Infinite Revelations

Corvus Belli and Carlos continue to reveal new tidbits and whole rules around the new Edition of Infinity. Extremely late on Monday they revealed how retreat works, with an addition Tuesday as to how the new templates will work. Each of these portions of the rules has some very, very strange interactions in the last edition. Each of these rules needed serious work, and they got them. Continuing to build on the excitement of how Loss of Lieutenant works and the clarification and simplification of a number of issues, the new template rules and the new retreat rules are fantastic.

Retreat was always a funny beast in 2e. I never really suffered from it, but it was always on your mind. You’d have to keep track of how much of your army you lost, and what portion was left to loose before your army went into retreat and started acting weird. The new rules are extremely interesting to me, as morale and fleeing are very large parts of many miniatures games, but no player likes to see their models turn tail and run or collapse with feat. Instead, everyone wants their troops to behave in predictable, standard ways. Some game companies temper morale by eliminating it completely, which I am not a fan of, and some will simply try to have it exert a minimal effect.

The new strategy that Corvus Belli is enacting with N3, is one of mitigated failure. They’ve moved the retreat threshold backward to 75%, meaning that you have to have less than 25% of your points on the board in order to be in retreat. In a 300 point game, that’s 75 points or less on the table. Combined with what Carlos mentioned were longer games, this is likely to come up later in the game than it used to. In addition to being later in the game, they way retreat works varies based on certain skills they have.

The chart above gives a good concept of what is happening at two points in time: Loss of Lt. and the Retreat Status.

Normal units are units without any special skill mitigating these two very bad positions.

• Loss of Lieutenant – Normal Troops become Irregular, and may generate only a single (Yellow) Impetuous order, which only they can use.
• Retreat! – Normal Troops become Irregular, but they also become non-combative. This means that they may only move, dodge and be scared.

This is a large change from 2e, where any number of times I would have had to deal with troops retreating in place. The old rule was that these troops had to make a compulsory move towards their owning board edge. This is no longer the case. Many losses in the game can be mitigated by getting models that are retreating off the board edge, due to the fact that you don’t get points for what you’ve eliminated of the opponents, but what you’ve managed to save of your own squad.

Impetuous units are those troops who suffer from the Impetuous skill. They are generally uncontrollable, and tend to have other benefits that allow them to ignore or mitigate this rule, but it is here for completeness sake, a method I can get behind.

• Loss of Lieutenant: Impetuous troops become Irregular, but also retain Impetuous (red orders).
• Retreat: The Impetuous Order Phase (the “red” phase) no longer occurs during retreat, denying them a move, and during retreat they are both Impetuous and suffer from non-combative.

Courage: Troops with the Courage Ability suffer the discord of retreat and loss of a chain of command admirably. Instead of becoming non-combative, these troops become Irregular in both situations. This allows them to continue to act, albeit at a loss of effectiveness, while the rest of their unit gets their shit together. This ability, granted by all levels of martial arts, also allows a unit to perform a fighting retreat, attempting to get off the board and and save points.

As the list goes down, the type of troop gets better and better.

Here we have Remote Presence, the Courage of the robot world. This operates with the same minimal downfalls and immense upside that comes with impetuous troops.

Regular Religious Troops.
As a Haqqislam player, I really look forward to using this profile. While in Loss of Lieutenant they suffer the same penalties as other factions, they refuse to retreat due to their overwhelming religious teachings. This allows them to generate a Green (standard) order, allowing them to both spend orders from the pool, and contribute orders to the pool as normal. This is truly amazing, allowing your troops to keep the fight going while the rest of the army retreats in good order. Oh, and one more thing: Religious Troops are not allowed to leave the table edge in a retreat situation. They will stick it out and sacrifice themselves to cover for the retreating troops.

Veteran Level 1
Veteran troopers are amazingly skilled and disciplined warriors. They have the ability to work together through the toughest of times and come out on tip. Neither Loss of Lieutenant or Retreat will cause them to break, and they will continue to function at full capacity no matter what the fight entails.

Finally, we have the baddest aliens in the known space.

Morats 

Not only do these guys retain their orders, they are also religious, meaning that they will never retreat off the board, they will always stay and fight, and they will keep fighting until they perish a glorious death. Its very interesting to me and I look forward to fighting them once again!

The other rules change, as part of an almost half-hour video, is the changes to template weapons. There are some very interesting changes here. Because I’ve not had a ton of experince with templates, I’ll just list the parts that seem important to me.

1. All templates act the same. The only difference are terminal templates now exist. The simple difference between a standard blast and a terminal blast is that the template either exists, or is generated on hit.
2. Templates ignore partial cover.
3. If you can see the model who originated the Template, you may dodge the damage. This is a normal PH roll. The worst PH still had a 50/50 shot!
4. If the model does not see the originator of the template, that model may still dodge, but at a -3.
5. Templates cannot affect models that are completely blocked from LOS by terrain in between the template focus, ie, the point on the template with the hole, and the target.
6. All models attacked may choose to ARO as normal, and all will a normal roll. Each troops results will have no effect on the next. You cannot eliminate a terminal Template (Missile Launcher, Shotgun) by being the target and succeeding in your ARO.
7. A troop may place the tip of the template anywhere within their silhouette, but not next to it. This is true in all three directions. You can shoot it from your head, your toes or your chest, but not next to you, over you, or under you.
8. Smoke Grenades are template weapons, and can be ARO’d as normal. He specifically calls out a model being targeted by smoke grenades nullifying their placement with a good ARO, but I’m not sure about targeting the ground.

Templates deserve their own entire post, but that’s all the time I’ve got right now! Hopefully tomorrow they have move videos and sneak peaks!