On Thursday, Spanish game studio Corvus Belli revealed the latest new faction for its flagship miniature wargame Infinity. Next Wave is the first human faction to come under the umbrella of the interspecies Combined Army, bringing together familiar human heroes with alien technology to make a totally novel force. This faction’s backstory is rooted in military conquest, political conniving, and personal vendettas – and it’s a great example of how Infinity regularly does things with its metaplot that Warhammer 40k never could.
Don’t get me wrong, I love Warhammer 40k lore. I’m one of the two team members who updates Wargamer’s 40k lore guides, and I’ve listened to well over 1,000 hours of Black Library audiobooks. It’s my Roman empire – a fantastic setting for melodrama, tragedy, truly apocalyptic battles, and psychedelic cosmic horror.
But if you want to follow a sci-fi plot that develops over time with genuine, meaningful change, coherent politics, and concrete stakes, Infinity has it beaten flat. Half the reason I have a day job is because people need written guides to keep track of the plot of 40k, but you can follow Infinity’s cyberpunk spec-ops space opera just by reading each new rulebook.
If you’re unfamiliar with Infinity’s setting, here’s a quick primer. Infinity takes place far enough into the future that humankind has colonised several exoplanets, and rapid interstellar travel is possible thanks to ancient alien wormhole gates. The small ‘Human Sphere’ of worlds is divided among empires descended from earth nations you might recognise today, and cooperation is facilitated by an AI system known as Aleph. The tech level is transhuman – most people walk around in their original bodies, but military personnel can backup their consciousness into a ‘Cube’.
Mankind isn’t alone in the galaxy. There are a range of non-human aliens, and while it’s not as diverse as Star Trek, there are other sentient species. Most significant is the Ur Hegemony, a multi-species coalition ruled by the so-called Enhanced Intelligence. Since the first edition of Infinity released in 2005, the Ur Hegemony’s devastatingly effective Combined Army has been pushing into Human Territory from the periphery.
When I say that the Combined Army has been pushing into the Human Sphere since the game’s first edition, I don’t mean that the lore has been frozen at that point since 2005. I mean that, expansion by expansion, the Combined Army has been winning, pushing back the frontline one planet at a time, breaking the blockade at one jump gate after another.
The Human Sphere is small, just a few dozen planets. The losses haven’t taken place in disposable locations with no narrative weight – the threat of the Combined Army army seemed almost apocalyptic. What began as an ignorable border war in the furthest reaches of human territory came close to ripping the heart out of the Human Sphere. But here’s the really interesting part – as of the supplement Endsong and the start of the new edition, N5, a peace treaty has been signed.
The Ur Hegemony’s real goal in human controlled space was an ancient and mysterious alien artifact called the T’zechi Digester, which had been relocated to the critical human world of Concilium. A military breakthrough at a critical blockade put the Combined Army within striking distance of the artifact. With the Combined Army’s objective within reach, spec-op forces from another alien group, the Tohaa, sent the device into a doomsday meltdown set to rip Concilium apart.
The meltdown was delayed (by a mercenary werewolf – Infinity isn’t totally hard scifi) just long enough to avert that apocalypse. The Ur Hegemony had the technology to freeze the Digester’s meltdown, but only if it could get past the human defenders – and the only way it could do that in time was by offering a truce.
Blindsided, and faced with the annihilation of a world if they didn’t comply, the governments of the Human Sphere took the only palatable option. The Ur Hegemony signed the treaties that would recognise it as a polity within the Human Sphere, and just like that, everything was different.
This was a neat way to de-escalate the conflict in the setting without blowing everything up, and rebalance the narrative away from all out war and towards special operations, which are the focus of the wargame. It also created incredibly interesting new opportunities for developments in the setting.
The planets that the Combined Army conquered had initially been controlled via military occupation, governed by species which the Ur Hegemony had chosen specifically for their talent in warfare, not peace keeping: the militaristic Morat, subtle and scheming Shasvastii, slave taking Exrah, and borderline sociopathic Umbra. It was a grim time, and resistance movements fought on in hopes that liberators might arrive from the Human Sphere.
With the war now over and the Ur Hegemony officially recognised as a legal state, the conquered worlds have been integrated into its civilization under the direct governance of the EI. And it has shown its human citizens that it is, to their surprise, a civilized ruler. At the least, it’s no worse than the powers of the Human Sphere which – some argue – extended the original conflict through sheer intractability and mistrust, and then left their former citizens to rot.
This is where Next Wave comes in. It’s a new branch of the Combined Army, staffed by humans, and there are diverse motivations for it to exist. Some are purely practical. Humanity suffered badly under the alien occupiers, and an all-human military formation within the Combined Army creates a buffer against their influence. Meanwhile, demonstrating that human culture can be valuable to the Ur Hegemony will help to preserve it against the rational, but interventionist, EI.
Among the most significant figures now on the side of the Ur Hegemony is Achilles – a genetic recreation of the famous Achilles from Greek myth, because Infinity does get to have the occasional super-soldier as a special treat from time to time – who was once part of the human AI Aleph’s elite security service, Steel Phalanx. Achilles felt betrayed by Aleph for its role in the (temporary) death of his beloved second in command, Patroclus, and has become a key leader of Next Wave, alongside other prominant human rebels.
As well as these pragmatic and personal motivations, there’s a philosophical side to it as well. Next Wave expresses mankind’s desire to recover and to ascend to new heights. The Ur Hegemony’s superior technology and successful multi-species coalition may genuinely offer a better future for mankind. The aspirations of humans emerging from a time of oppression into unexpected opportunities are reflected in the lore of some of the units.
The Raindancers are a cult of soldiers who spent time in Morat-controlled prisoner of war camps, where they developed a form of ritual dance as a means both of managing PTSD and of entering a berserker combat trance. Next Wave’s leadership recognise their potential, and negotiated with the EI for the development of variant Cubes – the technology that enables personality backups – that can mitigate the debilitating effects of PTSD, while preserving the Raindancers’ access to their lethal berserker trance.
Then there are the opportunists, like the Cliff Jumpers. Paradiso was one of the earliest planets to fall to Combined Army occupation. In the nigh-vertical city of Bag-Kobkha the occupiers faced a particular irritant in the form of wingsuit-wearing daredevils. Thrill seekers, resistance fighters, and mob-affiliated criminals, they regularly escaped capture by making near-suicidal leaps into the void.
They’re now sought-after jump troop recruits for Next Wave. With a de facto pardon for any past crimes when they sign up, and the opportunity to make even more ridiculous jumps in the heat of combat, the Cliff Jumpers regiment has no trouble recruiting.
Infinity has a different focus from 40k in so many ways. It’s a skirmish game instead of an army game, has much crunchier rules, and its narrative (usually) hinges on deniable spec-ops missions instead of massive military deployments. Its story is both political and personal, and though it’s not exactly small, it’s small enough that events in the metaplot can genuinely reshape the whole texture of the setting – and even launch a new faction.
If you’re interested in Next Wave, you can order it from the Corvus Belli webstore. The general release will be in mid November, but there’s a limited number of early access copies that are ready to ship immediately – so order now if you don’t want to wait!