Corvus Belli Fixes Infinity Loss of Lieutenant

I just finished watching the latest Beasts of War Infinity video where they describe some of the rules changes coming in 3rd Edition as seen in the new Operation: Icestorm starter. There’s a lot of good stuff and well worth watching.

What has inspired me to write this post is the changes to how Lieutenants are handled in Infinity. Previously your Lieutenant was this big secret and you would instantly lose as soon as your opponent guessed your Lieutenant. Never should you choose an Lieutenant with a high WIP (the most important stat for the Lieutenant) because your opponent would instantly know your Lieutenant and you would lose.

Shh, this is my Lieutenant. He’ll spend the entire game hiding inside a building with no doors as a camo token.

Also, never choose a Lieutenant that makes a good Lieutenant as that’s too easy to guess. Second choice Lieutenants are also out, since no one chooses the best Lieutenant they choose the second choice, meaning it’s too obvious. Finally, don’t take a cheap trooper as a Lieutenant because they are also too obvious.

You may gather, correctly, that choosing a Lieutenant caused me a great deal of stress. I always felt I couldn’t make the army I wanted because it didn’t let me hide my Lieutenant’s WIP score.

Loss of Lieutenant is Death

The reason letting your opponent guess your Lieutenant was such a death sentence was because having your Lieutenant killed would put you into Loss of Lieutenant status. This means you only had two orders to use for your turn, or you could do nothing an nominate a new Lieutenant for your opponent to guess and kill.

In Infinity, for those people reading this post without being familiar with the game for some reason, you get one order per model on the table. You can spend these orders to activate any model and a model can be activated as many times as you have orders. So, going from six to eight orders to two meant you could accomplish very little.

How Corvus Belli Fixed Infinity

In 3rd Edition losing your Lieutenant still puts you in Loss of Lieutenant. Instead of going down to two orders you get your normal amount of orders but they become irregular orders. Irregular orders can only be spent on the model which generated it, which means you can activate each model once. At the end of the turn you secretly nominate a new Lieutenant and the game continues.

Nomad Alguaciles become irregular during Loss of Lieutenant. Screen capture from Beasts of War video. Copyright Beasts of War, used without permission.

This means losing your Lieutenant is not as bad as it was in 2nd Edition when it frequently immediately ended the game. This means you can use your Lieutenant aggressively, you can make a good model a Lieutenant because you can afford to risk it in combat, and you don’t have to worry so much about your opponent guessing your Lieutenant.

Infinity 3rd Edition Keeps Looking Better

I’m really happy with how the 3rd Edition of Infinity is shaping up. It seems like my first impression was correct and Corvus Belli is keeping the rules I love: AROs, multiple activations and just streamlining things to make the game play faster with less room for confusion.

You should check out the Beasts of War video for more changes to Lieutenant and other rules.

What do you think of the new rules? Are you thinking about starting Infinity for the first time, coming back to it, or are you a die-hard Infinity fan who is just excited to be able to thrash their opponents without having to hear whining about “confusing” rules. Let me know in the comments, on Google+ or Twitter. For more Infinity content consider subscribing. I’m going to be painting some Infinity miniatures soon.

Beasts of War is a hobby website which offers excellent coverage on a wide variety of miniature games. They are often the go-to source for news on everything from Infinity to Deadzone. Video and screen capture ©Beasts of War.

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