Thursday 14 May 2020

HATE Infinity Isolation League Round 1 - Frontline: Tunguska vs Vanilla Nomads


With no-one getting out to socialise yet, Hackney Area Tabletop Enthusiasts have set up a small Tabletop Simulator Infinity League because we could. We'll be playing a round every couple of weeks while we can't get in to the club.

I decided to run Tunguska as I've been interested in them as a Sectorial for quite a while but never played a game with them. It turns out that Tabletop Simulator lets you get going on a force much quicker without having to invest a ton of money in the models!

Having signed up to run Tunguska, I then spent a week and a half writing list after list and having horrible trouble with them. I'm used to running high model count lists, which Tunguska . . . just can't do. They're a relatively elite army, lacking large numbers of cheap troops to power the heavy hitters.

In the end, I snapped, took the Szalamandra TAG, and built a simple ten order list to support it.


The first mission was Frontline, to keep things nice and simple. As the mission has a Liaison Officer I wanted to take the Grenzer Forward Observer, which made me trend towards a Grenzer link on the grounds that it could use Forward Deployment to start in the scoring zones and save me orders moving it up.

I was up against a member of the club who is moving out of Bakunin and into vanilla Nomads. My main plan was to not worry too closely about all the clever tricks and just shoot everything with a really big gun.


My opponent had placed his Liaison Officer - a Moran Forward Observer - prone on a rooftop in the centre of the building. I decided the first thing to do was to address that. I climbed the Szalamandra up a shipping container, then moved up and opened fire. There was a fine red mist where the Moran used to be, but he'd managed to put his Crazy Koalas on Standby when he saw me climbing up.

My Zondnautica then advanced up the other side of the building and took a shot at the Interventor who'd dodged a little too far away from the Szalamandra and into her line of sight, but the Interventor got lucky and managed to dodge again into a very very small blind spot I couldn't see from either side.

I started to advance my Szalamandra up, but was unfortunately hit by a lucky Flash Pulse, stunning it for the rest of the turn. I moved it back as far as I could and pushed the link up to provide as much ARO cover as they could manage.


I started to realise my mistake as various Morlocks started running forward under their own orders to start building a line of smoke up to my Szalamandra. And then the Uberfallkommando started moving up.


They charged out of the smoke and swarmed onto the TAG. Hoping to survive one round of beating, I reacted with the heavy flamethower... But there were just too many hits with the Viral close combat and the TAG was removed. The Pupniks all burned to a crisp, but the Chimera survived.


And to add some extra injury to the injury, one of the Morlocks managed to run up and dropped a Chain Rifle template over the link, taking out the Hacker.


I spent a boring turn running the doctor and their remote around to heal up enough of the link to get back in the game, and advanced models into the scoring zones. Weirdly, everyone was looking at the Chimera's hidey-hole, so when she ran around the corner she was blown off the board.


My Grenzers were able to take out an advancing Tysklon Spitfire, but the Nomad player still had plenty of orders left to recover from some bad luck with the dice.


I ended the turn with most of the link down, another Morlock who'd advanced under smoke covering most of my surviving models, and very little I could do to recover. I made a short but valiant attempt to turn the tide, but I didn't have a lot of orders to do it in.


The Nomad Taskmaster then switched into the main group, activated as Lieutenant and went on a spree of gunning down surviving models. I had nothing left to resist with, leaving me with an 8-1 loss with only 45 points left on the table while my opponent had a solid 239 left up.

If I was to run a limited insertion list again, I think I'd want both a Total Reaction remote and probably also a Heckler Jammer covering the approaches to the TAG to make sure it didn't get destroyed by warbands.

I suspect warbands are going to be something I'm going to continue to struggle with...

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