Infinity ITS 2014 – War and Rumours of War

4 Minute Read

Jan 9 2014

Ian from the Wargaming Trader here again. The tournament scene for Infinity is getting a big shake-up for the 2014 season. Here’s how…

Where to start?

There are a lot of changes to the new ITS (Infinity Tournament System) but the main ones are how your score is worked out, new formats, points level tiers, new missions/a shift in which models can achieve objectives.

Rankings

The old ITS seasons worked on a cumulative basis – your points for each event were added to your ranking, so the top of the leaderboard was dominated by people who played lots of events.

This is changing to a modified ELO system where your ranking will be based on how well you place in each tournament based on size of event, how good the other players are and the points level of the event. Yippee, no more ‘play lots of events to win the season!’.

New Formats

The 2013 season added formats to the ITS – classic for normal games and Spec Ops where everyone got XP to spend on an upgradeable Spec Ops character in their force.

ITS 2014 expands this out into:
Classic – as 2013.
Spec Ops – as 2013.
Joint Ops – two v. two games, recommended for pairing a new player with an experienced player.
Campaign – objective points from each round get you XP that can be spent on upgrades a la Campaign: Paradiso.
Escalation League – eight rounds of games with a growing points level each round.
Showdown – a single-round format for very quick tournaments or for counting your regular games towards the ITS.

Tiers

There are now three ‘tiers’ of game size for the ITS: 200, 300 and 400 points. The ‘standard’ size of games for Infinity has generally been 300 and there has been much muttering on the forums about this being an example of game size creep – ignoring that this has been requested by lots of players! I’m still in two minds about this one, but it’s not going to break the game.

More information about the new season can be found here.

New Missions

We now have preview versions of the new missions for 2014, which apparently are in addition to the existing 2013 missions, although we don’t know what tweaks will be happening to the existing missions.

Specialist Changes

In the ITS missions only models with certain skills can complete the main mission objectives. In the 2013 missions this included your Lieutenant which unfortunately led to the factions which could take TAG Lieutenants dominating some areas of the game – trying to take down a fast-moving Avatar with it’s Optical Disruption Device (think: Predator-like visual disruption), joint highest armour value in the game and it’s ability to subvert models that got to close was no fun at all.

Lieutenants are not Specialists in the new missions (and hopefully not in the revamped 2013 mission) but instead Doctors and Paramedics count, which adds new possibilities for some of the more restricted Sectorials who couldn’t always take enough Hackers, Engineers or Forward Observers.

The Avatar. Yes, that’s a 40mm base, eek!

Objective Changes

A very notable change in the new missions is that there are no objective points for enemy kills other than some of the random classified objectives (assuming the classifieds stay the same as the 2013 ones). Enemy kills didn’t make up a big part of the points in the 2013 missions (typically up to three out of ten possible OPs) but now it’s all objective-based.

Lifeblood

This mission involves searching and then destroying up to six crates that are spread randomly across the middle half of the table. A mission-specific army-building requirement for this one is to have units with special ammo types as only Double Action, Explosive, Viral or KA ammo can destroy the crates and this is worth up to four out of ten OPs.

Quadrant Control

A fairly typical ‘most points in the area controls the area’ mission, this is however a new type of mission for ITS events, especially as the quadrants are scored at the end of every game turn.

Beacon Race

Arguably the most complex of the new missions, your Specialists have to get into a central building, use a beacon generator to make beacons and then carry them into security zones at the front right and left corners of your deployment zone. For full points this needs to be done four times in three turns and you can only have one beacon in use at once!

Antenna Field

Another take-and-hold variant scored every game turn, this one involves your Specialists holding more of the five antennas each turn and then again at the end of the game, with bonus points for controlling the central and furthest antenna at the end of the game.

So how will your lists change to deal with the new missions and points levels? Will you start an escalation league?

Ian aka @wartrader

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Author: Guest Columnist

This article was written by a Guest Columnist who requested anonymity.

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