"Infinity 3.0" Topic

Anybody on here playing Infinity – ant version?

I plan on picking up the Operation Icestorm starter box if that counts.

Got into it this past spring – solid game though we haven't tried N3 yet.

Just got the new rulebook, I will be reading and dusting off my Aleph.

I have the 2nd ed and the new Operation Icestorm. Though I haven't played it yet (I am busy painting miniatures) I don't see big changes from 2nd to 3rd edition.

There are some big changes from 2nd to 3rd from what I can tell. One is that you get an ARO now when you are shot by troops that are in camo.

Plus they got rid of the Exrah for the Combined Army.

I'll probably be sticking with 2nd edition. I like the way it plays, I've had tons of enjoyable games with it and see no reason to switch. Plus the Exrah are some of my favourite troops in the combined army.

TMP link

Got the N3 PDF when it was posted, haven't gotten a chance to play a game yet.

There are MAJOR changes between N2 and N3. Hacking and close combat now act like shooting. Different weapons/Martial Arts skills or programs have different rates of fire, different impact strengths, different final effects.

The point of the 3rd edition was to make a better game of Infinity. So all the weird interactions have been standardized across the game. All the effects have been standardized into various states, and the weapons cause one or more states.

You almost always get to react, even to a sniper shooting you while in a camo'd state. (There are a limited number of weapons with a trait that disallows reactions other than turn-to-face)

I'm also a bit bent about the loss of the Exrah, but when the models are the worst sellers in the entire Infinity range and are absolute murder on the molds, those designs were likely to be redone, anyway.

I still want to get a Caskuda drop-bug and the Iskaller, but the Vector Operator and Void Operator don't look like they're from the same faction, let alone the same species. So between the lack of cohesive appearance, -poor sales, and short mold-life, I do understand that something needed to happen.

"The point of the 3rd edition was to make a better game of Infinity. So all the weird interactions have been standardized across the game. All the effects have been standardized into various states, and the weapons cause one or more states."

The point of any subsequent edition is to sell more stuff. That is almost always the point. It isn't a bad point, companies need to do it. Sometimes there is a version that is pretty badly broken and for tournament based games you need new editions because people figure out where the old one was broken, and any game like that has places where it will be broken.

The "weird" interactions were one of the big appeals of Infinity to me. The game seemed pretty realistic.

If there is a guy you can't see and he shoots at you, you aren't going to be able to react to him. To me that isn't weird, that is realistic.

Just like close combat. Some one has an assault rifle and you come at them with a knife? There is a decent chance you aren't going to make it.

That is another thing I liked about infinity, in our games close combat almost never happened. It wasn't worth it.

I like the Exrah. I'm going to the shop tomorrow to get all fo the Exrah models they have.

I really like 1st/2nd edition and don't see any reason to change them. I'll keep playing with those rules.

Going to play once the books get here to Finland. At a glance (to the PDF version) it seems to represent an improvment over the previous editions.

I thought so too, but I've never played so I trust Scott's judgement that the old version was just fine the way it was. We're still going to use the new rules here simply because we are all getting into it at the same time.

While I have some issues with the second edition, it's a fine game.

Looking at third edition, my two biggest issues have been addressed.

My first issue was that CC was too risky to enter, there was no reason to EVER put a ninja into close combat because they had better odds of killing a model if they shot it from ~4" away instead of charging into close combat and ganking someone from behind. In addition, CC skills and weapons were expensive for what lethality they provided. That's been completely redone, so that now CC is about as deadly as shooting (and there are now explicitly silent attacks that disallow most reactions). Getting to CC is still dangerous. But you actually have a chance of killing when you get there, now.

My second issue was that there wasn't a real reason to take hackers (or engineers, doctors, etc) unless your scenario demanded specialists. Hackers now do more stuff, have different programs loaded into their hacking devices, and are generally nowhere near as expensive as they used to be. Engineers are a bit better, as they can now deactivate mines in addition to fixing stuff (and there's a lot of stuff to fix). Doctors and paramedics got a bit weird, as the medikit now has a ranged "heal" ability.

But now the standard scenarios in the book provide reasons for taking hackers, doctors, engineers, etc, in your list.

The new rules also brought some scenery guidelines, as well as rules for destroying scenery (weapons with the "Anti-Material" trait).

I need to look again, but I think the only thing CB didn't include was my usual suggestion about the order of operations for arranging a game: Choose faction, choose mission, build table, then choose list, in that order.

The fact that providing a FAQ is CB's "maximum priority" before I have the book I preordered almost two months back doesn't inspire total confidence in the high quality of the rules. Tho it's hardly the first time in miniature gaming history this kind of move is called for.

Since item #1 on the FAQ is likely to be "what happened to [unit name]" when the answer is "it's in Human Sphere" or "it's in Campaign: Paradiso," well, some level of FAQ/rules wiki would be nice. Not to mention that the intention of N3 is to be completely compatible with Human Sphere and Paradiso, so there will need to be some FAQing to define how all the new status effects introduced in N3 interact with the rules in HS and C:P.

You know, I should probably download the N2 rules wiki, unless Pictors already has a copy of it? I already have an offline copy of Army 4…

Well, turns out FAQ wasn't among maximum priority items after all, they were referring to various army lists and the consolidation of rules introduced in Human Sphere and Paradiso only.