From the Archives 2

With all going well at my recent nuptials, I'm now enjoying the delights of Bali on Honeymoon. It's a tough gig, I can tell you. I didn't bring any hobby materials and the latest issue of WS&S didn't arrive before I left, but I've now had chance to catch up on the few weeks' blogs.

Today, I bring you the fruits of another rummage through the archives: Infinity by Corvus Belli.

I got really into Infinity when it first came out, struck by the anime stylings and dynamic poses. Despite its premium price point, I built up a fair collection of PanOc and had a small dabble in Haqqislam and Nomads. The Nomads, never even came close to getting paint on them and were recently shifted to fund other projects, the Haqqislam may well go next.

Here we've got some early PanOc: Fusiliers from the starter set, a heavily armoured ORC trooper and one of my favourite sculpts, the medic on the left, calling in a medevac.

I also did quite a few conversions, more than I tend to do these days, as when I played there was only or or two variants of each troop type available: I preferred not to proxy. Here we have a simple weapon swap to give an Akalis a much nastier boarding shotgun rather than combi-rifle (sourced from a Void weapon pack) and on the right, an Akalis hacker. I was quite good at cycling the spare weapons around to other models to minimise wastage - the Akalis HMG went onto a converted Nisse scout long before the official sculpt was available.

Infinity as a system was really fun it is early days, I liked that it was human vs human vs human, though each faction was pretty similar for a couple of years - they seem much more diverse with more recent releases. The 'ARO' reaction system worked really well, allowing basically unlimited reactions to movements within line of sight, resolved by a face-to-face roll. While it sounds brutal, the fact infinity used D20 mean the aggressor had a chance and there were plenty of tricks to avoid reactions, like therm-optic camouflage and smoke grenades.

Infinity had a simple force selection system but it did allow some game-breaking lists: Gharak spotted that he could engineer a Yu Jing force with six missile launchers (3 support weapons usually being the maximum at 300 points and missile launchers pretty rare). Admittedly carried by conscripts, but he only needed one to hit to do some serious damage. So I brought a force which deployed nothing on the table: Them-optic camouflage and drop troops abound. Including a camouflaged TAG (mecha).

Last up, another ORC trooper and one of the extremely cute PanOc Dronebots - it's cute curves hiding the fact it brings an HMG to the party. I think most of the drone sculpts are ace.

The iffy lists, the ever-increasing complexity and the constant addition of new special rules became tiresome for me, as did what I saw as early of power creep with the alien factions out an end to my Infinity gaming. Oh and I moved away to another area for a new job, which meant I didn't have a group in the area. I'd have preferred they kept a streamlined system with special rules to a minimum, but I think the economics of the hobby mean Corvus Belli need to keep pushing out new shinies and cool rules for them.

I still keep an eye on the amazing rate of new releases and still think about half the sculpts are awesome, some don't quite work and a few are downright ugly. But it's unlikely I'll get another game unless Gharak fancies an old school one: I suspect my old PanOc are likely to be quite underpowered these days!