Welcome to my first article on Infinity Defiance, the new co-op dungeon crawler with metal miniatures that Corvus Belli is working on. Today I’ll talk about the basic mechanics of the game and the reasons behind them.
The Project started in 2018. We had realized that in our hands we had a dungeon crawler that fit perfectly with the rich Infinity Universe, and since we already had the awesome game engine from Aristeia! it was time to blend it all together.
A series of specifications were handed to us, pointing out that we wanted a game for one to four players, and that’s why it was decided to introduce an Artificial Intelligence (AI) to control the enemies. I’ll talk about this AI in the next article, in which I’ll explain how Infinity Defiance was born and how it was honed to become what you’ll find when you play the game.
Another specification was that it had to be a co-op game, fluid in the fact that troops and Characters from the Infinity game were easily adaptable to Infinity Defiance.
With these conditions in place, we started to devise how the turns work, and how the enemies and Character’s activations would work. In the end we settled for an alternating activation system for several reasons. The main factor was time. With an alternating activation system, the time management of the enemies is fragmented, so enemy turns don’t become so wearisome and, by alternating the engagements with every activation, we can manage that your decision-making is influenced by what’s unfolding, making the game more dynamic.
To know which order the enemies activate, we opted for a randomly and covertly shuffled Initiative deck, therefore managing that you don’t have much control over what your enemies will do next. In response to these activations, you’ll be able to choose how to alternate your Characters. You’ll need to plan your activations ahead of time in order to retaliate against the enemy effectively. Once again, with this decision we made the turns dynamic, giving you freedom of choice when playing the different scenarios.
Once the order in which Characters and enemies will activate is decided (something like Aristeia!’s Running Order), we had to decide what would the Characters do during their activation. We had two possible ways to approach this: from Aristeia!, where we could work with an Energy value and assign the actions a value in points; or Infinity, where the troops have two actions available during their activations. This time we opted for the ease of being able to “translate” troop profiles. Assigning energy points meant evaluating each troop in order to assign them an energy point value and getting an estimate on how much their actions would cost. Relying upon the upgrades for each troop special effects and the two actions per activation system is just more functional.
There was a bit of a controversy around which two actions could be performed. To be precise, in Infinity only the Attack order can be used during activation. As we soon realized, since the board’s space is more reduced than an Infinity table, Characters can’t be activated multiple times, activations should therefore have the chance to be more powerful. For that, we enabled the Attack action, departing from Infinity’s action system.
Lastly, I’ll tell you that the decision to modify Critical Success and Critical Block has made them more powerful in regards to Aristeia!. While Aristeia! is a spectacle and a two-team match, Infinity Defiance is a military confrontation where you don’t go to the infirmary and get immediately patched up if you’re taken down - and the Red die is not there from the get-go, but Characters will acquire it via their skill trees. That’s why all that effort and blood you put into it will be rewarded with more power. Conversely, enemies that also have it will be more powerful as well.
I’m all out of space, so I bid you farewell and I hope you liked this article.
Best regards!
