Friday 19 June 2020

HATE Isolation League Round 4: Firefight vs Combined Army



For Round 4 of the League, I was up against my Combined Army Nemesis. I think I ended up drafting 12 lists before I settled on how I was going to play it. Firefight is a pretty straight forward mission, but I know my opponent likes bringing some of Combined's heavy hitters, including the Avatar, Sphinx, Charontid and Anathematic, supported by swarms of effective warbands.

We were playing on one of the White Noise tables, which has a lot of water at ground level and a lot of elevated gantries and building rat runs. It felt to me a lot like one of those laser tag venues where if you know the layout you get a massive advantage.

Fortunately, neither of us knew what on earth we were doing.


First up was the right flank, where a Zerat Red Fury was sitting right by one of the Panoplies, and needed to get killed rather than letting it go on a rampage. My Heckler ran up, tried to kill it, and died to an unlucky shot. Mary Problems then came up and quickly gunned down the Zerat, but in it's dying breath it laid a mine. I ran a servant remote up and made a play to heal the Heckler, but while I the healing worked, the mine killed him stone dead.


I then ran my Puppetactica up to the alley on the left flank I was pretty sure that the assorted angry impetuous warbands would come down.


I was right, and the first puppet took an angry clawed beastie to the face that then died to a hail of bullets from the other puppets. This was super convenient as I had a classified objective to repair something, so I ambled up the repair remote and stuck the puppet back together.


The puppets then wandered up and did some light murdering of warbands, but they didn't quite have the orders and the dice to kill the Sogarat with Feuerbach. The counter attack put a big hole in them. In the midfield, I tried to push a Reaktion Zond up, but again, the shortage of orders meant that while it caused a little damage, it was quickly put out of commission.


Going into my last turn, it was time for a Cunning Plan. I ran my Killer Hacker up the field under Cybermask (which I always think of as broadcasting fake signals for the advanced Friend / Foe systems in the far future). Once she found a spot out of sight of the Noctifer covering that fire lane, she unleashed her Fast Panda, which ran forward next to the Sogarat, before stopping and becoming a happy little hacking node. Mary Problems them hacked through the Fast Panda to freeze the Sogarat in place, before the newly healed Grenzer Missile Launcher fired a missile right into it's chest.

Of course, at this point, my opponent simply passed their Reset in reaction to being shot at, unfreezing themself, and refused to roll anything lower than a 15 on their armour save. And I was out of orders to do anything about it.


I still had a pretty good defensive . . . oh, no, wait. He still had a drop troop. I think it was actually a Morat Diplomatic Division, but we didn't have a representative of the model. But yeah, it dropped down and murdered the missile launcher and the doctor, and a few other people . . . but it was plenty to give the win to the Combined Army.

So, a 7-2 loss in the end. My nemesis swears blind I've beaten him at some point, but I genuinely don't remember doing so. The good news was that the list was good, the game felt close, and my opponent reported being pretty terrified of the list's potential for most of the game. It's likely to be a strong basis for Tunguska when I start playing them competitively, but for now I'm staying pretty casual with a new edition coming.

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