Infinity: Back to the Human Sphere.

It was a cold February and I was taking a break from playing Hassassin Bahram and Ramah Task Force and trying out Yu Jing in an escalation campaign where Tai Sheng had been tearing up the opposition. A small local ITS tournament was coming up and I was still debating whether to take my tried and tested Hassassins or leap out of my comfort zone and try my luck the Invincible army, and considering whether to sign up for the St Albans Smackdown which would be my first large Infinity tournament. Then 2020 happened, and that was, as they say, that.

My first faction is Haqqislam, mostly because my wife said she liked the look of them.

Priorities shifted, circumstances changed and Infinity faded into the background for me. I've still been playing other games but my local area has a dearth of Infinity players which necessitated a little more travel to play games. On came 2025 and Ginge (a regular opponent) wanted to try One Page Rules: Grimdark Firefight and I saw the perfect opportunity to dig out the Invincible Army and throw a list together. I had fun in the game, it was quick and brutal which meant we could play 3 matches, you can find the report here. But it wasn't Infinity, and I really miss playing Infinity.. so i'm going to!

What is Infinity?

Infinity, for those of you who are unfamiliar is a Sci-fi skirmish tabletop game published by Corvus Belli. In it you assemble a special ops team for a mission, and try to beat your opponent. The core mechanics are based around opposed rolling where players alternate whose turn it is as in a standard Igougo game, but you can react to whatever the active player does with 'reaction orders'. The game is incredibly lethal with the most heavily armoured and powerful units in a force being able to be killed by the weakest model in an opponents force. Its not very likely granted, but I've seen it happen. And thats from full health to dead in a single go.

The miniatures are amazing having a distinctly manga/anime flavour with distinctive styles for each of the factions, and they are true scale rather than heroic scale making them simultaneously a pleasure and a nightmare to paint.

Whats changed in 5 years?

My last games were under the N3 rules and I had just acquired Operation: Kaldstrom. The current edition is N5. If you are more familiar with Warhammer 40k you will be very used to sweeping changes in the core rules from edition to edition and month to month, keeping up with them as a casual player, and even a committed one is incredibly difficult. This constant rules churn is why I stopped playing 40k entirely. Starting in Rogue Trader and keeping up for 9 whole editions is more than enough for me.

I got all of Red Veil and never finished it. Now is my chance

I was somewhat expecting N5 to have similar sweeping changes. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the current edition is mechanically almost identical to the game I played 5 years ago with changes on the whole being to address some core issues but the majority of them being more quality of life changes to the game. Here is what I have noticed so far?

• Armour rolls have changed to match normal rolls and face to face rolls. In Infinity combat is usually resolved by calculating a target number based upon a models ballistic skill and any modifiers and then rolling one or more D20's. The object is to get equal to or under the number but beat your opponent. with each result cancelling any lower result, and rolling above the target number being a miss or fail depending on exactly what you were doing. Armour rolls in N3 were the opposite, with you having to beat the strength of the weapon applying armour and cover modifiers to the roll. In N5 you now have to roll equal to or under the weapon strength, so all the rolls have the same mechanic.
  
  
• Skills: the change to how skills are formatted is the biggest change I've noticed. In N3 there were a number of skills that required you to know exactly what the rules were, for example, TO Camo meant you deployed as a Camo marker, would allow you to deploy hidden, give your opponent -6 to attack rolls, and give you surprise shot. Now that same skill has been broken up into Camouflage, Mimetism, hidden deployment and surprise shot. This is a massive quality of life change letting you see exactly what a unit can do without having to look through the special skills section of the rulebook to know what it does. It also provides much greater granularity in unit abilities.
  
  
• Fireteams: You can usually only activate 1 model at a time in infinity. Fireteams give you the ability to form units of up to 5 models and have them move around the battlefield together. In addition to that Fireteams also enjoy certain bonuses to shooting. In N3 the bonuses were significant which put you at a disadvantage if you didn't have any of your own. They were also only available to Sectorials, which are variant faction lists with more restricted troop selections. That pushed a lot of players away from the vanilla factions into Sectorials. In N5 the bonuses have been reigned in significantly and fireteams are now available, in a limited fashion, to the base faction lists putting them on more of an even footing, additionally it's no longer a massive disadvantage to not have them.
  

Those are the most significant changes, but there are lots more. With the changes to how special skills are formatted a lot of unit profiles are very different. Other units have lost skills or had them changed, Points costs have been altered, equipment lost, in many cases for the better (Hello Ghazi Muttawi'ah). There are a few new pieces of equipment like the Disco Baller. There are many more I'm sure but my key takeaway after reading through the N5 rulebook is that it is still the same game with the same core mechanics.

A Couple of these I can still use, the others I will take off their bases and think of something to do with them.

Its not all sunshine and roses. There are quite a few profiles that no longer exist. Celestial Guards have lost a lot of their weapon options and Adil Mehmuts Dire Foes profile is obsolete. This isn't nearly as bad as you might think, Infinity explicitly allows you to use proxies, so they are still usable, there are just no official rules for some of the pieces.

I could go on, but I'm still catching up with everything.

What next?

I've been running a few demo games with Red Veil as the basis and I've dug out all my miniatures from storage. I've also been in contact with a couple of my former opponents in Milton Keynes. A lot of people have the Trench Crusade bug but i'm hoping to build a small group of people who play initially and work from there. 

The incomplete Invincible Army pretty much how I left them. Bixie and the Mowang are the new additions I decided to spoil myself with.

In the meantime I have a more pressing issue. I don't know exactly which faction I would like to play as I get used to the game again. I'm leaning towards Invincible army which is what I had started 5 years ago, Vanilla Yu Jing is also an option, or even imperial service. I could pick up the Haqqislam again since I have the most experience with them historically.

Alternatively I could dive into one of the non aligned factions like White company or Dashat. I have quite a few mercenaries of all stripes, plus of course the Outrage characters. I also have a few PanO and the original JSA pack along with a horde of Ninjas and Oniwaban I can use.

JSA, Scarface and the Outrage squad. the JSA I acquired with some terrain, and the others I liked the miniatures.

While I decide I'm going to concentrate on getting the Red Veil, Beyond Red Veil and Defiant Truth miniatures all finished but I went a bit overboard in 2018/19 so I have a LOT of things to paint.

In addition to miniatures I have to finish fixing my Antenocitis Workshop terrain. It suffered a lot of wear and tear and has been in storage for years now. I was quite upset when they closed as they had a good number of things that I was interested in getting. On the other hand, there are plenty of other places to buy terrain, and even better, I will scratch build my own. I've already started building up enough for a Cyberpunk 2020 campaign and it would make a fantastic, if a bit gritty, Infinity board. 

Some terrain that definitely needs fixing, windows have popped out and accessories have broken.

You could say I have a lot to do.

Did I miss any really major rules changes? 

What should I look out for in N5 thats different from N3?
Which faction would you play if you were starting again?

Let me know.

Next time:

The Centauri Republic face off against the Vree Conglomerate in a Babylon 5 A Call to Arms report

If you like what I do, please consider supporting me on Patreon or buy me a nice cup of Coffee.

Thanks for reading, and I will see you next time.

Infinity logo is the property of Corvus Belli S.L.
Metal miniatures by Corvus Belli,
Terrain by Antenocitis Workshop, Corvus Belli or scratchbuilt by me.
Miniatures painted by me.
Photography by me.