This guide will introduce you to Infinity, it’s gameplay mechanics, and basic controls.
Disclaimer
Nearly everything written in this guide is subject to change.
As the game at this point has basically no ingame tutorial, this game was written to help new players.
This guide is not finished! But since there are currently a massive influx of new players, I thought it can still be useful.
I:B = Infinity: Battlescape
“The planetary system is ravaged by war as two ruthless corporations fight for dominance”
I:B is at its core a space combat game. The core of the gameplay features huge space battles with hundreds of players.
Two teams must destroy each other’s orbital and planetary stations to win. Matches can take anywhere from hours to days, depending on how evenly matched the team are. If you know of Planetside, then think Planetside in space.
Players can use a variety of different ships to help their team. New ships are bought using credits. Credits are earned by completing meaningful tasks, or periodically through haulers.
The current map includes a gas giant, and its 4 planet-sized moons. Each moon has a number of orbital stations, and surface bases.
Objectives
The game will occasionally designate a station as a new attack target. There are two types of targets, critical and normal. If the attacking side lose a critical battle, then that station is lost.
As a new match begins, there will be no information on the location of enemy stations. Therefore, a team’s first task is to find the enemy stations. This is done by using the interceptors scanning ability.
Some surface bases will spawn AI Hauler ships that will fly, from the base, to another nearby station. If the hauler completes this journey, the entire team will receive some amount of credits.
Players can disrupt the enemy team’s credit production by intercepting and destroying their haulers.
The hauler will travel between stations using warp. This means that players must either intercept it at its departure or arrival, or force it out of warp.
Player’s can prevent hauler raids by acting as hauler escorts. TODO
The first thing you can do after jumping into a game, is to see where battles are currently being fought in the Tab menu, then warping to that location and shooting anything red.
Ships
The interceptor is the smallest and most maneuverable of the ships. It sports two machineguns., two blasters and two missile launchers.
Roles include:
- Scouting for enemy stations.
- Destroying enemy interceptors and bombers.
- Protecting friendly capital ships from enemy mines and torpedoes.
- Destroy turrets on enemy capital ships.
The bomber is meant for destruction of big capital ships and structures with its torpedos. It can also take out small ships with its large array of missiles.
Aside from those, it also has two machineguns, two shotguns and two blasters.
The machineguns and shotguns cannot be enabled at the same time.
Roles include:
- Destroying enemy capital ships.
- Destroying enemy structures.
The corvette is a heavy support ship. It has lots of armor for its size. For armament, it has 3 machineguns on turret mounts, and 2 blasters on turret mounts. Also has 2 missile launchers.
Roles include:
- Repairing and resupplying friendly ships.
- Preventing escape of hostiles.
- General support.
- Warp interceptor.
The destroyer is the smallest capital ship, and boasts an array both small and medium turrets. One of the destroyers key features, is the flak turrets. These are effective against small ships. Destroyers also has the ability to lay homing mines, which are very deadly to capital ships.
Destroyers also has two missile launchers in the front.
Roles include:
- Defending friendly cruisers against fighters and bombers.
The cruiser sports the biggest guns of all ship classes. It is meant to deal the most damage to enemy capital ships and structures.
The cruiser has little defence against small ships, so must stay close to friendlies to prevent harrasment.
Aside from turrets, the cruiser also has 4 missile launchers, and two torpedo launchers.
Roles include:
- Destroying enemy capital ships.
- Destroying enemy stations.
Carriers are by far the largest ships. They sport the same classes of turrets as the destroyer.
When holding still, carriers act as a spawn point for interceptors and bombers.
Roles include:
- Providing a spawn point for friendly small ships.
How do I…
By pressing Tab, you can bring up the Star Map. In here, you can see an overview of the map. In the list to the left, you see all planetary bodies, stations and players. The list is hierarchical, to show where which bodies objects are orbiting around. By right clicking an item in the list, you can target it for travel direction.
By holding X, you bring up the weapons radial menu. In here you can enable/disable your individual weapons, toggle missile safety lock on and off, and enable formation modes. You enable an action from this menu by holding the mouse over it and then releasing X.
In the same fashion and the weapons menu, there is also a quick chat menu on the C button. Here you can quickly give your friendlies info on what to target, if you need support, etc. If you have anything targeted when using an action from this menu, it will be referenced in the chat.
Finally, there is the systems radial menu, on the V button. Here you can enable/disable systems like Flight Assist, Anti-gravity and more.
“In an inertial frame of reference, an object either remains at rest or continues to move at a constant velocity, unless acted upon by a force.” – Newton’s first law of motion
The flight mechanics of I:B is more realistic than what you usually find in space games.
Your ship does not move in any direction unless you apply thrust in that direction, and you will not slow down unless you apply thrust in the opposite direction.
Your ability to rotate is completely independent of your direction of movement. This meant that you can easily turn around to shoot at someone behind you, without changing your direction of travel.
There is no limit to how fast you can go. As long as you apply thrust, you will accelerate.
However, this is very hard to manage. Humans are used to being able to stop much faster than it takes to gain speed. Therefore, the above means that it is quite easy to overshoot your target, or just simply crash horribly. To mitigate this, your ship has a system called Flight Assistant. The purpose of this system is to limit your ship, such that flying is easier.
The Flight Assistant does two main things: Limit your maximum speed, and slow you down in any direction in which you are not actively applying thrust.
Your ship also has the ability to boost. Though not just forward, but in any direction. This combined with the Flight Assist makes it much easier to rapidly change directions to avoid incoming fire. Boost is applied by using Shift. Note that boost uses energy.
The W and S keys are for forward and back. A and D for left and right strafe. Q and E for rolling left and right. R and F for up and down. The mouse controls yaw and pitch. Using the mouse wheel, you can also set a target speed that the ship will try to maintain.
There are two types of main projectile weapons in this game. Blasters and kinetic.
Kinetic are your main damage dealing guns. They use finite ammo, that must be resupplied. // TODO: more about kinetics.
Blasters are energy weapons that does not use finite resources. They are good against shield, but useless against armor. // TODO: more about blasters
There are two ways to repair and/or rearm. One is to fly within 1.5 km of a corvette. The other is to be within a station landing pad. Stations have 3 sizes of landing pads, corresponding to the 3 overall ship sizes (smalls ships, corvettes and capital ships). To make use of them, you must be within the blue halo of a landing pad of your ships’ size class. If the halo turns red as you enter, it means it is the wrong size. If it turns green, you will be repaired and rearmed.
To warp, you first have to be traveling at some minimum velocity. Then you press J. At this point there will be a window in which you are vulnerable, and any damage taken will disrupt the warp. While in warp, your ship will automatically speed up or down depending on how close you are to your target or a planetary body. The further away you are from a planetary body, the faster you can go. This automatic speed can be somewhat overridden with manual inputs. You can drop out of warp by again clicking J. There is no limit to how close you can warp to enemies, so you can potentially land right on top of them for a surprise attack.
Being able to target an enemy is crucial for being able to effectively deal damage to an enemy ship. When a ship is targeted, status of its shields and hull is displayed in the upper right corner.
Targeting also creates a targeting indicators for each of your enabled weapon types. These indicators tell you where to shoot in order to hit the enemy ship.
To target a ship, station or other object, use the T button.
Missiles can either be fired guided, or unguided. Guided missiles are used by first targeting the enemy (as described in the above paragraph), then hovering over the targeting indicators until there has been achieved a lock, and then firing with the middle mouse button. When locking to a target there will be played a beeping sound, finished by another recognizable sound. // TODO: describe better?
The game will not allow you to fire a missile if there is no lock. To fire unguided, you must first disable “Safety Lock” in the weapons menu. Firing unguided is only recommended on large targets while you have no sidewards relative velocity. Otherwise it is very hard to hit anything.
When a missile has locked on to you, a message with the missile’s range from you is displayed at the top of your HUD. You have two basic countermeasures. Movement and flares. Flares are deployed with the ALT key. When countering missiles, it is important to always have enough energy for evasive maneuvers with boost.
I recommend waiting until the missile is ~2 km away, popping a flare and then immediately change direction with a boost.
Though do keep in mind that missiles will regularly turn around again for a second try.
Only the corvette can warp jam. Jamming is done by selecting the Warp Jam action in the systems menu. When selected, any ship within ??? km (including yourself and allies) will have their warp disabled. // TODO: figure out the range again
If things are going bad, you may want to jump out of combat. However, this is not straight forward and can not always be achieved. The goal is to warp away. While in warp with sufficient speed, you are basically invincible and can travel to a friendly station. In order to achieve this, we must get far enough away from enemies such that they cannot disrupt your warp. To gain distance, you should disable the Flight Assist and then continuously accelerate away from the combat zone.
Capital ship controls are different from small ships. Now, the WASD keys are used for pitch and yaw rotation. To strafe you have to hold Left Ctrl before clicking the normal bindings.
Your mouse is used for aiming the manual turrets. The manual turrets are not enabled by default, so remember to enable them in the weapons menu.
Each turret has a small dot, representing where they are aiming.
Be careful with swinging from target to target, as the big turret has a slow traverse rate.
Unlike in small ships, the HUD is visible while playing third person.
FAQ
- I believe that I have heard about this game / seen a tech demo very long time ago
You have most likely heard of Infinity: Quest for earth. This was a hobby project for some of the developers, but proved too big. The tech was used to kickstart this game. But I:B itself has not really been in development more than 4 years (since the Kickstarter in 2015).
- Will there be any non combat-related things to do?
Not really. The developers hope that the sales from this will allow them to expand it to a full MMORPG. But that would probably be a different Infinity game. For Battlescape, it does not make much sense, just as it would be weird to, say, add mining in Planetside 2.
- How does the flight mechanics compare to Elite Dangerous?
The overall flight mechanics are comparable to ED without FA. However, it is much easier to control in I:B.