Infinity: CodeOne... The Cure for Kill Team?
- Lawson Deming
- Aug 6, 2020
- 37 min read
Updated: Aug 9, 2020
Kill Team proved to be a big letdown, so I went searching for something I hoped would be better. Did the new, supposedly easier-to-play version of Infinity do the trick?
Hello and welcome to my TED Talk.
I can't seem to write a review that doesn't turn into a screed, and this is no exception. Of note here is how my specific disappointments with Kill Team drove me in search of an alternative, and why I gravitated towards CodeOne - if you're interested in that, as well as my history in miniature gaming and aversion to self-editing, you might dare to read from the beginning (and get a free bonus review of Kill Team, essentially). If you want an idea of the contents of the Operation Kaldstrom box set and what it was like to assemble and paint the minis, skip ahead to “Putting the Damn Thing Together”. If you just want to know about my experience with CodeOne, hit up “But How Does it Play?” And if you're impatient and just want to get to my “Closing Thoughts”... well, they're somewhere near the bottom.
A (NOT SO) BRIEF HISTORY
I’ve always been drawn to miniatures games. Before I even knew they existed I used dice when playing with plastic army men to see which side 'won'.
I remember, at twelve years old, walking into my local hobby shop and seeing rows of professionally painted figures behind the glass cases. Shortly thereafter I got the starter box for Battletech, and I was hooked. I painted the little mech miniatures… very badly (we didn’t have Youtube yet to show us how to do these things properly) and played for hours.
And when I wasn’t playing the game I was poring over those Rules. Huge books of rules, hundreds of pages covering the minutiae of armored combat. Rules for heat. Rules for artillery and aerospace fighters. Rules for uprooting a tree with your giant mech-hands and using it as an improvised club.
It was a laughably complex game, and I wonder now how the pre-teen me ever figured it out to begin with, but I think it may have been the complexity itself which inspired me... the idea that out of these overlapping systems of rules and math a cinematic narrative experience somehow unfolded, with precision and creative possibilities that kickstarted my imagination and led to some of the most memorable gaming experiences of my life: A Thunderbolt with its leg destroyed, precariously balancing with a piloting skill check as it teetered, making that final shot which gutted an enemy Rifleman's internal structure and caused an ammo explosion that wiped it out. A Hatchetman making a desperate death-from-above attack and crushing in the head of a Javelin, but crippling itself in the process and then falling victim to a point-blank coup de grace PPC shot to the face from an enemy Mauler. The game was formative for me, and I’m still a huge fan of the Battletech universe 25 years after first playing.
Varying levels of terrible paintjobs on my old plastic Battletech minis
As I began to get older I didn’t have as much time anymore to spend 6-8 hours skirmishing with mechs, let alone painting them. The WizKids ‘Clix’ system came out when I was in High School, and I managed to get in way more quick games of Mage Knight (the original miniatures game, not the board game) and the ensuing Mechwarrior: Dark Age than I ever did of the OG Battletech.
In college I couldn't fit in a “lifestyle” type game at all anymore and started to get more heavily into hobby board-gaming, which demanded, at most, an evening at a time and next to no ‘prep’, but I always had a soft spot for the ones with miniatures in them.
Over the years, my boardgames collection expanded to include a lot of dungeon crawls and minis-lite games (Space Hulk, Warhammer Quest: Silver Tower, Level 7: Omega Protocol, Imperial Assault, Descent: Journeys in the Dark, Claustrophobia). I even picked up the Catalyst Game Labs reprint of Battletech... but at that point, spoiled on boardgames with shorter play-times and more modern rulesets, and with no opponents to enjoy the game with me, its resurgence was short-lived.
Looking for another way to re-kindle those good feelings from my youth I said out loud to my wife one day “I want to find a game I can really obsess over… a real miniatures game”. After a few false starts, I discovered Star Wars: Armada… and boy did I obsess over it. This review already has way too many tangents as it is, so I won't gush.. but Armada remains one of my absolute favorite games, and it turned me on the idea that miniatures games had evolved a lot in terms of game mechanics since my youth. It got me thinking: what other miniatures games are out there that I could get into - that I could perhaps... obsess over?
I'm no pro, but I've gotten much better at painting minis over the years
Around this same time, my business-partner re-kindled his own childhood hobby of Warhammer 40k. With a passing interest in the 40k universe myself due to my love of the game Space Hulk, I was intrigued, so we split on a copy of the brand new edition of Kill Team and put together some squads while he slowly pieced together a full army for 40k.
Kill Team promised to be a quicker 'skirmish' scale version of its big brother - squad-based combat that could be played on a small surface, and it wouldn't take years to assemble an army for it.
However, 40k itself was never a game that I had nostalgia for. I certainly remember as a kid seeing big maps in the game store with figures stretched out across them, and guys throwing huge handfuls of dice, but my only take-away at the time was that it looked like a blinged out game of paper-rock-scissors… chaotic and random. Seemingly futuristic armies with long range weapons would line up in something resembling Napoleonic era firing lines and march towards one another, with large intricately painted units getting wiped off the map unceremoniously.
To me, the point of a miniature game seemed to be as some simulacrum of a military engagement, with rules that served that purpose. Battletech, of course was not exactly 'realistic', but at least it felt like it was trying to represent some idea of hypothetical combined-arms combat. 40k was, on the other hand, downright Abstract - representative of nothing but its own wonky universe. The young me was too serious for a silly game like 40k. But the adult me had lightened up a bit and was ready to give “Grim Darkness of the Far Future” another look. Surely, I thought, a game couldn't coast along for 30 years just on its miniatures if there wasn't something appealing about the gameplay, right? RIGHT? Well, I wasn't ready to throw caution (and my bank account) to the wind just yet. Kill Team would be a way for me to dip my toe into the water before diving into the deep end of the hobby.
MY LOVE/HATE (MOSTLY HATE) RELATIONSHIP WITH KILL TEAM
At first glance, Kill Team seems to have a lot going for it. I can't say enough great things about the aesthetics of the game. GW sculpts are beautiful and intricate. The varying absurd factions are visually striking and distinct from one another, with signature weapons, equipment, and play-styles. Games of Kill Team promised to be quick… 45 minutes or less (which I appreciate as an adult with a job and obligations). The rules, no more than 14 pages out of the 200+ page tome that comes in the starter box, are simple enough to grok on first read-through, but the interaction of the various moving parts and the special abilities possessed by the individual units (theoretically) creates an appreciable level of emergent complexity.
The model count of the game is low, meaning that, as someone who gets a kick out of trying all kinds of options, I wouldn’t be forced to stick with just one faction. Best of all, the game actually felt like a representation of a firefight rather than the incomprehensible scrum of 40k. The miniatures were actual characters (not just glorified 'hit points') who could run, jump, climb walls, and take cover. Weapons and abilities were evocative and had exciting names like “Gauss Flayer” or “They Shall Know No Fear”. The promise was there for gameplay-facilitated stories of heroism, risk & reward, narrow victories, and crushing defeats... memorable moments. What was there not to love?
Genestealer Cult vs Necrons on my hand-made Kill Team board
Well it turns out that there was a lot of Kill Team that I did not love, and a few things I came to outright hate. Mechanically, the game feels very creaky and slow. That's because it’s tied heavily to the 8th edition 40k rules. While the movement and activation process has admittedly been significantly improved, from the 40k IGOUGO to a more interactive and tactical alternating activation system, the actual combat rules are left largely unchanged, which means tons of dice rolls for every attack. While the dice-odds may work okay for a 40k game where a squad launches dozens of attacks, only for a fraction of them to hit, the fact that Kill Team is dealing with individual figures means games can involve a whole lot of ‘nothing’ combat - wherein you calculate and roll the dice several times for each attack only to have no result.
And while most figures only have one, or maybe two wounds before they die, Kill Team has added an additional roll on top of the traditional 40k Hit/Wound/Save to ensure that units don’t die too quickly. The result of this, though, is that the already tough elite units are monumentally hard to kill unless you're facing them with an elite of your own. Since the vast majority of results are binary (even with the incremental “Flesh Wounds” system), there is often a large probability of NOTHING happening (e.g. no damage, no result) and a small probability of something BIG happening (instant kill), but no incremental result in-between - creating a feeling of randomness to the proceedings.
Working with the terrain in your favor can sometimes get you a mild tactical advantage, but even an enemy at optimal range and in no cover can be rendered almost impossible to hit via their stats alone, and OP abilities like fly and deep strike, which allow units to go pretty much anywhere on the small battlefield, trivialize the need to be cognizant of traditional movement and positioning - making the game feel spatially one-dimensional . This, combined with the necessity of aggressive list-building (e.g. composing a specific load-out of units appropriate to a particular type of opponent) for certain factions to even have a fighting chance at not getting steamrolled by a casually built list from a more ‘pushed’ faction can make the game downright painful to play.
Da best laid plans of Orks and Men
See, the game’s overall strategy is heavily biased towards creating good ‘match-ups’ on paper in order to win battles, rather than using tactics like maneuver and cover on the battlefield. Don't have the right weapon to take out a heavily-armored foe in one shot? The all-or-nothing nature of damage means there's no way to win by plinking away at them with the 'wrong' guns, even if they wade recklessly out into the crossfire.
Sure, a Space Marine Terminator is a tough nut to crack for line-troops in 40k as well, and shouldn't it be that way? Well yes, but in 40k you always have a bigger gun in the form of tanks or artillery if your mooks aren't cutting it. To go back to the paper-rock-scissors metaphor from earlier: Kill Team feels (for some factions at least) like you only get to choose one. If you have only scissors and your opponent is throwing rock for 5 rounds, the game is a foregone conclusion. So, both on and off the battlefield, the focus is on those match-ups. You can work around the 'noob trap' units and equipment by looking up the RIGHT lists to take online, sure, but the truth of the matter is that there are plenty of non-viable selections in Kill Team that exist simply because they were just ported over from 40k, so its surprisingly easy to stumble into a completely unbalanced game experience with some factions.
Let's say you manage to put together a couple of reasonably balanced teams though. Here we run into another problem. In spite of the simple and straightforward basic rules, the game muddies the waters with the addition of “Tactics” - special additional skills and abilities that can be trigged by spending from a limited pool of Command Points (similar to 40k’s “Stratagems”). In theory it gives you more options and adds to the flavor of the various factions, but in practice they are pedantic and kludgy. There are generic tactics, faction-specific tactics, specialist-tactics of varying levels, and even scenario and terrain-specific tactics. This frequently results in a team having 20+ available tactics spread across all the different phases of a round. A scant few are massively overpowered, but many are pretty useless, feeling less like cool powers and more like a features list for a kitchen appliance. The intention of creating uniqueness is undermined by the fact that a good half of your tactics are exactly the same as everyone else's, and even the tactics that are different are sometimes just differently named abilities with identical rules. Their vestigial nature relative to the rest of the game and the marginal effect of many tactics makes it easy to downright forget to use them, even if you’ve made custom sheets that order them by turn phase like I have. When you do remember that you want to use one, you likely won’t have enough Command Points, because you only get a couple per turn and most tactics cost 1 or 2 to use. It just feels very wrong to be given such a huge number of options but the ability to select so few - like one of those restaurants with 300 things on the menu but most dishes taste the same - more choice doesn't mean better choices. Every tactic is more-or-less a specific rule or rules-exception, which, while not exactly complicated, feels like clutter, and it more often than not leads to gotcha “I didn’t know you could do that” type situations that further undermine the core rules rather than cleverly augment them.
Even though the base set comes with some tactics and unit cards, making your own player aids is vital if you don't want to be flipping through the book looking for tactics.
Depending on your faction, the morale system will either be a complete non-issue for high leadership elite teams, or the bane of your existence for hordes, where your already easily-dispatched squishy units can cause a catastrophic snowball effect loss of morale, effectively stunlocking your entire team and adding insult to injury - e.g. you've already lost half you army... now the leftover guys can't even move or shoot anymore. Again, its a weird holdover from 40k where it sort-of made sense that in a huge pitched battle, entire squads could 'break' from taking massive losses, but at least there it was just one part of a larger army, and you had the dignity of just 'killing' more guys on your squad rather than having to watch essentially your entire force do nothing for the rest of the game. Like many other parts of the rules, it feels like it was designed backwards. Instead of deciding on a feel or style of gameplay that they wanted to encourage and building a rule around that, they took the pre-existing Leadership stat-lines and morale concept from 40k and just decided to try and make something that roughly interacted with those numbers and mirrored a rule that was their mass-battle game. Aside from flavor, I'm not sure exactly what the point of really having it is except to speculate that its intended as a rubber banding mechanism to compensate for horde armies' ability to make more activations and hold more objectives simply by having more bodies on the map - of course it might be more useful to balance out objective-capture benefits of horde armies if the included scenarios were actually well-designed. Are they, though?
NOPE, the scenarios contained in the core rulebook are downright terrible - the game doesn’t seem to know whether it wants to be a tool for narrative play or competitive play, and its pretty bad at both. The scenarios that aren’t just plain dull have incredibly capricious victory points scoring, and the pre-battle Scouting Phase has you selecting from among a group of special starting conditions for the game arbitrarily, with really the only motivation being a guess at what your opponent will choose (insert another paper-rock-scisssors reference), further adding to the sense of randomness rather than mitigating it. GW tried to fix this with the introduction of essentially a new game mode called Arena, but it's a completely separate paid product and creates its own weird metagame issues. For me, the only way to make things bearable was to use the LVO (Las Vegas Open) Kill Team tournament rules (which were designed by a separate tournament body, not GW), which add some actual structure and strategy to the game, and which led to the closest it got to actually feeling like a balanced experience. These rules tellingly remove the Scouting Phase entirely and focus much more on varied primary and secondary objectives. Combined with a mere 4-turn match, these rules force games to play faster and more tactically, and as far as I'm concerned, are an essential update to the game.
Kill Team even fails from a metagame standpoint to deliver on the value-proposition of being a lower-cost alternative to 40k. Sure, its technically cheaper, but the 40k ecosystem is not designed around the kind of single-figures that Kill Team requires. Even the supposed Kill Team faction boxes are just regular single-type sprues from 40k disingenuously marketed as a ready-to-play Kill Team.
Do you want to add a Boss Nob or Flash Git to your Ork warband? You have to buy a full 40k set of 5 for $40 to get the one figure that you need. Some factions may benefit from a full 'squad' of a particular type of unit, but the aforementioned need to build deep rosters with some factions in order to create fair (let-alone competitive) matchups against others means that you may need to spend $150+ to field a squad unless you want to try getting random singles off of ebay with hopefully the accessories you wanted. I get that 40k players have long been used to certain factions sucking or things getting nerfed and needing to grudgingly buy new swag to keep their armies up to date, and I get that GW is a business and needs to make money, but that shouldn't preclude a brand new game with an extremely limited model pool from being so difficult to build decent armies for. I want to feel good when I spend money on a game because I'm getting more cool things that expand an already good experience... not feel bad that I'm buying to try and plug holes in a bad one.
Would you believe in spite of all this I still dabbled in Kill Team for almost 2 years on-and-off, trying to convince myself that I enjoyed it? I put so much effort into trying to make it work for me, buying more books and factions, reading strategy and watching battle reports, and finally, after tirelessly balancing a handful of teams against one another and completely throwing out the missions in favor of the LVO rules, I managed to play a few games that were... okay, I guess.
I'm not sure what kept me going - maybe Stockholm Syndrome, or the Sunk Cost Fallacy? I did love painting up teams of guys... maybe GW really was just coasting on the quality of its miniatures. Perhaps surprisingly, I'd still probably play a game of Kill Team if someone asked nicely, and dammit if 40k has not piqued my interest again in its universe with the 9th edition rules and small scale Combat Patrol sized missions, but I've mostly moved on to other things... namely Frostgrave and Warhammer: Underworlds. The former is as light and chaotic as can be, but without all the baggage and kludge of Kill Team. The latter is an amazingly balanced tactical brawl mixed with lite deck building and a spectacular example of what GW can pull off when they untether themselves from their janky legacy rulesets.
Getting wrecked by a Ghoul in Frostgrave but still enjoying myself
But these swords and sorcery themed games, as fun as they are, only scratch one of many itches, and with a growing desire for some shooty futuristic action, I recently found myself back on the GW website trying to figure out what I'd need to do for a good Space Marine Kill Team. Uh oh, here we go again. There had to be a way to snap myself out of this cycle. What I needed, I thought, was a Better Game to cure me of this addiction - if I'm gonna spend another $100 on some plastic space-men anyway, why not try something totally new.
A BETTER GAME?
As luck would have it, the new offshoot of the miniatures game Infinity (a simplified version of the game system, called “CodeOne”) released within days of my urge to try a new sci-fi miniatures game. Infinity had never appealed to me, less due to its obsessively large ruleset than its anime aesthetic. Let's be real - a lot of your time with any miniatures game is going to be assembling and painting miniatures, and for me it's half the fun of a game... so I better like the world the game is set in. For some people, Infinity's aesthetic is a big plus. For me it was a big minus. The factions all looked the same to me, with very similar unit types, weapons, and proportions. A lot of the anime-inspired designs seemed goofy, and I know that's a thing to say coming from 40k, but to me the over-the-top look of Warhammer represents some strong and very consistent design choices, while the Infinity line felt arbitrary and unfocused, with 'realistic' elements of some figures clashing with other more fanciful design touches in others, and a generic 'coolness' that felt too po-faced relative to GW's more tongue-in-cheek universe.
A re-creation: most engagements happen from much longer range
In spite of my reservations about Infinity as a whole, I'd heard only good things about the game, and the Operation Kaldstrom starter box for the new CodeOne system at least contained minis that I didn't hate at first glance. I added Infinity to a list of games, along with some others like Deadzone and Beyond the Gates of Antares, that I considered looking at, and I created sort of rubric in which to score them. Two of the factors that ranked very high on my list of desires, in light of my negative experiences with Kill Team, were a game that had strong and flexible core rules where skill and tactics dictated the outcome more than list building, and it also had to be something that allowed for easy and incremental expandability that didn't feel like being shaken down (really, though, this second factor is true with any game that's not GW ;-) ).
I was intrigued by Mantic's Deadzone universe and its 'Fantasy Races in Space' aesthetic (even though it does feel like a bit of a less-interesting 40k ripoff), and its grid-based movement system seemed promising, but something about CodeOne made me want to give Infinity a chance. Maybe it was the fact that it was a brand new release and I was feeling daring? Maybe it was the fact that the Deadzone starter set was sold out worldwide?
I placed my order for Operation Kaldstrom and got about reading the rules pdf that CodeOne publisher Corvus Belli offers for free on their website while concurrently fiddling with their (also free) army building app. Right off the bat, free rules is a big appeal over Games Workshop's flagship products, which obfuscate their games behind a rolling series of pay-to-play rules and codex updates that feel more like costly necessary errata than optional expansions. Kill Team was no stranger to this concept, with 4 additional rulebooks released over two years (Commanders, Elites, Arena, and Annual 2019), each of which swung the game in one direction or another to try 'fix' the previous update. While the CodeOne rulebook is not the best organized rulebook I've ever read, it did have the advantage of being a searchable pdf, and I felt like I had a reasonable grasp of the basics of the game by the time I was done reading it. It certainly felt fresh and novel compared to Kill Team, and I could feel the tactical options of the game stretched out before me. Much like Battletech from my childhood, there was a crunchiness to the complicated rules that felt freeing rather than restrictive. But would the game in practice live up its promise? There was one way to find out, but first I had put the damn thing together.
PUTTING THE DAMN THING TOGETHER
Back in the very early days of my wargaming hobby, good miniatures were cast out of lead or pewter. The technology to make quality plastic miniatures didn't exist yet, so I had a handful of nice metal miniatures and a lot more murky terrible-quality plastic ones. I didn't know what the hell I was doing as a kid, though, so when they were painted, they turned out universally ugly. Fast forward to 2020, and I've been working with incredibly high quality injection molded plastic miniatures from Games Workshop and other companies for years, and I'm a pretty decent painter to boot. The prospect of Infinity's metal miniatures honestly scared me a bit, though, since I was utterly unfamiliar with working with them.
I haven't dealt with metal minis since the age of 13
Corvus Belli designs their figures via CG sculpting programs like most in the industry these days, but they're still all cast in metal, partially because it allows them to create small runs in a cost effective manner which directly ties into skirmish/individual soldiers nature of the game. So while their figures aren't exactly “cheap” compared to GW, you're also not forced into a bulk-buy business model that the plastic 'sprue' system encourages. The metal minis come in little baggies, usually in 3-5 pieces. I took the proper precautions in building them (including aggressively washing with soap and water to remove mold release) but nonetheless ran up against a couple of significant issues. Firstly, the metallic surface of these minis is a bit hard to read' prior to putting primer on. As a result, I definitely missed some flash and seams that you'd normally want to take off before painting. All throughout the process of painting I noticed issues that required emergency 'surgery' and re-painting to fix. While plastic minis tend to have more flash and required more cleanup overall, it's also much easier to catch the flash on plastic minis early.
The second and more significant issue with the metal minis is that they are a huge pain to glue up. With plastic minis, superglue bonds almost instantly, and plastic cement does a good job of melting pieces together to create nearly seamless joints. Obviously plastic cement is a no-go on metal, but superglue was surprisingly ineffective as well, since the metal has nearly no moisture in it to aid the bonding. I would hold pieces together for several minutes at a time only to have them fall apart (or stick to my fingers) the moment I took my hands off them. I tried all manner of clamps and contraptions to hold the pieces together for longer, but it was impossible to clamp from the right direction with the way that many pieces fit together at odd angles. Even after I thought I was done, some figures that had been glued together for hours broke apart when I accidentally dropped them from a few inches above the surface of the table. Eventually I had to go to the nuclear option. I ordered some superglue accelerator (which was an absolute must) to improve the bond, and furthermore drilled with a pin-vise and pinned every part of the miniatures that I was concerned about (which was a lot of parts). In some cases when I was worried that even this wouldn't hold together, I used two-part epoxy. The bases also require being cut open in order to fit the slots from the minis into them for a good hold. All in all, it was a ton of unexpected work before the painting process even started.
White is a damn hard color to paint
Painting was no walk-in-the-park either. One thing that I came to take for granted after years of painting GW minis and their ilk is how most miniatures are made with exaggerated proportions. GW calls this “Heroic Scale”, but nearly all miniatures have some variation on larger than normal hands, feet, heads, etc. and simplified details that subtly aid in painting them. Infinity eschews this for something approaching a “true” scale, which means high-detail body parts, like hands and faces, are microscopically small. In addition, many figures are covered in over/underlapping armor bits and excessive amounts of detail-for-detail's-sake, which makes some of GW's densest sculpts feel downright restrained. To cap things off, I'm a sucker for doing the 'official' faction liveries on my minis (as opposed to striking out on my own custom color schemes right off the bat) and both of the enclosed factions in the game (Yu Jing and PanOceania) extensively use white - a color that is notoriously hard to paint well, in their schemes.
All things considered, I feel okay about how the figures turned out, but it took me nearly a month of consistent painting in my spare time to get through just 15 minis, and there were a lot of days that I had to force myself to do it. They were probably the most difficult and most frustrating set of minis I've ever painted. Others' experiences may vary, but if Infinity was someone's very first experience with miniatures, I could see it potentially scaring them away from the hobby overall.
The chipboard terrain was a pain to put together and the map is heavily creased
The chipboard terrain that comes with the set also proved surprisingly difficult to assemble. For a game that requires a goodly amount of terrain to play properly, its nice that they include a bunch of little bits in the starter box, but the buildings in particular were downright paradoxical in their construction, with pieces that needed to be slotted in opposite directions... so-much so that eventually I started just clipping the majority of the tabs off and gluing them together. The terrain looks okay once assembled, but the map that comes in the box is just folded paper and doesn't really lay flat, and the edges were so creased that the image (only printed on one side) was already worn off in places when I first unfolded it. All-in-all, this is an area where the Kill Team box provides better value, with both a double-sided good quality 'board' and really cool plastic terrain. The bad experience with the Kaldstrom terrain made me wary of chipboard terrain overall now, and I'm not sure I would risk getting more of it in favor of buying MDF kits and/or building my own out of foam (which is luckily something that I have the space and resources to do).
This does bring up a question of overall 'value' of the package here, which is not something I'm usually too keen on discussing. For me, value is not just about a tally of the contents of a box - if a game isn't fun, it doesn't matter how many bits it has, because you won't be using them if you don't like playing and it's just a box of expensive garbage. That said, while the Operation Kaldstrom box set of figures is likely a good deal within the economy of Infinity products, you ARE basically paying $130 for 15 miniatures, a few D20s, and some cardboard terrain and chits. Unlike the Kill Team starter box, you don't even get a full physical rulebook. Now, this is sort-of a debatable point, partly because while Kill Team gives you more up-front, it also demands more from you - its got more to sell you and more reasons to do so, and the nature of the GW business model makes it feel like you're never done buying stuff.
Kill Team gave you a physical rulebook in the box, but its been errata'd to hell and GW wants you to buy 4 more books to play it properly. The Infinity CodeOne rules are free and can be updated on the fly, and you'll never have to pay for Corvus Belli's mistakes in the form of a new physical copy (though you can buy physical if that's your thing), and any army balancing updates are free as well. Also, because of the nature of the way armies are built in Infinity, you can literally expand your forces by buying 1 or 2 figures at a time and immediately get a lot of potential value out of the abilities they will bring to your faction. In that sense, I think that while the boxed game's value is questionable, the Infinity ecosystem is probably a good value overall and successfully hits my desire coming off of Kill Team to have a game that doesn't feel unreasonably costly to expand upon.
I made my own spreadsheets for the game because the Army Builder had some problems
One final thing I noticed, unfortunately, while preparing for my first game, was that the CodeOne Army app on the Corvus Belli website has a number of problems with it and was clearly not properly tested. Particularly when it comes to exporting army lists to pdf for printing, the results are nigh un-usable, due to the fact that the range-markings for weapons and movement use different forms of measurement (inches for movement and cm for weapon range, regardless of how you set it in the app) and figures are listed without their close-combat weapon load-outs (even for figures whose primary skill is CC, their specialty weapons are not listed among their equipment). For all I've said about the free support, this is a pretty big strike against Corvus Belli, especially since these problems persist over a month after the game released. I've contacted them both via email and in the forums about the issues, and they may be fixed eventually, but in the meantime I had to make my own spreadsheets for my armies rather than using the official Army Builder.
BUT HOW DOES IT PLAY?
So here we are - the moment of truth, for those of you who didn't want to hear my life story before I got to the actual game. How is Infinity CodeOne to play? It's pretty good! With more play, I might even say it's great.
First things first - Infinity is a game that's known for having a high rules overhead. I've never played the original game, but if CodeOne is the “simplified” version of those rules, then I can imagine they're a doozy. The actual Operation Kaldstrom package only contains quickstart rules, but unless you're a total miniature game noob and want the rules drip-fed to across multiple practice missions, I'd recommend you skip this entirely and go straight to the pdf rulebook instead. The CodeOne rulebook is over 100 pages long, and while some of that is fluff, a large portion of the book consists of charts, rules, and examples of gameplay. However, while the rules are dense, they do all feel logical and necessary, and they combine together nicely to form a unified structure that doesn't feel like the patchwork of colliding systems that Kill Team did. Also, as someone who is admittedly used to the extreme simulation nature of games like Battletech with its myriad rules, the CodeOne rules aren't really so complicated as they are novel in a way that can make them procedurally tricky to wrap your head around.
Overlapping lines of sight means you might be able to react multiple times to one enemy
Let's take one of the core aspects of the game, and likely its best idea, as an example. Infinity is built around the motto that “It's always your turn”. In practice, what that means is that you have Active Turns, where you expend orders to make your guys do stuff such as move and shoot, and Reactive Turns (essentially your opponent's turn) wherein your figures are given the option to “react” (via a system called Automatic Reaction Order, or ARO) more-or-less every time they have line-of-sight to an opposing figure who is activated (its more complicated than that but you can read the rules for yourself). An active turn figure performs the first half of their order, then you check to see if any of your figures could have witnessed the opponent's action. If so, your figures can interrupt that action at any point during its progress with a declaration of what they are doing (for example, firing overwatch on an enemy that has popped up from cover).Then the opponent performs the second part of their order, usually some form of a reaction to your reaction (e.g. shooting back, dodging, or a second move action). Then all of the declared actions are assumed to play out simultaneously. This leads to some complex, yet realistically interactive situations - in other games, a figure could run out into the open and across the firing lines of multiple enemies, but as long as they ended their turn back behind cover there is no recourse, leading to some very game-y tactics. But in Infinity, the reactive player can declare that they shot the active character while they were out in the open during the process of the movement. The target doesn't even have the option of benefitting from a partial cover bonus because the shooter decided to hold their fire until the moment that the target was fully exposed. Since the whole move plays out simultaneously, though, if the shot connects, the wounded soldier makes it to their intended point of cover before they collapse into unconsciousness from their wound. This system is surprisingly elegant once you get it down, but the way it plays with time and space in such an unusual way relative to other games makes it seem much more complicated at first than it actually is.
Whenever opposing figures directly contest one-another through their actions, as in the case of two soldiers shooting at each other simultaneously, the game engages in a Face-to-Face roll. In another bit of cleverness, each figure has a target number on a D20 (modified based on range and visibility, in the case of shooting) that they are trying to roll equal to or below. However, they are ALSO still trying to roll higher than their opponent, and a higher successful roll cancels any lower successes. So if I need to roll a 15 or less to succeed and you need to roll a 7 or less to succeed, I have a higher range of possible successes, but if I roll a 5 and you roll a 6, you've still won the roll. Hitting your exact target number also functions as a critical hit, which trumps any other successes (even higher successes) except for another critical hit. It sounds complicated, but its actually quite simple in practice, and it tends to get around the swing-y-ness of the flat probability curve of most D20 based game systems.
Infinity uses an interesting take on combat rolls which feels like it helps mitigate the 'flatness' of D20 probabilities
Another tricky (yet rewarding) aspect of the game is the way that orders are assigned. Every figure on your team generates one order per turn that you can use. However, there is no rule requiring you to assign orders evenly across your squad. Instead, you could assign all your orders to one figure, allowing them to make multiple activations and bound across the map like a damn hero. So what's to stop you from assigning all your orders to your best soldier? Well, remember that your actions have consequences in the form of enemies who have line of sight being able to react to them. If an enemy team is well deployed throughout the map and has multiple overlapping fields of fire, every single action performed by your lone Rambo might draw reactions from 2 or 3 guys. Even if you survive, once your figure ends up deep in enemy territory, your opponent has a full turn's worth of their own orders to flank them and pick them apart unless you have some guys on your team that can provide covering fire. In doing this, the game gives you a litany of viable options - big risky moves and play-it-safe scenarios that you have full control over. A reckless advance by even a high-end unit can result in a quick death, but properly maneuvering a squad of rank-and-file soldiers in a way that allows them to collectively punch way above their weight class is a huge rush.
There's so much more... the major benefits afforded by cover and the ability to go prone allows you move around purposefully and precisely without drawing enemy attention. Cover itself only counts if you're pressed up against it, so in spite of line of sight being hugely important, you don't waste a lot of time speculating about whether something does or does not count as cover. Some units have cloaking devices and/or special types of mimetic camouflage that allow them to risk going out in the open and avoid taking shots, but you can specifically combat the difficulty to hit these kinds of units by going after them with template weapons (like shotguns and flamethrowers) which always hit. Like Kill Team, it only takes one or two hits to take a unit out, but whereas units tend to die arbitrarily in Kill Team due to the random swing of fate and the fact that nearly anyone on the map can be attacked with impunity, in CodeOne you have precise control over how much risk you put your figures based on how and where you position them, and since your units are also the source of orders that could be used by other units every turn, you can't take your 'fodder' guys for granted (inherently giving low cost units value without needing to resort to an additional morale mechanism). And sure, having some big beefy killing machines on your side is great... but some of your 'squishies' might also happen to be specialists (medics or hackers, for example) who are sometimes the only figures who can score you victory points by interacting with objective tokens.
There's a lot of great stuff in here, and although I haven't had as much time with it as I did with Kill Team yet, I get a completely different feeling in playing it - Infinity feels less like an optimization puzzle where you commit to a strategy before the games starts and more like something that you interact with (and react to) in the moment - It's a chess-like battle of wits where you bluff and outwit, and where your opponent can't say to you “your pawn can't capture a Queen... its too powerful”. Each game led to me analyzing and trying to learn from my mistakes about how to play better next time, as opposed to, in Kill Team, wondering how much more money I would need to spend (on figures or terrain or sourcebooks) before the game actually felt like it was working as intended.
Infinity doesn't take for granted the common miniature game tropes and mechanisms and just recycle them thoughtlessly, but its also not just different for the sake of being different. In almost every case, from turn order to movement to cover to combat, they've tweaked systems in ways both large and small, with the goal of adding more interactivity, more tactical options, and more control... and in spite of the complexity of some of the rules, it manages to create something more than the sum of its parts.
A FEW ISSUES
The Army Builder has a cool interface but the pdf/print export has some problems
If I can be critical, and perhaps a bit skeptical, of some of the aspects of the game that I'm still unsure of, the biggest one would wondering how CodeOne is going to fit into the Infinity universe in the future, and whether it will expand the game or instead fracture it into people who play an “incomplete” version of the game vs those who play the REAL version of Infinity. There are some odd rules inconsistencies that likely come from the fact that CodeOne was adapted from full Infinity - the only reason I know about them really is because CodeOne is very sparsely explained in online forums and rules clarifications at this early stage, and so I've needed to dip into the knowledge base of the Infinity sometimes to try and get answers.
Somewhat bafflingly, the CodeOne rules have adopted a system of point values for units that are essentially 1/10 the cost of the Infinity Units... so for example a unit like a standard Fusilier, which normally costs 10 points in Infinity, costs 1 in CodeOne... but this results in a weird need to round point values to the nearest whole number that removes a lot of potential nuance (not to mention the ability for the game designers to adjust costs slightly to re-balance in the future if it becomes necessary). For example, a version of the Fusilier that is a Paramedic Specialist with a Medikit costs 12 in standard Infinity but only 1 (same as the vanilla unit) in CodeOne... so the option to choose the arguably better version of the unit has no cost associated with it (except in very specific scenarios). This simplification might make some sense if CodeOne didn't introduce fractional 0.5 costs into its units as well. But what's the point of going from base 10 unit cost to base 1 if you're going to have units that cost 1.5, or 2.5 or etc? Why even make the change? This, along with the separate Special Weapons Cost (SWC) requirements make army building more difficult than it needed to be, at least for the smaller 15 point games that Kaldstrom supports out of the box without any expansions. Its very difficult to put together a team that contains both the maximum allowed 15 points of figures and 3 points of SWCs, because often times switching up a loadout on a figure changes the value of BOTH numbers, leading to a paradox where changing one figure snowballs into weapon loadout changes across your whole crew until you find something that works without putting you over or under cost. Obviously this becomes less of an issue with bigger armies since you have more ways to spend points, but the dual-point values and half-point increments felt weirdly restrictive.
The CodeOne rules in some places seem clearer than Infinity Rules. Camouflage, Mimetism, and the Surprise Attack ability are split up, with clear explanations of what they all do in the stat-line rather than being treated as levels (e.g. L1, L2, L3, etc.) with inherent rules associated with them in normal Infinity. Ditto with skills like “Forward Deployment”. Instead of Saying Forward Deployment L2 (with the player needing to know in this case that the L2 version of this skill means a bonus 8”) the CodeOne version of the skill is the much-simpler Forward Deployment +8”. Skills like Dodge are simplified to provide bonus movement consistently, whether the dodge is used by the Active or Reactive player (its inexplicably not allowed to move as the result of a successful dodge as the Active Player in the normal Infinity Rules). Likewise, the omission of things like Intuitive Attacks, which allow you to essentially shoot template weapons at cloaked figures under some circumstances, feels like the right choice to simplify the game (as far as I can tell).
The flipside is that abilities that seemed useful to me like Suppressive Fire - a trait that allows units to eschew offense for stronger defensive fire, don't exist anymore either... not being familiar with the standard Infinity rules beyond what I found while trying to clarify questions in CodeOne, I can't say whether this takes away anything from the game tactically or not, but I have no idea the methodology by which things were changed, and I fear that unless the overall Infinity rules are streamlined to help match the CodeOne rules, it might create a lot of confusion to players looking to step up into the upcoming N4 Infinity rules release and also create an elitist mindset among traditional Infinity players, with them looking down on the CodeOne players for not having one of their particular 'pet' rules in their game.
Of course, I’m basing this on the fact that the older N3 and CodeOne rules do disagree in many places without any knowledge of the upcoming N4 ruleset. I have heard that CodeOne rules will essentially become the basic rules of Infinity proper once N4 comes out and the advanced rule system will add on top of it a-la-carte rather than having very similar, yet in some cases conflicting basic rulesets, weapons, and equipment at the core of both games. I’m hoping that’s the case, because otherwise it could be a mess. I’m also concerned at the preponderance of errors that have stuck around in the CodeOne Army Builder over a month after the game's release are evidence that Corvus Belli is not going to fully throw their weight behind this system.
Its hard enough for anyone competing with Games Workshop to get their game noticed, let alone when its actually two similar games that aren't 100% compatible with one another, and none of the FLGS I frequent in Los Angeles even carry Infinity products as it is. As such, I'm afraid that the downright rarity of the game might limit its market penetration. I presume CodeOne's appeal to newer players is at least meant to try and correct that, so I do hope that for the sake of the ecosystem, long-time Infinity players will be welcoming to us noobs and it does spread the game far and wide. I suppose the worst case scenario is, if CodeOne ends up being a flop and loses support, the game is still more or less interchangeable with Infinity, so one could transition over to the parent game easily as long as they were willing to learn more rules.
I spiced things up by adding some of my own terrain (only the chipboard stuff comes in the box)
And now that the figures are all painted up, and pain of that experience has subsided, have I changed my mind about the art style of the game? Eh, not really. I'm still not really a fan of the aesthetics. The newer sculpts that I've seen are certainly less anime-ish, and many of the designs have a sort of Halo or Mass Effect aesthetic.
One bright spot with the minis is that there is a surprisingly not-terrible balance of male and female characters for a miniatures game - 5 women out of the total of 15 characters, and none of them were in absurdly sexy poses our outfits. Some of the older sculpts I've seen from CB are a bit silly and pinup-y, so I'm hoping this represents a design shift towards something more visually consistent in the universe and inclusive for the game.
However, I still find the appearance of most of the characters to be uninspired and same-y. If the factions weren't painted in different color schemes, I likely couldn't even tell who was on which side. They're all some variation of 'person in futuristic armor' with only the subtlest of design cues to differentiate the factions. Furthermore, all the units are essentially humans (or at least proportionally human-shaped), which doesn't leave much room to differentiate the factions broadly via a trademark silhouette (whereas 40k factions tend to have obviously different sizes and shapes across the board). Sure there are some variations within each faction, such as the Remotes and Palbots, but since each faction has these same types of units with roughly similar form factor, they don't really help players differentiate on a faction-to-faction level. The Combined Army (not part of the Kaldstrom starter box, but available from the limited faction-set for CodeOne), with its typical Shasvastii troops sort-of resembling the Turians from Mass Effect, is probably the closest thing to visual variety among the unit types, though at tabletop-distance their silhouette still looks very human.
All the figures essentially draw from the same batch of generic weapons as well, with nearly every type of soldier having multiple loadouts across a range of options. This is kind-of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, many choices for how to outfit each soldier gives you flexibility to try new things in army building without having to buy more figures just to get a particular gun or piece of equipment. On the other hand, it only serves to further confuse the generic-ness of each soldier when you can't really even use, say, a signature weapon, or battlefield role to distinguish between already same-y guys. For all of Kill Team's faults, the imaginative quality of the factions and sculpts and the specificity of the units creates a level of personal attachment that Infinity just can't match with its more well-rounded and jack-of-all-trades units.
An ORC Troop (no, not that kind of Ork) getting ready to advance from behind cover
Figures also tend of have long and nonsensical names that don't give you much of a hint as to the unit's function and in some cases are confusing. For example “Knight of Justice of the Order of the Hospital” is not a medic-type unit in spite of “Hospital” being in the name, and “Jujak Regiment, Korean Shock Infantry” doesn't hint at the fact that many of the equipment loadouts for this figure come with flamethrowers. It may sound like a niggle, but when you're dealing with a completely unfamiliar sci-fi world wrapped around complex gameplay, it really helps when the flavor of the game underpins the functionality. In a game like Battletech, you could easily surmise that a Wasp or Locust mech is smaller and weaker than something like an Atlas or Zeus, or, to refer back to the above naming conundrum, that a Firestarter mech is equipped with flamethrowers. There are far fewer of these context clues inherent in the naming and aesthetic design of the Infinity figures to help things along while you're getting familiar with the game, and considering that it's daunting on so many fronts, it would be helpful if there was more to help ground it for new players.
CLOSING THOUGHTS
So where do I stand on Operation Kaldstrom and Infinity: CodeOne overall? I knew I was getting into something that would have a significant learning (and hobby) curve, and also that the first edition of a new game (albeit one that was a spin-off of a pre-existing system) would not be without its speed bumps. But you only get one chance to make a good first impression, and Kaldstrom stumbles out of the gate a bit with some technical issues, rules eccentricities, and some questionable aesthetics, as well as being in an unclear space relative to its parent-game.
For Infinity fans out there who may be defensive about this game's faults due to being long-term entrenched in the franchise, I would remind you that CodeOne is likely NOT designed for you, and it is instead explicitly here to bring new gamers into Corvus Belli's universe, and considering that I am the absolute ideal new player to approach a game like this (based on my level of experience and tempered expectations) its worth considering that CodeOne currently doesn't do quite as strong a job of making converts as it might want to. Now, I say this out of a deep respect for this game and what it's been able to accomplish, because, with all its brilliant gameplay ideas, I genuinely want to see it be successful. It's very hard to compete with Games Workshop's monopoly of the miniature game landscape, and so, to be a serious contender, you can't make mistakes. I think the mistakes that CodeOne has made so far are minor and can be fixed, but CB needs to be incredibly vigilant in these early days of the game to ensure it survives and thrives and have to throw their full support behind the product. If they can do that, they'll likely find a lot of other people like me who might come to love the game they've created.
If you've not played a miniatures game before but you enjoy playing tactical combat videogames like Xcom, or if you're a minis fan already who is in it for more than just the painting and are attracted to highly tactical skirmish games and relish detailed rules and tough strategic choices, this may be the best game system out there. It's neither as aesthetically and narratively outrageous nor as imaginative is Kill Team, but it's tactical, balanced, and precise in ways that most GW games can only dream of. It isn't as smooth or inviting to pick up as Star Wars: Armada, but it benefits from a variety and open-endedness of units, terrain, and scenarios that mean there is more creativity and exploration in it than can be found in Fantasy Flight's strict and tuned ecosystem. And I will likely never be able to love Infinity the way I loved Battletech... nothing can really compare to your First Love. But, as I said, I was looking for a game that I could get “obsessed with”, and if a nearly 10,000 word essay doesn't scream “obsessed”, what does?
Finished paint jobs on the PanOceania and YuJing armies. Not pictured: The Kunai Solutions Ninja that comes as a bonus. He's hidden because he's a Ninja. (camera was acting up for these so they're a bit distorted and blurry around the edges)
THE GOOD
An incredibly novel and solid core game system that gives players lots of tough tactical choices and a fine level of control over their army. Very “crunchy”. If you want your miniatures game to emphasize the game aspect over just the hobby/painting aspect, CodeOne is a solid choice.
Because its designed from the ground up as a skirmish game and figures can be purchased individually, the business model for expanding armies isn't onerous.
The rulebook is free, so you never need to pay for errata or “updates”.
THE BAD
Despite the good quality of the metal figures, these are some of the most difficult miniatures I've ever built/painted.
The chipboard buildings in the box were a pain to put together and paper map left a lot to be desired. I likely won't be using much of this terrain once I can replace it with alternatives.
The art/design and weapon loadouts of figures are very same-y, making the characters feel generic and hard to tell apart on the battlefield. Some may like this aesthetic but I'm not a huge fan.
As of July 2020, the official Army Builder app has some serious technical errors that make it almost un-useable.
THE ???
I'm unclear on what Corvus Belli's future plans are for the CodeOne ruleset, and if it’s possible for it to live harmoniously within the larger Infinity ecosystem, or if it will create a split among players and a distraction for the publisher.
I don't understand why CodeOne uses a different points/cost system than regular Infinity. It doesn't provide any improvements or simplification as far as I can tell.
Comments