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...