Infinitively Infinite

I’ve been playing Nomads since day 1 of my entry into Infinity with the Icestorm Starter Box. I’ve always wondered: What’s the big deal about the vaunted Nomads hacking abilities? Even with the highly rated Tunguska Interventors. They were at best… OK. In other cases... just meh.


Well, it turns out that I’ve been playing them ALL WRONG! So the way to maximise the Nomad hackers is to use repeaters, but I’ve (and my opponent) have always figured it out to be the repeater is only active when placed in the hacking ZOC of a hacker, and you’d need a string of repeaters all within the ZOCs of each other to be fully effective.


Turns out, no. As long as you have a repeater on the board, the hacker can hack through it! That makes things SO different! I can push up my Moran Masaai now, as he haas (sorry I couldn’t resist) a repeater, and that instantly extends my hacker’s abilities even though they are way at the back of the table!


I was pretty excited and made up a hacking focused list… and promptly forgot how to use it, falling back on my old playing habits (pushing up my Nomad Jaguar Warband using smoke grenades and using smoke to block LOF for the opponent’s AROs when I’m the active player). Bad luck and dice rolls meant my expensive Intruder with HMG went down to a lowly 1 shot ARO even though he managed to kill another ARO enemy unit on the board. To compound my errors, I put my expensive Tomcat Doctor + Zondcat OFF the table figuring to use its Jump/para capability but that took too many orders to get my Zondcat base to base with my downed Intruder. Alas I forgot that my Alguaciles hacker also had a repeater which I could’ve used to ARO the HI that turned the corner to shoot at my Alguaciles… the list goes on and on.

What I SHOULD have done was place my Tomcat Doctor on the table ready to head for a button to push, and the Zondcat should be Base to base contact (but prone) with my Intruder). The Tunguska Interventor Hacker should’ve just used a White Noise zone to block one enemy ARO piece so my Intruder would only have to deal with a single ARO piece instead of two.


My Jaguar should move up into place to deal with the low rank and file troopers smoke + CC of 21 using either a shotgun template or CC weapon.


My Alguaciles hacker should move up, push a button then drop a repeater to maximise my Tunguska Interventor’s hacking range. Then that leaves my Intruder to drop into Suppresive Fire mode in the reactive turn.


So many “what ifs”! 


Of course, no plan survives contact with the enemy but I didn’t even manage to maximise the benefits and bonuses of my Nomads list! So I can’t tell if all of this is wishful thinking or actually viable tactics to whittle down the number of enemy troops.


Oh well. There’s always the NEXT game…


BONUS: I've been painting my Nomad minis again now that I'm re-starting Infinity.




Comments

Post a Comment