O-12 Learning Game - Supremacy vs Invincible Army

 

My current "learning faction" is O-12 and I decided to get in a game at HATE, my local wargaming club. A fellow club mate hadn't played in a while and was bringing his Invincible Army, so it felt like a sensible time to try out O-12. We picked Supremacy as a nice simple mission to get back into things.

I picked a list with some pretty predictable things, and a few weird left field choices I wasn't sure about. For main hit pieces I decided to bring a Lawkeeper Red Fury and and Epsilon. The idea was that the Lawkeeper would go forward and it's Sidebot could help with any mine or perimeter weapons as I didn't want to use a Varangian on them. Meanwhile the Epsilon would lurk around the back committing acts of violence.

For the midfield, I went with Casanova, backed up with a Crusher and a Gangbuster. I feel like this is the minimum sort of investment if you're taking Casanova - he basically needs tucking away with a bodyguard on each side to guard approaches to him. In the scrambling for points, I ended up without a Katherine Cho Chain of Command, but I shrugged and decided that I'd be fine, and what's the worst that could happen?

I deployed a pretty central defensive team of a Peeler, backed up by the Beasthunter FTO who was taken to beef up the first turn ARO presence. There were mines everywhere in the midfield and the centre, and I felt pretty good about it.

However, as the game started, it became clear that I had completely missed an attack vector, and a Zhencha made a camo run past my midfield pieces, Spotlit my Raveneye Lieutenant, and dropped a guided missile on him, putting me in Loss of Lieutenant for the first turn.

I crawled my Gangbuster forward and sent out a Madtrap to the Missile Remote, who was now on ARO duty. The Epsilon then popped out, blew a hole in it and retreated. It ended up double unconscious and immobilised, but there was an engineer on hand to fix it.

I took advantage of the Oko's Tactical Awareness and some Command tokens to get a button pushed and positioned pretty well for the next turn.

I forgot to take photos for a bit, but my Crusher got shot to bits and the Guided remote repaired and unglued. I think I lost a couple of other pieces.

The Haris of a Shang Ji, Bixie, and some other special character, managed to get a button pushed...

And Bixie then got into base to base with the Lawkeeper, although she was unlucky to take a wound on the way in.

They clashed blades for a round, but then luck ran out and the Lawkeeper was Isolated and Unconscious. This pretty much put paid to it, as there was no way I had the orders to get a Doctor and an Engineer to it to get it back up and running.

Despite having spent a whole bunch of time thinking "How great is Climbing Plus in O-12", I hadn't positioned models to allow for Bixie having it. She split from the fireteam, climbed up a wall, and unceremoniously shot Casanova in the back of the head. I managed to take her out eventually, but it took a whole bunch of orders. The Shang Ji and other member of the Fireteam got shot up by the Epsilon at awful ranges and had a sad time.

I push the Epsilon forward to claim a zone in my third turn, but that's about all she wrote. We've both scored two boxes, drawn on zones for three rounds, and got our classifieds, leaving the final score a 7-7 tie. We even had surviving victory points as 138-134, so this is probably one of the closest games of Infinity I've ever had.

So, what were my learning points?

• I should have watched Rob Shepherd's YouTube video about defending from Guided earlier.
• The Lawkeeper and Epsilon are both good
• Casanova requires a significant investment to make work and I'll likely want to give him a miss while I learn more of the faction
• I've had bad experiences with a Gangbuster previously, but this time around he was great - more information needed, I think
• The Crusher needs trying again, it didn't last long enough to get a full understanding of it
• The Nyoka Parachutist also seemed really promising and could do with another look

Terrain Crate Wizard's Library - Brushchewer Inc

 

I decided to commission out the rest of the Mantic Terrain Crate boxes I have to get them all done. I decide to use Brushchewer Inc to get this Wizard's Study set done, and am really pleased with how they've turned out.

The book cases are a nice bulk of terrain, with some more specific pieces that will still see plenty of use making up the rest of the set. Seeing them all painted up, I'm a big fan.

Work in Progress Wednesday - O-12

 

With an upcoming game to start learning how to play O-12 in person, I needed to get a handful of new models undercoated ready for play.

The Nyoka Parachutist was because I was keen to include a Parachutist of some kind, and I had the SWC necessary to pick the Red Fury option. The Oko remote (the O-12 Forward Observer remote) was an obvious choice in the current ITS season. Finally, the Cyberghost is a bargain basement Hacking Device Plus, and I was keen to try him out.

Finally, while I already had a Gangbuster ready to go, I have a lot more time for the Killer Hacker profile that brings Madtraps, so got him ready to go as well.

A fresh start and a dwarf berserker

 

With most of the clutter from the flat now safely stowed in a storage unit, I managed to settle down and finish up another one of the dwarves I have from Oathsworn Miniatures. This one is clearly intended to be a Troll Slayer type character from the Warhammer setting.

I ended up sticking with the bright orange hair as I was having deep indecision about an alternative hair colour, but he's otherwise pretty generically painted so he can easily be used as some kind of berserker or barbarian in D&D and similar.

Some dungeoneering scenes

 

I had a play around with some of my figures and made some simple battle scenes. Here, a human warrior and a dwarf cleric try and fight off some black oozes.

A motley adventuring party burst in on an evil wizard who has hired a couple of gnolls to protect him. The party's wizard summons some fae allies to aid them, but the wizard has some dark allies of his own.

A malicious summoner calls forth a cacodaemon to hold off some inquisitive meddlers...

Deep below the earth, an adventuring party seeks to end the vile schemes of a Mind Flayer and those who it has forced into its service.

A band of adventurers fleeing a black ooze accidentally stumble into the lair of a spirit troll. Sometimes, it's one of those adventures...

Work in Progress Wednesday: Unidrons and a Noctifer

 

I've started splitting my Infinity mini prep into smaller batches again to get things done and put away. Over the course of a few evenings and lunchtimes, I've gotten these three Unidrons ready for paint, so I can put them away for now.

I think it's most likely I'll use Unidrons in Onyx Contact Force, which I now have most of the models for, but no particular timing planned for while I'll use them. I'm currently missing "Bit and Kiss", who is pretty close to a "must have" in the faction, so I should probably pick them up before I start trying them out.

I also picked up the new Noctifer to paint up. He can be used with either the Shasvastii or Onyx Contact Force. I've been regularly using the Noctifer Missile Launcher (and doing well when I do), so he'll probably see quite a bit of time in lists once painted.

Spring Cleaning!

 

Sim and I spent the Easter long weekend tidying up the hobby space. We have a very small flat and it's taking time to sort and sell the excess miniatures and books we have, so we've taken the decision to hire a storage unit up the road to give us space to breathe.

The idea will be to pop up every few weeks and pull back another box to sort through, and get it sold or stored at the flat before moving on to the next one. Its helped me realise how much stuff I actually have, and hopefully will help me decide what I'm really using and what's just taking up space.

More importantly, a lot of things that were sitting on a desk now have a place to live, so they can be put away, and I can get out a hobby project, work on it, and put it back at the end of the day. I'm really looking forward to this.

How did March go?

 

I had a couple of Infinity tournaments (and a LARP event) in March, so I didn't get a massive amount of panting done.

I got a couple of miniatures painted - one by Oathsworn Miniatures and one by Bad Squiddo. This is a little behind where I want to be with my pace, that's also kind of find given how busy a month it was.

With my Easter Weekend planned to be a heavy re-organisation of my hobby space, hopefully that will change how much time I have available to paint. I'll report back soon on how that went...

Some odd Wizkids monsters

 

Gem Dragons, or "what happens when you need more variants of a popular monster" aren't something that hugely jumped out as me as adding much to D&D, but I make a small exception for Amethyst Dragons. With their dislike of Far Realm monsters and a tendency to prefer to live on the Elemental Planes, they can serve as a strange ally and a good indicator to the players that things have gotten weird.

These Amethyst Dragon Wyrmlings seem to have been limited release models, so when I spotted them on sale as separates in a store, I grabbed them straight away.

Ssurrans are a variant Lizardfolk that were in Dark Sun, and Wizards of the Coast have revisited as part of Spelljammer. Rather than produce entirely new stat blocks, they've suggested using Lizardfolk stat blocks plus a couple of new ones in their Spelljammer book.

The Neogi are awful interdimensional slaving monsters that have no redeeming features and are therefore a good villain to run into. I first came across them in "Minsc and Boo's Journal of Villainy" as awful merchants in some evil city. They give off strong "when the Forgotten Realms got too big" energy to me, but really found their home as Spelljammer villains.

In both these cases, the weird look of the miniature and the organic shapes of them that suit Wizkids mediocre painting quality meant I was willing to pick them both up to use as odd monsters at some point.

Getting organised

 

It's been a busy week! Over the past couple of weeks, I've had a whole bunch of stuff turn up, particularly Kickstarters for Tanares, Next Level Miniatures and Fenris Games Rubble City. The first two are assorted minis I got for D&D and other RPGs that I'm not emotionally attached to painting.

So, the Fenris Games Rubble City Adventurers are off to my usual metal assembly guy so I can paint them once assembled. I sent the first of the Tanares boxes off to Blood Medusa Paints. I also fired one of the Mantic Terrain Crates I haven't started yet over to Brushchewer, as I am not having fun with the first one.

The O-12 Alpha Unit finally turned up after having been out of stock at the distributor for a little while. I've booked in my first in person practice game with O-12 and I'm pretty gosh darn stoked about it.

Also, here's a terrible photo of a Kickstarter that arrived this week - the Deadchurch Townsfolk. There's just ten of them, but they're very characterful. I'm tempted to knock up some non standard "character zombie" monster stat blocks for them when I do get around to using them in RPGs to add a bit more variety that simply a swarm of zombies.

My hobby this week was mostly getting some of the bigger jobs moved along - brush tidy ups on some of the Combined Army I undercoated before I do the zenithal, and adding basing paste to my Lyran Urbanmech and my most recently arrived O-12.

These are big, time consuming jobs, and I'd been kind of putting them off a bit. I've previously learned splitting them into smaller, more manageable sections gets things moving along, so I split a handful of each off and knocked them out pretty quickly.

Looking forward, I'm planning to spend the upcoming long weekend having a major Sort. After some discussion with my dearly beloved wife, we've realised that we would be much better off getting a small storage unit near the flat.

I spend a lot of time moving around boxes, or moving boxes around. Boxing everything up once, moving it out of the flat and having space to move around will be a big weight off. I can then see how much space we have to work with, and work on slimming the hobby collection down one box at a time, rather than constantly searching through box after box trying to work out what should go where.