The Pen of Penemue

~The Problem~ The problem for this week is the AD/Infiltration surprise attack.   Surprise attacks are the order of the day in Infinity. After all, how can you react to threats you don't see coming? You already have to deal with multiple possible attack vectors because of the order system, and things just get trickier when you have to deal with models that have actual surprise capability. That's right, we're talking about Infiltrators (chiefly TO and those kept in Reserve) and AD units. Time for some unorthodox diplomacy... ~Why is it a problem?~ Simply put, these units combine the element of surprise with a drastically more efficient order-to-action ratio. Your opponent could spend three to four orders moving his attacker into position, or he could spend one to bring down an AD troop. Infiltrators start further up the board – in some cases, much further than normal – saving the orders required to move a normal model towards the enemy. Because th...

~The Problem~ The problem for this week is  Camouflage , both normal and TO. Also included are the penalties to hit that arise from Camo and TO, and from the marker-less-but-still-deadly ODD. ~Why is it a problem?~ Camouflage is a constant source of agony for players because it breaks one of the fundamental promises of the Infinity system: the face-to-face roll. With Camo, you only ever get to react if you survive. "I didn't even get to say ow ..." On top of this, Camo carries the added bonus of to-hit penalties, so even once the model is out of Camo, it's still a pain to gun down. It's even more of a pain when the penalty is TO or ODD's -6. (As a brief aside: this article focuses chiefly on dealing with the marker kind of Camouflage, but I'll also touch on soft counters to the to-hit penalties of the above abilities.) ~Hard Counters~ The Multispectral Visor is, in many ways, a counter to Camo. The MSV3 can just...

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 becau...