My thoughts on Infinity's 'Intent' pseudo-rule

The notion of "intent" is a dividing line between various infinity communities in Australia. As a TO, I thought I should clarify my thoughts on it. I would be interested in any comments other people have. 

From reading this interview with the 2015 Interplanetario winner, my understanding is that intent was brought in my Corvus Belli (CB) to chill the competitive community out a bit. In the past, players were really aggressive about telling people where LoF existed. CB moved to clarify that you must tell people where LoF exists so that they don't need to spend hours coming round to your side of the table to check their movement. It was designed to make the game less testy and faster. 

The intent "rule" is on page 61 of the N3 book in a box labelled "gaming etiquette". It reads:

"Checking all possible Lines of Fire for all figures and Markers on the table can be cumbersome. It is perfectly acceptable for a player to ask their opponent whether existing Lines of Fire could disrupt the declaration of an Order before declaring it. Players are expected to share this Open Information in a truthful and spostsmanlike fashion. Honesty and fair play are conducive to a better gaming atmosphere, and all players benefit from that."

I’d first note that this says nothing about "intent". What it says is that rather than a player moving around the table checking all LoF for a potential move, which is super slow, they just ask their opponent “if I go here, can that model see me?” Players have sensibly sped up this process to be mostly a matter of saying "my intention is to move to here to see+shoot only that guy" in situations where it would be possible to figure out where to move a model freehand such that it only triggers one ARO by painstakingly checking LoF from the other side of the table.

This is meaningfully different from the way 'intent' is understood by some communities. Notably:

a.       "Mathematically, there is a place where I can move to and see only that unit and not that other unit that is 1mm away, so I will move there and shoot even though I can’t achieve such by freehand movement". This includes people using laser pointers to demonstrate the existence of a 1mm gap for a corner cut, for example. It reaches ludicrous proportions when people are talking about super jumping on diagonals to hit people on ledges while avoiding distant snipers. A friend used to do this with Rodoks precisely to demonstrate how ludicrous the "mathematically, I can..." approach was, but nobody seemed to get the message. When you lean around a corner in paintball you can’t slice your vision 1mm at a time—same goes for Infinity.

b.      Work-shopping your whole order using the intent system. For example, "If I move there I can angle this plasma template such that it hits this model and just manages to clip that model behind it", so my intent is to do that.  Or, more commonly "oh I see now that I can’t hit everyone with my template as I intended, so I’ll just creep forward an extra 2mm". This one seems to come up a lot with players who are paranoid about making errors (which is understandable) and consequently fuss over things like making sure their units are only 1mm outside of cover rather than 2mm "just in case" something unexpected comes up and this matters. Some players can argue for an hour over such inconsequential things, drawing the intent system in to justify their approach. 

My view is that this notion of "intent" is a house rule and not what CB has written in the rule book. Now obviously it’s hard to draw clear lines in the sand from what CB has written in a tournament context, so it is unsurprising that the more competitive minded communities that require such lines lest rules lawyers have a field day have just decided to go with ‘mathematically, I can’. But this is: 

1) Lame 

2) Makes it extremely difficult to ever get more than 1 ARO onto a model, which really takes a lot out of the game and basically shoe-horns people into using HI link teams for defence. 

3) not the rules-as-written (see the box above). I emphasise this in particular because the box on pg. 61 is about encouraging sportsmanship and fast play, while intent as used by many communities has the opposite effect. It encourages people to spend a lot of time checking silhouettes and flashing laser pointers around to demonstrate the existence of a spot where they can see ARO1 but not ARO2. In the old system, they could not have placed the model in that exact spot, so my impression is that this is an abuse of a clause designed to encourage less abusive play. 

My inclination when people try to do this to me is to just slow shit right down as per the letter of the box and force my opponent to constantly ask LoF if they’re trying to corner cut <1cm. This isn't fun for me or my opponent, but I honestly think they should just suck it up and take 2 AROs from my units that are <1cm apart. 

Basically, my view is that intent is something to make the game go faster, so when players instead use it to make the game go slower by squeezing optimal engagements out of everything that to me is unsportsmanlike.