A Beginners Thoughts On Infinity #3: Guided Missiles

You know that feeling don't you? When you're playing that wargame you love so much, and someone unleashes a unit on you, that seems so utterly awful and impossible to counter, that the whole game system feels like it's falling down around your ears?

"You'll never get me when I'm in cover, pigs! -3 to hit, +3 to my ARM... mwah ha ha! Wait, what are those things coming out that remote..?"

Well that just about summed up my first experience with guided missiles.

Let me put this into context for you. Myself and my gaming nemesis, James (Mr Nomad of Toth) have been slowly building up the hardness (for want of a better word) of our respective forces. I'd recently hit upon a winning formula of raging Cameronian-shock-attack-doggie-dude chucking smoke about and landing hard on his camping Wildcats/Intruders/Tomcats; with midfield irritation in the form of Uxia and SAS CRAP; plus the backfield camo sniping of an autocannon-toting Tankhunter. Oh and the Ariadnan Cruise Missile Assault Pack making an occasional, but awesome appearance.

I was fully exploiting vanilla Ariadna's capacity for lots of camo, lots of infiltration, and crazed hybrid-human-canine soldiers.

After two consecutive pummellings from Dawn's finest and brightest, James decided to hit back. Hard.

Being Ariadna, and being his sole opponent so far in our two and bit months of Infinity, he'd really not had much chance to exercise his biggest strength: hacking. Afterall, he had nothing to hack. Not even a Traktor Mul or an orbiting Dropship. I'm guessing a couple games worth of ITS defeat had pushed James to the edge and so he rolled out the most feared weapon in the Nomad arsenal: the Guided Missile Remote Face Smasher.

"I really need to do better at this in the future..."

I'd decided to take an experimental list I'd never tried before for this game, not knowing what he had planned. In retrospect an Assault Pack would have been invaluable, but instead I opted for Van Zant and Para Commando flanking tactic, reinforcing a William Wallace and Cameronian crushingly quick flank attack. The rest of the army was considerably weaker than normal with more FO's than usual and one less Tankhunter (I went for HMG rather than HMG + AC).

James took a much more aggressive list than I was used to facing. A newly purchased Morlock warband was to be used to push down a flank; with a Moderator backline (a classic James tactic) with Zeroes used to mark targets for the real coup de grace of his list... a Guided Missle remote. Most annoyingly he put the remote and the Rev. Custodier used to shoot it, inside a MAS Garage building with one door missing. Impregnable and able to exploit the fact a missile can shoot into or out of a building.

In deployment I made my first mistake, and chose table sides and not to go first. Secondly, I naively placed my two most valuable, on-table deployed units (Wallace and the Cameronian), behind a building. Together. James first action was to move his Zero down the table to the opposite side of the building. My confidence in their positioning turned to dismay when he announced the Cameronian was within his ZoC and he was marking it for a missile launch. But wait... he's out of LoF... how can this happen?! This seems unfair?!

Cameronians do not last against AP/EXP missiles when that lovely big building they're standing behind counts for nothing at all. I may as well have stood him out in the open for all the good it did. Insult turned to actual injury, as the blast template of the missile also covered the base of Wallace who died even more quickly and ignominiously than the Cameronian.

My game plan was starting to collapse, it was turn one, and James had spent four orders.

Over the course of the next turn and half, I watched each and everyone of my key units die to indirect missile shots without generating an ARO in return. I took a couple of Nomads down from HMG shots, but otherwise it felt more like a game of 40k as the reactive turn was more a case of me rolling and failing ARM rolls with no other response possible.

A late flank move by Van Zant and the Para took down the Zero menacing my right flank with his target marking, but it was too little too late. I was shot off the board by a combination of indirect fire and Morlock Chainrifles.

Did I take defeat well? Probably not. A combination of feeling utterly helpless in the face of technological supremacy; and having to endure 'unhelpful' spectators (I'm being very diplomatic there), meant I had little chance to take in what was happening and formulate a coherent response. When a single order is interrupted repeatedly by inconsiderate bystanders, it's not that easy to get your head round what is actually happening and why. If I'm honest it wasn't until I fired up the Wiki that I fully understood the sequence of orders and rules involved. But having people butt in with questions about formulating a 40k Daemon list enhances anyone's game of Infinity.

A poor workman blames his tools, "It's you, not your list" etc... bullshit. I'm going to blame everything else but myself because guided missiles are broken and unsporting.

I joke. But the reasons behind my experience demonstrate how deep Infinity is, tactically.

It's a list I wouldn't replicate ever again. I had four camo markers in the whole list - I usually run 9-11 of them. Against missiles, for an Ariadnan player, camo is my greatest defence. It gives me a measure of protection short of suicidal units going for discover rolls first. I do think my list was pretty poor at 300pts - that was born from arrogance I could beat him again, and a desire to try something new. No Assault Pack. No Vet Kazak. No snipers. Little camo.

Additionally I put both my minelayer Chasseurs together on one objective in a vain attempt to lock it down with mines - it simply made them vulnerable to templates and being overrun by Morlocks. In retrospect the ability to control a greater area of the board with camo tokens was not something I exploited properly.

Wallace and a Cameronian in the same list. I'm not sure this works the way I played it... if at all? Wallace is actually pretty fragile for a high-point model, and he can't tank hits the way you'd like -  I see his place in a link team for ablative wounds and guaranteed smoke. But I put all my eggs in one 6-4 basket expecting to use smoke to protect them both before hitting hard into James' flank. Being suckerpunched before they'd even taken an order highlighted the importance of not focusing this threat into one corner of the DZ. I made it far to easy for him to wipe out my speartip.

But I digress.

Guided missiles on the face of it sound, and yes they are, absolutely awful. Would the game of Infinity be better without them? In my opinion, yes. Are they broken and auto-win-button units? No... and that's a conclusion I wouldn't have immediately agreed with.

It was a simply a case of a bad tempered player, with an iffy list, failing to have a plan to deal with them. But as a learner player hungry to absorb as much of this game as I can, I can't emphasise the importance of having A Plan. Not just a A Plan to Win. But A Plan for a multitude of different threats and situations. Infinity swings so far between defeat and victory, within just one turn, you can't afford to be fixated on a single path to victory.

Plans and flexibility aside, GML is order intensive. So spreading out my units would have forced James into expending more orders into moving and marking. As it was I made it easy for him to maximise his shooting from as few orders as possible.

Missiles use templates. Bunching troops behind cover simply provides a nice neat target to drop a missile onto. Hiding in cover, with no recourse to an ARO additionally allows the targetter to get within his ZoC unopposed. Something, anything, with a free LoF down the routes those units need to advance shuts them down without firing a shot.

And of course there was his DZ encamped remote and hacker. Two targets. Only one needs to be removed. Sit back and try and soak up the shooting at your peril. I had Van Zant and an HMG model capable of at making some kind of attempt on their lives... something I failed to utilise by sticking to a pre-game plan of using him to deny an objective carrying unit in James own DZ.

Would I play against a GML list differently next time? Most certainly. I think even the potential to face one again would be factored into future lists regardless of whether they're used. I never clocked on to the importance of the units being used to mark the targets, to this kind of tactic. Had I realised this earlier, the rampaging Intruder would have been Van Zant'd much earlier in the game. Take out the targeting link and the GML-tactic simply falls apart.