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Ever since I discovered Infinity in November '19, I've been collecting the miniatures and playing the tabletop. One of the best hobbies to ever come across (for a person like me).
In early '19 I stumbled across a kickstarter for Bloodborne and the amount of minis in the game box intrigued me. Yet all of them were gray resin. They looked like crap. I ordered the kickstarter and decided to get the Dark Souls Board Game to learn how to paint minis. Something to get me away from gaming. Therapy made me aware of the toxic influence gaming had on my state of mind. Doing something with my hands that showed progress definitely would help.
I went on to paint the Dark Souls miniatures, and I was fairly successful, too. Yet I lacked someone to play the game with. Solo campaigns did work, but somehow it pushed me back into the state of mind gaming did. Half a year later I went to a local gaming store and asked for tabletop games with miniatures they had a larger community in. The store owner pointed at the longest wall he had in his little store and said \"Infinity, almost everyone here plays that, it's a great game, and it's a skirmisher, so you don't need to paint 200 pieces to play\". Barely home I checked the rules, watched a few games, went back and bought my first pack.
After ranking the different armies, evaluating the minis and talking to one of the players, I decided to go for Yu Jing. The anime power armour look (there is an anime army called Japanese Secessionist Army that does mostly melee, which I didn't like, after all I wanted a scifi game, not a fantasy melee combat game) was nice, the promise of the strengths of the army was intriguing, and so I bought into the sectorial (a small selection of units within the army) that had the most power armour units.
10 games later I was ready to give up. Nothing I did worked, and I kept buying and buying units that others told me would work. The biggest problem was, everyone I played against had a different army, a different playstyle, and so I faced a largely new set of units and skills every time I went to play. The size of the game took 2 hours to resolve, and including travel times I could squeeze in one game per week. It was frustrating.
And then came COVID-19. The store closed its doors. No more game days. Luckily I convinced a friend to join me with the game and since they were not willing to invest as much money as I was (and painting time respectively), we moved to the tabletop simulator. Suddenly all of the units and armies were there to try. And boy did I try different stuff. I failed miserably. A lot. A few of the other players from the local store chimed in, too. On discord I found a flourishing online community that also organized on TTS. VaulSC, a celebrity youtuber (no one knows him unless you play Infinity), hosted a tournament on TTS, because the stores were closed all over the world. Eventually I learned to play. And pick an Army that suited my style better.
On TTS I tried to play Tohaa, a small alien army that got phased out by the company behind Infinity (it's a small company from Spain, they can't support thousands of units so they sometimes kick some from the roster, but the armies are still playable if you have the miniatures, it's quite cool). Tohaa got rebooted into Spiral Corps with a slightly changed roster and focus. I started to like how they worked. The game mechanics became so much clearer, and when the local store opened again I went in to buy into Spiral. All of Spiral. Months of painting was ahead of me. And this is the result:
While learning the ropes with Spiral, I started to like low-tech armies. Main reason for this was the approach to their defensive. In Infinity you have certain defensive options and tactics. Yu Jing also has those, but I never learned properly how to use them. With Spiral you rely a lot on a single, defensive unit and a Spiral/Tohaa specific fireteam option. This is great for learning the game. TAK on the other hand doesn't appear openly for the most part. Many units are camouflaged and bring mines and decoys to distract the enemy. It's a fun game of cat and mouse.
This time I didn't go all in and buy everything available. To add here is an aversion of mine towards certain units. Well, not the units, more how they looked. I instead replaced them (initially) with others. I stole Hassassin Lasiqs from the Arabics and used them as Scouts, Andromeda from Aleph (a synthetic army?) as Voronin, Uxia McNeill for Pavel Aleksei McMannus and the Blackjack for the Ratnik. Eventually I made peace with many of the replaced units and painted them anyway. Some turned out to be the best visually of my entire army.
I took them fully painted to the table twice already. Playing them makes me feel all fuzzy and nice inside.
Starting with a new colour scheme: grey + more grey + orange (they look quite like SWAT teams, I like that)
And while I own every single unit from USAriadna that I want to paint, I only started just now. It's going to take me half a year or something to get them all painted up.
There will be some rebasing to quality bases (Wasteland from MicroArts Studios), but I don't have them yet.
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