TTK in tabletop skirmish games: Infinity
This is part of a series of posts on Time to Kill in Skirmish games. See the first post for an overview of my thoughts on this.
Infinity (Low TTK)
Last time1, I wrote about how Carnevale has a high TTK. Characters take several hits before they go down, sometimes whole rounds devoted to grappling each other and not really doing anything.
Infinity is not like that.
If you don't know anything about Infinity, it is a small scale sci fi skirmish game, usually played between two players. The setting is a future Earth, in which the power balances we know today very much no longer exist, and there are aliens, and space travel, and Russian bears, and super samurai armour. The tech level is high, with some really neat gameplay bits like hacking.
In terms of TTK, most characters will go down with one shot. You shoot something, there is a good chance it dies. Or you might die.
In Infinity, every action has a reaction. These are called AROs, and meant that when you shoot at something, it can shoot you back, or dodge away. It also means that when you shoot at something, everything else that can see you can also shoot you. It is dangerous to poke your head out of cover in this game, and you really have to watch your angles.
To make it clear, and action goes a bit like:
- declare first action
- declare reactions
- declare second action
- assign targets, roll dice
- apply results
The first action and the second action are simultaneous. If you move and shoot, that shoot action can take place at any point on your move. Equally, if you move, the enemy can choose when to react. If you are moving across a corridor to duck from one area of cover to another, the enemy will shoot you just as you leave the first bit of cover.
The combination of very lethal attacks, and actions which can be reacted to, mean that characters tend to drop like flies. There are exceptions to this rule. Some characters have really good armour, or several hit points, and there are medics, doctors and engineers which can patch friendlies up, increasing the TTK slightly. But on the whole, you get shot, you die.
This very low TTK really focuses the mind. You have to be so careful with the actions you take. One wrong step will lead to death. There is a real emphasis on movement, positioning, and timing, both in your own turn and your opponents. The facing of your models matters, and dictates what they can see, and therefore what they can react to.
Infinity gives you the flexibility in your actions to lean into this. Each character adds a command token to the pool, but you can spend these tokens on any character. If you want, your entire go could be to spend all of your command tokens on one, super character. If you only have one model in a good position, this can be the right thing to do.
For example, you could sneak round the back of the enemy, past all their sentries, and start chopping them up with your powered samurai sword.2 The low TTK makes this a very lethal option, but also means that one wrong step will cost you your hero.
Quack