With the Totally Crit Open 9 coming up, I headed down to HATE to get a little practice in at some of the missions. The mission we were playing was "Safe Area", where you need to control the quartered areas of the board that aren't the deployment areas, and hold as many of four consoles as you can at the end of the game.
My opponent, running a Yu Jing list, started off by running his Shaolin monks up the board - irregular skirmishers with smoke grenades. I haven't taken photos of every part of the game, just particular highlights or learning points for me.
One walked got close enough to my Zero Forward Observer to line up a chain rifle shot, so I reacted by dropping a mine in his path. His Chain Rifle shot took out the Zero, but the mine left him with a problem with his Impetuous Order next turn.
My opponent had run a Rui Shi remote up my right flank - a Spitfire armed remote with a Multi-Spectral Visor, which counters smoke and camouflage. I gently educated my opponent in the mysteries of White Noise fields - a hacker dropped interference field that blocks the sight of anything with a visor - and shot the remote to pieces through the electrical interference.
You can also here see Pi-Well, one of my rightly hated units, holding the centre position with a hacking programme granting him better marksmanship, laying down a curtain of suppressing fire. This was very good and I should have done it more!
Suspicious of drop troops, I left a lot of models in suppressive fire.
The Shaolin impetuously triggered the mine, but successfully dodged it's blast.
A remote with holo-projectors ran across my line of fire, but I only shot one of it's fake holo-echoes.
A Tiger Soldier hacker dropped in behind Pi-Well, but misjudged placement and ended up just within range of Zoe, who helpfully "Stopped" him.
Similarly, a Ninja Hacker came out of hiding to cause mayhem, not realising how close they were to a repeater, and got the same kind of love.
One of my Morlocks ended up in hand to hand with a Shaolin Monk. Lesson: people who are better at Martial Arts than you have a significant edge in hand to hand combat...
Another one of my Impetuous Morlock tries to take out another Martial Artist, and learns the hard way that this sort of shit does not fly.
At this point, I finally revealed one of my key new models - an Intruder HMG with a visor that could see through smoke, and the camouflage of the Ninja. Sadly, I rolled poorly and they ducked back into cover before I could do anything useful.
Having neutralised the drop trooper, I moved a whole bunch of models up the field to start setting myself up for the third turn to score points.
Wait, where did they all go? That's three completely dead models and a further unconscious one!
Life Lesson: Think about where your opponent's models could move to. This heavy infantry Hsien with an HMG had moved from where they'd been ineffective most of the game, using a well placed smoke grenade to cut back on retaliation, shooting down model after model - the only model of mine who could see through the smoke, the Intruder, was facing the wrong way.
At this point, the club was closing up, and I did the quick maths that there was no way I could pull back the game. My opponent was holding down 3 table quarters and I couldn't bring it up to the tie, or get to enough of the consoles to swing it back. By my count, it would either be 6-0 or 6-1, as I might have been able to make a console.
Other than the "think through what your opponent will do" lesson, I'd also highlight the massive importance of not giving up. I was pretty brutally mauling the Yu Jing right up until this point, keeping key models pinned down and setting up for a pretty strong third turn. Until the models started dropping in the third turn, we both thought Yu Jing were on the ropes and were going to lose. He saw a good opportunity to seize the game back and turned it around very solidly indeed.
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