St Albans Invitational Infinity Tournament

This weekend, I headed up to St Albans for one of Laina's reliably good "St Albans Smackdown" tournaments. I've been pretty demotivated of late with Infinity. With my Druze doing very badly at tournaments and my planned Dahshat away with my painter, I've been having more fun with Necromunda and really looking forward to getting into Malifaux 3e and Age of Sigmar.

Still, I'd promised to go, and I've often found that dragging myself to an event can help me find the fun again, so I dragged myself out of bed and headed up to St Albans with an earlier start time than I need to get to work.

Given Corregidor received an update in the last Infinity book and my Druze weren't bringing me joy, I decided to go back to some unpainted figures for a tournament and just have fun.

First game was Engineering Deck. This is a mission I've literally never played. My opponent, multifish, announced they were playing Bakunin. Losing the deployment roll and forced to deploy first, I noticed the mission required controlling the central room and decided to take the pain of the first turn as well in the hope of some sneaky late game scoring.

The Bakunin list was built around a tanky Riot Grrl heavy infantry link. I was definitely worried about this as I wasn't confident I had enough punch in my list to get them out of the central room, which they promptly staked a claim to in the first turn.

I brought my Intruder HMG out to take out the Missile Launcher who'd been left out to ARO, but took a critical hit to the face and only a fine red mist was left. I was a little stuck for what to do next at this point, but managed eventually to stun it.

I moved my Lunokhod up to cause some worry - not really too concerned about losing it, but trying to make multifish expend too many models and orders getting rid of it. And then . . . the game got very focused and involved and I didn't take any more photos until the end...

And this is the final situation in the room . . .

The two main scoring points in this mission are "activated more consoles than the enemy" and "have models in the central room when your opponent doesn't have any". At the top of my last turn, I held two consoles to my opponent's three, and they still had a whole ton of models controlling the central room.

So, I had to resort to sneakiness. My Bandit Killer Hacker had downed a Morlock earlier in the game, and then used the Scavenger skill to pick up their smoke grenades while performing a coup de grace. They threw a smoke grenade into the room, walked in under the cover of the smoke, and took over the central console before ending the game. With the middle room contested, I claimed a 5-2 win for having more consoles controlled.

Next up was Hunting Party against laina, who'd stepped into the breach to cover a late drop out, and was running a Steel Phalanx list. She was running at a slight disadvantage in that she'd never played Hunting Party before, and it's a very strange mission.

I'd drawn two classifieds of Predator (kill two targets in close combat) and a second that needs you to take out an unconscious model with a WIP roll. Looking at the deployment, she had her Lieutenant well guarded in a bunker with a full linked team guarding them, and only two specialists.

I sent McMurrough up the board to try and get some early classifieds. First turn, he ended up like this, with the specialist resolutely not glued, and open to a counter attack. In later turns, as more models came out to deal with him, he was able to take out one that was unconscious for the second classified, but was put down before he could take out two cleanly in close combat.

On the right, I sent Senor Massacre and friends up to act as a screen for my core link (who had no orders after McMurrough used them all) and a threat that had to be dealt with - hopefully, this would mean I could predict where an angry Ajax was going to go.

The plan went OK, but sadly too both Jaguars died to a chain rifle, while Massacre got into combat. He didn't manage to cause much damage before he went down, sadly.

I dropped in my Hellcat with Adhesive Launcher to glue the Steel Phalanx engineer and secure me some points. We started running out of time at this point so things got rushed. At 4-0 up, I panicked and ran my Lieutenant into an adhesive launcher with one order left, meaning I'd changed the score to 4-4.

With little needed to win, laina advanced Ajax up to secure the HVT for a 5-4 win. I was super mad at myself for making a really terrible decision with my Lieutenant, but there was still a good chance she would have been able to get the glueing and the objective in her turn for the win.

Last game was Frontline against East of Irem's Yu Jing. I was pretty shattered and forgot to take photos for a lot of the game. What it basically came down to was that I managed to drop a Hellcat into his back line, and massacred most of one flank in a turn.

In retaliation, he dropped his Tiger Soldier, but as he was targeting a core fireteam with sixth sense, simply wasn't able to get the damage he was looking for and eventually the drop trooper was shot down.

I'd managed to get second turn this time and after a bunch of super nervy movement of models around the board, I managed to claim the centre and far zones while losing my own near zone for a 9-4 win.

After the games

I was absolutely ecstatic at this point, as I've never managed to win two out of three games at a tournament before, and it's been my goal for competitive play all year. To have it happen with my old Corregidor force at a tournament I'd not played practice games for,(and in one case, never played the mission) was amazing.

At the prize giving once the venue had been cleared away, I was even more pleased to discover I'd ranked 4th out of 16 players. While I don't have much Infinity planned for a while (I've had to cancel the Satellite event "Warcors Warparty" due to a family commitment) I'm definitely up for getting back into it and hopefully winning a few more games.

Infinity: B4ckd00r Challenge - The Grid

 Recently, the Infinity competitive scene has had a new addition in the form of "Challenges". In short, these are story events which are recorded internationally and have an impact on both story and ongoing play.

The first challenge is the B4ckd00r crisis. In canon, a whole bunch of incriminating evidence has been released in encrypted files and threatens the big political players of the Human Sphere. If you play certain missions as an ITS registered game, then your faction can recover some of this missing information. The faction that has recovered the most data by the end of the challenge avoids consequences - and the other factions lose access to a named character who is somehow implicated in the scandal for a currently unknown length of time.

I laid down the challenge to HATE and kaizer82 took up the challenge with his Steel Phalanx. We picked The Grid as a mission, which neither of us had played before, and I decided to take the punchy and direct forces of Corregidor.

The objectives of the Grid mission are to activate or Forward Observe as many of 9 consoles as possible, and then, from the second turn onwards, blow them up while you've got control of them. You also need to shank up the Designated Target, preferably with your own Data Tracker.

The Steel Phalanx took the first turn and opened with  a link team of Thorakitai Forward Observers running around and Observing as many consoles as possible. This was a big lead I was worried about being able to catch back up from.

With as many consoles flipped as possible, they settled into cover to await my counter attack, with at least one demo charge placed on a console to detonate next turn, and a landmine set up to impede my advance.

At the end of the first Steel Phalanx turn, they'd set up an impressive lead with eight of the nine consoles owned by them.

I decided that before I started taking too many casualties, I should make sure that the enemy Designated Target went down. I sent Senor Massacre forward with his Jaguar team under cover of smoke to get the job done. Massacre was the Data Tracker, so he'd have to be the one to get the kill in.

Clearing out a couple of the Thorakitai on the way, Massacre dropped an Eclipse Grenade to hide from the Agema sniper covering the Designated Target, and ran in to get the kill. With the target down, he took an opportunistic pop at Ajax, but missed and took an explosive hammer blow to the head, putting him out of action, but with his job done.

Meanwhile, I moved up the Wildcat Haris team to cover my Designated Target and make sure they were as protected as possible.

Phoenix decides that the surviving Jaguars need to not be surviving, and hits them all with incendiary rockets, leaving nothing but ash.

Cut to my turn two. My Intruder advances up and fills Phoenix full of holes, while an Alguacile Forward Observer starts getting some of the consoles flipped to me.

An Ekdromoi Hacker had dropped into my back field and caused some significant damage, although one of the Alguaciles caused some mischief by reacting to them by dropping a Deployable Repeater, keeping them locked down and afraid of my Wildcat Hacker melting their brain.
 

For the final turn, Ajax ran up to destroy some more consoles, but misjudged a second move and took a Hacking attack to the face, leaving him isolated and unable to take any further actions that turn.

My Wildcat Lieutenant and Lunokhod then headed up to the consoles, blowing them both up to scrape a win (Destroyed same number of antennas - 2pts, Killed Designated Target - 2pts, With Data Tracker - 2pts, compared to More Designated antennas - 3pts, Destroyed same number of antennas - 2pts).

I had a little moment of panic after the game when I realised I'd screwed up and thought it was one action to detonate all your D-Charges, rather than it being a separate order for each one. However, running over the order spend in my head, I could have achieved the same number of D-charges placed and detonated by using my orders in a slightly different way, so it didn't materially affect the result.

This was definitely a tough mission and game, with it really coming down to the last rolls of the dice. My learning points on this mission would be to be more aggressive with Forward Observing earlier on and to bring more options for destroying the antennas once the observing is done - D charges are incredibly order intensive!

War of the Worlds V at "ibuywargames"

So, on Saturday I headed down to Woking with a whole bunch of the Infinity players from HATE to do some of this ITS tournament stuff. Unfortunately, a booking mix up meant that the tournament had to relocate from the local Conservative Club to the ibuywargames store, but everyone was very accomodating and it went off without any further hitches.

I was running Corregidor for the first time ever. In the end, I only ever used one of the two lists, which basically consisted of a full Senor Massacre Jaguar link, my always loved Lunokhod, a smattering of specialists and a Haris link of Wildcats with a Spitfire.

First up was Transmission Matrix against generic Nomads. My plan had always been to run a simple Alguacile Hacker to do some cheap annoying AROs against Hackers until she died, while my opponent was running Zoe and Pi-Well and two Interventors. After one careless move of Pi-Well in range of a repeater wasted a co-ordinated order as the plan was urgently changed to "reset", my Hacker was squished like a bug.

The smoke or eclipse options of the Jaguar link was excellent, and meant I could selectively decide whether I was going to keep the board open for my Intruder, or shut it down for my opponent's. My Intruder had an excellent moment himself when a Vertigo Zond landed on the ground near the roof he was hiding on, and he destroyed it with a speculative fire grenade. I could just imagine, as the model was prone, the veteran troop sighing, casually lobbing a grenade over the wall, and nodding at a job well done at the sound of a breaking remote...

Sadly, my opponent had muddled up "explosive" ammunition and blast templates, so his Tsyklon with Feuerbach was a teensy bit better than it actually is, but it seemed like an honest mistake. I never managed to catch up with him after lunch to let him know once I realised. In my game, however, it managed not to change anything due to my Jaguar link's tendency to not roll under an 18 for armour saves. In the end, Senor Massacre held the centre objective in close combat with a rival Jaguar to squeak me a 5-4 win despite almost everyone of my models being dead.

After a delicious lunch at the Korean Restaurant next door we headed back to play Hunting Party. This is a new mission where you're trying to immobilise specialists and enemy Lieutenants, and your more elite troops all get issued with Adhesive Launchers. I was up against one of the other HATE residents, who was running Yu Jing.

I decided to start the exercise by dropping a Hellcat with Adhesive Launcher right behind his Lieutenant. Sadly, I couldn't thread the needle sufficiently to be completely undetected, and some warnings meant enough models turned around that I'd only have one shot at gluing the Lieutenant. The Hellcat missed and was reduced to a fine red smear by a lot of angry guns.

My Alguacile made it to one of the antennas, but couldn't activate it for any points. Meanwhile, my Lunokhod reduced a hacker to a smouldering pile of ash.

Senor Massacre and friends made it up the field, but when the time came for the final run at the Lieutenant, he couldn't quite land his E/M grenade and was instead glued in place. A mistake in the placement of my Lieutenant meant a Tiger Soldier was able to drop down and glue her in the back. This left me with a thorough 8-0 kicking.

Battle three was Comms Centre against Yu Jing. Nine antennae to flip to your side, with the aim of getting more than your opponent -while taking out your opponents specialists and designated target, preferably with your "data tracker". My Wildcat Haris did a lot of work here as the Spitfire "data tracker" gunned down the designated target and anyone else foolish enough to stick their heads out for a good while.

My Hellcat managed to stuff his landing this time and was shot to pieces after landing in the open near way too many people...

The careless placing of a couple of specialists meant my opponent was in the lead with specialists, and I was in real trouble...

An Oniwaban materialising in my backfield and murdering my engineer did not help the situation - but I was able to set him on fire before he could kill my designated target (who you can see in the corner here).

With all my specialists dead, I resorted to brute violence and killed enough of his models to put him into retreat, preventing him from pressing any more of those pesky console buttons to take the lead, leaving us tied at 5-5.

In the end, I ended up 13th out of 20. I won some Nomad transfers I've been wanting to pick up for a while, and also some more Antenocitis Workshop brass etch, because you can never have enough...

I'd definitely recommend the ibuywargames tournaments to anyone who plays Infinity. They're good fun, and more welcoming than you might expect. While people are competitive, its in a friendly way, and not in a way that would leave you with a feel bad experience. Hopefully I'll see some of my readers at the Totally Crit Open X2 this coming weekend...