Underground Lasers Perimeter Walls

Thanks to Underground Lasers we got our hands on one of their Perimeter Walls package deals. As a first impression, I can say the Walls look amazing and I can see this as being a big centrepiece for all kinds of tables for Infinity. It is designed to look like a fortress, with strong fortified walls and a heavily guarded gate. No-one will get in there easily.

The Perimeter Walls pack contains:

• 2 x corner Perimeter Wall sections
• 1 x 6” Perimeter Wall section with door
• 1 x 6” Perimeter Wall section
• 2 x 3” Perimeter Wall section
• 1 x 3” Solid Cube with 3” walkway
• 1 x 3” Frame Cube with 3” walkway

That is a lot of terrain, and while you can’t build a closed fortress with one pack, mainly because you’re missing two corner sections to do so, you can definitely do so with two packs.

Product

The Perimeter Walls are a bit of a departure from the norm in the world of Infinity terrain. They look like a fortress, with walkways on the top, allowing for soldiers to guard the walls. Its gate is shut and the guard tower is closed from all sides except for the door.

Most of the terrain we see for Infinity are typically rectangular buildings, sometimes with stairs to the roofs, and lots and lots of scatter terrain. Models go around, in or through the buildings. The Perimeter Walls instead form a large centerpiece for every table you’ll put it on, with possibilities to allow for different tactics. The sloped walls are high, and they provide a lot of partial cover. The inside of the fortress is cramped and I think it would be a bit difficult to walk models around on the ground level.

While one Package deal doesn’t give you much room to experiment with different  construction of the walls, two package deals would allow you to make the fortress bigger, smaller or more rectangular.

Assembly

Assembling the Perimeter Walls was quite easy. The walls are large squares and the construction is quite simple thanks to its interlocking parts which hold the mandatory pieces of the Walls together. The insides of the walls are designed so that it looks as if pipelines are running along them. This  gives the walls a bit more character than just a solid slab of vertical MDF.

While Underground Lasers say that using glue isn’t necessary, I found the structure has some loose parts, and while they all stayed in place as long as you keep it on the table, they fell out of the walls as soon as you have to move the terrain. So for those who need to transport the walls, or don’t have a designated table for Infinity, I’d recommend gluing them. By doing so, you’ll have a firm and durable wall.

The guard tower consist of two 3” by 3” cubes, one with solid walls, one with an open frame. You can stack them together well enough but, again, you will need some glue to keep it all together.

The characterful pipelines

Theoretical playability

The design and shape of the Perimeter Walls allow for a lot of different tactics. While this is mostly theory, these theories are things to think about when you set up a table with these Perimeter Walls. While this isn’t necessarily related to the product, I thought of multiple ways to use the Walls and to play different tactics around them during assembly and I would like to share those thoughts. These comments are based on theory, and have not been game tested.

The Bao Trooper has a great sniper position, while the State Army advances

Cover

The entire complex gives every model behind its walls partial or total cover. Models can look over the top of the wall, allowing them to take shots at anything that walks by without risking to leave partial cover. This makes it very hard to take out your opponent models if they get hold of the building. Luckily we’ve already seen some new skills being introduced in Third Edition, like Marksmanship, which will negate all cover-effects.

Different Tactics

Imagine your opponent is turtled inside the structure, killing every Myrmidon link team that approaches. Luckily you still have an Ekdromos in Hidden Deployment. You let him drop on the table with AD right next to the walls as there is room for a template there. You then Superjump over the sloped walls and once inside it becomes a turkey shoot as you spray your HMG into targets that are now completely without cover.

Or you might need to grab an objective that’s hidden inside the structure. Luckily, your Tomcat Engineer can use his Climbing Plus skill to climb the walls, and once on top, use his light flame-thrower to shower some of the Light Infantry models that took cover behind the walls. The next order is used to quickly grab the objective.

The high walls make the Perimeter Walls an impressive building and allows for some odd tactics!

Using the Infiltration skill of the Oniwaban, you can easily get inside the structure unnoticed, and while your opponent takes the stronghold and sets up for a defensive position, your Oniwaban decloaks in the next turn and strikes in the back, taking out some valuable units of your opponent. He did not see that coming! Or leave a couple of Shasvastii Embryos inside the structure during deployment. The camo tokens will probably have such a psychological effect on your opponent it will be a great way to deny them the structure and take it for yourself quickly afterwards. Or use the Impersonation skill of the Fiday to get inside the structure on your first turn, together with the opponent. It will become a cage fight pretty quickly as panic starts to erupt.

If you don’t have any of these special skills available, you could of course always just bombard them out of cover using the synergy of the Auxilia Forward Observer to mark the target and letting the Squalo Armoured Cavalry shoot some Speculative Shots over the walls with his Heavy Grenade Launcher.

You can see how this structure allows for some really out-of-the-box tactics and while it might look impregnable from the outside, once inside you’ll have lots of options to give your opponent a really bad day.

Recap

The Perimeter Walls package is a great asset to Infinity for all the optional tactics they (literally) bring to the table.

I don’t think this is a great piece of terrain for an ITS scenario, as I feel they can greatly shift the favour to the player that gets a hold of the “fortress” first. Only with specific tactics that aren’t readily available for every army can you really manage to dispose of your opponent if they are in the structure. Morats will have a hard time if someone is turtling within those walls. It reminds me of Helms Deep, for example, and you can easily guess who the Orcs will be in this case 😉 .

It is however a really characterful structure that will work well if you play some friendly games, YAMS or home-made missions where it could become the centerpiece of the game. Think of a mission that needs one of the players to steal some new tech from a high-secured NeoTerran facility with some of the hired guns of the Nomads, or a prison break from an Imperial Secret Service by the Japanese Sectorial Army on Paradiso’s moon Satori. Maybe a HaqqIslam trade center fell victim to a Shasvastii infiltration attack! I know I’ll be writing something like that to use these walls to the fullest.

The Perimeter Walls will allow you to showcase such amazing scenarios with a beautiful piece of terrain. Maybe you’ll need to tweak a little bit as the walls can give you certain big advantages, but Data Sphere will try to work that out for you later on with some more in-game Batreps. Of course, I could be all wrong! 😉