allot of catching up to do!

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  2. Looking good Noakes:) thats a nice start to your Yu Jing collection and nice to see you have painted the best looking T.A.G in the game:)

    Please don't give up on playing Warhammer as I only like playing light hearted story driven games rather than hard core dick play lol so I am sure there are guys out there who like playing that way too.

    Keep up the great work buddy:)

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