Some basic tactical principles in Infinity

Last article I wrote down some basic list building guidelines. This time I thought I'd list some basic tactics that I have assimilated.

I've got three core principles I'd like to discuss here:

Imperial Service Sectorial List-Building at 300 points

It was going to cost me about $400 to buy all the stuff I needed to play the Warhammer army I wanted at the big convention, and the TO wanted me to do some modelling for WYSIWYG that I thought was stupid (like apparently my fusion pistols aren't kosher as combi-bolters on bikes, so I need to model combi-meltas onto their legs or some such), so I'm playing in the infinity tournament.

For some reason, the organiser of that tournament has also opted not to play the rules as written (even though the best thing about infinity is that it plays great straight out of the box). The mission selection is the five missions that favour killing your opponent rather than scoring objectives - annihilation, quadrant control, frontline, seize the antennas and supplies. Furthermore, everyone counts as a specialist except TAGs and skirmishers (though many skirmishers get specialist status by being one of the specialist classes) for the purpose of pressing buttons, they just need to spend a long skill to press a button whereas specialists only need to spend a short skill. Even furthermore, there is no roll for pushing buttons. To me, this seems to take the game straight back to when TAGs lieutenants (one in particular) just mowed everyone down and stepped over to the button to press it. Yes, the specialist heavy missions reward one faction (Ariadna camo spam) more than others, but going from one extreme to another is not a solution. The organiser claims that making primary objectives count for a bit less and classified objectives count for two each resolves this issue. He seems to forget that anyone can claim 'secure high value target'. I suspect every second list will be Combined Army with an Avatar, half of the rest will be Pan-O with a cutter and the rest will be a grab bag, including me.

Here is what I am play-testing at the moment:

A better comp list?

So I was thinking that maybe you can actually get the White Scars rush to work within the limits of the comp, it will just cost you 6 (I was desperate to stay under 5). The White Scars rush is absurdly brutal because if you can't get the scout thing going you can just outflank your entire army and come on later to grab objectives at your leisure. The constraints here as far as the community comp goes are as follows:

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Working with Australia's Community Comp System

There is a big tournament here in late January. I was planning on playing but then in the last 6 weeks or so I've dramatically lost interest in Warhammer. The game is just a bit too much of a headache to figure out these days. This tournament uses Australia's community comp system, which is basically a panel-determined comping system where certain units and combinations of units and/or equipment cost a certain number of credits. Each player gets to spend up to 20 credits, and the more you spend the more it hurts your comp score, which is typically 50% of your overall score (the other 50% is battle points). Most people I've seen on the local Forums are running lists in the 8-12 points range. The cookie-cutter Necron harvest list is a minimum 12 points. Ravenwing struggles to get in under 15. The system moves in 5 point increments, so that up to 5 points doesn't hurt you much, but 6-10 is a bit of a burn, and anything above 10 points really starts to sting your comp score. On the one hand this stops people taking bullshit cheese. On the other hand this is a really laborious way to manage comp, which bugs me a bit, and it can break in places. So I wasn't going to play. But then I built a list that I think breaks the system (you can break any system with marines because there are so many options), so now I might, I just need to borrow some models because I don't want to give GW anymore money at the moment. Alternatively I might try to sell some of the stuff I am definitely never going to use, like my poor Orks, to finance the completion of my Marine collection. Anywayz, here is my list:

Infinity list building in 200 points

We play 300 point pick-up games of Infinity in my club, but last year's tournament (one of the few in our city) was 200 points, so I've been mucking around building lists at that level. The points limit is a pretty intense restriction, making it difficult to cover all your bases. In particular, getting orders and still having decent units to spend them on is not easy, and having answers to most shenanigans like smoke, drop troops, impersonators and camo shell games is tough. Below is a list of list-building principles I've brought from 300 point games and some suggested lists for Yu Jing/ISS