Introduction

A common concern for players new to Infinity, as with most wargames, is some variant on either “is this a good list?” or “what should I take in a list?” Now while there are certainly more and less optimised choices within each faction, synergies and strategies to consider which are specific to them, all Infinity units draw on shared rules, and all Infinity lists share most of the logic that makes them work effectively. So we can offer some advice and understanding on how to build a good list for Infinity, without getting into faction specifics. 

This article is part of a series on playing Infinity, seeking to explain from ‘first principles’ rather than giving further opinions to those who already understand the competitive metagame. Thus it is aimed at new players, or those who want to move from purely casual games into a more competitive approach. While the points should be valid for all factions in the game, it is aimed at the standard points level – 300 – and the standard Infinity Tournament System (ITS) mission pack. 

Model and Order Counts

All Infinity lists have a hard cap of 15 models, and they need to be separated into two Combat Groups of up to 10 models. A cardinal point of list building in Infinity is that almost everyone wants the maximum number of models. First, each model generates an Order, and Orders are the absolute lifeblood of your gameplay. Second, more models mean you can exert greater control over the board, and you can absorb more casualties before either losing that control, and/or dropping to so few Orders that you can’t execute a plan.

Balancing Cheap vs Expensive Models

Because players want 15 models, they have to be ruthless in cutting costs. The most ubiquitous models in each faction are the cheapest options which provide Regular Orders. Consider that to fit 15 troopers, a standard size 300pt list needs an average cost of 20 points per model. You can hardly get a powerful, hard hitter to beat your opponent’s models for less than 30; many highly effective units will be 40+ and TAGs are usually 60-75 (and can be far more). Clearly the savings need to come from somewhere. Including cheap troopers like Remotes which don’t have any lethal weapons, or Warbands which don’t have any ranged weapons effective beyond 8”, is necessary to enable that model count. 

This approach works because of Infinity’s Order activation system, provided players understand how to use both their cheapest and strongest units in their intended roles. If your list includes 7pt Remotes and a 75pt TAG, clearly you are going to push the latter piece heavily during your Active turn. It can do a lot of damage and (if you play it right) be troublesome for your opponent to deal with. The cheap Remotes can simply sit at the back and provide those Regular Orders and they would be valuable for that alone. But, by leveraging them as board control, you can also set up situations where your opponent has to fight through them to get things done. As long as you are canny about this, and don’t offer cheap models up to the enemy units which are most efficient at killing them, you can present opponents with a real headache. Cheap models may not be hard to kill, but they can be unprofitable for your opponent to attack, simply because they are so cheap – you can plan to trade away such models in your Reactive turn, forcing your opponent to spend their Orders removing them. That will hopefully leave your valuable models intact, ready to swoop in and finish the enemy or achieve the mission Objectives.

In the opposite set-up, if a player ‘goes wide’ and only takes models which are, for example, 15-30 points, they will have more pieces they want to use offensively, but those could be more fragile, or less mobile, or struggle to break through the hardest defensive pieces. Defensively, their opponents will have more threats they need to defeat – but equally, those are all of similar value. Take it from us, it’s generally easier to defend a couple valuable units with a lot of disposable ones. So an even spread of medium-cost units tends to be a niche strategy. It might work for some factions where those units have the right mix of capabilities, but most factions want to concentrate their force to some extent. 

One very common list-building mistake for newer/casual players is simply adding cool, capable (and therefore expensive) models until they run out of points. This overlaps with taking too many offensive, rather than defensive units, but the result is the same – lists which are easy for skilled opponents to disable. If you want to play your chosen faction competitively, one good lens to start is filtering the army builder for the cheapest units available, and considering how you can work them into your lists, and how you can deploy/play them to best effect. There is a flip side to this for factions which abound in cheap, aggressive models – you can’t have more than 15 troopers, so everyone needs to do at least one important job. If you throw in too many cheap pumpers who are just there to contribute Orders, you can run short of ‘slots’ to put in the models you actually want to push around the table to win the game.

Models Usually Equal Orders

Models Which Start Off the Table

We’ve said that a primary reason people take 15 models is to maximise their Order count. Players need to remember that only models on the table at the start (Tactical Phase) of their Active turn contribute Orders. So, Hidden Deployment models don’t contribute to the pool. They do get to use their own Order to move and act if they reveal during the Active turn. So using Hidden Deployment doesn’t hurt your overall Order count per se, but it commits you to using at least one Order on that particular model, unless you reveal in the Reactive turn. If you wait until Round 2-3 to reveal that Hidden model it is costing you Orders. Combat Jump and Parachutist models are even more punishing, they are placed on the table ‘using their own Order’ but can’t move, shoot etc. They rely wholly on the other Orders in the pool for that. Due to the dangerous nature of dropping in amongst the enemy, such models often don’t make it to the tactical phase of the turn after they arrive, so they effectively risk never contributing any Orders to your force.

For these reasons, players generally need to limit the number of Hidden Deployment models they take, unless they have really clear plans to use each of them individually (a common ploy with Specialists in some missions) or reveal them in ARO, which is fun but does risk them getting killed. Even more so, players rarely take more than 1 Parachutist or Combat Jump model, simply because it hurts their Order count so much. 

Irregular Models

Models which are Irregular are ‘selfish;’ they can spend their Order only on their own activation and don’t contribute it to a pool. In an Active turn where you actually want to use the model, great, it doesn’t have a downside. But when you want it to just sit tight, and use all your Orders on other models and tasks, well, it’s useless. This is a major constraint, but good news, it makes a model much cheaper than an otherwise identical Regular version. This is a manageable downside for units in two particular roles:

• First, if you are nearly certain you have a useful way to spend at least one Order on the Irregular model. A specialist who can deploy near an objective, and wants to move and activate it. A cheap Warband unit, which wants to move forward and throw a smoke grenade to support another unit. 
• Second, if you never particularly need to spend Orders on the model, because you intend for it to fight and die in the Reactive Turn. Examples of this would be Haqqislam’s Daylami Infantry or PanOceania’s Helot Militia. Irregular troops which are as good, or better, at fighting in Reactive than Active. So players leverage their cheap cost to use them as a disposable defensive screen.  

Most Irregular units fit into one of those categories, and they tend to be cheap. Because of Infinity’s activation mechanics, if you took a very expensive powerhouse unit and made it Irregular (and thus cheaper), that would simply be a flat buff, because players would always be happy to use the unit in their Active Turn, and the negative aspect wouldn’t matter at all. 

The final caveat with Irregular units is you can use Command Tokens to convert their Irregular Order into a Regular Order for one turn. This is an okay use of a very scarce resource. But as a backstop, it means players whose unit selection includes Irregular units are often comfortable including 1-2 in a list. They can probably get value out of their Irregular Orders in some turns, and if a situation arises where they can’t, they can always consider converting the Order. Just be aware there is a real opportunity cost, so it should never be ‘plan A’. 

Models Which Bring Extra Orders

There are a few ways in Infinity to get more Orders than the models you have on the table at the start of your turn. The bottom line is that all of these rules are highly desirable, and commonly included in lists unless they are attached to truly unattractive units.

• Lieutenant (Lt) Order(s). Your Lt generates an Order which only they can spend. What’s more, some Lt options have skills like Lt (+1 Order), where they generate two such Orders, or Strategos, which means that special Order just becomes a Regular Order that is added to the pool for their Combat Group. The major limit is that using these Orders means declaring who your Lt is; that information is usually kept secret because it’s very bad if they get killed – see part two of this article for more on Lts. They also can’t be used on a Lt to move along with a Fireteam; spending one on the Lt causes the team to break up.  
  • NCOs. Models with the NCO skill can spend the Lt Order(s) as if they were the Lt. Not only does this let you avoid declaring your Lt’s identity, it can be used on a model in a Fireteam. 
• Tactical Awareness. This skill effectively grants the model one special Order per turn, which can only be spent on itself (including as a Fireteam leader). This is most commonly found on models which actively want to push forward and fight (all TAGs have it, for example), where it is nearly equal in value to a Regular Order. The other main use is in models which can join powerful Fireteams – even if the owning model isn’t that powerful in its own right, it can lead the Fireteam during that activation, while they reposition. 
• Impetuous. The Impetuous skill gives a model a tightly constrained Order which they have to use at the start of the turn. They must use the first skill to move into melee combat with an enemy model, or failing that, directly towards the enemy Deployment Zone. The second skill is selected from a narrow list of options. So models can use this ‘free’ Order to Move-Shoot or Move-Dodge quite freely. But if they Move-Move, both moves must be directly forward, and they can’t take other actions like Move-Discover. The key context here is that Impetuous is usually paired with the No Cover rule, and frequently appears on close assault troops. Because of that punishing downside, and the lack of good ranged weapons, such troops are cheap. Clearly, running such models straight forward is only going to be a good idea once enemy AROs have been suppressed. But Impetuous Orders are still extremely useful. They can be free forward movement when AROs are not present, and they can be used for supporting moves – most commonly, throwing smoke grenades – while leaving the real Order pool untouched.
  • Frenzy. Models with Frenzy can gain the Impetuous rule after they’ve inflicted Wounds on the enemy, along with the downside of Partial Cover. This can lead to more Orders later in the game, but it’s very difficult to plan on in list-building. Due to the push-pull of Infinity games, if you send a model into an attack and it inflicts a Wound, it’s often one of the models most likely to be attacked in the next Reactive turn, and so less likely to survive to generate its first Impetuous Order. That makes Frenzy less of a benefit, and more of a drawback – although it does make aggressive models cheaper.

The bottom line here is that having extra sources of Orders from the Lt, NCO, TacAware and Impetuous is extremely beneficial. If those features are available on units which are at least usable, they tend to be included. It can be really dispiriting to an opponent, who thinks they have degraded the number of Orders you have available by killing your models, to see you take two Impetuous activations, use two NCO Orders and finally one TacAware Order, and get a whole lot done before even touching the Regular Orders pool. 

Balancing Combat Groups

Players have to split their models into Combat Groups of up to 10, and it’s each of those Groups which forms an Order Pool. Models can only spend the Orders of other models in their own Group. This is an abstract aspect of list building which can be tricky for new players to grasp the full implications of. Because Combat Groups are maximum 10 models, and players can only have 15 models total, there is no benefit to having more than two groups. If you are playing 15 troopers, clearly the splits are 10/5, 9/6 and 8/7. Essentially, you should think about where and how you want to spend Orders during the game, to avoid having models in one Group run out of Orders, while there are unspent Orders in the other Group, without good capabilities to make use of them. This relates to the split we mentioned earlier, between expensive models (often the ones you want to spend Orders on in the Active turn) and cheap ones (which only tend to activate in the perfect opportunity, or to achieve a limited goal).

All of those splits above are valid, but 10/5 or 9/6 are the most common in competitive play. This is because no one ever has enough Orders to do everything they want, and the most devastating attack runs would basically want more Orders than it’s possible to take. So, players want a big group (9-10) to fund their core plan, and they create a small group (5-6) where they can achieve more limited tasks which are easier to plan for. One advantage of 9-6 is that it can be easier to swap units between Combat Groups – this is a use for Command Tokens, but it isn’t allowed to fill a Group with >10 units, including Unconscious models. So the 9-6 split will always give you the option to swap models from the smaller group into the larger (the most common direction) to preserve a big enough pool to have tactical options. At 10-5, you risk having models marooned in the smaller group, even if some models have been knocked out (unless you spend 2 Command Tokens to move units back and forth, which is painfully expensive).

Let’s look a little more about what makes a good mix of units in combat groups:

Active and Passive, or Offensive and Defensive Units

How you choose to divide your models between groups depends on their roles, and how many Orders you think will be needed for them to accomplish them. Some models are intended for the Active turn and expect to use some Orders executing your ‘plan A’, usually by attacking the enemy or achieving the mission objectives. Some especially are ‘order hungry’, they want a lot of Orders poured into them to move aggressively and attack successive enemy positions. Some models are almost purely Reactive, they are included in the hope of deploying either in a position where they can contribute an ARO, or just stay safe and provide an Order, if the game goes well they should never have any Orders spent on them in the Active turn. Let’s look at some examples:

• A heavy TAG needs some Orders to fire on enemy AROs, or targets that can be acquired from long range. It probably won’t need all your Orders from a large pool, because most opponents won’t present it with too many targets, and if you send it running forward into the fray, it can be very vulnerable. This advice applies to a lot of big gun units which want to operate exclusively at long range. 
• A high-value Warband or other close assault unit is very order-hungry and can profitably use all the Orders you can give it. Moving up towards the enemy DZ and engaging multiple targets one after the other takes a lot of Orders. So does reaching melee combat (because it’s usually at least one Order more than the distance you could first draw LoF to the target from). 
• A flash pulse Remote is nearly a purely Reactive unit. You want it to just sit where it has deployed, flashing anyone who approaches, and offering Repeater coverage. If you did have to move it, to contest an Objective or get a Repeater to another area, that would only be 1-2 Orders at most. Many cheap models, like those with direct template weapons acting as ‘corner guards’ fall into this category. Ideally they never have Orders spent on them; if they do, it’s for a short, opportunistic move.
• Support specialists, like a doctor or engineer, are models that don’t want to use many Orders – but you need to be able to spend a couple Orders on them if things go wrong, while still leaving some available for the piece(s) they’re intended to help. 
• A specialist model that you’ve included to activate a Mission Objective can be order-hungry, or only use 1-2 Orders, depending entirely on the mission and how close to the Objectives it can deploy.

The balance is to not overload any group with more order-hungry models than it can resource. A large group might have 2-4 such active models. A small group shouldn’t have more than 1-2. One of the most common mistakes in list-building (beyond really basic stuff) is picking too many units because of their potential in the Active turn. This leads to players having a lot of offensive power that doesn’t get activated because the models are competing for Orders with each other. In turn, the player didn’t spend any points on models better suited to the Reactive turn, and their list is highly vulnerable to attack. Many great active turn units in Infinity are relatively weak if ‘caught standing.’

Strategic Reach and Absorbing Casualties

A larger group basically has a further ‘reach;’ it can put together more ambitious and devastating plays. It also can suffer more casualties before it becomes ineffective. This is one reason why many players favour a 10/5 split. For attacking the enemy force, against a competent opponent, no amount of Orders is too many! It is a priority for many aggressive players to channel as many Orders as possible into a couple aggressive models to smash the enemy. This means putting your primary attack pieces into the bigger group, and allocating some models with a supporting or complementary task into the smaller group. There’s no fixed right or wrong here, the point we want to drive home is it really matters how you split your 15 models. Put some real thought, and experimentation, into whether models can function without stepping on the toes of others in the same Combat Group, who need the Orders.

One method we favour is to have your best unit(s) for breaking through enemy lines and assaulting their models at short range in your larger, 9-10 model Group. Those roles are more demanding on Orders. Then have your best long-range firepower model in your smaller, 5-6 model Group. That role needs a few Orders too, but it generally has a limit. Your opponents will only stand up a few models to provide AROs against your attack – once they have been engaged, your long-range firepower piece doesn’t have much left to do. By splitting those two attacking capabilities into different groups, you can use all the Orders in your list to put together one big attack. The long guns remove AROs, the assault troops get in amongst the more vulnerable enemy models. 

There are other ways you can split down your Combat Groups, keying off that split of one larger ‘main’ Group and one smaller ‘secondary’ pool. Typical examples are:

• A purely defensive small Group, which just provides disposable AROs to clog up the enemy advance. This makes it easy to plan your own Orders in the Active turn, and because it’s usually cheap, you can concentrate more points and power in the main Group. But it might have lower potential because you’re not using your maximum number of Orders for full Active turn effect.
• A small Group which is focussed on providing Specialists to do the mission objectives. This can be a good idea depending (obviously) on what Missions your list will be playing. Some Missions definitely need a few Orders to accomplish a discrete task like activating a console, so planning for your small Group to do that isn’t just resourcing a necessary task. It’s guiding your play to use those Orders on the objective, preventing you getting distracted and using them to attack the enemy! Such a group would have Specialists which can deploy close to the central Objectives, and maybe vision control tools, like smoke grenades or Discoballers, to help them get there.
• One alternative method is to keep both groups with open options for different situations. E.g. if hacking is a big part of your gameplan, have hackers/pitchers in both groups. If you have one big gun in one group, put your second best gun in the other. This way of thinking rewards more flexible players who want to improvise as the game develops, rather than sticking to a default plan in as many games as possible. 

Final Thoughts

Now that may seem like a lot of advice to keep in mind, especially when so much of it is ancient Greek until you’ve played a few games. This is a perennial problem with written Infinity advice – there’s a lot of explaining and exceptions and situational caveats. Here’s a basic review of the points:

• Try to take 15 models.
• Don’t make too many of those Irregular, Hidden Deployment, or Combat Jump/Parachutist.
• Look for your options for ‘extra Orders’ (Tactical Awareness, Impetuous, and NCO/Lt options) and consider taking at least some.
• Take some cheap models that you don’t mind losing, so you can afford a few more expensive ones which reliably can execute your plan.
• Take some models which you don’t mind using – and therefore losing – in the Reactive turn.
• Arrange your Combat Groups carefully, envisioning how each group will spend Orders during the game.

Look forward to part two of list building, which will expand on how to choose a Lieutenant for your force – one model must fill this role – and go through the rare exceptions or counter-arguments to taking 15 models.

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