Infinity League: Last Launch - Nomads vs Invincible Army

 

For the second round of the HATE Infinity League, I was up against Invincible Army. The mission was Last Launch, one of the new missions in this season. I've never played it, either, so I was a bit nervous. The mission is about getting points and specialists evacuated, so I chose three expensive specialists - Mary Problems, Mother Agatha and Zoe, on top of Jazz as a primary Hacker. For firepower, I was relying on an Intruder sniper and a Hellcat with Spitfire.

My opponent won the Initiative roll and chose to go first. He had a chunky heavy infantry link led by a (proxied) Shang Ji HMG with all the tools. On the closed table, it was able to clear out the one ARO piece that could see the box, have a specialist take three ID tokens to escape, handing them around the team.

Two models then headed up into space, with the missile launcher staying behind to provide some AROs. I ran up my Heckler and tried to Jammer the Shang Ji HMG, but he passed his save. Someone then managed to take the Missile Launcher out, all the way to dead so he wasn't getting back up again.

Mary Problems had started heading up the table to push a button and got very lucky avoiding the Shang Ji HMG in ARO. Mimetism -6 turned out to be clutch in this case. The Shang Ji then ducked back inside to protect the box.

So, there was still a special character engineer on the ID dispenser, and a Shang Ji HMG guarding the room. How was I going to clear this?

I dropped in my Hellcat Spitfire, scored my classified with him, and shot someone who was protecting the engineer, before going out for the engineer.

Unluckily, I didn't manage to land a useful shot on the Engineer and he failed guts out of my line of sight, and I didn't have the orders to chase him down.

I then mercilessly bullied the Shang Ji HMG. He got Isolated, Targeted, and shot unconscious. A Pan O Paramedic managed to get a shot to medi-kit him back up again, and now I still had a problem! 

Agatha ran up to the box, shot at the special character until he ducked, but ended up having to spend a turn holding on the box...

The Morlock dropped smoke on himself and got a lucky high roll meaning a Total Reaction remote couldn't beat the roll. This gave Zoe a clear run for the box.

The Chimera dropped Eclipse smoke to cover the box, and the Shang Ji dropped a chain colt, killing the Chimera who'd gotten a little too close. Two Uberfall smacked him about, but he passed all four armour saves and survived the game!

Agatha and Mary Problems were able to evacuate the room, swinging the mission score from a 3-5 loss for me to a 9-1 win for me! So a very good score, but it didn't reflect how close the game was in practice.

My opponent is now assembling and painting his actual Shang Ji HMG model in honour of this brave soldier who survived all sorts of Nomad awfulness to hold the room. A true hero of the people!