Infinity Battle Report: Nomads vs Onyx Contact Force - Rescue

Totally Crit Open 9 has now been and gone, but before I went, I had a last minute opportunity to get a practice game of Rescue in. Rescue is a notoriously difficult mission where your objective is to try and retrieve four civilians from just in front of your opponent's deployment zone while they try and do the same thing - then have more civilians in various zones than your opponent.

It seems that in practice, you spend two turns punching your opponent's army in the face, then grab a civilian if you have enough people left standing...

The Lunokhod gets to hide as far forward as possible with the intention of acting as area denial for the civilians. The Intruder with HMG sits prone in camo in a good firing spot. The WarCor is a lie - it's a new hacker "Switch" using a Holoprojector to pretend to be a passing journalist.

There's nothing much out of the ordinary here, either, but there is a SinEater hidden away in that building on the left covering people's advance onto the civilian, and a Securitate using their Repeater to act as an unpleasant surprise for anyone who gets too close!

My opponent cheerfully drops down a link team of four robots and an alien hacker, with a plasma sniper rifle covering an awful lot of the board. They become a definite priority to do something about. There's a doctor nestled away out of sight.

And a small fireteam of two heavy infantry who are poised to charge down my left flank - which they immediately do.

On my right flank, the Intruder pops out and riddles the sniper full of holes. Once it's gone, I advance a camo token (a hidden Zero Forward Observer) and Lunokhod up to a place where they might have a chance of getting a civilian in a future turn.

Meanwhile, that flash of white you can see up the street is my Prowler with Spitfire, who has handily blown away one of the two Suryats before it can do anything dangerous.

He retaliates with a Fracta drop troop with Spitfire coming on from the board edge. It rampaged down my backfield, and nearly reached my lieutenant before I was able to take it out.

In the centre, a total camo Noctifer comes out of hiding and takes out my Zero. I return the favour by running the Lunokhod up and setting it on fire. Zoe runs up to repair the Lunokhod, succeeding, but being shot down in the process - but I complete my classified objective to test run some new engineering technology repairing the robot.

I reveal my sneaky hacker, but he isn't able to do anything really cool.

I start seriously losing models, and anyone who could get to a civilian on my side is taken out.

Finally, the Suryat on my left, with no-one to really oppose them, runs out and grabs a civilian. They don't get far, but end up controlling their HVT while I don't threaten theirs - leaving the score 3-2 in their favour.

My big learning experience here was to watch out for controlling the HVTs at the end of the game - I had the Prowler free to deny the points without making any dice rolls but didn't remember to do so! If I'd done that, I'd have won 2-1. Not a mistake I'll be making for a while...