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
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