The Infantry Trilemma

There’ll be another update out shortly to discuss the state of the game and progress towards the various goals I’ve set for the year. In the meantime, I thought it might be interesting to take a closer look at one of the final tweaks I’ve made to the squad leaders expansion.

Coming up with different squad types was mostly fairly easy. There was an inherent logic to it, and once I knew what role a squad was going to fill then the rest fell into place without too much trouble. The abilities that the squad leader brings, what equipment they should have available, the orders and tactics they can use – it mostly came together well.

Where it didn’t come together well was for the infantry squad. To me, with an army background, infantry have a fair bit of prestige. They’re durable, versatile, and essentially the tactical building block around which the rest of the army operates. There are some tasks where infantry are not just a good choice, or even the best choice, but practically the only choice; and anything they’re not a good choice for they can usually have a go at anyway.

However, that’s not how most of the gaming world views them. To most gamers, infantry are boring. They’re the basic troop type with nothing exceptional to recommend them. You’re usually forced to use them before you have access to anything better, but once you do have different troop types available it would be strange to deliberately choose to include infantry squads.

Obviously I wanted something different for the infantry in my game. I didn’t necessarily want them to be a must-include squad, but I did want them to be a valid alternative. A skilled player might or might not choose to use an infantry squad, but the decision shouldn’t be automatic either way, and there should be compelling reasons why you might want to take them.

This led to what I thought of as the infantry trilemma (what’s a trilemma? Well, you know how a dilemma is what seems like an impossible choice between two alternatives? A trilemma is the same, only with three alternatives). Infantry squads had to be:

• Tough, but not so tough that they couldn’t be defeated
• Versatile, but not in a way that just made them ‘a bit of everything’
• Tactically interesting, but not in a way that significantly increased the cognitive load required to use them

All of these proved to be difficult to achieve. I had several areas to work with: their equipment, their orders and tactics, and their squad abilities. Perhaps in the future I’ll talk more about the other aspects, but in this post I want to focus on the squad abilities.

You’ll notice that I’ve been talking about squad abilities, not squad leader abilities. Usually, the squad leader is what gives a squad it’s special ability. They’re a bit tougher than a regular trooper, but if the bugs can take them out then the squad loses their special ability. This was the first change I made to the infantry squad: they’re the only squad that doesn’t have a named squad leader. Instead, their special ability is assigned to the squad as a whole. It can still be lost (or, more accurately, discarded when the player decides to trade it in), but that decision is now up to the player controlling the squad.

This decision was made in part because of the desire to make infantry squads durable. The obvious way to do this was to make them able to ignore the first one or two wounds the squad took. The problem there was that the bugs have to work pretty hard to get those kills, and being able to ignore even the first one might be all it took to get the troopers an advantage that the bugs just couldn’t overcome. Now, that decision comes with a cost: the infantry can still ignore a wound, but to do so they have to trade in their special ability. This give the controlling player some interesting decisions: is it better to lose a trooper, who might be a badly-needed specialist, or to lose the special ability which the entire squad benefits from?

The versatility was another area which benefited from not being tied to a specific character. It allowed me to give the squad two related special abilities, one on each side of the ability card. At the end of the turn you flip the card, which means which ability the squad has is regularly alternating.

This also ties in to the desire for interesting tactical decision-making. You know what special ability is coming up next, so you can try to position your troopers to take maximum advantage of it when it arrives. But you also know it will change at the end of the turn, so you need to be prepared for that too.
If you don’t feel like doing that, of course, you don’t have to – you can just take each turn as it comes, and try to make use of whichever ability you have available. That ability to think on your feet is also tactically useful, however, so anyone doing that shouldn’t feel that they’re missing out on anything!

We end up with a situation that is quite unlike those of the other squads. Which special ability the infantry squad has is regularly and predictably changing. It isn’t tied to any particular member of the squad, so the only way to lose it is for it to be discarded in order to prevent a wound to a squad member, and the player can choose when (or if) they wish to do that.

That ticks all the boxes for the trilemma. There’s durability available if the player wants it badly enough; there’s versatility for the player to find ways to take advantage of; and there are interesting tactical choices to make about how to best make use of the previous two attributes.

I’m really pleased with how this has worked out, and having made this tweak I think I can freeze the mechanical development of the squad leaders expansion. It’s always satisfying to come up with a solution that works well!