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Another wild "I'm a new player" thread appears!
I'm crazy new to the game, as in have never played, don't own models, only know the very basics of the rules. I'm very well-versed in 40k, so tabletop gaming is not new to me, but the rules for Infinity are (thus far) much much different.

I've been drooling over the site, looking at models and deciding what I like the look of the most.
Is ALEPH a viable starter army, when it comes to fairly simple playstyle, but with plenty of potential complication in more advanced play?

I generally like finesse versus brute force, and being tricksy is my jam. I also have a love of being able to pick things off from a distance, and having access to tools that drastically alter the way things "normally" occur (think Harlequin Veil of Tears, or the old Chaos Daemons Boon of Mutation).
What army would Dakka recommend for me as first-timer?


(Also, as I have a magnetic implant, the idea of a post-human sounds freaking awesome. I guess I'm a pre-post-human :B)

If you like tricksy you'd like Nomads most. They are called Dirty Nomads my many for their dirty tricks. Hackers doing things like forward observe to rain down missiles, jump troops coming in from off-board everywhere. etc.

Aleph is a bit more complicated than other armies but not bad. The Steel Phalanx sectoral is not subtle though. They are pretty much in your face assault troops. Go to the infinity site and you can read some of the background of troops that are out so far.

Aleph isn't for life - but it's for a period longer than christmas.

The Assault Subsection (aka "the greeks") is about as subtle as a brick to the face.

Nothing in Infinity plays remotely like any unit in 40k. Leave your preconceptions at the door. Even CC troops have guns for a reason.

As a first timer, I'd be getting used to the rules and interactions before selecting a sectorial of a faction that is not easy to use well.

Try vanilla Aleph and ONCE you understand the rules and how best to use certain units, then you can branch out. Fireteams then being the new rule to wrap your head around (Enomotarchos is the Steel Phalanx version of it).

I definitely understand that the game is entirely different, I was just giving examples of the degree of game manipulation I like to see.
In general, I find it more fun to learn how to use a difficult army at the same time that I'm learning the basics of the game, as it makes understanding the rest of the game easier in the long run.

The more fluff I read about the ALEPH, though, the more I definitely like the idea of the whole army.
I have some credit at my flgs from a recent tournament, and I think I'm going to buy an ALEPH starter, and maybe the support pack (more cause I want to paint Yudbots and netrods than anything )

Well if you want a difficult to learn army, I would definitely say that Aleph are towards the top end of that scale.

Even their basic troop (the Myrmidon) requires you to learn special rules, with their Optical Disruption device and frenzy, and the likes of your post-humans and 'proxy' ghost that can travel between units and make them more effective. Synchronised units, human-sized TAGs: it goes on!

Certainly, I've played against them rather than playing with them and found it quite hard to keep track of what nasty tricks are going to be used against me!

 Pacific wrote:

Certainly, I've played against them rather than playing with them and found it quite hard to keep track of what nasty tricks are going to be used against me!

As a Tzeentch player, this is exactly what I love in a game

Kind of a funny story about that kind of thing - I started playing the game against a friend; he chose Aleph, I chose Haqqislam.

Basically we ended up in a kind of arms race, with me constantly lagging one step behind - each time we would come to a game the Aleph would spring some horrible surprise or introduce a new unit - for example, an air-dropping troop that came down behind my force and machine-gunned them all to death like in a shooting gallery. So in the next game I used a similar guy. With the same result right? Wrong - he used a hacker to 'ice' my drop trooper, with the end result he came down badly and landed straight in front of his TAG. You can guess what happened to him

So I wheeled out a Heavy Infantry with HMG (Jannissary) - this guy looks like a bad ass, and is a bad ass most of the time. Except when he runs forward, and a Thermo-camouflaged Naga has dropped monofilament mines in front of him. You know the bit in the Resident Evil movie where the guy tried to negotiate the laser grid in the corridor? Guessing that happened to my HI... next game he kept getting immobilised by a nearby Hacker who kept hacking his armour system - each time I tried to reset his armour I would lose the FTF roll and waste an order..

Just a few examples, but we had great fun discovering the game together and lots of "your guy can do WHAT?!" moments on each other.

TBH, I can't think of another game that offers anything like the potential for such cunning and trickery as Infinity.. and when you think you've learned everything, you forget one part or another, or someone springs a new one on you..

I always love to hear stories like that. While I do love playing 40k, it can get stale pretty quickly if you don't have every money forever to spend on new and exciting (and usually FW) models.

Looking forward to getting started

ALEPH have a tiny bit of everything, if you want to run around and get position advantage, they have smoke grenades for that. Those Myrmidons they're talking about have an equipment (ODD) that makes them more difficult to hit, they have a few camo units, and they have some things that can be air dropped into combat. Their primary doctor also functions as an engineer, so regardless of if your robots or your soldiers slip up in your plans you can get them right back up. They have a bit more to understand than other armies, but understanding that most of your soldiers are initially harder to hit does not take a vast knowledge of the game and should be easy enough for a new player to understand.