Infinity - Secondary Unit Roles

Welcome to the second part of my series about list building in Infinity.

In part one I wrote about the primary roles that I tend to build lists around. If you haven't read it then I recommend that you go take a look now as I'll be referencing it quite a bit.

There are clearly many units that don't fit into the roles I've previously described, so this time I'll be talking about secondary roles which should cover most of the outstanding units. Understanding these roles and knowing why you are taking a particular unit can be very helpful for making a cohesive and competent force. Not only that but it can help you determine weaknesses in your opponent's armies too.

Once again there is a disclaimer: These aren't hard and fast rules and many units can fit into multiple roles or may not appear to fit any - but this is good place to start. All examples are assuming a 300 point army built for ITS missions.

Please enjoy some pictures of March's releases from Corvus Belli: Does anyone else find the cactus weirdly cute?

The Great Banner Search

With the one year anniversary of Lead Rising coming up in the next couple of days I think it's finally time to spruce the place up a bit.

I'm looking to commission a banner for the blog. There are a great many talented artists who are also wargamers so I figured where else would I turn to other than the communities I'm a part of?

The banner must include the name of the blog and ought to take aspects from the gritty world of the Realms of Chaos and the sleek, futuristic style of Infinity. Think gruesomely-mutated beastman squaring off against high-tech power armour soldier.

If you'd like to know more, or are interested in working on this, then please let me know by PM, Comment or Email (west.herts@gmail.com). I'll leave this open for a couple of weeks, or until I've made a decision, whichever comes first!


Secondly, as you may have already noticed, I've got a new look for the blog. The old design was only meant to be a place-holder and really was around for far too long.

Hopefully the new look will be easier to read and more pleasant to look at. This isn't likely to be the last change and you may catch me tinkering with the settings over the next few days so don't worry if things change again suddenly! Please do let me know if you experience issues viewing any of the pages now or something doesn't appear to be displaying correctly.

Infinity - Primary Unit Roles

List building in Infinity is hard. The mantra of "it's not your list, it's you" has gone up in smoke and, given the new 2015 scenarios, it's unlikely to make a comeback. For ITS (Infinity Tournament System) events especially, list building is an important part of playing the game.

A solid list won't win the game by itself, but it helps to have a solid foundation to build on.

The good internal balance of Infinity and lack of combo-based gameplay means that it's hard to just make an army by discounting 'underpowered' units, spamming the best thing or building around obvious/deliberate combinations of profiles. There aren't really any archetypal lists for most factions and the idea of net-listing hasn't made its way into the game yet.

On the forums we've seen a lot of new players who are confused about what makes a cohesive force and tend to make (understandable) mistakes when shaping their armies. So I'm planning for this to be the first of a three part series, aimed at newer players, about list building for competitive games of Infinity.

The inspiration for these articles came from these posts on CritsKillPeople - so go have a read about Unit Roles & Misunderstood Roles.

You can find part two of the guide here.

Please enjoy some pics of new releases from Corvus Belli. Nazarova Twins: Don't the old mono-bikes seem so quaint now?

Infinity Weekender II - Spring Challenge

The second part of my Infinity Weekender was the Spring Challenge tournament in Exeter. I travelled down with Stuart (Fathi Amirmoez), Robin (i0003) and John - who were all also at my event yesterday!

I've got to admit, I almost didn't go to this event. We'd stayed up fairly late playing the X-Com board game and One Night Ultimate Werewolf, which meant I was somewhat lacking in sleep and feeling rough in the morning. But I dragged myself out of bed and piled into the car (cheers Robin for driving us!) - although I sleepily forgot my templates, army lists and rulebook. Oops!

Much to my surprise, this thirteen man tournament - my first ITS event of the year - actually went pretty well!

New Aquila Guard renders released this weekend - with what looks like a shoulder-mounted Panzerfaust?!

Infinity Weekender I - BIG Tournament

This Saturday was a big day for me as it was the first Infinity tournament held in Bristol and was the capstone on our escalation league. Ten Competitors showed up for a 200 points ITS event at Bristol Independent Gaming, all hunting for fame, glory and riches. Or at least some new toy soldiers and a certificate!

The prizes were from a pair of Tournament Packs, plus the obligatory wooden spoon, and were distributed as follows:

• 1st Place: 3 blister packs and a patch
• 2nd Place: 2 blister packs and a patch
• 3rd Place: 1 blister pack and a patch
• Last Place: Wooden Spoon (granting discounted entry to the next event!)
• Raffle Prize: Armand "Le Muet" - Freelance Killer

Yep, First place was not going to be getting the limited edition mini. This was deliberately done because the event was going to be host to a mix of very new and very experienced players. I wanted to keep some excitement going right through to the end of the event as anybody had the chance of snagging a cool prize without having to worry about their score.

One thing that I didn't know at the time though was that the ITS Winners Pack (with Le Muet in it) also had a patch and badge stating "ITS Winner 2015 Season" on it. If I had known then I would have removed them and given them to first place also. Lesson learnt for any future events.

Not a bad prize pool for a £9 event I think!

My Hopes for Warhammer 9th

As I'm sure many of you are aware, the Warhammer world has been exploded. Pretty dramatically at that. In what has been a fairly exciting six months, the fantasy world that many of us have grown up with has finally been pushed over the brink. Lizardmen have absconded in their pyramid-spaceships, Skaven have got fed up and left, the Estalians have been wiped out and all the elves are best buddies again (kind of).

What comes next is anybodies guess.

There are various rumours whizzing around of self contained chunks of land contained in warp-protecting bubbles that occasionally crash into each other and spawn conflict, complete reboots of the setting with a new genesis or even the survivors of the forces of good sheltering in a haven while chaos marauds all around. (I don't think I've ever written the word "marauds" before, and it looks really weird for some reason!)

I'd like to tell you what I'm hoping for though. A return to the Realms of Chaos.

Boom! - Image taken from RareWallpapers

Oldhammer Warband Creator

Well, I haven't had much time for painting, but at least I've managed to get something gaming related done.

Now, like many of you I'm sure, I tend to daydream and plot what projects to work on next and what to paint up or collect in the future, and one of the driving factors behind my purchases are chaos warbands. I was also concerned that my, completely amateur, programming skills were getting rather rusty, so what better project could there be than making a warband generator for WFRP3?

My goal was that the program should create a warband with the click of a button and that it should have a number of settings to allow you to customise the output. It should follow the rules laid out in Slaves to Darkness and Lost and the Damned as closely as possible.

The project was completed in an Excel workbook with lots of VBA and some tables carefully copied from the source books. There is a lot more I could do to work on it, but I've decided it's stable enough to release into the wild for now - although there's always the temptation to just keep adding little features forever!

Please note that for it to work, the file will need to be downloaded and macros will need to be enabled.

You can find the Download Link here.
(Now on it's own page!)

A sample output using the Lost and the Damned rules