Infinity Practice Game: Highly Classified, Druze Bayram Security vs Nomads

I wanted to get a little practice in before the upcoming Firestorm Satellite tournament in April, so managed to arrange a game of Highly Classified with Yashar down at HATE. Yashar was playing at St Albans Smackdown last weekend and wanted to give his list a shake out. Although Highly Classified wasn't on the roster, some specialist heavy variable missions were, so it was worthwhile to shake out any problems in the list.

I lost the Lieutenant roll and got to pick table sides, with the Nomads wanting to go first. Classifieds were a veteran or elite troop making a WIP roll on the other half of the table, engineer roll on the HVT, Visor or Sensor roll on the HVT and Forward Observing an enemy troop. The secret objective for both of us was Sabotage because sometimes that's just how the cards fall.

Yashar was running the Puppetactica unit. As the models aren't out yet, he's scratch built some penguins with guns, because, well, penguins with guns frankly.

First turn was pretty  brutal, as all my flash pulse ARO pieces got picked off one by one by an Intruder Sniper. It didn't even bother spending the order on the smoke.

More dead ARO pieces...

A Jaguar got shot down by the Hunzakut who survived the retaliatory Chain Rifle. This was about the only casualty on the Nomad side all game.

I decided to send Saito Togan out to murder the Obvious Lieutenant to try and give me a full turn to just get the objectives, but it turned out the camo token I had to pass to do so was a Heckler with a Jammer, and Saito got stuck.

I tried to bring up my Sniper and Engineer to turn the game around, with most other things dead, but didn't have the orders to do it in a single turn. Yashar then neatly went through and did all the objectives in his turn as there was nothing to stop him.

With his spare orders, he took out the sniper with the visor and left multiple ARO pieces out, meaning there was no chance even of a suicidal run to complete an objective or two, meaning the game finished a solid 10-0.

I think Druze struggle a lot at Highly Classified, and my ARO choices this game were particularly poor. I simply couldn't deal with the Nomad versatility and firepower, meaning I was constantly on the back foot and being effectively countered whenever I had to do anything.

I'm definitely considering what to play next. Druze was always about getting a painted army on the table, but the regular losses are just demoralising. While I need to think about a re-written list for Firestorm, my heart really isn't in it and I'm thinking forward to what to play after Druze, not Druze lists for my next games.