Tinbot III Infinity Tournament

 

At the start of the month I headed up to Norwich to play in the "Tinbot" tournament that was running there. I headed up the night before to avoid an early start and spent some time resorting my token box having managed to drop it some months ago and not taken the time to fix it.

I was running vanilla Combined Army with one 10 model list intended for Supremacy, and then the list I'd run a practice game with for the other two missions.

Game 1: Supremacy

For the first round, I drew against Copper, a very skilled Combined Army player. I had the first turn, but my Speculo Killer got hemmed in by a Libertos Minelayer, and my Q drone was wildly ineffective.

Dukash and Sheskiin managed to flank my Rindak so he couldn't avoid getting shot in the back, and I was definitely ending up on the back foot.

My Rasyat dropped onto the board edge and sadly was broadly ineffective and ended up failing to take out the Q drone and being taken out in return. I'd spent quite a few orders that hadn't turned into the loss of a huge number of orders for Copper, although I did manage to complete my classified.

The Charontid pushed up the vain hope of scoring some points, getting shot up by the Q drone on the way as his plasma rifle was thoroughly outranged, but I was running out of units and was getting out manoeuvred. 

Without much further opposition, Copper neatly pushed plenty of buttons, set up defensive positions and was able to resist my quite weak turn 3 push to solidly secure the game 10-1.

Game 2

Next up was Capture and Protect, against solomon0997, a returning player from N3 who was running Yu Jing. I won the Lieutenant roll and chose deployment to push to get the second turn.

In the first turn, I was showered with Tiger Soldiers, but fortunately a couple of failed Combat Jump rolls meant that only one got close to the beacon, and wasn't quite able to make it into base contact.

In return, I decided to try and push to get Dukash onto the beacon to score some first turn points. Sadly, while he fought most of the way up, he bit off a little more than he could chew and fell on the last order that would have secured him the box.

My opponent then tried to push onto the beacon with his Hac Tao. Sadly, as my opponent was still getting the hang of the rules after a long break, the game was far enough behind that the TO curtailed his second turn so I'd have a turn as well. These things happen sometimes - my opponent was lovely and not doing any intentional mischief, just needing a little too long to work out what to do at this point.

I then engaged in some relatively swift on table violence - a Daturazi cleared a Ninja, threw a smoke to block a Reaction Remote, and then Sheskiin moved up the field. She eliminated a couple of Shaolin, cleared the reaction remote when she got into a good range, and moved up to capture the console to give me the win for this game.

Game 3

For the third game, I was delighted to be paired against my buddy Jarval, the reason I started coming to Norwich events. The final mission was Unmasking, and he was running Kosmoflot.

Having trouble clearing my Q Drone, Jarval resorted to smoke grenades to get up the table, and scored an early decoy before pulling back to not get gunned down.

Agent Dukash then redeemed his appalling run of luck in the games I've run him in so far as he walked out, took out a Volkolak ARO piece, one of the bears, and a Kosmosoldat. It was an absolutely brutal turn that I think left Jarval a little shell shocked!

He returned the favour by air dropping a werewolf onto me. It wasn't quite as destructive, but I lost a chunk of my backline to an angry werewolf.

I then scored a decoy by berserking a Daturazi into it, but Margot and the second bear did away with the Daturazi before it could do any more damage.

My Libertos tried to clear the other decoy and got blinded. Oh deary me.

It was time for Sheskiin to do her thing... She moved up the field, finding an angle to pick off Margot before she could cause any more trouble.

She then worked her way up, dodged around a corner, and engaged the designated target. The poor civilian had no chance and was eaten by this awful alien, before she charged into the bear to pin it down and stop it causing too much damage.

Duroc worked his way around to get smoke down onto the Q drone, but it sadly left not quite enough orders for Kosmoflot to score back the boxes they needed, and the game ended with a Combined victory, 8-4.

It was a great event, held in a school cafeteria that had been booked out for the Saturday. I finished 4th out of 10 players, and would absolutely recommend them to anyone who plays Infinity who can reasonably travel to Norwich. I sadly can't make their next one, but intend to make it up again in the future when time allows.

Overcoming brain weasels and finding joy

It has been a bit of a rotten week, and I'd stalled out a bit on painting. I've been working on my plans for 10th edition Astra Militarum, plus considering paint schemes for my Nomads and Bretonnians. I'm also really keen to get the Aenor Goblins that have been my Cursed Side Project for too long now.

I was getting to feel like I had a lot of painting I should be doing, and that was making it feel like a chore. So, one evening I grabbed some miniatures I wasn't at all invested in and just threw some contrast on them.

This Conquest Games Hedge Witch ended up being the one I got the furthest into. If you look closely there's a few spots I've missed on the base coats, but it's not far off getting finished up. It'll probably be one short paint session to finish her up.

I got in my Infinity campaign game for this round, playing a 250 point custom mission with my Shasvastii, and trying out some profiles for the new edition. More on that later.

I've also had a couple of arrivals in the post, too. First up are these miniatures from Black Magic Craft. They're produced in short runs, so when I saw a post mentioning they were available, I couldn't resist.

I also had this Bad Squiddo Pulp Heroines Kickstarter arrive. It's a nice, small set of six figures. I was thinking I didn't have much to use them for, but Annie has done a partnership with Forbidden Psalm to have free rules to use them in Last War or Endless Horrors from Between the Stars. That suddenly makes them a nice quick project with a purpose, which is quite exciting. I'm sort of day dreaming about how to base them, which is probably a good sign.

Tournament Practice: Combined Army vs Steel Phalanx

 

With a tournament at the weekend, I arranged to get in a practice game with one of my club mates. We were practicing Capture and Protect as the mission I'd played the least out of the three at the tournament.

I was up against Steel Phalanx, who'd taken first turn, and had Ajax as their reserve drop. He forward deploys now. Could that be a problem?

Ajax spent his first turn running up, using smoke and positioning to kill Sheskiin. Which was deeply unfortunate for me as Sheskiin was my Lieutenant, so I started my first turn in Loss of Lieutenant.

Never mind, I'll just have Agent Dukash walk on the back board edge using my Warhorse orders. He'll be fine. Whiffed against a Servant Remote, you say? Immobilised in place by a 3 point peripheral you didn't respect? That's deeply unfortunate.

Maybe the Libertos can . . . nope, he's discovered.

Well, at least the Dartok can drop a Repeater from his Pitcher and immobilise Ajax before he does any more damage...

Agamemnon then led the charge to lock down the Combined Army. Unfortunately, my inability to stop rolling critical hits helped me significantly here, with two crits in my first ARO, and continuing along that vein for several orders.

Eventually, however, the luck had to run out, and the Q drone was down.

To make sure the pesky remote didn't get back up again, an Ekdromoi dropped in, jet packed over, and took out the Med-Tech. Who . . . was my new Lieutenant. Oh dear.

There wasn't much I could do on my second turn really. I locked down Ajax but that was about it. Agent Dukash got out of his immobilised state just in time to get gunned down by Agamemnon.

Phoenix then fought his way up the board, getting held up a little bit by a Libertos, but he was not to be denied.

The fireteam reached the console and got in place to score it. The kicking I'd received meant I started my third turn in Loss of Lieutenant, and while the Dartok tried to run back and deny the scoring, it was no good...

Despite the horror, I did manage to score my classified, which is pretty good going for two turns in Loss of Lieutenant and one in Retreat... I learned a couple of lessons about positioning and the vulnerabilities of my two main attack pieces, so it was a productive evening of having terrible things happen to my models so I could play better at a tournament...

Tiefling Warlock and Combined Army Agent Dukash

 

In last week's update I mentioned I'd finished a couple of figures but hadn't had time to take fancy photos. Well, here's the fancy photos! I feel like I'm definitely getting the hang of this photography business.

First up is Agent Dukash, another Shasvastii for Infinity. In N5 he's now a Parachutist (Deployment Zone), and is pretty fighty. He's a hefty chunk of points, though, so he's not going to taken all that often. He's been very hit and miss for me so far, though I'm not sure if that's because he's very hit and miss, or just that it's a skill issue on my part.

Meanwhile, I also painted a Tiefling Warlock. This is a Frameworks miniature, and it's painted up really well. When I first got these models, I thought the details were a little soft, but I've been pleasantly surprised how it painted up. There's still a few areas of meh detail, but they aren't in areas you'll focus on.

To get this miniature done quickly, I painted it with contrast to start with, then gave it an Agrax Earthshade wash. Once this was dry, I drybrushed it with Karak Stone before picking up a few details, mostly with the skin. If I was doing this again, I might pick a couple of block colours to drybrush a more specific colour on, and other areas where I don't drybrush at all and use manual brush highlights.

I'm not sure if that's going to add a lot of time onto painting a model like this but I suspect it won't add much time on but will look much better. I'll give it a go in a future model and report back.

Old World Campaign Day - Battle 3 - The Finale

 

The final battles of the campaign were the undead trying to take the town - but they had a limited time to do so before the sun rose and the vampires got significantly weaker. The games were doubles game, and my ally was running a powerful Blood Dragons list, using some custom rules written by the organiser for this event.

I took the right flank to, with the plan of using my ghostly stuff to hold up some scary units on the flank, while the Blood Dragons were planning on charging into the rows of Empire infantry.

I brought my wolves up into the outriders, who managed to cut them down quite effectively.

Meanwhile, my bats, which I'd planned to send flying over the enemy lines to take out the war machines, either got charged by a big block of infantry and smushed, or enchanted to not be able to charge, which did not go well for them.

The Blood Dragons were doing terrible things over on the left flank, taking advantage of the event rule that let them form lances...While the Empire knights had gotten caught up in some massive zombie hordes...

The grave guard and spirit hosts swarmed over and destroyed the outriders.

Meanwhile, the banshee tried to hold up the steam tank, but instead got discorporated. Whoops.

The spirit hosts pushed forward to lock up the demigryph knights.

The undead started to push into the town as the demigryph knights desperately tried to get away from the ghostly swarms.

Meanwhile, the big block of Empire infantry swung towards the blood knights and zombie horde...

The Empire infantry block crashed into the undead lines, cut down swarms of zombies, and pulled down a couple of blood knights. The impact was too much for the undead, and they crumbled away as their magic stopped holding them together...

At this point, the game ended, and we narrowly hadn't taken the town, and overall in the campaign, the Empire had narrowly swung back to win at the last moment.

All in all, this was good fun. I definitely made some bad decisions from not knowing the game very well, but it reassured me that I enjoyed playing the game and it was worth continuing to try and get my army together.