First up was Hunting Party, and I drew shrikeh from HATE. He was running Druze Bayram Security, which got me a bit worried. Hunting Party is a weird mission, and one of the ones that Druze excel at and Dahshat don't.
Winning the Lieutenant roll, I chose to take first turn, as both Druze and Dahshat are brutal on the first turn, although Dahshat has less defensive options for ARO.
Shrikeh was running a limited insertion Druze list, and set up a Brawler Sniper and Armand opposite my main link. I also spotted that there were only nine models visible, which meant either a Bashi Bazouk or Saito Togan. My guess was Saito Togan given the points I could see on the table.
My first choice for taking out the snipers was McMurrough, who headed up the table behind smoke until he was out of sight of the snipers. I didn't have enough spare orders to start a big close combat charge this turn, so decided to throw a couple of speculative grenades . . . only to have Saito reveal and fire an adhesive launcher at McMurrough and crit, gluing McMurrough in place!
I weathered the Druze first turn and hit back, making sure I'd taken out the Druze HMG, and clearing off both snipers. But I was still having trouble scoring and getting to a Lieutenant or Specialist to capture them.
The Druze E/M Grenade Launcher proved it's worth, isolating my Lieutenant and putting the Druze ahead.
I'd never quite got the E/M Grenade Launcher working for me . . . but shrikeh got the range dialled in on my link team and dropped a couple of E/M grenades on it.
Fortunately, the specialists were further back and not caught, but three of them were isolated . . . The game then got pretty intense and I didn't get many more photos. The link got mostly fixed up, but it took orders to do, and I was still no closer to immobilising the Druze Lieutenant.
I managed to flip both of the consoles, and controlled the HVT . . . and put a stun pistol on an unconscious paramedic to put me 5-4 up on the score. But with only four orders left on the board for his last turn, he managed to stun my Hunzakut to tie the specialists and take the game 4-3.
While it was close, shrikeh managed to inhibit my ability to score points while scoring his own throughout the game. I felt like I was always behind on scoring objective points, though I suspect he was constantly worrying about the damage I was doing to his troops in turn...
Next up was my first play through of Countermeasures, a new mission for this season. My opponent was KR15, who was running vanilla PanOceania. I managed to win the Lieutenant roll again and chose first turn.
Looking at his deployment, there was a Nisse sniper in a good nest keeping my main link team pinned down, but there were only 8 orders in his main pool, and a huge diagonal fire lane appeared unguarded. My main worry for my link was a Swiss Guard missile launcher.
I took a cautious approach, but no missile launcher! Just as I thought that wasn't where he'd deployed his TO, he revealed a Swiss Guard HMG and shot a trailing Bounty Hunter down, dropping the link to a four person link.
The TO revealed, I ran McMurrough up under smoke and cut him down. With one wound left, he then jumped off the roof and chain rifled a Forward Observer Fusilier and a Mulebot while he was shot unconscious by the sniper.
My opponent didn't really recover from the loss of the Swiss Guard. He brought on a Spitfire Akali drop troop, but when running out of orders, he went to go for both of my Zuyong at once, and lost the firefight.
He managed to bring on a Cube Jaeger behind my Libertos, took him out and went on to cause a lot of mischief in my back lines.
I pushed forward with the three remaining active members of my link to finally deal with that blasted Nisse Sniper at a solid range for the HMG.
The weight of dice was enough and he went unconscious. With the sniper down, I was clear to move around on the right hand side of the board that had been shut down for me so far.
The Hunzakut snuck up the flank and managed to Forward Observe a remote, narrowly avoiding being set on fire by an Auxbot. Objectives done, I dropped a mine to help lock the surviving Pan O forces down and pulled back.
With four cards scored, I was on a full 10 objective points. KR15 had one classified so could theoretically score three in a round and bring the game back to a draw.
In the rush to try and score a fifth objective, I walked one of my Zuyong into his hacker. Fortunately, my careless moment didn't cost me, and I managed to get a last objective. In the last turn, KR15 managed to score two objectives, including one with his Data Tracker, bringing him up to five objective points. I still had the major win, but PanOceania honour was restored!
So, on to the last game, and the tournament was finishing up with a simple game of Annihilation against zzzinger's Tunguska. I was worried about the Hollow Man link as it's a tough nut to crack without hacking.
As I feared, it was a Hollow Man link, and my cunning plan of having McMurrough punch them to death fell over when he got hit twice by missiles on his way up and fell unconscious. I didn't have enough orders to do much more, so I shifted some positioning to be more defensive for the following turn.
Raoul Spector dropped in on the flank and started giving me a master class in how a drop troop can ruin your day. A drop bear was neatly dropped on one of my flank guards.
He then came around the other side and took a quick shot at my Warcor, who was lucky to survive.
And this is the result of the first boarding shotgun run...
Then he went to work on the main link with another drop bear.
Miranda ended up the only one still up.
She got into a knife fight with Raoul, as my best chance of stopping him. It was close, but he passed his Monomolecular save, and managed to take her down in turn.
I managed to hold up the Hollow Man advance a short while with a healed up Valerya and a Hunzakut deployable repeater. She lasted way longer than her points merited, but eventually she went down.
The only redeeming moment was the Dozer engineer managed to crit Raoul Spector, finally ending the rampage. The Hollow Man link finished up everything else, leaving only the War Cor alive. With 3 points of my list surviving, I managed to hold the game to a 9-0 loss by having caused a few points of damage on the way through...
I finished 17th, but I'm not unhappy with that. I'm getting the hang of Dahshat and learning about how to write lists for them. I've got a few more practice games to fit in before my next tournament, St Albans Smackdown in November.
Totally Crit Open is an excellent tournament, and I'd absolutely recommend it. They're looking to run two next year, and if you play Infinity and can get to one, look them up and give it a go!
17th ain't bad with a new faction!
ReplyDeleteThere were 28 players, so in the bottom half of the field, but only just!
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