In Search of Wisdom - Exploring Your Options

IN SEARCH OF WISDOM - Exploring Your Options

In this series I reflect on the game of Infinity, as well the place of Ramah Taskforce in it.

 

At it's core, Infinity is a game of decision making. You decide what Faction you want to play, what units you choose to include in your list, what initial game plan you want to follow, how you deploy, what model(s) you leave in Reserve, how do you respond to the Opponent's deployment... And all this before the first actual turn of the game even begins! After that, as the motto of the game goes, it's always your turn, thanks to the amazing ARO mechanic... Before everyhing is said and done, you have made dozens if not hundreds of decisions, and while there are dice rolls involved, usually the player that has made more (impactful) good decisions will win the day! Afterwards, it's time to head back to the drawing board and begin planning anew... Because of all this and more, I wanted to take a look at the decision making processes in Infinity, and offer my humble opinion on what could help us as players get even better at what we do!

Remember that I'm not writing this piece as a psychologist, behevioral scientist or anything like that - just as a student of the game of Infinity... And with that, let our journey begin!

The Stardard Decision Making Process

Someone who's an expert in the way the human brain works could surely express what I'm about to write in a more scientific (not to mention more exact and correct) manner, but how I've come to conseptiolize the situation is as follows. In an average game of Infinity, we end up making so many decisions, that mapping out the all the potential options and their potential effects (not to mention their long term impacts on the game as a whole) would require an immense amount of cognitive power. Using all this energy to process simple decisions isn't really viable, because as the game goes on, the players will get more and more tired, and if one of them has spent all their cognitive capital on less-than-important decisions, they won't have enough juice left in them to perform optimally when it truly counts. As such, in practise it's neccessary to narrow down the list of options to the realistically useful ones, lest you and your Opponent spend all the afternoon waiting on the decision about where your Nasmat wants to end up after helping fix up that Shihab! So, the decision making process in the field might end up looking something like this:

1. Map all the options available.
2. Remove all the options deemed "non-realistic" or "unuseful".
3. Consider the remaining options, pick the best one overall.
4. Execute.

Usually "mapping all the options available" doesn't in reality mean taking your time going through every single model you could use an Order on in the active turn for example, but rather considering the potential ways one can achieve a given objective they've set themselves (be that the destruction of a particular foe, the triggering of a Mission scoring parameter, or reviving an unconcious model, just to name a few). If everything goes well, a veteran player will quicly consider their best options and then put themselves to the task of executing their play, but if the process of "considering the best options" is flawed, we may have identified something that we can indeed improve on.

The Available Options vs The Perceived Options

As a player gains more experience, and a type of "muscle memory" on what one can expect from particular tactical situations or interactions sets in, the phases 1. and 2. of the above can start to fuse together - rather than first thinking of all the possibilities and then ruling out the obviously unusable ones, a veteran player may instead focus on the most viable options from the get go, thus conserving their calculating power for later in the game. This is one of the telltale signs that sets a rookie and an experienced player apart, so it's obviously something to strive for! But even so...

Always falling back to the same solutions to the commonly faced situations can lead to problems however. First, it makes you predictable as a player. If the Opponent knows that you will usually tend to solve problems in a particular way, they may partially already know what you're planning to do, and this will give them an important advantage over you! But what to me is even worse, defaulting to the same well trodden paths to a tactical solution may also mean that there's actually a better play still out there, but because you've discarded the particular tactic or some of it's prerequisites, you actually never get to innovate this situationally brilliat solution!

This also leads to one of my few critiques of the Infinity community - the conversation culture revolving around tactics and especially units. Whether this dialogue takes place on the official forums or on the many Discord servers and what-nots, there seems to be an unconstructive tendency for the "veteran players" to matter-of-factly state their views as unassailable truths, and I feel that such behavior has the potential to stifle or atleast slow down innovation and evolution in the (larger or smaller) meta. When somebody voices an unorthodox unit or profile pick, or starts to brainstorm a new outlandish tactical consept, usually somebody comes in to tell them "to stop what ever they're thinking of doing, and simply apply the well proven thing X".

If (whether because of personal oversight or outside pressure) a player ends up picking their ingame actions from their perceived tactical options, instead of their actually available ones, we will have a suboptimal end result. I personally believe that while a player working with just the perceived options can be very good at Infinity, they're never going to be truly great!

So You Wanna Be a Trailblazer, Huh?

If one makes the commitment that they wish to challenge their decision making process and try and find out-of-the-box solutions to improve their game, where might one start? I can't provide you with an exhaustive list, but here are some of things that I've personally found helpful:

• Refer to the (Truly) Wise. There are genuinely very smart and innovative people in the Infinity community that you can and should learn from. Most of the great players I've come across have helped me improve in some areas of the game, while there are also some truly savant level innovators like Robert Shepherd out there, whose every word you should heed carefully!
• 
  Read the Rules, Again. Sometimes when I have downtime to invest in Infinity, I just comb through the wiki and/or the Army, and reread the various rules concerning my units and the ingame challenges I've recently faced. Then, bit by bit, I process what I'm reading and try to find tactical applications to the various clausures, bonuses and combinations that I find. "Bâtard has Sensor, so he can easily out Camouflaged models in his immediate vicinity. Oh, Sensor also grants a +6 mod to Discover Rolls... So Bâtard is great at reactive turn Discovers too, that's interesting... He can even unmask a Mimestim (-3) Camouflaged model in Cover on 13s while withing 32'' of them... And you can Discover-Discover on the active turn - so up to two revealed models on a single Order, now we're talking!"
  
• Consider ALL the Available Tactical Options. While it is immensely draining, one way to try and improve one's understanding of the available choices is at times to truly consider every single option on the table, no matter how ridiculous they may at first feel. Then map out the effects of the "silly" options you may have, and see if any of these paths leads to a unexpectedly useful outcome for you! This consideration doesn't always have to be made in the heat of an actual game though - sometimes mathing out the various scenarios alone on the sofa will do just fine!
• Try Out All the Units, Several Times Over. This one is surely more realistic when playing a Sectorial than when playing a so-called Vanilla Faction... As I've mentioned in a previous article, theorizing your way to a sound conclusion on the usefulness of a unit/profile is almost impossible... While this is obviously not the case with all the Factions, I can proudly say from personal experience that every single unit in Ramah Taskforce is usable, and every single one of them can be situationally stellar. There are several units that I did not think much of, and there are certainly ones I wouldn't have played (because me and/or the internet thought of them as redundant or plain bad), had I not made the firm decision to play every single unit enough to write an article about them! Oh what gems I would have missed...
  

I feel that the important thing to realise about trying out new and unorthodox solutions is that most of the time they won't work out - there is a reason the tactics you are trying aren't widely used... If you find yourself innovating new plays that advance the game day in and day out, stop playing Infinity and start inventing a cure for the HIV or making step by step plans on how to achieve world peace!

The World of Options Expanded

The Infinity meta is in a constant state of flux. The ITS Missions get updated every year, new seasonal special rules make life easier or harder for certain trooops, and CB peridiocally releases new units and/or Factions, not to mention FAQs and rules updates. The meta responds to not only these "given changes" but also to the perception of the tactics that are seen as strong by adapting to counter them. If you don't want to be the one who clings to the old ways until changes in gameplay are forced upon them the hard way, it may be time to start challenging your decision making process!

 

Obviously the response to the changing metagame and the goal of self improvement should not be to endlessly obsess over your ingame choices in a way that paralyses the gameplay - or worse still - makes playing unenjoyable! It should be totally fine to throw down the list you're most familiar with and aim at your usual plays when you feel like just relaxing after a long day! Challenging yourself should ideally be saved for the times when you have the energy and the ambition to invest in studying Infinity, and if such times are rare or non-existent, you're in no way a worse person for it!

When I set myself the task of learning the ins and outs of every single unit in RTF, I already new I'd be trodding a path less travelled. My original vision was to go as far as the Sectorial could take me, but what I found was something even more: I discovered that the Faction would go as far as I could take them instead! So the weight fell upon me to make innovative use of the rich and versatile pieces that Ramah Taskforce is home to, and so far I've been having such a blast!

Over time my repertoir of potentia choices, whether those be unit picks, game plans or tactical choices has expanded drastically. Much is thanks to simply gaining experience "in the old fashioned way", but a fair share of these new options have been learned through a deliberate process. These days when I play new Opponents I often hear "oh unit X, cool" or "I don't really see that used alot", and after the game many of these players seem surprised at some of the things RTF was able to do. Sometimes I even manage to surprise one of my closest buddies with a new trick, and that feels pretty great!

The moral of the story from where I stand is this: learn to distinguish between your options and your perceived options, and you're on the right track. Don't let yourself be discouraged by someone who thinks they know better. If you fail at what you're trying to do, that's totally okay - it's just a game, and you've just bagged some important experience! It's not about the result, it's the process that counts!

Out of Options... For Now!

I'm not ashamed to confess that I was hesitant to write this article at this time - while I fully stand behind the thoughts I've presented here, I wonder if I could have argued them better if I'd waited on this one a few months longer... Then again, this blog is not supposed be the absolute truth when it comes to playing Infinity, nor do I hold any infallible position of authority. What I'm hoping is that this piece causes some of it's readers to think on the topics I've covered here, and thus helps stir up some conversation - and who knows; some of you may even find ways to improve your game afterwards!

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