Thursday 15 September 2011

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!

14 comments:

  1. I'm actually looking into it. The models look amazing and I watched the demo videos online yesterday and it seems pretty straight forward. Ariadna for the win!

    On a related note, I discovered a home brew rules set for what seems to be a mix of Mordheim and Necromunda and Infinity. It's called Death Squads. Check it out:

    www.deathsquadsgame.com

    Seems to have a lot of potential.

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  2. I run an PanO Military Order sectorial and definitely appreciate the use of linked teams. The MO sectorial opens up access to AVA Total Order Sergeants which are Religious line troops with BS 12.

    The most effective combination that I have found so far is to run a three man team (maybe 4) consisting of two order monkeys and an OS armed with Multi sniper rifle. The team sits at range and the sniper is getting 2 DA shots (usually at BS 12 - assuming my opponent is in cover) in ARO.

    Linked teams are a lot of fun but the definite downside is the more limited troop choices.

    We have started Infinity blog over here: http://remote-presence.net and I have a few Infinity posts over on http://23lines.com.

    Keep up the Infinity posts - it's an awesome game that should get more highlighting in the wider gaming community!

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  3. Morgrim, love the site! The more I hear bout Infinity the more I want to check it out and play.

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  4. Hey Roland. Its a great game, check it out..but I guess you need to make sure someone else will play with you!!
    I'll check out that Deathsquads stuff over the weekend...

    @morgrim..hey! I already follow you boys at remote presence..your site swung me into actually getting involved!! Its a slow slog getting infinity people over here, but I'm working on it, personally I'm so amped about it, even the 'discovery' of link teams today got me pumped to play again!!
    I looked at pano when investigating factions, that sounds a beastly combo with the sniper link team..so the B bonus works in ARO too? Or were you referring to the DA effect...
    How do pano play? The knights etc cool?

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  5. I dont get it....Oh wait I skim read the whole thing cause I dont care ;) <3

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  6. Linked teams definitely give your whole battle group a boost. Note that you can have one linked team at a time, but you can link and unlink all you want.

    anyway, linked teams provide a serious amount of mobility to your group. They also can castle up and create a pretty sick zone of ARO, as each member of the team gets +1 B in ARO. Yes, the down side is that you have to be a sectorial army, but the Japanese one is fairly balanced without being too restrictive, like some others.

    I have more experience ins playing against them than I do with them though. I would definitely say that when facing them, breaking the team is a priority has they can be tough to deal with if they get in the right position. Flame throwers and shotgun weapons help with them because of their templates.

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  7. @OSH - there you go again giving away ALL my secrets ;)

    For me, Infinity was a natural progression from Necromunda. Necro is an awesome street gang-based game with some very cool campaign mechanisms. Infinity takes that to the next level by offering more of a high-tech, SWAT team feel to skirmish level gaming.

    The PanO knights are a pretty much in-your-face style of play. They don't have the finesse of some of the other factions. If that's your style of play then go for it!

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  8. @Morgrim: Interesting. I LOVE Necromunda and am alway son the lookout for more tactical, squad level type skirmish games. I'm checking out Infinity tonight to get a feel for it. Definitely loving Ariadna right now though :)

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  9. @Roland, thats totally cool. We have resident expert over on remote-presence for those devilish outcasts. I will say they are tough to face due to all the smoke grenades they can chuck. They don't have much in the way of TAGs (big robots) or hackers and IIRC not too many multi-wound models.

    Let us know what you think of the game though! I still have an Ash Waste Nomad gang that gets dusted off for the occasional Necromunda campaign. Its amazing how well that ruleset has withstood the test of time.

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  10. @OSH, thanks for pointing out its only 1 link team at a time...and for highlighting the importance of breaking an enemy team, the +1B ARO for all members is nasty!

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  11. Link teams... *shudders* the first time I faced one it was a Keisotsu HMG Link team and it did horrid things to my battle plan. I had to totally change tack. There are big downsides to them though, like with anything in Infinity you take the rough with the smooth and use your tools better than your opponent. I have ran a few link teams of my own recently... Haramaki ML link teams FTW. An important note on Link teams is that once linked Impetuous or Frenzied troopers become not Impetuous and not Frenzied... this can be extremely useful for certain sectorial armies. Sounds like you're starting to get a good grasp of the game Ven!!! Plus you're still enjoying it, so it can't be bad. Don't listen to the naysayers and the gaming 'Luddites' they just want to hold back progress and are stuck in the past ;)

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  12. @Morgrim: Thanks again! I'm definitely on the fence whether I should try to do a sectorial Caledonian or Merov list. I like the models and background of both, I'm just trying to figure out which one "fits" me best.

    BTW the S.A.S models are just ridiculously awesome looking.

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  13. I dont know if anyone mentioned this earlier: Each player only can have only ONE Linked Team on the game table at any time.

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