Introduction

This is a continuation of our series on Infinity from first principles, aimed at newer players or those moving from casual to more considered play. It follows on directly from the prior article on list building, which you can find here.

Choosing Your Lieutenant

In Infinity, every list must include one model with the Lieutenant (Lt) special skill. This represents the force’s commander, and critically, if you start your turn with the Lt Unconscious, Dead, Isolated or in any Null State, you play that turn in the Loss of Lieutenant Condition – basically deprived of your pool of Regular Orders. It’s quite possible to play such a turn and accomplish limited goals, if you’re a very savvy player and the overall table state hasn’t turned against you. But it cripples your reach for putting together complex attacks, and if you are on the back foot it stops any attempt to regain the initiative. So, the primary concern when picking a Lt is the ability to keep them safe, at least until you have begun your Active Turn 3. 

Only certain profiles can be the Lt, typically models armed with a rifle or other ‘standard’ equipment. NOTE: you can filter units in the Army builder by skills, including the Lieutenant skill, and that will show you the list of options for your given faction. The options available are definitely influenced by fluff/background as well as rules design. But the rules impact is that most Lt profiles are sub-optimal within their units – if it weren’t for the need to include a Lt, most players would rather take that unit as a Specialist or a model with a better gun. 

Passive Lieutenants & Decoys

It’s common in Infinity to talk about ‘active’ and ‘passive’ Lts. The latter is a cheap model that just hides in the back, trying to be in as safe a position as possible throughout the game. These passive Lts are the simpler way to manage the problem. You don’t run any risk of falling into Loss of Lt by getting the model killed in your own Active turn, or moving it forward into a more exposed position in pursuit of your objectives. You do still need to worry about the enemy intentionally hunting down your Lt to impose that Loss condition on you. 

The standard defence for a passive Lt, as well as deploying your Lt in a safe, remote location on the table, is to take at least one ‘decoy Lt’. Your Lt’s identity is secret. But, since only certain profiles can fill the role, experienced players usually remember who the potential candidates are, at least for factions they’re familiar with. Even if your opponent doesn’t know much about your faction, having ordinary models which aren’t Specialists, don’t carry serious firepower, and don’t seem to have an active role in the list, is sort of a giveaway. So the best way to deny your opponent surety is to just take two cheap models that could be Lts. For example, I play Nomads and most of my competitive lists will include two Moderators. These are very cheap line infantry, they are valid Lts, and they both get deployed in widely separated positions right at the back, in total cover. This sort of list and deployment makes it unproductive for opponents to try and assassinate my Lt. If I had only one valid Lt model on the table, my opponent could beeline for it and cause me to go into Loss, crippling one of my Active turns. When I have two, they would have to correctly guess which is the real Lt, otherwise the whole manoeuvre would be very inefficient. If an opponent does commit a lot of Orders and maybe a valuable attack piece to take out my cheap, useless ‘decoy Lt’, then I’m the one laughing.

Active Lieutenants & Chain of Command

Active Lts are those you actually expect to activate during the game, spending Orders to attack the enemy or accomplish the objectives. This stems from the fact the Lt gets a special Lt Order  every turn, which only they can spend. In spending it, you have to specify which model is the Lt, so the system isn’t really compatible with decoys, at least past your first Turn. Now an extra Order is a nice little bonus, but the penalty for losing your Lt is so harsh, that if you play an active Lt, you need a way to mitigate the risk. This is where models with the Chain of Command (CoC) skill come in. It lets them take over automatically and seamlessly should your Lt go down. We should also note that CoC is ‘secret info’ – you are not required to tell your opponent that a given model has the skill. This is kind of deceptive, because most experienced players will know which options have CoC profiles available, and, similarly to the profiles for Lts, there will often be competing options that you would have naturally chosen if not for that specific CoC capability. 

If you fancy choosing an active Lt, you could look at how tough the model is, but that tends to be a false metric. No model in Infinity is truly tough, the right threats can and will take it out. You are more likely relying on a CoC model deployed in a safe place for your insurance. What attracts competitive players to an active Lt is partly the freedom from taking two otherwise fairly useless models (a passive Lt and decoy) amongst their 15 slots, but more likely access to a Lt profile which is truly desirable. Some units (often special characters) can be the Lt while carrying great weapons and/or being Specialists, and if that sort of unit is actually good and meshes with your list, there is potentially power and efficiency there. Just remember that need to protect against the Loss condition. If you commit your Lt to a fatal attack run in your turn, and your opponent can figure out which model has CoC (like the identity of a Lt, this is readily apparent to experienced players) then you’re still only one model away from disaster. One final caution, it is absolutely vital to deploy your Lt and CoC model in widely separated positions on the table. You don’t want to let an opponent make one attack run and efficiently despatch both of them!

Blending the Two Options

At this point, reviewing our arguments so far, sharp readers will notice that we have drawn pairings of passive Lts with decoys, and active Lts with CoC support. That is not set in stone. Firstly, you might well want an active Lt, but with a decoy to stop your opponent identifying them and launching a decapitating striking in the first turn of the game. That isn’t as strong a mitigation as a CoC model, but it can be much cheaper. There’s no rule saying you have to spend your Lt Order in the first game round – it might be something you want to save until the endgame.

Specialised Supporting Lieutenants

There are reasons for picking an ‘obvious Lt’, ie one where your opponent can figure out its identity from your army list or at the start of the game, beyond being an active turn powerhouse. Some Lt-eligible models are relatively weak in fighting stats, but come with good ‘command’ skills: Strategos, Inspiring Presence, or additional Lt Orders. Examples would be O-12’s Alpha Unit or Ariadna’s Colonel Voronin. You take these units for their order-economy and strategic benefits, but if you do, their role as the Lt will be immediately obvious and you should invest in a CoC unit as insurance; decoys are not plausible. You probably won’t push such specialised supporting Lts forward in your turn, but they make very tempting targets for the enemy to try and assassinate. There are even some very expensive models that combine such skills with beefier stats, like the iconic Sun Tzu in Yu Jing. They’re absolutely fun to play with and can be very competitive, but be aware, at that investment, you should be trying to build the list to make full use of their expensive capabilities. 

NCO Units

The final piece of the Lt puzzle is NCO units. These allow a model to use the Lt’s Order on themself (and on their Fireteam by acting as the team leader).This capability is especially useful on passive Lts who aren’t obvious. NCO lets the player get value from the Lt Order, without revealing the Lt’s identity, or paying for a Lt who is good at fighting. As we discussed in the first list-building article, Orders are a primary consideration and you should never neglect a chance to squeeze another useful Order out of your list. In most cases, factions with good access to NCO and passive Lts can ignore their more elite active Lt options. A passive Lt, a decoy and an NCO are usually cheaper and more efficient than a strong active Lt and a CoC model – but you will have to look at your own faction’s options carefully, and it is three ‘slots’ of your 15 models, rather than two. Clearly, NCO meshes well with Lts who provide additional Lt Orders, but Lts with the Strategos skill bypass the need for NCOs.

Lists with Fewer than 15 Orders

Look, we did say in the preceding list-building article that lists should usually include 15 troopers. But Infinity is a game full of situational exceptions, so now it’s time to explain those.

The Element of Surprise

Once your opponent has seen 15 models on the table, they know they have seen everything, and you don’t have any further reserves ‘off the table’. This can be obscured to some extent with models which deploy multiple camouflage markers (via the Minelayer or Decoy skills) but experienced players will often see through those. In any case, once you take your first turn, your opponent can count your generated Orders, which will accurately tell them your number of models on the table. Because of the strong consensus that lists should include the full 15 models, it is almost an automatic assumption in competitive play that if an opponent sees, e.g. 13 or 14 models, that means two or one models in either Hidden Deployment, or awaiting Combat Jump/Parachutist deployment. You can use this to generate a slight advantage – if you have drafted your list and come up with 14 models that you really like the composition of, you get some intangible benefits from keeping that doubt in your opponent’s mind. This is especially true if your faction has widely-known Hidden units which are a threat in ARO, or Parachutist (Deployment Zone) units. If the former, your opponent might waste some Orders by being shy about crossing open ground; if the latter, they might deploy some units watching their own board edge, which would have been better used to look towards your own table half. This is not a particularly common strategy for list-building, but especially if you have ‘extra Orders’ as discussed previously, having 14 rather than 15 troopers is hardly a big problem. Especially if you commonly do take Hidden or Parachutist units that have a big impact on the game, it can be fun to run without them, and watch your opponent tie themselves in knots trying to prepare for a reveal that isn’t coming. 

Immunity from First Turn Order-Stripping

A key feature of Infinity for several editions has been that the ‘second player’ – the one who is not taking the first Active Turn of the game – can spend a Command Token and ‘strip’ two Orders from the first player. This has a pretty significant effect in limiting any alpha strike, which even so is a major concern for the second player. It is almost universally done in competitive games – I have almost never had an opponent turn down the opportunity to strip me of Orders, despite the opportunity cost, and I would consider it a mistake if they did so. There is a secret skill – Counterintelligence – which mitigates this effect to one Order stripped, and even when that is present, many players still choose to spend the Command Token.

Well, in N5, if you are the first player, and your list has 10 Orders or fewer in your Order pools at the start of the first turn, the second player cannot strip your Orders. This is a surprisingly big deal. Two extra Orders might not seem to be make or break, but if you have the right offensive units, and a way to penetrate the enemy defence, those could be two Orders you spend inside the enemy DZ, killing their most vulnerable or important models. Now that limit of 10 Orders includes Regular, Irregular and Tactical Awareness Orders. Lt Orders don’t count (even if your Lt has Strategos), nor do Impetuous Orders. Units in Hidden Deployment, or awaiting deployment by Combat Jump/Parachutist don’t generate Orders, so you can have more than 10 troopers in your list and still generate this benefit.

The downside here are that your overall Order pool is by definition smaller. Spreading just 10 Orders (plus any Impetuous or Lt/NCO uses) across two combat groups isn’t going to equal the reach of a conventional 15-trooper list, so the most common way to build for this is to have a  single Combat Group. That can be 11 or even 12 Orders, as you’ll want a Lt that can contribute either personally or via an NCO, which is a lot of reach and striking power. However, that leaves any off-table models in a second combat group rather out on a limb – if you want them to accomplish anything in your Active Turns in Rounds 2-3, you need to spend Command Tokens to put them back into the first Group (and you’d have to sustain casualties in order to make room for them). You can either play this honestly, with 10 troopers in the whole list, which naturally means they will be more elite, but lack any sacrificial models to form a crumple zone. Or, you can game the system with off-table models, but we’d suggest that 2-3 of those are the limit, unless you are completely comfortable with them being mostly Reactive, with no Orders to draw on besides their own. In either case, you are definitely sacrificing flexibility for a boost to first turn offence. Note that the number of Combat Groups in your list is open information, so you can’t try to fool your opponent into thinking you don’t have any off-table models.

Historically, these sorts of lists have mostly been played by factions with the best access to really high end units. Steel Phalanx, with its very strong Greek heroes, was known for it in N4 – one of the major weaknesses of such lists, lack of cheap models to screen out attacks, was mitigated by mass Mimetism-6, close combat skills and strong smoke grenades. In N5, there has been a rise in some factions using multiple strong Hidden Deployment units, at least partly as ARO defence, Hassassin Bahram being the best example. That gives rise to a new sort of list, which might indeed spread their on-table models across two Combat Groups, use the advantages of Hidden Deployment to full effect defensively, and take the immunity to Order-stripping as a fringe benefit if they do play first. After all, if your concept of a competitive Hassassins list already includes 4 Hidden units, you’re only a small tweak away from that. 

Final Thoughts

Lieutenants are something that all Infinity players will need to consider, and due to the relatively narrow choices within each faction, this swiftly becomes second nature. Many factions are considered at least partly ‘solved’ in terms of your Lt, so this is something a new player can easily ask for advice on, but it helps a lot to understand the core principles. Unless you happen to have massed access to units with the Warhorse skill (ie the Morat Aggression Force), protecting your Lt, and so avoiding Loss of Lieutenant, is the primary consideration. Making efficient use of the Lt Order, and any extra ‘command skills’, comes second. I often find it useful to make the decision on Lts first, and then build the rest of the list from there, since it can have implications for building Fireteams, or including other units with synergy, like decoys, CoC units or NCOs. 

While 15 troopers are absolutely the norm in Infinity, players who want to play an extremely elite force, or one which makes heavy use of Hidden Deployment, can always experiment with builds that only start 10 Orders on the table. Just be aware of the weaknesses that presents, especially against very strong opponents – unless your Hidden elements have a lot of Reactive power, you are giving your opponent a smaller problem to solve, with 10 moving parts rather than 15. 

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