Countryside Infinity Terrain Guide - Introduction

Infinity is a quite complex game with many different factors interacting and determining failure and success. Most of the discussion and optimisation you can find out there, and also in this blog, circles around units, profiles, lists and game plans, while one major factor of the game, the terrain, is only discussed as a side note. Of course, those things are far easier to assess, to change and to handle, since the terrain most of the time is a one shot, quickly done before the game. Nevertheless, terrain remains a major factor in this game, but coupled with different problems and uncertainties. To help mitigating these problems, I want to give  some guiding based on my experience about most of the topics related to terrain in Infinity. Of course, in such a difficult topic there will be different opinions and insights, so feel free to contact me and discuss things! I am always up to new things and like to change things if necessary! The following topics are planned, divided into different posts:

1. Impact of terrain on the game

2. How to build a reasonable map

3. Terrain rules and their impact

4. Trade-off between rules and reality

5. How to get your map together

1. Impact of terrain on the game

What defines Infinity is the interaction of movement, line of fire and positioning. All of this is shaped by terrain, which determines most of the interactions in form of accessibility, targeting, modifiers and range. While you choose the weapon because of the range, the position mostly chooses which unit you take for the job. With this, terrain is a central point for your game.

Maybe you will question this importance a bit, but you probably know a lot of situations where you are pinned down in your deployment zone by a linked sniper, overwatching most of the map or got overrun by warbands templating your deployment without any chance of shooting them on their way. Of course, you can try to deal with these issues with different list-types, but in the long run, most of list-choices will be denied by the one-sided terrain and the fun will be limited. The two factors you can vary on your map here are the placement of terrain and the density. A third factor may be the type of terrain you are using, but since this is a bit harder to assess, this factor will be discussed in a later part on its own. Issues you can address by the other two factors are:

Long range weapons pin you down completely. Assuming terrain of a good quality (different heights and volumes), too long firelanes are often the source of this issue. By replacing the terrain to break up the long corridors into more smaller ones, not only the long range weapons are weakened, but also other weapons have the option to access them via the new, smaller corridors. Also placing the highest buildings more in the center of the table, while having lower ones in the deployment zones, mitigates this issue. Depending on the general horizontal design, the density/amount of terrain can be a factor here, too. The higher single spots are and if there are no high obstacles around, the more difficult this solution is, since you can simply look over smaller terrain and still have LoF. But if you are worrying about two or three long and empty corridors, the addition of smaller terrain pieces of different sizes (scatter terrain) inside these corridors or between smaller ones may help. This way you create spots to hide on the way, maybe allowing cautious movements and give nice spots to shoot out of cover.

 

A sniper in a too elevated position overwatching empty corridors is not only death to many models.Bildunterschrift hinzufügen

Warbands controlling the game with their templates. This problem often is the total opposite of the previous issue. Once you put too much terrain on the map, creating a really dense table, long range weapons lose their reason and warbands harass every more expensive unit with their templates, trading themselves for higher value. By lowering the density, there is more space to overwatch them on their path. 

Parachutists are not played/AD troops and impersonators are too strong/weak. These three units share their initial zone of action. While parachutists need to deploy on one table edge, impersonators and some AD troops may want to work in the adversary deployment zone. While parachutists don’t really like completely unobscured edges, since they are simply gunned down by everything while deploying, obstacles in deployment zones may boost the potential of units landing there. Both problems can be addressed mainly by the placement of your terrain. Putting something with at least S2-size somewhere on the edges give parachutists a safer opportunity to enter the game. Inside the deployment zones it gets a bit trickier, since overdoing the obstruction here, creates a new problem. But with placing some obstacles there, you are creating interesting choices and things to be considered. Increasing the terrain-density in the deployment zones as the second option, adds more different angles to hide your troops from attacking impersonators.

 

Unobstructed lines can cause serious problems in the deployment zones

Besides those zones around the edges, even in the central zones the connection of density and placement of terrain influences the effectivity of infiltrators in the same way as it works with impersonators in the deployment zone. If there is no place to hide them, they are discovered quickly and never reach their target. But with broken fire lanes and scatter terrain here and there, there are always some spots to hide and to take cover. By choosing the right places for these spots, you may direct some interactions and tune the effectivity. This is also valid when it comes to good and not so good spots to hide your HVT, especially in missions with designated targets or many classified objectives. Speaking about objectives, also the normal objectives like antennas or tech-coffins need to be placed carefully and the game can be directed by the corridors around them. Is there one side overwatching the whole approach to one objective? Or can one antenna be defended quite well from one side with a trooper in suppressive fire?

Everything coming from the south will need to deal with -9 or -12 (mimetism -6 + suppressive fire + cover) on their BS attacks

All these issues can really limit your fun with the game, if you have not agreed with your opponent about the specific situations you want to set up with your map. Since there is barely a practical situation where you pre-define each scenario you play with your opponent in this detail, you need to consider those points while preparing the map. In most cases, everyone wants to play the list he prepared for the mission or to test his new stuff and don’t want to be forced into a certain list-type by the map everytime. Nevertheless, if you would really want to, you could design nearly every interaction on your map by setting up special fire lanes, defining the points where you get cover and where you can’t end your movement and so on. But to be honest: Nobody has the time, the patience and the mental capacity to do this to that extend in such a complex scenario as you find in Infinity. And it is not necessary for most of the situations, if you at least think about some basic issues while setting up the terrain for the next game.