Infinity: Learning Dashat: Hunting Party vs TAK

Before Totally Crit X4, I thought it would be worthwhile seeing how Dahshat ran in Hunting Party, as it was the most "non standard" of the missions in the tournament. One of my club mates was happy to give me a practice game against his TAK.

My main plan was to use a Brawler link and be super clever and do long ranged Stun shots. I had a couple of models who could throw smoke to cover this.

It was the only long ranged gun I really had, but I thought it should be plenty, shooting through smoke and being clever.

It turns out that when you're taking out linked missile launchers who get to shoot back unpenalised because of Sixth Sense, one big gun isn't enough. This led to me tweaking the list for the weekend and adding an extra sniper rifle for long ranged fire fights.

I managed to take out one of the infiltrators running forward with a mine layer Libertos. They worked pretty well and I decided to keep them in the list.

McMurrough went after the TAK Lieutenant up on a high rooftop and was taken out by a lucky crit, having taken a wound on the way up. There's still limited options for Dahshat to deal with "Lieutenant lying prone on an inaccessible rooftop" as a plan. I need to go through the list again and see what other options are viable.

Then there was the turn of everyone getting glued and stunned. It was very bad.

A parachutist Spetsnaz was responsible for most of this. I ended up taking the risk approach of having my Lieutenant go to gun him down. I cheekily did so in front of a missile launcher, as if he killed me without gluing me, he couldn't score the Lieutenant in his following turn...

And yet this was my armour save, when it wasn't particularly important.

My two engineers were super busy unglueing all the specialists. This worked and was super effective.

But in the end, TAK were able to glue a specialist and pip me to the win.

Lessons from the Game

Aside from some basic army composition feedback (bring bigger guns, engineers are super good in this mission), the main lesson I got from this was that taking a lot of specialists in this does leave you vulnerable.

There's a balance to be struck, though. There's four points to be gained from "stuff Specialists can do" and only two to be gained from gluing specialists. But with four points tied up in the Lieutenant, I think I want to start considering what tools Dahshat has to deal with either a "top of tall building" Lieutenant or a "castled deep in enemy deployment zone" Lieutenant. I never really put pressure on Lieutenants in either game while mine were threatened in both.

Definitely something to consider in the future.