On failure, defeat and picking yourself back up again...
Last time I posted, it was about losing your hobby mojo and rediscovering it again. The source for getting back into painting for me has been picking up a new game: Infinity, by Corvus Belli. Infinity has always been a game that has hovered in my periphery, ever since a Belgian friend of mine claimed it was the best skirmish game out there. At the time (sometime back in the early 2010s), I was deeply into Warmachine—a game that seemingly died a death sometime after Mk III came out and has recently seen a resurgence in popularity after Steamforge Games took it over from Privateer Press. As a result, I didn't really have time, nor money, it invest in it. Roll forward some 15 years or so, and here I am now, getting stuck into it with gusto.
Many say that Infinity is a difficult game to get into. It is complex and not particularly beginner friendly. I was surprised to find that picking up the basics of it was fairly easy after an intro with my local WarCor (I guess you could call them Corvus Belli's street team, for want of a better term). It was fun, and I grasped the basic nuances of the game over a couple of hours playing a number of small format games that escalated the complexity with each iteration until I was playing with the 150pt army list from the Operation Sandtrap boxed set that I'd picked up. So far, so good. I eagerly picked up some more miniatures to expand my force and looked forward to heading back to the club for more games.
My next game I went up against a very friendly player, and had fun getting beaten. I built my list towards the mission we were playing and got introduced to even more aspects of the game, including the ITS mission system designed for competitive play. Even though I lost, I felt like I'd achieved something because I played towards the mission objectives and made my opponent work for their win. And I felt like I learnt some stuff doing it, although I was a bit overwhelming.
My third game went to a full 300 point list. I probably wasn't ready for it. Back up against the WarCor, they showed me the full nuances of Infinity N5 and systematically took my army apart. While they were very helpful in explaining step by step what was taking place, and I felt like I did somethings OK (and a lot of thing wrong), I came away from it feeling more overwhelmed than feeling like I had something to take away from it. I was trying to learn what my own new units did, but wasn't getting to use them effectively because they were getting shut down, shot up or switched off before I'd had much experience with them. Plus, I was also trying to take in all the other rules from my opponent's list. Still, head swimming a little, I pulled out my first win with a Hail Mary pass—my opponent hadn't achieved their objective and we were sat at a stale mate, and so, having the last turn of the game, I had one chance to win. I had a drop trooper I hadn't brought on yet and dropped it into their DZ. We then saw a string of seat of the pants dice rolls that allowed me to move up, shoot the surrounding enemy threats and slap a demo charge on the objective, blowing it up to take a victory. So, overwhelmed and slightly frazzled, I came away with a win, but not one that I thought I deserved.
Queue the next three weeks of games, which can only be described as painful. Each time, playing against experienced players, I saw my army dissected, disassembled and destroyed. Units I was trying to learn how to use were recognised as the threats I can only assume they can be in more experienced hands and instantaneously nuked off the board before I even got a chance to activate them. My response was to try reading up on tactics, trying new things and new lists, but instead ended up making mistakes and misplays that opened up opportunities for my opponents to exploit. I began to turtle up on deployment, meaning that I wasn't providing reactive threats to my opponents' orders and resulting in my force ending up pinned down in its own deployment zone.
I began to see why people claim Infinity is hard to get into. I began to see why a lot of people drop out of this game early on. There isn't anything quite like getting curb stomped and not even grasping why or how it happened.
This culminated in the start of my local groups Escalation League, an ongoing, relatively friendly, semi-competitive, weekly/monthly series of games in which the points value for lists increases each time, with the addition of having Spec Ops added in as a spicy extra. In my round one, I didn't even make it to Turn 2. My army was annihilated. I had nothing left. My opponent scored maximum victory points. My Spec Ops was killed before I got to use it and hence got no XP. I'm sat at the bottom of the league table.
To say I was despondent after this experience is a bit of an understatement. I'd picked up this game as something to play for fun and to get me motivate to paint models. Each week I found myself feeling depressed with my losses and the absence of learning anything new about the game over the previous month or so of games, and I was starting to ask myself why I was playing it. Why had I invested so much in it? (People may tell you Infinity is cheaper to get into that Warhammer, but it's not that much cheaper—I have a significant hole in my wallet due to it). There's nothing like looking at several hundred pounds of painted metal and asking yourself, "Should I even have bothered in the first place..?"
Despite this, that 150 point beat down at the start of the Escalation League has actually been a bit of a turning point. I had a bit of a sit down and asked what could I take away from it. What could I learn, and what might I do differently. And in doing so, what might I learn from and what might I do differently after future games. I don't know whether it was due to it being a smaller sized game, which allowed me to better remember the pieces my opponent had used and then look them up later to find out what skills they had and how they had leveraged them, but things started to feel like they were falling into place a bit. And I picked myself up and thought about how I could get the most of out my next game, and the one after that, in order to keep learning each time.
And so, I found myself excited for my game this week. I had a fresh outlook and a new priority: don't focus on trying to win, focus on what you can learn from the experience. While I was up against another new player and, due to timing issues, questions and looking a lot of stuff up, we only got through one round of the game, I did come away from it feeling like I learned some stuff. Yeah, I made a ton of mistakes and had a crap first turn, but my reactive turn actually went really well and, at the end of that first round, I actually felt like I wouldn't have been doing too bad going into Round Two. Plus, I did remember the mission and so I technically won by one point because I'd booped a console on my turn. See, learning.
So, that's my experience of Infinity so far. A few highs, a lot of lows, and much more to learn. And the determination to learn. I will be sticking with it for the foreseeable future. And there is always Moonstone if I need the occasional break. Plus, I have been enjoying painting the miniatures, as you can see...
The climb continues...