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. 

Infinity Tier List for N4

Infinity is an extremely well-balanced game, so pretty much any faction can beat pretty much any other faction. Nonetheless, there are some marginally better or worse factions. Here with my two cents...

INFINITY: Best (and worst) factions & sectorials for beginners

 So I'm now very much back into Infinity. Haven't played much N4 yet, but I'm spending too much time on army and buying models, so it's happening. With an eye to making this a good infinity blog again, I've decided to update some old conventional articles for N4: a beginners guide to factions, a beginners guide to the game, and a tier list. Here is the first of those articles. This article is best read in combination with the beginners guide to the game so that you understand the importance of things like MOD stacks. 

Yu Jing elite camo

Since invincible army came out I've been experimenting with variations on an "elite" camo army for Yu Jing. Most camo lists use cheap and cheerful infiltrators to pepper the midfield with camo tokens. The closest thing to an elite unit in these lists is something like Pavel McMannus, who clocks in at 32 points with 1W and BS12. The Yu Jing approach is a little different...

Nomad Camo Spam: One more time

I miss the infinity community so I'm thinking of getting back into the game in a very casual way. New edition seems good though I really don't like the 15 order cap. Not because I played many lists with order counts above 15, but because it just seems like a really lazy way to balance the game. It also makes link teams even more important, which was something I didn't like even before the new edition. 

Anyway, some of the new Nomads units and changes means that nomad camo spam might finally, finally, be viable. I have been trying to make this list work since the end of N2. It feels like the way Nomads are supposed to be played, you could just never quite get all the pieces together under 300 points. Has that changed? Read on to find out. 

How to win at wingspan

My girlfriend's family is full of bird nuts and boardgamers, so what a delight when we discovered a multi-award winning boardgame based on building a bird sanctuary. Wingspan deserves the accolades. It is beautiful, wholesome, deep but simple to play, competitive without being nasty, and educational. We burned through a lot games over Christmas, and because I am mildly austic or something, I had to break it. I have a problem and I need help. Anyway, after dominating proceedings I decided to write up my stratagems for you to benefit from. Voila!

Character building guide for Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel

Another one of those posts where I brain dump. Been playing Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel lately because it's something I can do for an hour to unwind. Pick up and put down as it were. Not a good game in the pantheon of Fallout, but fine on its own. The early levels are much more tactically interesting than the late game. Ambushes and minelaying work pretty well against raiders and mutants. Reavers are always static and wait for you, which makes sniping the (boring) game, and robots also have huge health which means you have to basically just run up with a full squad of laser/plasma and shoot the crap out of them. Pretty boring but at least the last few missions are fast. Anyway, thought I'd write a character guide because Tactics is quite different to other Fallout games, notably:

Best one-run guide to Baldur's Gate Trilogy

I have a compulsive need to write down things I have painstakingly assembled in my head, even if nobody else cares. This is in that vein. I've played the BG trilogy through 4 times (good guy fighter-cleric, neutral fighter-druid, bad guy kensai-mage, neutral Barbarian in a deliberately bad party). Here are my thoughts on how to do it if you only want to play through once and want some respect for roleplaying i.e. you won't kill Drizzt the lvl 14 ranger with your lvl 4 party by abusing the video game format, and you won't mix-and-match good and evil party members who really don't belong together.

O12 listbuilding

Hola

I have retired from Infinity, and I've actually been really good about it and only checked army twice in like 3 months. It's working! Then O12 came out and I had a bit of a longer look. Eventually I felt the need to write some stuff down. Getting it out of my system will make it less likely that I look at Army again.

Infinity faction tiers 1-4

Edit (17/07/2021): I have updated this for N4 in a new post (there aren't many changes) - see here: https://emperorsghost.blogspot.com/2021/07/infinity-tier-list-for-n4.html

It is often said in Infinity "it's not your list, it's you". This is somewhat correct, but mostly horseshit. Some units in the game are simply inferior to others, like the Yan Huo with Missiles is strictly worse than a Hac Tao with missile launcher. Let me list some other units that are just bad: bolts (they are now passable with CoC and the changes to bioimmunity), Aida Swanson, Cube Jaegers, Taskmasters, Guijia, Takael (the symbiobug guy). You never see these units in winning lists, and I would almost say that you don't see them period. The same can be said of some factions: they just suck. Inversely, some units and factions are simply outstanding. I won't write a list of the best units, because that would take forever, but I do think it is helpful to have an idea of the faction tiers so that newbs stop playing Morats because "it's easy". MAF is actually infinity on hard mode. Yes, there are fewer rules. There's also no hope of winning unless you are very skilful in melee. I will explain my picks.

Note that some factions in tier 2 become tier 1 when the mission mix/meta is right. For example, Hassassins is nigh-on unbeatable in ground control missions when piloted by a good player on tall terrain. I would also say that the difference is only really noticeable between tier 1 and 3/4. Tier 2 against 3 is totally fair. Tier 1 against 2 is also barely noticeable. Tier 4 is always noticeably hard to win with.

Playtesting Vanilla Ariadna

I make no secret of a few opinions that I hold:

• I want to be able to play a finesse faction - something that relies on things like melee, hacking, stealth, smoke shenanigans and jank like sat-lock to win games rather than just pounding my opponent with first-order optimal strategies (e.g. link teams) and units (e.g. Rui Shi). 
• I think link teams are a bit broken (make BS only work on active and B only work on reactive) and I don't really see any reason to play vanilla these days. As such, playing Vanilla is basically a handicap. I like the idea of playing with a handicap and still winning
• I've been trying for ages to make a camo-spam Nomads list work but it just doesn't because hacking is over-costed (compare it to a 5 point Mutt that does the same thing) and under-powered (mostly because everything you want to hack has stealth...<cough> knight <cough>...)
• I'm bored with infinity because second-order optimal strategies are so tough to make work.

Well I have an announcement: vanilla Ariadna may save Infinity for me.

Playtesting jank shit

Now that CanCon is over we're going deep into the praxis labs to test weird shit that might work as part of some unexpected second- or even third-order strategy. My mate actually discovered a very powerful way to play Tohaa using this method. He started by trying to build a list with highest wound count possible, using things like Rasails, preceptors (super cheap 2 wound model) and lots of cheap Sakiel paramedics. We discovered a couple of things. First, double makaul + sakiel paramedic triads are fierce. They score well and the Makaul eat anything in close combat. The best your opponent can do is put a useless wound on the Sakiel. Tohaa melee was born. Second, guerilla warfare with heaps of cheap direct template weapons on cheap units is a very effective counter to most alpha strikes, especially if the templates are flamers. Trading with things like Chaksas works especially well in a ~31 wound list. These were golden insights that are now informing all sorts of weird shit that actually seems to work. Below are other things we intend to try:

CanCon Battle Reports

Well CanCon is over for another year. Went 4-1 and finished 3/70. Pretty happy with the result. Only loss was a close one at 4-1 and might have flipped to a win if we had time for turn 3. All other games were major victories. Aside from maybe one moment I managed not to be a dick at any point, which is the main thing. Battle reports below. I have omitted my opponent's names.

Ikari Tactics and Playtesting

God I love this sectorial!

• I love the fluff: Japanese revolutionaries and deserters from the Chinese penal corp committing dishonorable war crimes; mercenaries; machismo
• I love the units: a shit-tonne of impetuous dudes including the amazing (top 5 units in the game) Yuan yuan backed up by HI link teams, the Rui Shi (another top 5 unit, though maybe not at 1.5SWC) with smoke support, and cheap specialist profiles from Keisotsu
• And I love the playstyle: BANZAI!!!!

The only thing stopping me from completely committing to this faction for the next 12 months is that I freakin' love STARCO as well. 

Alright let's break the faction down and do up some initial lists (date: 03/04/2018):