Going places and doing things?

 

So, it's been a pretty busy week, all told. I've been Going Out and Doing Things an awful lot, which meant that I haven't had a huge amount of time to get any hobby done. I did manage to do a bunch of tidying on the hobby desk so it didn't look quite this bad, but I think it's deteriorated again as I sorted my KR cases to work out what models I was taking out and how I was packing them.

Early in the week I did grab a few of my Combined army models who needed basing material adding to get that done.

The basing material takes a long while to dry, so getting it done early means that when the weather breaks to allow some undercoating, they can be ready to go.

Wednesday night I had a practice game for Saturday's tournament. I took a bunch of profiles I haven't tried before to see if they were good. My opponent hadn't played in a while, but brought a pretty tasty Tohaa list, and some models didn't survive long enough for me to determine if they're good or not. One that did was the Rindak, a heavy infantry paramedic who can deploy into the midfield. He's pretty tough, and while he was eventually taken out, he's a tough nut to crack and I'm keen to try him out again.

The other model I tried out was the Caskuda I'd just assembled. It has to drop in, and with the table we had and not having been able to clear reaction pieces, I had nowhere good to drop it in. I went after the sniper who was pinning me down, but it just got exploded by reactions before it could really do anything.

Saturday was Red Star Blues at HATE (Hackney Area Tabletop Enthusiasts). It was a three round tournament with Frontline, Unmasking and Firefight. I was bringing my vanilla Combined again. I'll write up what happened later - I've got other blog posts planned for this week, but maybe next week?

Sunday was a Bring and Buy at HATE. I went up to the storage unit and picked up a bunch of stuff I'd packed up previously before getting a cab down to the club.

It was a pretty productive day clearing things out. I sold enough bits and pieces to cover the cab ride from the storage unit and the cab ride home, so its a net success. It was good to get back to selling things.

This many things to do in a week was massively exhausting. It was all fun and productive, but also A Lot. I definitely feel like a bit of a rest after all that!

Red Star Blues Infinity Tournament

 

Last weekend was Red Star Blues, an Infinity Tournament held at Hackney Area Tabletop Enthusiasts (or HATE). It was a small event with ten players, though it's intended the next one will be bigger now the first has been a success.

I decided to bring Vanilla Combined to push some models around and shoot some things. I haven't played Vanilla at all before, so I wasn't confident with how I was going to do, but was happy to just roll some dice and have fun.

First up was Supplies, against TomxJ who was running US Ariadna. I took deployment and and was facing off against a strong Grunt link team with two Snipers and a Minuteman Missile Launcher in ARO.

Under the smoke from the Devil Dog, a Foxtrot opened the Supply box and handed the box off to the Devil Dog who ran away with the box. In the centre, again under smoke, they grabbed another box and ran away.

My attacks on the US reaction pieces took ages to take them down, and even at the end of the game, all the reaction pieces weren't down and I still couldn't move around enough.

My Malignos Hacker ran out and grabbed a box, but wasn't able to stay up to hold the box. I managed to get a Classified, meaning I lost 6-1.

Game 2 was Frontline, and I was up against Chappers playing Invincible Army. I was expecting it to be a very bloody game given two very punchy armies.

My Shrouded Killer Hacker held up the Hulang for a while, but couldn't take him down...

While the Libertos snuck past Krit Kokram and shot him in the back to take him down. He was then able to score the Extreme Prejudice Classified.

The Invincible Army were having trouble taking out the Avatar, but I was running out of other models. I needed to push up to the furthest board area to score points, which meant the Avatar was over-extended. A Zhencha was able to get behind it and crit with a Panzerfaust, taking him out, leaving me with a 9-2 loss.

My last game was against zenithed, who was also running Combined Army. He was bringing a Charontid, while I brought the Avatar again. It was a simple game of Firefight to finish the day off.

I managed to get my Killer Hacker up to his Charontid to score a Classified . . . 

A Caliban Spitfire (we couldn't find the model so used a Speculo) tried to take out the Avatar in close combat, but was unlucky with their dice, and got taken out.

In the end, zenithed couldn't hold the Avatar off, and I was able to score a comfortable 10-2 win for my last game, leaving me 9th out of 10 players. It was a great day, I had a ton of fun, and I'll absolutely be going to the next Infinity tournament H.A.T.E. puts on.

A busy week

 

It's been a busy week hobby wise. I got a bunch more Infinity models that I had assembled based and undercoated. I still need to check I didn't miss any spots and get the zenithal done.

I also went down to Bethnal Green for the first Hackney Area Tabletop Enthusiasts Infinity tournament. It was just a small one to work things out, but was good fun. I'll hopefully post a write up later.

I've finished a couple of Northumbrian Tin Soldier minis, which I haven't had time to take fancy photos of them just yet. I'll get them up soon.

It's preparation time for Empire at the moment, I may be quite for a little. But the hobby wagon is careening along at a reasonable rate now, so there's plenty to come.

HATE Isolation League Round 5: Show of Force vs Ariadna

The HATE Isolation League is nearly done (whatever is going on with lockdown itself). This time, the mission selected was Show of Force. As this gives bonus points to scoring with a TAG, I took another Szalamandra list. This time, I took the Haris link of Perseus, Raoul Spector and a Forward Observer remote.

I'd picked them because I was up against Ariadna, and I was worried about mass camouflage. I was not wrong. They managed to advance up, discover a Chasseur Minelayer and his mine, and neutralise him, but left themselves rather exposed when I ran out orders.

Some big gun or other had a bit of a go at Perseus, but he successfully dropped smoke.

So instead, they sent in a pack of werewolves . . . which I now couldn't shoot . . . as they used my smoke.

Bother.

Perseus was reduced to a small red mark on the floor, although he successfully killed one Werewolf on the way. Some guns managed to pick off the rest of his mates, though I forget what.

The Szalamandra cautiously wandered up the left flank and shot everyone he could see. I didn't want to overextend, so I set up the Lunokhod and the Reaktion Zond on the right flank to stop myself getting flanked and wiped out.

As it was, Ariadna managed to counter attack pretty effectively. It ended up in mutually assured destruction, with a dead Grunt and Dog Warrior, but the Lunkhod and Reaktion Zond similarly wiped out. The second Chasseur was all that was left on the flank. The rest of the Ariadnan turn was spent carefully moving things around so my Heckler Jammer couldn't take out their Blackjack.

For my last turn, I pushed the Szalamandra up onto the objective and put it into suppression fire. He took a wound from a mine, although he gunned down the midfield skirmisher (a Foxtrot?) that put it down. The Heckler then pushed up to be in the most awkward spot possible for anyone to deal with it.

Sadly, it was not to be. The Heckler was taken out, then managed to get a lucky pistol crit on the Szalamandra to leave it on a single wound. The Blackjack was much happier with those odds, and managed to put another two wounds on the TAG, taking it off the board, and allowing it to advance at leisure to take the console.

All in all, it was well played by the Ariadnan player. It wasn't a great match up for Tunguska but I think I gave it my best shot. Being forced into going first was super awkward, but I wasn't comfortable deploying first and then taking second turn - I was seriously worried about being mobbed by infiltrating troops and werewolves!

The weird Haris was interesting but I'm wondering if a different set of models would have been more useful. With no speculative fire weapons, I think Tunguska needs to look at finding suitable drop troops, Climbing Plus or Super Jump models to deal with rooftop nonsense.

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.

HATE Infinity Isolation League Round 1 - Frontline: Tunguska vs Vanilla Nomads

With no-one getting out to socialise yet, Hackney Area Tabletop Enthusiasts have set up a small Tabletop Simulator Infinity League because we could. We'll be playing a round every couple of weeks while we can't get in to the club.

I decided to run Tunguska as I've been interested in them as a Sectorial for quite a while but never played a game with them. It turns out that Tabletop Simulator lets you get going on a force much quicker without having to invest a ton of money in the models!

Having signed up to run Tunguska, I then spent a week and a half writing list after list and having horrible trouble with them. I'm used to running high model count lists, which Tunguska . . . just can't do. They're a relatively elite army, lacking large numbers of cheap troops to power the heavy hitters.

In the end, I snapped, took the Szalamandra TAG, and built a simple ten order list to support it.

The first mission was Frontline, to keep things nice and simple. As the mission has a Liaison Officer I wanted to take the Grenzer Forward Observer, which made me trend towards a Grenzer link on the grounds that it could use Forward Deployment to start in the scoring zones and save me orders moving it up.

I was up against a member of the club who is moving out of Bakunin and into vanilla Nomads. My main plan was to not worry too closely about all the clever tricks and just shoot everything with a really big gun.

My opponent had placed his Liaison Officer - a Moran Forward Observer - prone on a rooftop in the centre of the building. I decided the first thing to do was to address that. I climbed the Szalamandra up a shipping container, then moved up and opened fire. There was a fine red mist where the Moran used to be, but he'd managed to put his Crazy Koalas on Standby when he saw me climbing up.

My Zondnautica then advanced up the other side of the building and took a shot at the Interventor who'd dodged a little too far away from the Szalamandra and into her line of sight, but the Interventor got lucky and managed to dodge again into a very very small blind spot I couldn't see from either side.

I started to advance my Szalamandra up, but was unfortunately hit by a lucky Flash Pulse, stunning it for the rest of the turn. I moved it back as far as I could and pushed the link up to provide as much ARO cover as they could manage.

I started to realise my mistake as various Morlocks started running forward under their own orders to start building a line of smoke up to my Szalamandra. And then the Uberfallkommando started moving up.

They charged out of the smoke and swarmed onto the TAG. Hoping to survive one round of beating, I reacted with the heavy flamethower... But there were just too many hits with the Viral close combat and the TAG was removed. The Pupniks all burned to a crisp, but the Chimera survived.

And to add some extra injury to the injury, one of the Morlocks managed to run up and dropped a Chain Rifle template over the link, taking out the Hacker.

I spent a boring turn running the doctor and their remote around to heal up enough of the link to get back in the game, and advanced models into the scoring zones. Weirdly, everyone was looking at the Chimera's hidey-hole, so when she ran around the corner she was blown off the board.

My Grenzers were able to take out an advancing Tysklon Spitfire, but the Nomad player still had plenty of orders left to recover from some bad luck with the dice.

I ended the turn with most of the link down, another Morlock who'd advanced under smoke covering most of my surviving models, and very little I could do to recover. I made a short but valiant attempt to turn the tide, but I didn't have a lot of orders to do it in.

The Nomad Taskmaster then switched into the main group, activated as Lieutenant and went on a spree of gunning down surviving models. I had nothing left to resist with, leaving me with an 8-1 loss with only 45 points left on the table while my opponent had a solid 239 left up.

If I was to run a limited insertion list again, I think I'd want both a Total Reaction remote and probably also a Heckler Jammer covering the approaches to the TAG to make sure it didn't get destroyed by warbands.

I suspect warbands are going to be something I'm going to continue to struggle with...

Club Scatter Terrain

Last year, one of Hackney Area Tabletop Enthusiasts passed away. Their family asked that we arrange a charity sale of their gaming collection, and I picked up a whole pile of crates to use as scatter terrain for the club Infinity tables.

I originally thought they were from Maelstrom's Edge terrain sprues, but an astute reader has corrected me that they're actually from a Mantic Games kit. A few of them had some small casting defects, but nothing major.

I did make a poor life choice and try and paint the entire lot as a single batch which meant I ended up spending a week burnt out and doing no painting at all. Still, they're done now, and it brings my total for the year up to 30 models painted. Halfway to the year's target, and it's only April!

As a side note - why is my camera going all "soft focus" on the shots in my light box? I know I'm missing the light strip due to a missing cable, but as you can see from this photo taken on my painting table, it's focusing just fine there!

If anyone knows anything about iPhone phone cameras and their mysteries, please do get in touch.

Vague Memories of an Infinity Game: Dahshat Company vs Onyx Contact Force - Safe Area

Back in the Days Before when when we could go out, and play games, I got in a game at HATE against one of the club members who was running their Onyx Contact Force. It's now been ages since then and I can't remember much of what happened...

After putting a hole in my reaction remote, my opponent sent their Greif Operator up to take out the Engineer. They were a little careless and took the shot in the line of sight of my Libertos, who happily filled them full of holes.

But the damage was done, and the reaction remote and engineer were both down.

I was super worried about the Combined TAG, and snuck my Hunzakut up to get a Deployable Repeater up. My hacker then managed to immobilise it, but I then made the mistake of having the Hunzakut move up to shotgun it, allowing it to reset and get out of the immobilisation.

Learning point: sometimes it's fine not to kill a thing but leave it in a place where it will just be an order sink to free up.

There was then a big push to have my link try and take out the defensive Unidron link.

But I over extended and got most of my link killed. It was super close, and I can't even remember who won now. It was certainly down to the last order or so.