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Hello,
i'm pretty new to the game, as a bunch or us recently started playing, attracted by the models and the apparent balance of the game.
However..... link teams, perhaps I'm missing something but I don't see how these are balanced at all?

The game balence is often discussed in terms of 'it's how you play, not the figures you bring to table, all units are well balenced' and this is much of what attracted us to the game.
And, link teams are described as balanced in sectorial armies as they don't have acces to some of the good units.

Surly those two comments are mutually exclusive? If there are no power units, what does it matter if your choice is restricted? How can it be considered ballenced when one player can move 4 figures 24" with only three actions, while his opponent has to use 12 orders to do the same thing?

I know the title mentioned Myrmidons and I've not actually talked about them yet, but that was because they were the particular horror that really highlighted this issue! If used well, you have a four man unit that behaves as a single figure (more or less) but has -9 to be shot in cover and an ARO of burst 8 at +3bs!
I'm sure that is not unbeatable if using the right figures, but if comes down to combo vs combo and paper rock scissors to win, then where is the balence?

Don't mean to sound like I hate the game, have been really enjoying it, and lots of aspects are great (except the rule book), does anyone think that I'm missing something really obvious?

Use flamers and mines more . Spam chains . Out range the myrmidons , their links will be full of chains .
As far as the the link vs no link balance goes . There is balance . I can have a link in my caledonian sectorial , but I have no access to ton of good units that a vanila list has. A MRRF can get flamers and mines, I don't get , but they on the other hand have no access to my Cameronians , ultra cheap galwagians or Uxia .
The vanials are not weaker then the sectorials , the ability to cherry pick what ever you want is a very powerful one .

How are you getting hit by Burst 8 in ARO? The only way is that you are in LoF of every member of the link team on your active turn, which would be just as bad if they weren't a link team.

I'm in no way an experienced player, but I would suggest that you are not approaching the problem in the most tactically sound way. There are no 'hard counters' like in 40K, where if opponent X takes ABC then you need to take DEF, a regular grunt, used correctly, can be just as much of a threat as an expensive well armed combat monster of a mini.

When dealing with link teams, you want to maneuver yourself so that either:
a) you can take out members without getting any AROs back
b) if you can't do that, you limit the number of models that can ARO you.

Once you start picking apart the link team, it will quickly dwindle in effectiveness and begin to order-starve your opponent. If you get the opportunity, kill the link leader, as that will break the link and the opponent has to wait for the next ACTIVE turn to be able to re-link the team (which gets rid of the nasty bonuses).

As a side not, you appear to be calculating the link bonuses wrong. you don't get the +3BS unless the link team is 5 members strong (you said it was 4 members)

Yes, balance, really.

It's not that Sectorials 'don't have acces to some of the good units', they don't have access to as wide a variety of units.

For example Nomad's Bakunin army get no MSV2 troops and only one drop troop while Corregidor have restricted access to camo, infiltrators or smoke.


Taking your specific examples - yes a Myrmidon link can move 24" with three Orders, but to do that they would need to be totally out of sight or they would be taking lots of unopposed reaction shots. Don't forget that it's only the link leader that gets to shoot in the active turn - react by shooting one of the other models and the link player has the option of either:

A. Shoot with the link leader and let the other shot at models get shot for 'free'.
B. Dodge with the whole team which means no shooting and the targeted models might still get hit.

The Enomotarchos skill (which lets multiple links happen in Steel Phalanx) is capped at four models so as mentioned above they never get the BS bonus.

EDIT - are you one of Bryan's group of Infinity players in Salisbury?

 Inflatable love badger wrote:
If there are no power units, what does it matter if your choice is restricted?

Well balanced doesn't mean all "units are equal", "every list will work" nor "you can use any tactic". As much as people like to say "It's not your list, it's you", it is entirely possible to write duff lists.

But you won't ever find a list that another decent list hasn't got a chance against, nor a (good) list where the player has spammed one unit because "it's the best". About the only time you do see a heap of the same models is when it's for bulking up a link team.

What sectorials tend to do is restrict the range of viable tactics and the available synergistic combinations. These may not be major disadvantages in the light of the game balance, but link teams aren't much of an advantage against an opponent who understands how to deal with them either.

~~~~~

Link teams have a few core weaknesses:

- On their active turn, they all have to declare the same order, but other than Dodge, only the Link leader actually carries out the skill. AROing a model other than the link leader forces him to either declare dodge for the whole link or allow a normal roll versus that model.

- Losing the link leader immediately breaks the link. This is of most advantage on the reactive turn (some of the translations only mention the link breaking on the active turn, but the error is addressed in the Infinity wiki, which is considered official. In any case, an unconscious/dead model has no ZoC, which means none of the rest of the link can be in that ZoC which would break the link anyway).

- Links also generally hate template weapons, as it can threaten several of them at once. Myrms particularly dislike it, as it ignores their ODD. (It's also worth noting that fire is a generally good response to Camo or ODD, so bonus points for using a flamethrower).

an ARO of burst 8 at +3bs!

Well, if you're going to walk out in front of four models at the same time, you deserve what you get. Work the angles, take them out one at a time.
It can be particularly easy given a lot of Myrms have chain rifles and will only be able to ARO with a pistol if you can get a bead on them from outside template range.

Also, +3 BS is for a full 5 strong link and Enomotarchos links can't be bigger than 4s.

Myrmidon link teams with combi-rifles on each man cost at least 100 points. If some of them have chain rifles, then they aren't contributing their firepower in anything but a close range shoot out. Where you can slaughter their team with a chain rifle or flamer.

The -6 to hit is a nasty modifier, but it's not too hard to work around. Isolate members of the team with only 1 in LoS at any time if possible, and use high rate of fire weapons like HMGs or Spitfires, and the numbers will likely be on your side.

Alternatively, use a heavy armor unit. Myrmidons can't do jack in a shoot-out against a TAG. Also, ambushes screw them up bad, from camo markers.

Cheers, think we may have got the skills for 3 and 4 size teams the wrong way round! Perhaps it's the inexperience of the game, but it still sounds like, "you need to take x to beat y" And while you'd be daft to walk in front of a b8 ARO, yes, it's effectively a free suppression fire that covers everything in their fire arc, board control seems to key to this game and that seems massive.
Just seems like instead of being a skirmish game with objectives, it's all about dealing with the link team and then seeing what else you can achieve.

Not played in Salisbury, I know one of our guys learned to play in 7th heaven tho?

Will get a few more games in and hopefully find my feet, mighty have buy a few more figs.

3-strong link = +1 Burst.
4-strong = Sixth Sense 2 (can't be surpriised by Combat Camo etc.) and +3 to Discover rolls.
5-strong = +3BS.

You don't need anything special. Just turn a corner very slowly, so you only draw LoS to one guy at a time and murder him with a machine gun, or MSV2 trooper.

There's almost no case where you'd have to face all 4 of their AROs at once.

 Inflatable love badger wrote:
but it still sounds like, "you need to take x to beat y"

Well, yes? There's always going to be a degree of that.

You're taking the idea of "all units are well balanced" rather too literally. If I tell you that a troop with the missile launcher is better for destroying a TAG than one with a rifle, you shouldn't bat an eyelid. But in an infantry vs. infantry shoot-out, the missile launcher's damage is overkill and the rifle's higher rate of fire will help win the fight.

You want there to be such imbalances in a game, because that's where tactics come from.

I'd suggest looking at Extra Credits' "Perfect Imbalance" episode. It's about video games, but much of it applies equally well here.

I also recall reading/hearing/seeing something about the tactics in WWI recently, but I can't recall exactly where. The gist was that up until that point, the old "walking forward in a straight line" technique had worked pretty well for dealing with large open spaces that could hide the enemy. However, "get more riflemen than the enemy and walk forward" isn't a very interesting tactic.
So then the machine gun came along and produced a biggggg imbalance against the "walking forward" tactic... and this kept happening, so by the end of the war, there were flamethrowers, sub machine guns, rifle grenades, highly accurate artillery, the first tanks AND the first anti-tank weapons. Admittedly it was mostly the end of cavalry (although they were very effective in the Hundred Days' Offensive near the end of the war), but the tactics suddenly got a LOT more interesting, trying to turn the odds in your favour.

Then there's things like the first Gulf War - the Americans had recently got GPS working (and it was still very secret), so had the ability to navigate the deserts the Iraqis had assumed were impossible to get bearings in and were therefore a safe front.
That imbalance... well, it lead to some new tactics, but the US commanders stalled long enough that the Iraqi army figured out something was up and redeployed, so the advantage was squandered. Still, GPS in general has changed warfare a lot.

Imbalances, in the right way, are good. Yes, they does mean that you can't just pick a list willy-nilly and expect it to be a good one, but if that were honestly the case, the tactics wouldn't feel like actual combat. Chess, as mentioned by Extra Credits, is very well balanced in the sense the two lists are absolutely equal - but it has absolutely no relation to how one would actually fight.

The point is that only so much of the skill in Infinity is in the list building. You can't expect to (easily) win with any list, but you can't expect any list to always win.

For posts like the one above there should be multiple exalt buttons.

Can't agree with that enough!

Your right that list building is part of tactics, and one that I am fairly poor at, given that I pick on looks rather than effectiveness, efficiency and combo-y-ness!

Your argument is well thought out and compelling, and I agree that fire teams could be seen as the evolution of GPS, to use your metaphor (or simile?), although I would ague their more like the evolution of the Nuke. However, the tactics you describe stem from technical innovation, and standard armies still have the same toys, new tactics can be developed, but balance in your definition appear to come from new toys, not new ways of using old ones.

I suppose I'm arguing against the prevailing opinion and that's fair enough, I am fairly new, so might not have grasped all the viable options yet. But that also puts me in a position to notice things that have crept into the game over time and will stand out starkly for me and be 'normal' for long time players. Infinity is a fantastic skirmish game without link teams, but with them feels a lot more like warhammer and death star tactics.

Just seems a shame that without them the game (when played) seems to involve shrewd tactical decisions balancing target priorities (specialist or TAG or speedy guy or heavy etc), threat ratings, victory conditions and board control. Where the wrong choice can be very influential on the game.
While with link teams it seems more like, 'get the link team before they wreck me', then think about everything else. Changing the entire tactical decision making process and making it sway wildly in one direction.

To be sure, they have added another dimension to the game (GPS, machine gun, nuke etc) and that is always good for tactics, but it seems to have overshadowed a lot of the existing ones and be a bit crude and obvious, which I didn't expect, given the rest of the game mechanics.

ps - don't mean to insult any link team lovers, I'm sure your lovely

Let me introduce you to the anti-link-team tactica...

http://infinitythegame.com/forum/index.php?/topic/13228-anti-link-team-tactica/

Yay! Cheers

I'm thinking that my cheap Auxbots would be good counters to link teams. Go Junky, take one for the team!

Generally I find that using the unit type in question often sheds light on their weaknesses. Proxy up and play some links yourself, its an eye opener on how vulnerable they can feel to play.

 Inflatable love badger wrote:
Your right that list building is part of tactics, and one that I am fairly poor at, given that I pick on looks rather than effectiveness, efficiency and combo-y-ness!

Oh, I refuse to use models I don't like the look of. I just can't necessarily use all my favourites at the same time...

balance in your definition appear to come from new toys, not new ways of using old ones.

Not at all. But for showing that imbalances between "units" are where tactics come from, a scenario where these imbalances changed and tactics changed to match is a good example.

And, these scenarios did result in very different ways of using old troops.
It can be hard to tell a picture of a British rifleman of WW1 apart from one of WW2 - the same equipment was used for large portions of both wars. (Often the most apparent difference is that the WWI trooper is more likely to have a moustache). However, very different tactics were used in both wars.

 Inflatable love badger wrote:


I suppose I'm arguing against the prevailing opinion and that's fair enough, I am fairly new, so might not have grasped all the viable options yet. But that also puts me in a position to notice things that have crept into the game over time and will stand out starkly for me and be 'normal' for long time players. Infinity is a fantastic skirmish game without link teams, but with them feels a lot more like warhammer and death star tactics.

I think this thread is a good advert for why starting out with sectorials isn't always a good idea. Especially when you have a group of fairly new players. For a new player coming up against a myrm link team is going to be hard. Even if they have the right type of units in their list to deal with the myrms they still have to know how to use them properly and hope the dice go their way too. Its easy for someone new with a list based on 'ooh shiny!' to come up against something like myrms and just go 'its broken!', where a more experienced player would know that in their next game they need to take a, b, and c units and they will use them to do x, y, and z in the game. Newer players might not have access to the types of units that would help them or not want to proxy. And its easy to see why people would get turned off learning the game by getting their face smashed in.

When the Human Sphere and link team rules came out they were aimed at giving more experienced players a load of new options in the game and not necessarily at new players starting the game. There are obviously plenty of newer players starting up with sectorials that don't have any problems but then you get situations like this where something seems broken. When the answer is 'its balanced but only if you know how to play against it' its probably not that much help to newer players.

I suppose I'm arguing against the prevailing opinion and that's fair enough, I am fairly new, so might not have grasped all the viable options yet. But that also puts me in a position to notice things that have crept into the game over time and will stand out starkly for me and be 'normal' for long time players. Infinity is a fantastic skirmish game without link teams, but with them feels a lot more like warhammer and death star tactics.

I strongly disagree with this. As another new player, I too hit the "holy gak, X is overpowered" walls (and there are a lot of these - airdrop, TO camo, infiltrating minelayers, Sepsitor...), and after facing them and using them a few times, figured out how to counter them.

Your problem is that you don't have experienced players to use your 'overpowered' gak against and see how easily they spray its guts all over the walls, without the need for a hard counter. Because in this game, most of the time, the way to 'counter' a thing is to play to your strengths and its weaknesses, not to take Infinity's equivalent of 'AP2 weapons to kill Terminators' or fantasy's "int test or die" deathstar removers.

That said, your list is a toolbox and you do need to learn what to include in it. A toolbox without a hammer is a gakky toolbox, and to a degree Infinity works in a similar fashion. In this case, one solution is an HMG, ideally on a camoflaged platform that can focus down individual link members. It 'counters' the link team by being able to provide overwhelming firepower to bear on one member of it (B4 +3 at long range against most likely B2 -3 or even -6 before cover and camo), and by killing him, neuter the team as a whole. What it isn't is some magical "this unit ignores link team bonuses" device, a rock to their scissors, and in addition, having that HMG can also be useful in so many other circumstances.

Alternatively, a chain warband can wreck havoc, smoke can cover your avenues of approach to bypass or attack from better angles, you could speculative with grenades or a grenade launcher, send in an impersonator to shank the leader, set up a TR bot or mines where the link intends to move to, drop an aerial deployment unit behind them and kill targets of opportunity, attack with other long ranged weapons such as sniper or autocannon, bypass them entirely and attack from the flanks or focus on objectives, rampage with a TAG which laughs at their puny rifle AROs, or even simply perform favourable piece trades with your own B3 10pt riflemen in 1v1 against their defenders. Theres a thousand ways to counter this, but they do require you take the right tools for the job. The difference between this game and games such as 40k is that the tools are not *hard counters* and are generally extremely flexible in their application and in the things that they 'counter'

The simple fact that link teams have to declare the same reaction in ARO and only the leader can declare shoot should be hint enough at how to tackle them in reacting turns. Same way you used to cover all angles still works. Shoot non leader models in reaction to make a dodge reaction from all models rather than trade models with the rather powerful link leader. If they don't dodge, they bleed link members, though you'll probably lose a model or two as well.

Something else to remember is like TAGs, link teams are often an 'all your eggs in one basket' tactic, with the rest of the list about supporting it. Using better tactics to kill the link will often take a lot of the teeth out of their list. However, like TAGs, they're not all super expensive death squads, and are sometimes just used to make back line cheerleaders a bit nastier.

Link teams are full of variety, as are the methods of dealing with them. Comparing them to a 40k deathstar is unfair - 40k has gotten to the point of rerollable 2++ saves on super killy units. You won't find that level of dumb in Infinity.

 -Loki- wrote:
The simple fact that link teams have to declare the same reaction in ARO and only the leader can declare shoot should be hint enough at how to tackle them in reacting turns. Same way you used to cover all angles still works. Shoot non leader models in reaction to make a dodge reaction from all models rather than trade models with the rather powerful link leader. If they don't dodge, they bleed link members, though you'll probably lose a model or two as well.

Something else to remember is like TAGs, link teams are often an 'all your eggs in one basket' tactic, with the rest of the list about supporting it. Using better tactics to kill the link will often take a lot of the teeth out of their list. However, like TAGs, they're not all super expensive death squads, and are sometimes just used to make back line cheerleaders a bit nastier.

Link teams are full of variety, as are the methods of dealing with them. Comparing them to a 40k deathstar is unfair - 40k has gotten to the point of rerollable 2++ saves on super killy units. You won't find that level of dumb in Infinity.

Just a note - all the Link team members can shoot back in ARO, the limit to what the Link Team can do is for the active turn only, where only the leader makes his rolls and the rest just watches, providing bonuses. In ARO, all of them can shoot.

Eh yeah I meant in the active turn. Bad habit that I refer to the active turn as ARO and reactive turn as well the reactive turn.

 Inflatable love badger wrote:
...but has -9 to be shot in cover and an ARO of burst 8 at +3bs!

Hold it right there.
If someone did told you that a 4 figure fireteam has +3 BS there are two options:
A) That guy is wrong.
B) That guy is cheating.

Only 5 figure fireteams have +3 to BS.