The Atalanta Problem: Part 1
Understanding Game Pressures
Intro
Atalanta was the first model I ever got for Infinity. When I first started playing, she was my Queen of Aleph to Achilles’ King. Together, they represented to me what it really meant to play Aleph, a premium army with the most premium of pieces, where one model could hold its own against the hordes. And when I was new to the game, this was true. My brother’s QK fumbled ineffectually against the awesome power of a TR Sniper that’s “always on 18’s”. As I got more into the competitive scene though, things began to change. She was now on 12’s against Nomads and the Combined Army with White Noise. Against TAG’s she might score a lucky hit or two before being wiped off the board in a hail of APHMG fire. Combat jumpers and parachutists shot her in the back, or stabbed her in the front. Atalanta spent more and more games killing zero models. I got so frustrated with my supposedly “greatest single ARO piece in the game” that I even quit Aleph for a while. I played Ariadna for the span of a few months where a 23 point 1SWC Cateran felt less painful to lose.
I’ll confess: Until some brief experimentation in reinforcements, I hadn’t seriously played TR Atalanta in well over a year now. I even dabbled briefly with the hidden deployment version when Blackwind released until I discarded that too for other options, first the Mk2 Sniper, and then most recently, Armand. Finally, I decided that with the reasonable success of Midrangers, I would sit down and write an article on precisely why I found Atalanta so frustrating to play. “It’s a variance issue,” I told myself. “I’ll just write something on how Atalanta is feast or famine and math that out to prove why Armand feels so much better. It’ll be easy!” I thought, foolishly.
That was…nearly 4 months ago.
I did some of the math, and yeah, it more less showed what I expected. But it didn’t feel like it explained it completely. Sure, Atalanta was feast or famine, but her variance wasn’t that much worse than Armand. Clearly, there was more at work here, and so, without further ado, I present Part 1 of the Atalanta Problem.
Understanding Pressures
To figure out why TR Atalanta can feel so frustrating we need to talk a little about game pressures. At their simplest, they come in two varieties, positive and negative.
Positive pressures could also be called enticements. They encourage you to do something.
“If I push this button, I’ll get an objective point”
“If I take this impetuous unit, I get a free order to throw smoke”
Negative pressures could also be called deterrents. They deter or discourage you from doing something that you otherwise want to do.
“I want to pass through the midfield but a mine will go off”
“I want to kill that unit, but it has a good chance of killing me instead”
“I want to fight my opponent, but I have to push 4 buttons or I can’t win”
One action might have both positive AND negative pressures.
“I want to kill enemy units because it will weaken my opponent, and if I don’t then they’ll destroy me”
Understanding pressures is understanding the push and pull of an Infinity game. Hypothetically, the best players are the ones who are best at correctly identifying, prioritizing, and reacting to the various game pressures. Generally speaking, players will respond to pressures by following the path of least resistance. If there’s a moderately scary ARO piece, they’ll avoid or they’ll fight it with a piece well-equipped to do so. If there’s an easy opportunity to accomplish an objective or dish out some damage, they’ll take it. When players fight against those pressures (or just aren’t able to recognize them), they might find themselves in a sticky situation, e.g., trying to make an attack run while ignoring the negative pressure of too few orders.
What makes Infinity fairly interesting is that the first-order pressures, the state of the game board at a single time, don’t necessarily yield clear decisions to make, and perhaps the most interesting for competitive play, the pressures on a board at any given time won’t always be obvious. There are plenty of times when those first-order pressures balance out and there are several decision-trees to explore. There are also other times where there are very clear and obvious choices to make, but we’ll get to that later. Instead, let’s contextualize some of this discussion with the elements of an Infinity game:
The Mission
In any given game, you have a mission that serves as a positive pressure; it gives you the objectives that you need to accomplish to win the game. Sometimes the missions aren’t great and they either don’t provide enough positive pressure to actively accomplish (these are missions where you just table you opponent and then do the mission later) OR they end up providing a perverse pressure that encourages you to not really play the game at all (these are missions, where in the tactical wargame about shooting people, you spend most of your time making WIP rolls and praying).
The Meta
A given meta can create pressures all its own, especially when it comes to listbuilding. If your meta is filled with repeater nets and premium hackers, you probably have a negative pressure to avoid taking TAG’s, HI, and REMs. If your meta is filled with mimetism and smoke, then you might have a positive pressure to take MSV.
The Map
An Infinity map can generate both positive and negative pressures. Very closed maps tend to encourage CC units, templates, and units with shorter rangebands. Very open maps tend to favor long-range gunfighters, especially TAGs. Depending on the map, you might be discouraged to use a unit because it can be shot from across the board, or encouraged to use the exact same unit because it will only ever have to operate in its best rangebands. A map can completely change a player’s plans, to the point that some players build a second list just to survive a hostile map if necessary.
Your Army
Generally speaking, your gunfighters want to shoot, your CC specialists want to CC, your hackers want to hack, your specialists want to push buttons, and your cheerleaders desperately wants to stay alive to provide orders to the other 4. Well, actually all of them probably want to stay alive. The exception would be your defensive units which are quite content with just trading up. Regardless, these are your positive pressures. You chose an army and the units in it because you want to do something with it. The positive pressures will shape how you play, and most people like to use a unit to do a job that its good at. That’s why Netrods hide in the back instead of being on ARO duty; you have a positive pressure to keep it safe because its best at generating orders. When units aren’t able to able to get value for their cost in their role, this can generate a negative pressure to not take them.
Their Army
All of those lovely positive pressures in your own army, turn into negative pressures when fielded by your opponent. You don’t want to leave a piece standing up, or else it will be shot by their gunfighter. You don’t want to march your hackable into the midfield, or else it will be hacked by their hacker. These “or else’s” are the primary negative pressure your opponent exerts on you. A smart opponent will force you to do things you’d rather not do like take risky fights or spend extra orders. A good example might be a cheap edgeguard. At the end of the day, your opponent probably doesn’t care if the edgeguard dies trading with one of your units because it means they succeeded in making you engage with that instead of the piece you really wanted to kill (and they really wanted to not die).
The Game
The combination of positive pressures from the mission and your army, and the negative pressures from your opponent’s army tends to be how players make decisions (consciously or otherwise). At time of writing, there are some perhaps overly weighted positive pressures for killing as many models of your opponent’s as possible, but the game should still play the same: accomplish what you want to accomplish and thwart your opponent from doing the same.
It isn’t quite that simple though. Remember, we’re talking about pressures. So, what happens when there’s too powerful of a pressure in a game? We’ve already discussed that for most pressures people will just respond in a path of least resistance. There are usually alternatives to dealing with enemy CC specialists rather than taking a coinflip CC fight. But what if for whatever reason, there weren’t any alternatives?
Atalanta’s First Problem
TR Atalanta is the single greatest ARO piece in the entire game, and everyone knows it. Given the right map and opponent, she is extremely oppressive. She generates an incredibly powerful negative pressure that says “if I see you, I will kill you.”
“But Drey,” you say. “Don’t I want my premier ARO piece to be scary? Isn’t that a way to pressure my opponent into doing something else?”
It would be, but in the right circumstances, Atalanta doesn’t leave any other options open. You can’t smoke past her; eclipse and white noise are rare; on an open map, cautious moving can feel impossible (and is already impossible for something like a TAG). And like anything in life, when too much pressure is applied, something has to give. What gives, is your opponent’s prioritizing of decisions. Sure, your opponent doesn’t want to potentially throw away their gunfighter into the Atalanta meatgrinder, but when the options are 1, try to shoot her and maybe lose a model, or 2, lose the game, then I have a good idea of which option your opponent will choose.
The first issue with Atalanta is that she forces the issue. She doesn’t just waste orders by forcing enemies to go the long way or throw smoke like other ARO pieces, she forces the opponent to put their chips on the table and either kill her or die trying. Put another way, Atalanta is the ultimate negative pressure that outweighs all the positive pressures of an opponent’s army. It doesn’t matter if they want to play pacifist and just push buttons; so long as Atalanta is watching, anything other than fighting her is a death sentence.
“But Drey,” you say again. “She’s the best ARO piece in the game, can’t she just kill everything that tries and call it a day?”
Unfortunately for us (but fortunately for game balance), the best ARO piece in the game isn’t all that much better than a fairly mediocre gunfighter. Imagine for a moment a BS13 HMG with no other mods. This tends to be the bare minimum for a gunfighter. That HMG in good rangeband has just over a 25% chance to put Atalanta unconscious in a single order. Of course, Atalanta has over a 40% chance to do the same to them, which is usually odds enough to dissuade someone from trying. But remember, Atalanta is an existential threat. People will throw that HMG at her time and time again. So, to put that math a little differently:
1 in 4 games that you put TR Atalanta on overwatch duty, she will be knocked out on the first order of an HMG firing.
When it comes to HRMC’s, fireteams, higher BS, white noise, different rangebands, surprise attack, and TAGs that can survive a few fails, that number gets much, much worse.
Atalanta isn’t failing more fights than any other ARO piece, but she is taking a lot more. And because burst is king and no ARO piece has truly great odds, she spends more games bleeding out or dead than the ARO pieces who just gently encouraged an opponent to spend 3 more orders going the long way. In essence, her pressure is so extreme that it backs your opponent into a corner, and a person backed into a corner is far more likely to take risks that they wouldn’t normally consider.
This is the first step to understanding the Atalanta Problem.