Infinity: Link Teams? Crazy useful?

Link Teams in Infinity are a way of coordinating movement and improving the performance of some of your units.

3 – 5 miniatures activate together as part of a “link team” for the cost of ONE order.

The guys can all move together, but only the one, nominated leader may use another short skill, such as shooting. This seems bad but there are bonuses to being part of the team, including an improved rate of fire and an increased ballistic skill to represent the fire power of the whole team.

So what if I buy 3 or 4 cheap, crap dudes and then another with a decent special weapon?

The special weapon dude becomes the leader of the link team, therefore the one that benefits from the stat boost.

The rest of the team all move with him, as they must stay within his Zone of Control (ZoC) of 8” in all directions, but we only use up one order from our order pool so that the special weapon can fire.

Not only can we only spend the same amount of orders as if we had just moved one dude, we can shoot with an improved stat line.

Bonuses to stats from being part of a link team:
+1 Burst
+3 BS
Sixth Sense skill

These apply for a team of 5. A team of 3 just gets +1B, 4 gets +1B & Sixth Sense, a team of 5 gets all of them..

In Yu Jing, the linkable troops are:
Keisotsu Butai
Domaru Butai (And Domaru “Neko” Oyama)
Haramaki Zensenbutai
All troops that I have looked at, but never really considered...until now!

Keisotsu Butai ...starting here:

These guys are basic troopers, you can see they only have a BS of 10, giving their success rate (disregarding modifiers) to be just 50/50… but if we equip one of them with a Missile Launcher then we see some real benefits:
- Normally a ML costs more than 0.5 in SWC, around 1.5 to 2.0..primarily because the ML option is available for far superior troops…like the Hac Tao.
- The dude himself only costs 25 points, almost 1/3 the costs of the Hac Tao!
- With the link team bonuses, the Keisotsu can fire his ML 2 times in one order AND has a BS of 13. If we then also apply the modifiers from the weapon itself and we have a BS of 16 (ML gets a +3 up to 32”)…pretty damn decent
- When I fire this guy, I am still only using ONE order, but my little dudes in his team still get to move…creating some great mobility AND meaning that I can use their Orders on other models not in the Link Team…elite infantry for exmple..

So for a 5 man Link Team, we’d grab 4 normal dudes and a Missile Launcher dude for a cost of 4*9 + 25(& 0.5 SWC)
Then I’d grab a second link team of 4 normal dudes and an HMG wielder at a cost of 4*9 + 18 (SWC:0.5)
The total for 10 dudes, 10 regular orders and 2 mean heavy weapon support dudes is just:

Link Team 1/ML: 61/0.5
Link Team 2/HMG: 54/0.5
The trouble with this is that we are now in quite a high body count but only at 115 points.

So we need some cheap Heavy Infantry and a Lieutenant:

These guys are also ‘Linkable’…Heavy Infantry at 27 points? OK. Granted, these are incredibly short ranged killers..but haven’t we just gotten some excellent fire support from our link teams? Yup, so lets go kill stuff up close and personal!

27 points get us the Lieuteneant with a Chain Rifle (for killing lots of lightly armoured dudes) and EM grenades (for immobilising then CC’ing heavy Infantry)..

The Haramaki’s are young samurai who just love to go for the glory…luckily they have decent armour and 2 wounds…because these boys are close combat types are well.
If we picked up 2 bog standard Haramaki’s…we’d get access to the excellent CC and short range HI.. for just 52 points.

That’s:

2 x5 man Keisotsu Butai link teams (1xHMG / 1xML) 115/1
Domaru Lieutenant 27/0
2 x Haramaki’s 52/0

That leaves just 6 points…so I need some tweaking…How about a simple Lieutenant switch.. over to the special character Domaru ‘Neko’… 34 points over 27 for my current Lieutenant.
So I’d go 201 points..our current play limit is 200. If I switched my 2 Haramaki for 1, and then bought a regular Domaru for 27, saving a point…I drop in at 200 on the mark.
Cool. So let’s look at this guy:

He is an absolute beast in CC and is also pretty cheap still for a 2W dude. His AP CCW and EXP CC combined with Frenzy, Berzerk and Martial Arts L2 added to his already bitching CC of 19 mean he is one lethal mo fo.
With this change we are bang on 200 points and can split our force into 2 combat groups (as we have more than 10 models) with a 7/6 split, with the Lieutenant in the 6 man combat group to benefit from his extra order.
The two link teams are supported by lethal CC Heavy Infantry, who they in turn support with their very nasty fire power..

It seems to me that Link Teams are an incredibly effective way of getting cheap special weapons into the army and then boosting the stats of cheap regular dudes to get a great performance from said weapons. In addition to this, the Link teams cheap nature means that we get a load of Order generated for the army pool meaning the elite troops can really put in a great performance whilst hogging all those orders...
This is my understanding of link teams in a Yu Jing context…
Infinity dudes – have I got it wrong?
40kers…why have you not picked up this game yet? The rules are free fuckwits!