Survival Guide - Hard and Soft Counters (Part One)

Generally speaking, new players come to Infinity with baggage. Not the good kind of baggage that's really useful in Campaign: Paradiso, but the kind of baggage that keeps them from seeing the entire Infinity picture. This burden comes in the form of relying on hard counters.

I like to think of a hard counter as something that definitively counters an existing tactic or strategy. A great example of this is the rare and powerful MSV3: any model with this piece of equipment can see straight through Camouflage to target the meaty model beneath the marker. Having a model with MSV3 gives a player the ability to definitively counter Camouflage, so the MSV3 is a hard counter to Camouflage.

You camo?  I don't care!  Pew pew!

A soft counter, on the other hand, is something that allows you to counter an existing tactic or strategy without being a definitive solution in every case. Using the example above, Direct Template weapons are soft counters to Camouflage because they allow you to Intuitive Fire and they ignore Mimetism/TO penalties once the counter is revealed...but they do not in themselves solve all Camouflage problems.

Not every faction has every answer, though. Some factions specialize in hard counters but lack soft counters, while others have very few hard counters. It's up to individual players to choose which they prefer, but I promise you that the better you get at using both, the better of an Infinity player you will become.

Before I go on, I want to say that this is not intended to be a series on “how to deal with X”. Those already exist on the Infinity forums, and I think they're awesome. Rather, this short series features a number of illustrations about alternate forms of engagement. In other words, over the next little while I'm going to teach you (I hope!) a little something about soft counters.

First up, Camouflage and ODD.  Catch this article on November 16th!