Officer Training School - What Tips I'd Give Myself If I Were Starting Playing Now

OFFICER TRAINING SCHOOL - What Tips I'd Give Myself I Were Starting Playing Now

In this series I'll be focusing on subjects that are specially geared towards new players starting with Ramah Taskforce.

 

The Infinity community is awesome. One of the many ways that this awesomeness comes out, is the amount of geared-towards-new-players material that's available online... And it's there for a good reason! Infinity can be an intimidating game to get into, even though it's also terrificly addictive once you start to get the hang of it!

While I don't think there's too much new or exciting that I can add when it comes to tips for new players, I thought it might not hurt to pen down some of the things I would like to say to myself if I could send a message back in time to when I was just getting started with Infinity either... Most of the readers of this blog have probably found the excellent Infinity resources available online (if you haven't, check out the links on the sidebar!), but it rarely hurts to have more voices be active in the community, so here we go!

Don't Let Yourself Be Discouraged!

Negative voices always seem to carry further and have more impact than the positive ones. When starting Infinity, one of the joys I got to experience was the wondrous discovery process which saw me get excited about most of the models belonging to the Faction I'd chosen to play... But when I went online to research the units, it was common to find multitude of people saying many of them were "too expensive", "too niche" or "hot garbage". Such comments felt very discouraging, and even though I wanted to give all my units a fair shake, it was easy to have my early impressions tainted by the negative stuff I'd read.

 

The truth of the matter is, that Infinity is such an amazingly complex game that really knowing what the various units are capable of takes a great deal of personal experience that many of the naysayers actually very much lack! So go buy the models you feel are cool and give them a spin (or preferably a dozen); find out how they work, what are the situations where they can shine and what are their weaknesses. If you feel like you can't make a unit work, play something else and circle back to the ones you've shelved once you've learned some more! At the end of the day, there are very, very few actually bad units in Infinity (and none in Ramah Taskforce), and the ever changing meta challenges players to always keep exploring and optimizing their ever changing combinations unit choices!

Probability of Success x Impact of Success - Probability of Failure x Impact of Failure - Amount of Resources Spent to Execute = How Good a Play Is

"Is this a good play?", I ask myself dozens of times each game. It would have been helpful to have some kind of guide on how to evaluate such things when I was starting, as most of the time the anwer back then was "I guess I'm about to find out"! Being favored to win a face to face roll doesn't neccessary mean that going for it is the right thing to do, as often the event most likely to occur is "Outcome is Inconclusive", or the success doesn't bring you meaningfully closer to winning the game. As such, I've created the above written guideline for myself for evaluating if executing a play is a good idea!

The Probability of Success is the raw likelyhood of the outcome I'm aiming for coming to pass. Surviving a Shock Mine hit with a Ghulam is unlikely, while shrugging such  hit off with a Maghariba Guard is a pretty safe bet. You can even use the Infinity Dice Calculator to help count the odds for you!

The Impact of Success is one's estamate of the effect pulling what you're attempting off has on the state of the game. Killing an enemy Flashpulse Bot with your Parachutist Nahab merely robs your opponent an Order/a soft ARO piece/a piece of their Repeater network, while killing their Lieutenant will most likely derail atleast their next turn!

The Probability of Failure is just that; how likely things are to not go the way you want them to. Remember that your opponent doesn't neccessarily have to win a face to face roll to succeed - merely surviving can be a tactical victory for them!

The Impact of Failure is basically what you're risking to execute your plan. Using your Ghulam Lieutenant who's out of cover to fire at a lone enemy Sniper in their tower can quickly leave your strike team without it's leader if things go south, while engaging the same sharpshooter with a Shakush firing from Cover is a pretty low risk affair.

The Amount of Resources Spent to Execute refers to what models and how many Orders are involved in making a play. Getting to shoot an important enemy piece out of cover with an advancing Namurr can be great, but if the Orders spent maneuvering for this could have been spent on having a Shihab take medium chance shots at the same target, the latter could have actually been a more optimal play to go for.

Evaluating what the risks and rewards of various plays one might execute are is a skill that improves over time and effort, but it pays to remain aware of the process. It's easy to perform actions that "feel" right in the heat of the moment, and lose sight of the big picture! An example of such a situation might be repeating the same face to face roll again and again in the hopes of obtaining the sought after result, even though your diminishing Order Pool means that the plan the success was part of is no longer valid for this turn, even if you manage to brute force your way into a success in what ever you're attempting to do!

Don't Be Afraid of Your "Opponents"!

It's very human to feel nervous about new people, even more so when you're about to face them in a competitive environment! But fear not! The (very) vast majority of the people I've had the opportunity to play have been wonderful people - you do after all share a common passion, and the Infinity community's gaming culture is one of the best out there - it's really not so much about "playing against someone" as it is about "playing with someone"!

When starting it's also easy to feel like an underdog when facing more experienced players, but don't let that get to you! Unless you've just wagered your house on the result of the game (which you should never do!), there's nothing to lose by... Well losing! There's always the chance you get to claim a sweet victory, and if the (more experienced) opponent ends up defeating you, you've just had an excellent lesson on Infinity, and you should walk away with plenty of food for thought - the nutrition of champions! Which neatly leads us into...

Defeat and Self-Reflection - Parents of Innovation

When a defeat is raw on one's mind, it's easy to blame the dice or an "unfair" unit/interaction for your loss - it's part of our mental safety mechanisms to protect our ego from negative experiences by explainig our failures away after all! But if you truly desire to be great at Infinity, you'll need to learn to rise above such excuses!

I've never had a game I've played with Ramah Taskforce that was in hindsight totally unwinnable. Sure, there have been times when the odds have been fairly heavily against me, and there most certainly have been games where the dice have just said "no", but both these instances have been exceedingly rare, and even in games such as these, there's almost always something I could've improved on when it comes to what I did to effect the end result. As such, it pays to analyze one's games with a fine comb and a hefty amount of objective criticism!

After a game is over (whether it ended in a win, a loss, or a draw), I try to eat someting, relax and let what happened sink in. Then, (often after a good night's sleep), I will mentally go over the game again turn by turn, action and action, decision by decision - but not as a player trying to validate my own actions, but rather as a spectator looking for flaws in both players' game! Sometimes it's neccessary to calculate some odds of successes, re-check some profiles in the Army or rules on the Wiki, and after a while, a scene starts to form; a picture what actually happened! What did I do right, where did I allow my emotions to get the best of me? Were there mistakes that my opponent made that I failed to capitalize on? Did the dice cheat either of us of a deserved result? Are there any patterns that the game reinforces or undermines about the Sectorials or the players involved?

When I'm being brutally honest about the games I've just played, I can almost always find something that I can use to improve my future efforts - whether these innovations originate from my own actions, my opponent's excellent plays and/or the armylists themselves! Sometimes I even conclude that the end result didn't do the game justice - I might have just won a game that I should by all accounts have lost, or the opponent was just able to luck his way out of tough spots and deny me a deserved victory... This just further proves the point that the process is way more important than the result!

The Dice Don't Owe You Anything!

So you've failed your WIP 14 check to activate the all important Console four times in a row already? Guess what; you've still got the same 30% chance to fail the next roll as the each previous four times you tried! Your opponent has rolled several Critical Hits against you, while you yourself haven't gotten any so far? Tough luck, you aren't any more likely to get Crits from here on out as you were before! Your opponent passed their Saves again, and they held their ground, the next Order must surely put them down, right? Wrong; the opponent is happy to see you waste your diminishing resources on forcing a round peg into a square hole! You getting unlucky doesn't bank any good will with the dice - they don't owe you anything!

 

I once remember reading a quote from somewhere that an ancient emperor of Japan said that the dice were one the few things he didn't hold power over, and Infinity players should take this notion to heart! While there is nothing you can do to influence how the dice fall, you are in command of what you're asking of them! If you can avoid rolling alltogether, that's obviously the best case scenario. If you can make a roll an unopposed one, that's fine. Face to face rolls get more risky, and the worse the odds, more likely it is there's going be trouble heading your way!

 

But what to do, when even after minimizing the risks involved, the dice still decide to destroy all your hopes and dreams? Take a breath, calm down, and keep playing. Make smart decisions, fall back on plan B (or a further letter - the whole alphabet is there for you to use!), and keep at it! If the game turns out to be unwinnable, you can always go back afterwards and count the odds of what happened occurring - if the odds where heavily in your favor and there was no way to improve them further, it's really not your fault - if you repeat what you just did ten times and it works nine times out of ten, you just got unlucky and it's time to move on! There's bound to be the time when your opponent rolls badly and you get to outright destroy them in turn...

 

One last note! If you keep falling back to the "dice betrayed me" argument when evaluating you performance too often, the problem might be in the player who's rolling the dice, rather than the dice themselves!

 

It's Not the Sectorial, It's You!

Ramah Taskforce can at times feel an unforgiving Sectorial to play. The reliance on aggressive elite (Light) Infantry pieces and the lack of "trend setting" strategies can leave you feeling very vulnerable. Back in the days I sometimes found myself thinking: "RTF just can't do this" or "RTF just can't respond to that", but fear not! I can say from the bottom of my heart that I've yet to come against an opponent, Sectorial, strategy or Mission that Ramah can't handle with the proper preparation and execution!

The weight thus falls upon the Ramah Taskforce commander to build a list and forge a strategy that can carry them to victory when meticulously executed. I've found this is to be very much a process trial and error, and as one's understanding of the Sectorial, one's personal abilities, and the game itself deepens, the way one plays and builds lists should also evolve. I personally divide my list types into "generations" - when I make profound breakthrough in how I think I can make RTF work, I move on to a new and more effective way of constructing my strike teams! I'm currently working on "fourth genereation" lists, and these days I rarely feel that I start any given game at a distinct disadvantage!

So my tip is this: be fearless in your attemps to improve and innovate! If the RTF's playstyle(s) are something that you can work with, I can promise you that in the long run the Sectorial itself will not let you down! Then again, if you hate aggressive strategies and bold plays, maybe another Faction might prove more fun for you to play!

 

Infinity is Supposed to Be Fun!

At the very end of the day, Infinity is a hobby, and hobbies are supposed to be fun! While it can be fun to obsess over profiles, tweak armylists and prepare for tournaments, it's also easy to get too serious about this stuff, and end up not enjoying what you're doing! If you find this to be the case, take a break, hit the gym, take a walk, read a book, watch a show, or go and sleep! Infinity will still be there when you come back!

If you've like me chosen to play RTF, it can also at times be fun to try someting else just as a palate cleanser! I've just played a couple of games with my Spiral Corps (my first non-Ramah Taskforce N4 games so far!), and doing so felt really refreshing! After those games I've again been more than happy to don the orange and enter the fray Light Shotguns blazing!

 

And that's really it! I sincerely hope you've found my tips to new players to be helpful, or in the very least entertaining!

Until the next time - I wish you the very best in leading the Swift and Deadly Spear of the Haqqislamite Army to Victory!