With a new season of ITS coming up, I pottered down to HATE to get a practice game in with Dahshat company, the faction I'm planning on playing for at least the first part of the next season. They're the faction I took to the Firestorm Satellite tournament back in April when I was getting frustrated with Druze, and I had a brilliant time.
The faction background is that they're a mercenary company owned by a successful Uyghur businessman, so as a result include troops from both the Yu Jing and Haqqislam factions (with a few support troops from Ariadna as well for other background reasons). They're perceived as being very strong in the current tournament meta, due to good mixed fireteams, a variety of cheap order options and some very strong assault pieces.
I didn't want to rock the boat to start out so generated a pretty typical list:
Supplies Dahshat
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GROUP 1 7 / 2 / 1
GHULAM Lieutenant Rifle + Light Shotgun / Pistol, Knife. (0 | 12)
ZÚYŎNG (Tactical Awareness) HMG / 2 Breaker Pistols, Knife. (1.5 | 38)
ZÚYǑNG Missile Launcher, Light Shotgun / 2 Breaker Pistols, Knife. (2 | 36)
VALERYA GROMOZ Hacker (Hacking Device UPGRADE: Expel) Combi Rifle + Pitcher / Pistol, Knife. (0.5 | 21)
BOUNTY HUNTER Submachine Gun, Akrylat-Kanone / Breaker Pistol, Knife. (0 | 12)
BOUNTY HUNTER Submachine Gun, Akrylat-Kanone / Breaker Pistol, Knife. (0 | 12)
RUI SHI Spitfire / Electric Pulse. (1.5 | 20)
McMURROUGH 2 Chain Rifles, Grenades, Smoke Grenades / Templar CCW (AP + DA). (0 | 32)
WARCOR (360º Visor) Flash Pulse / Stun Pistol, Knife. (0 | 3)
GROUP 21
GHULAM Doctor Plus (MediKit) Rifle + Light Shotgun / Pistol, Knife. (0 | 16)
DOZER (Traktor Mul Control Device) Rifle, D-Charges / Pistol, Knife. (0 | 14)
NASMAT Electric Pulse. (0 | 3)
KAMEEL (Minesweeper, Repeater) Electric Pulse. (0 | 8)
FANOUS REMOTE Flash Pulse, Sniffer / Electric Pulse. (0 | 8)
FANOUS REMOTE Flash Pulse, Sniffer / Electric Pulse. (0 | 8)
RAFIQ REMOTE Rifle + Light Shotgun, Sniffer / Electric Pulse. (0 | 16)
TRAKTOR MUL (Minesweeper) Electric Pulse. (0 | 5)
KUM Chain Rifle, Smoke Grenades / Pistol, AP CCW. (0 | 10)
LIBERTO (CH: Mimetism) Submachine Gun, Chain-colt, D.E.P. / Pistol, Knife. (0 | 9)
BASHI BAZOUK (Specialist Operative) Rifle + Light Shotgun / Pistol, CC Weapon. (0 | 17)
5.5 SWC | 300 Points
Open in Infinity Army
The idea with this list is that McMurrough runs around for a bit until he invariably dies, then the big link moves up and consolidates. The second order group utilises whichever of the Kum Biker, Libertos or Bashi has an opening to exploit and open up, but doesn't worry too much if one or other of them fails and dies.
I deployed with my big Zuyong link on my right and left an opening on the left for McMurrough to advance down as my reserve, with the idea that the Bashi would come on behind that and loot the crates. Spiral Corps had taken first turn.
In the opening turn, Spiral Corps ran infiltrators up to two of the three boxes, opened them, and ran away with them.
They hid away behind a network of mines and other models and their mobile saturation zone with the intent that they would be quite hard to root out.
A Tohaa infiltrator revealed and took out one of the ARO bots, but couldn't quite capitalise on the situation. Instead, he settled down in suppression fire to make my life as difficult as possible.
The Kum biker tried to brute force the situation by charging into the Tohaa and cutting him in half in close combat, but was shot down as he tried. I then brute forced the situation by running the Rui Shi back and blowing the troublesome Tohaa apart.
With my remaining orders I rocketed McMurrough up into the midfield, and charged into the new Tohaa large heavy infantry model - not realising he's also pretty good in close combat as well. The idea here was that the best thing to do in this situation is not to charge after the well defended supply boxes, but target the Spiral Corps order generators - but they were well defended and entrenched as well. So I was taking the next best option of setting up for a devastating turn two strike with enough different threats that it would take a disproportionate number of orders to deal with any one of them.
In a similar vein, I brought my Bashi Bazouk on to snipe at a couple of pieces and spread out some holo echoes to cause confusion and waste orders.
In the end, that tactic worked. My opponent spent a whole ton of orders on trying (and failing) to deal with McMurrough, and wasn't able to really get the supply boxes much further away with the remaining orders.
He did, however, cause me some 'discomfort' in managing to use Pheroware to neutralise the Zuyong big gun and shot down a couple of the Bounty Hunters who were padding the link out. In retrospect, I'm not happy with how I placed the link and I think in future I need to have a clearer idea of what I'm trying to do with it, and what the role of each model in the link is.
Fortunately, the link wasn't what saved the day. McMurrough butchered his way through most of the Tohaa centre, picked up one box and left another for my Bashi Bazouk to pick up and run away with.
The Zuyong had a bit of an up and down, as I managed to engineer him back out of being isolated, only for him to be isolated a second time. This wasn't the end of the world, though, as despite being isolated he was able to move up under his own steam and block off an approach to one of my models with the supply boxes. He eventually went down, I think, but took enough orders in the process that there weren't enough to save the day.
Retrospective
So, an interesting win for Dahshat in a fun practice game.
I think that McMurrough and the Scary Link being in different groups didn't serve them well and I could have done more with them being in different groups. I'll try that build again in future.
I do need to remember the weaknesses of the Zuyong link - it's not great against hackers and those fragile Bounty Hunters making up numbers are vulnerable to being picked off to limit the link.
I'm going to be careful and not fall into the mistake I made with Nomads and jumping into super different list builds and having to learn lots at once. I'm going to iterate on this list a bit at a time and build on that a bit at a time.
Writing this game up a little while later has reminded me how much fun the list is and how many different options I have to play around with and learn. I'm already looking forward to my next tournament!
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