Horizon: Zero Dawn tactics for ultra hard, no death, base game run

New Game+ on H:ZD is quite easy because you have all the gear, notably blastwires for early game scrappers and chargers, the war bow for anything with a cannister kill option, and the Banuk hunter bow for DPS on frozen enemies. You also have shield weaver and huge health, which makes random death very unlikely. Playing the regular game on Ultra Hard is a whole different story. Everything kills you in one hit until you're about level 20, and then 2 hits until you're level 40. It takes ages to get heavy armour and shadow weapons because everything is colossally expensive so you're not optimally equipped. And most enemies have so much health that even after blowing off their canisters they're still alive. 

Aloy, my #1 waifu, ready to fuck shit up

Why play on this mode? Well besides the challenge, my main reason is realism. I find it a little silly when giant robots are running into me and I'm not dying. I find it silly that armour made from leather strips can protect against a T-Rex. And I hate using 'healing potions' made from animal meat. The weapons are vaguely more believable, at least if you rely on elemental attacks and the machines' own weapons. So what tips do I have for a no-death, 100% run on ultra hard? 

FUNdamentals: A beginner's guide to infinity

Note: I haven't finished this yet because it is long and I am always busy, but I will add to it occasionally until it is done.  

My hope is that this will be the #1 "must read" article on the internet when it comes to Infinity besides The Rules. That's a bold claim Cotton. Read on to find out if I succeed in delivering value. This guide is meant for beginners, but I hope that even advanced players will pick up a thing or two. At the very least, I will introduce some jargon terms that I use throughout this blog (like sniper traps and tarpits) that will help you understand other posts. I suspect it will be hard to absorb everything in this guide on a first read, so beginners will benefit from circling back to it as they progress to intermediate. 

Ariadna playtesting #1 - Frontline vs O12

I played a game! It was lovely! I made a whole bunch of mistakes! Learnt a lot! Still won! Still got it! Read on to find out more!

How to Win with Japanese Secessionist Army (2 Good Lists)

JSA may be the worst faction in the game. I've still played them a lot - I have the N1 Keisotsu minis to prove it - because they are so cool. In this article, I want to walk you through all their problems. Then I will put up a list that I think might actually be halfway decent and talk you through it. I won't have many opportunities to playtest it, but I promise to do so eventually. It will be great to play against beginners because it is fun and doesn't crush on the alpha. It was born of trying to figure out who could put the most wounds on the table in the 15-unit cap. It is JSA because samurai are 2W and dirt cheap, as is Yojimbo and Musashi (Kuroshi also has dogged). JSA also has quite good economy because of multiple link teams, impetuous bikes, and Oyama's new tactical awareness upgrade. 

Ariadna camo spam in N4

This was my favourite playstyle in N3. Not quite top tier, but very fierce and lots of fun to play because of the voluminous shenanigans. Only problem really was that I'd time out a lot of games because my opponents were so slow deciding what to do when confronted with a sea of camo tokens. How has it changed in N4? Not much...

STARCO lists

Another article I forgot to publish. I guess I was waiting to do some playtesting and never got around to it. Not so dated because haven't changed much since debut. 

Love this sectorial. Mostly because I love mercenaries: I love the idea of putting units together from different factions, and I like the idea of Private Military Contractors in the sci-fi future in general. Starco also has some interesting design principles. I think they're a somewhat limited faction, but there will be some mission mixes where they are just absolutely savage. Let's get on to an initial analysis and some lists.

ITS mission breakdown from a TO’s perspective

This is a post from years ago that I forgot to publish. 

As a tournament organiser (TO), what I want from the mission mix at a tournament is one of two things:

1.       An extreme bias towards a particular kind of list e.g. I would set show of force, frontline and annihilation for a tournament where I wanted to see a lot of TAG and HI lists (probably running the limited insertion rule).

2.       As diverse a mission mix as possible to make list building hard even with the generous 2-list approach Corvus Belli uses. The idea here is that each mission should lend itself to a slightly different kind of list e.g. TAG, HI-link team, link team surrounded by orders and infiltrators, infiltrator spam and specialist spam.

a.       Critically for (2), you don’t want any mission to invalidate any particular kind of list. So for example, you want to avoid Biotechvore because it basically invalidates everything except HI-link team and double link team approaches. Everything else just melts, especially because of the exclusion zone.

Below, I’m going to break down how I understand each ITS mission in terms of (1) and (2) above.