HATE Infinite League: Bakunin vs. Hassassins

Back to the League, and my next scheduled opponent was Hassassins. "Can we play Rescue?" my opponent asked. "It's just I've not played it before and I'd like to try it."

Using some crates as civilians, because we didn't have enough civilian models to hand, I agreed, and learned very quickly that the reason my opponent had never got to play Rescue before is that Hassassins are really obscenely good at it, and no-one wanted the kicking.

There were swarms of Impersonation Markers crowding up my deployment zone, although at least the Lunokhod and it's Crazy Koalas scared the hell out of my opponent...

Desperate to avoid losing my entire backline in the first turn, I dropped my Sin Eater  to catch them the moment they came around the corner. My first learning experience - he should have been further back to be outside eight inches when they came around the corner.

Oh, and a whole bunch of the models on the other side of the field were actually Holoprojectors, but I wasn't really paying attention given the horror in my front lines.

One of the Mutts ran up the field and isolated my Killer Hacker

Then Bob from Accounting managed to wander all the way around to here without being discovered...

Aaand it's a Fiday! Who'd have thought it...

Short ranged shotgun blast devastate the area - taking out my engineer completely, knocking out Pi-Well and the Sin Eater. Then he planted a mine around the corner to paralyse my link team.

Before finally going and hiding behind Pi-Well from the retribution.

I managed to educate my oppnent about the joys of Minesweeper, stealing the Fiday's mines off him and leaving him trapped by his own, stolen mines. But in my dark amusement, I foolishly turned my back on the other Fiday who ran up and murdered the Lunokhod in revenge.

Meanwhile, Hassassin specialists retreived their civilians without much opposition.

The Moderator link team pushed up the table to try and retreive the situation, but despite causing some damage to the Hassassins at last, weren't quite able to make it as far as a civilian, leaving the score 7-2 to the Hassassins. (I'd picked up a classified somewhere along the way.)

Learning points:

• Don't leave people all in a line where shotguns can come around the corner
• Fiday are pretty fragile once you're through the Impersonation - the Clockmaker would have ironically Crit the first Fiday to death if I'd not used a Demo Charge as a close combat weapon giving myself an unnecessary penalty to hit
• Spread out the Line of Sight of your link team, using the Sixth Sense to counter wandering Fiday
• Put together a stronger, supported push up the field for Rescue, and don't let yourself get put on the back foot, as you'll stay stuck there

Wayland Games ITS Season 9 Launch Event

I . . . forgot that I hadn't blogged this when I started catching up on blog posts! In order to finish my account of the HATE Infinity League this year, you're getting another blast from the past today and two Infinity things in a week...

For the first day of Season 9 back in September, Wayland Games put on a small Infinity tournament. I pottered down to take part. Sadly, the Season 9 pack hadn't been released when it took place, so the local WarCor picked some of the Season 8 missions to make do.

There were an assortment of different tables at Wayland - some from the store and some brought by players. This one used a mix of Bandua, Customeeple and the Corvus Belli cardboard terrain.

This Yu Jing themed table was mostly Micro Art Studio buildings and walkways, nicely painted up, with some additional bits from elsewhere, like the Antenocitis Workshop Happy Panda Noodles. I suspect the truck is TT Combat.

This table was mostly Corvus Belli cardboard again, but with a little extra from TT Combat's range.

I don't know where the jungle and river terrain came from on this table, but the MDF seems to be mostly Spartan Scenery? You can't get it at the moment thanks to Spartan sadly ceasing trading, but I suspect that Warcrade will be making it available if they got the rights to it with everything else they bought.

First up, I was facing MeekRebel's Vanilla Nomads at Supplies. I mostly hunkered down behind a large building, with Knauf up on the roof to provide some ARO mischief.

A prone Zero ended up depressingly near a Krakot Renegade.

Someone made the mistake of wandering around where Knauf could see them and took a round.

Meanwhile, the Zero died to a chain rifle, but had AROed with "Place Mine", which made the Krakot sad.

Armand Le Muet was causing me grief running around the place.

And a Krakot managed to run down and take out my Intruder Lieutenant, although they were set on fire in the process.

A Moran ended up going on a rampage, taking out a whole bunch of my back field.

My Interventor decided they'd had enough and put up a Cybermask.

I attempted the shooting through smoke nonsense with an Intruder HMG, but Armand ducked sufficiently.

He then came down the stairs and got into a gunfight with my Intruder, but I was still toast. As you might have guessed from my complete failure to mention any of the Supply boxes, I never got anywhere near them, scraped my Classified, and took a 10-1 loss...

So, second game up on the port board with all the shipping containers. This was Comms Centre against a Neoterra force played by NiceGuyRosen. This is an early turn one shot, with the Lunokhod already aggressively up the board.

For the first time, I got my Intruder / Smoke combo working well, with a smoke grenade at the feet of the Intruder allowing him to smoothly turn an Uhlan and a Locust Hacker to paste, seriously affecting my opponent's firepower.

Unfortunately, I'd misjudged where I'd put my Reverend Healer, and an Auxbot set her on fire.

The Intruder remembered that standing out in the open was stupid when the smoke cleared, and fire from a link team was a little unlucky, letting him dodge back out of sight.

A Morlock got the lucky job of punching an Auxbot to death.

Just out of this shot on the top right was the other Auxilia, who were clearly going to come in for a late game objective grab.

Suicidal Morlocks were sent in to try and cause backfield chaos, but they were cut down.

The Wildcat Hacker flipped one of the Pan O objectives back again.

Meanwhile, the Auxilia managed to grab the Console, and my Alguacile Forward Observer couldn't quite make it. Still, I'd managed to scrape a win in a hard fought match, 7-4.

Final game, back to the first board again, for a game of Armoury. I was up against Aleph this time, played by SixthAndPowell. I tweaked my set up, learning some lessons from last time about the risks of being brutalised in the first turn.

Classic Intruder set up on the roof this time, far to the side to see past as much of the infinite height building as possible...

Meanwhile, Aleph brought a TAG. Which comes with MSV 2. So, no repeating the Intruder smoke trick here! I tried a Hellcat with an Adhesive Launcher, but they got cut down before they could make it.

A lot of hacking later . . . using a lot of Repeaters and oddness - the only person who could make it to the Armoury from my side was a Securitate HMG who'd been providing the one of the Inconvenient Repeater Hacking Fields most of the game.

In the end, it came down to the last roll - if I'd killed the surviving Aleph trooper in the Armoury, I'd have held it, but sadly, down went the Securitate, giving the game to Aleph 7-0.

While I came 7th in a tournament of 8 people, and only won one of my games, I had great fun at the event overall. I'd definitely recommend heading down to Wayland for their future Infinity events - the next is on 16 December 2017.

HATE Infinity League: Bakunin vs. Morats

Back in August, I was down to play one of the Morat players in the HATE Infinity League. We picked the Armoury as this mission to play.

I haven't seen an Oznat / Hungries link before, so I was curious to see how it went.

Meanwhile, a Sogarat Haris Link took the other flank.

For my list, I was primarily running a Moderator link with an extra Moderator to switch in and go mobile for a late game objective room grab, and an assortment of bits and pieces to hold the list together.

Well, I said I wanted to see how a Hungry link worked - I didn't particularly fancy just leaving it to run up the board unopposed, so I filled it full of holes from the Prowler Spitfire to get the numbers down.

Still, I managed to end the first turn with the Zero and Zoe holding the room, with the Zero in a suitably inconvenient spot on Suppressive Fire.

There then began the lesson in "making sure you kill the Moderator Sniper", which is as ever made extra awkward by their super cheap Shock Immunity.

An Angry Morat of some variety did for the Prowler.

The Sogarat HMG had a bad day being ever so slightly outranged by the MULTI Sniper.

But my new learning experience number one was to learn when to duck and stay alive to annoy someone in a future turn rather than just dying...

 Then I discovered they had Automedkits and they started running up the field, killing everyone in their path.

The Lunokhod succumbed to Hungries rushing out of the smoke.

A suicidal Morlock broke the Morat lines in the right spot, however.

And slowly but surely, the Sogarat were chipped away by weight of numbers - but at the cost of the Lieutenant!

And finally, the brave surviving Moderators grouped up and headed for the Armoury... I'd fortunately got just enough command tokens to convert their orders into regular orders for the move.

.. joining the Zero who'd bravely held it all game.

The final result was 10-1 to me, with my having looted a Panoply early on and the Morats never really managing to challenge the holding of the Armoury itself.