It's time to talk building that Infinity squad!

Points v. SWC v. AVA

Pretty well every tabletop wargame has restrictions on which units you can put in a force. Whether it's points values, Force Organisation Charts, percentage points for different types of troops.

Infinity has three of these: Points Cost, Support Weapon Cost (SWC) and Availability (AVA).

Newbies Guide to Points Costs

Please move along, nothing to see here!

Well, being more serious, the points costs for individual troopers is about twice as high as in 40k and the official 'full' game is 300pt, although the mechanics work well from about 100pt upwards.

Also, specific weapons tend to have a fixed points cost so a line grunt with an HMG plus an elite powered Heavy Infantry with a basic Rifle costs the same points as a line grunt with a Rifle plus that HI with an HMG, even though the HI is going to be much more effective at using the HMG. Which brings me on to...

Newbies Guide to SWC

Support Weapon Cost, as you might expect, is a limit on support weapons. You can spend 1SWC for every 50pt of 'game size', so for example in a 300pt game you get 6SWC to spend, no matter whether your list comes to 300pt exactly or 297pt etc. This is where the balance to the above scenario kicks in - while the line grunt with HMG might only cost 1SWC or even 0.5SWC, the elite HI is likely to cost 2SWC. In other words, a full third of your available SWC at 300pt.

As most factions have a whole bunch of units you'd want to take which involve using up your SWC it's a precious resource.

Typical units to spend SWC on include:

Hackers to attack enemy HI, Remotes (robots) and TAGs (the big Dreadnought-equivalents) and to protect your own HI/REMs/TAGs.

Support weapons such as HMGs, Missile Launchers, Sniper Rifles, Grenade Launchers etc.

TAGs (Tactical Armoured Gears) are themselves some of the most SWC-heavy units in the game.

Lieutenants also sometimes use up SWC, usually on a background-based level, so you might have a line trooper unit that has a Lieutenant option but because that unit doesn't normally lead a force they might cost 1SWC or even 2SWC.

Newbies Guide to AVA

Last but not least, availability or AVA. This limits the number of troops you can take of a given unit. So basic line troopers might be AVA Total (no limits on how many you can take, beyond points cost and SWC limits) while an elite unit like a TAG might be AVA 1 - you can only have one of that unit in the list.

Note that this is how many of that unit you can take in total, regardless of loadout - so if a unit is AVA 2 you can two in total but could choose different loadouts if the unit has different loadouts listed.

So what does this mean in practical terms? When list-building you're constantly juggling the three limitations, so you might have a high-AVA elite troop but in lower-point games you might still struggle to field several due to their high points cost or only be able to field them with basic guns due to SWC limitations. In the same way you could field a large number of basic troopers with heavy weaponry (high AVA and low SWC) but start running into problems with points costs.

On a final note, not all factions/players have the same approach to using up all their SWC, for example while Nomads and PanOceania tend to max out on it, Ariadna has a lot of very effective troops with low SWC and they also tend to pay slightly lower SWC for big guns than the other factions - to make up for having fewer of the high-tech toys...

Ian Wood aka @wartrader.

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