Wayland Games ITS Season 9 Launch Event

I . . . forgot that I hadn't blogged this when I started catching up on blog posts! In order to finish my account of the HATE Infinity League this year, you're getting another blast from the past today and two Infinity things in a week...

For the first day of Season 9 back in September, Wayland Games put on a small Infinity tournament. I pottered down to take part. Sadly, the Season 9 pack hadn't been released when it took place, so the local WarCor picked some of the Season 8 missions to make do.

There were an assortment of different tables at Wayland - some from the store and some brought by players. This one used a mix of Bandua, Customeeple and the Corvus Belli cardboard terrain.

This Yu Jing themed table was mostly Micro Art Studio buildings and walkways, nicely painted up, with some additional bits from elsewhere, like the Antenocitis Workshop Happy Panda Noodles. I suspect the truck is TT Combat.

This table was mostly Corvus Belli cardboard again, but with a little extra from TT Combat's range.

I don't know where the jungle and river terrain came from on this table, but the MDF seems to be mostly Spartan Scenery? You can't get it at the moment thanks to Spartan sadly ceasing trading, but I suspect that Warcrade will be making it available if they got the rights to it with everything else they bought.

First up, I was facing MeekRebel's Vanilla Nomads at Supplies. I mostly hunkered down behind a large building, with Knauf up on the roof to provide some ARO mischief.

A prone Zero ended up depressingly near a Krakot Renegade.

Someone made the mistake of wandering around where Knauf could see them and took a round.

Meanwhile, the Zero died to a chain rifle, but had AROed with "Place Mine", which made the Krakot sad.

Armand Le Muet was causing me grief running around the place.

And a Krakot managed to run down and take out my Intruder Lieutenant, although they were set on fire in the process.

A Moran ended up going on a rampage, taking out a whole bunch of my back field.

My Interventor decided they'd had enough and put up a Cybermask.

I attempted the shooting through smoke nonsense with an Intruder HMG, but Armand ducked sufficiently.

He then came down the stairs and got into a gunfight with my Intruder, but I was still toast. As you might have guessed from my complete failure to mention any of the Supply boxes, I never got anywhere near them, scraped my Classified, and took a 10-1 loss...

So, second game up on the port board with all the shipping containers. This was Comms Centre against a Neoterra force played by NiceGuyRosen. This is an early turn one shot, with the Lunokhod already aggressively up the board.

For the first time, I got my Intruder / Smoke combo working well, with a smoke grenade at the feet of the Intruder allowing him to smoothly turn an Uhlan and a Locust Hacker to paste, seriously affecting my opponent's firepower.

Unfortunately, I'd misjudged where I'd put my Reverend Healer, and an Auxbot set her on fire.

The Intruder remembered that standing out in the open was stupid when the smoke cleared, and fire from a link team was a little unlucky, letting him dodge back out of sight.

A Morlock got the lucky job of punching an Auxbot to death.

Just out of this shot on the top right was the other Auxilia, who were clearly going to come in for a late game objective grab.

Suicidal Morlocks were sent in to try and cause backfield chaos, but they were cut down.

The Wildcat Hacker flipped one of the Pan O objectives back again.

Meanwhile, the Auxilia managed to grab the Console, and my Alguacile Forward Observer couldn't quite make it. Still, I'd managed to scrape a win in a hard fought match, 7-4.

Final game, back to the first board again, for a game of Armoury. I was up against Aleph this time, played by SixthAndPowell. I tweaked my set up, learning some lessons from last time about the risks of being brutalised in the first turn.

Classic Intruder set up on the roof this time, far to the side to see past as much of the infinite height building as possible...

Meanwhile, Aleph brought a TAG. Which comes with MSV 2. So, no repeating the Intruder smoke trick here! I tried a Hellcat with an Adhesive Launcher, but they got cut down before they could make it.

A lot of hacking later . . . using a lot of Repeaters and oddness - the only person who could make it to the Armoury from my side was a Securitate HMG who'd been providing the one of the Inconvenient Repeater Hacking Fields most of the game.

In the end, it came down to the last roll - if I'd killed the surviving Aleph trooper in the Armoury, I'd have held it, but sadly, down went the Securitate, giving the game to Aleph 7-0.

While I came 7th in a tournament of 8 people, and only won one of my games, I had great fun at the event overall. I'd definitely recommend heading down to Wayland for their future Infinity events - the next is on 16 December 2017.

HATE Infinity League: Bakunin vs. Morats

Back in August, I was down to play one of the Morat players in the HATE Infinity League. We picked the Armoury as this mission to play.

I haven't seen an Oznat / Hungries link before, so I was curious to see how it went.

Meanwhile, a Sogarat Haris Link took the other flank.

For my list, I was primarily running a Moderator link with an extra Moderator to switch in and go mobile for a late game objective room grab, and an assortment of bits and pieces to hold the list together.

Well, I said I wanted to see how a Hungry link worked - I didn't particularly fancy just leaving it to run up the board unopposed, so I filled it full of holes from the Prowler Spitfire to get the numbers down.

Still, I managed to end the first turn with the Zero and Zoe holding the room, with the Zero in a suitably inconvenient spot on Suppressive Fire.

There then began the lesson in "making sure you kill the Moderator Sniper", which is as ever made extra awkward by their super cheap Shock Immunity.

An Angry Morat of some variety did for the Prowler.

The Sogarat HMG had a bad day being ever so slightly outranged by the MULTI Sniper.

But my new learning experience number one was to learn when to duck and stay alive to annoy someone in a future turn rather than just dying...

 Then I discovered they had Automedkits and they started running up the field, killing everyone in their path.

The Lunokhod succumbed to Hungries rushing out of the smoke.

A suicidal Morlock broke the Morat lines in the right spot, however.

And slowly but surely, the Sogarat were chipped away by weight of numbers - but at the cost of the Lieutenant!

And finally, the brave surviving Moderators grouped up and headed for the Armoury... I'd fortunately got just enough command tokens to convert their orders into regular orders for the move.

.. joining the Zero who'd bravely held it all game.

The final result was 10-1 to me, with my having looted a Panoply early on and the Morats never really managing to challenge the holding of the Armoury itself.

HATE Infinity League: Bakunin vs US Ariadna

There's an enemy prone camo marker on the bridge.
But I think the Zero Hacker should be more more worried
about that rifle on the rooftop!

Welcome to another episode of "The Responsible One tries to remember what happened months ago from photos and incomplete notes".  This week, we're looking at a game of Seize the Antennas in the HATE Infinity League against those delightful folks from the US Ariadna Sectorial.

At the time, I only owned the models for a defensive moderator link, so decided to give a link-less Sectorial list a go. I took advantage of Bakunin's availability for Zeroes and Sin Eaters, creating a crowded camo midfield with some brutal reactive turn fire lanes.

I still hadn't quite gotten the hang of Morlocks at this point, so quite a few of them died due to poor placement and running out into gun lanes.

Pi-Well did OK at running up into the midfield and using Sensor to identify a whole bunch of the obligatory Foxtrots. For those who don't play Infinity - both armies took a whole bunch of infiltrating models who start the game represented as camouflage tokens, meaning the first part of this game was like a massive game of sub-hunt. Fortunately, I'd invested in a dinky little robot who is 90% scanning equipment and he proved a collossal PITA.

One of the banes of this game were the Mavericks. Bikes with light smoke grenade launchers are really rather good and smoke ended up all over the place.

This is a typical indication of the game - my opponent has a recently discovered trooper hiding behind the wall on the left, and another camouflague token still hanging out behind the boxes. On the other side of the boxes is one of my recently discovered infiltrators.

One of the edges I had I didn't quite manage to capitalise on is that I can take Minelayers - models who can have mines set up under camo tokens at the start of the game. At this point, Pi-Well has been shot in the back by a bike, and my opponent has discovered that the central objective is mine as well as crawling with infiltrating troops from both sides...

My other big worry for the game had been the special character "Van Zant" - a specialist drop troop who unlike any other drop trooper can walk on the table edge in your deployment zone.

To counter this, I had two "Sin-Eater" - religious fanatics whose nervous systems are re-wired to be hair trigger - letting them use their guns to full effect in the reactive turn, rather than just getting a single shot. This was super effective and Van Zant was a fine red paste without causing any real damage.

You can also see my main problem here -  I was pinned down in this small set of buildings, with long ranged weapons covering my exits. With my smoke dead, I couldn't win a long ranged firefight with the snipers covering the exits.

My lesson here was that the Sin Eaters are great in the reactive turn, but they can't proactively hunt down a target - and you need one or two good shots with long ranged weapons to have a chance in those long ranged firefights to avoid getting pinned down and stuck.

With nothing but medium and short ranged assault weapons, a lot of my points were stuck in my deployment zone, unable to help my lightly armed infiltrators in the midfield.

Here, an Ariadnan rifleman picks off Nomads trying to get close to the central antenna.

Meanwhile, the Sin Eater HMG is able to block off the best approach to the central Antenna, but is only able to delay them.

The end result of the game is a 3-6 loss for me. I still had my Antenna, but my opponent had their own and the central one. I didn't have enough long range units or alternative solutions to deal with snipers, and insufficient combat punch to push up the field and deal with the low tech, but tough and punchy Ariadna Rangers.

A bit of a mistake

The not mistake bit first - the first Chaos Spawn for my Warriors of Chaos project is finally assembled and ready for paint.

One of the work in progress pictures I posted on Twitter elicited an "Oh God, what on earth is that?" reaction, which I regard as pretty much on the mark. He'll double for a Spawn in my Iron Warriors if that project ever gets off the ground.

And here's the mess up. I thought she was done to table top quality, but when I came back to her this evening to do the blog photo, I didn't like the face. I went in to "quickly fix" it, and will now need to completely repaint it, having stuffed it up.

Bother.

Anyone got any good zombie face / flesh painting tutorials they can recommend?

HATE Infinity League: Bakunin vs. Nomads

Once again, I find myself looking back at past battles (this one is from June) and desperately trying to remember what on earth happened. Fortunately, I have a few notes, so I know that this was a game of Supremacy in the HATE League, playing against Vanilla Nomads.

Given I needed to dominate game quadrants, I decided it was time to give the Lizard a bit of a run for it's money. It happily stomped up the field, discovering and gunning down anything in its way. Once it was thoroughly up field, I dropped it into suppression fire to discourage anyone else thinking of heading in it's direction.

My opponent decided the best way to deal with a big angry robot was to shoot it in the back with Hellcats. Sadly, he made the tactical error of dropping close by, and I managed to pass my change facing roll. They got a short round of shooting before being burned to ash by the heavy flamethrower.

Still, it had taken a little damage, so I ran an engineering bot up to patch him up.

Then, I discovered the joy of Spektr Assault Hackers possessing your stuff.

No, wait, we're not friends any more!

... a little bit of careful placing to make sure the civilian isn't caught by the flamethrower.

 Aaaand that's some very unhappy Bakunin.

I'm not quite sure how I managed to dislodge this Zero in Suppressive Fire. I think I left them and got a classified for something - maybe repairing the Lizard?

I dropped a Command Token to get my Lizard back and avenge myself on the Spektr for a thorough 10-0 win. The Lizard was definitely angry robot of the match. At one point the pilot popped out to flip a console, and they also smushed an Intruder Lieutenant at one point.

However, as you may have seen from my battle reports from Totally Crit X2, it seems I've still not learned not to casually walk it around near Hackers...

A finished model!

So, I settled down at the weekend to get a little more hobby done. The last couple of "transport casualties" of my Infinity figures needed sorting as the next step on clearing my hobby table. Some newly purchased super glue made me realise how much my old stuff has "gone off" and takes forever to stick things. I'll continue to use it up on stuff where the join is unimportant or not under strain, but for anything complicated or likely to break, the new stuff will be deployed.

I promised you a new figure - and here he is! This figure was given to me as part of a "secret Santa" kitbash exercise a few years ago. You were meant to paint them straight away, but, you know...

Still, here he is in all his terrible glory. He's likely to either see the table as a Chaos Spawn or maybe an Imperial Daemonhost.

There was a really odd reluctance to sit down and finish off painting him. But once he was done, the sense of achievement was massively disproportionate to the amount of effort I'd put into him. It feels like I've broken through a barrier somehow.

For next steps? Keep knocking out some quick tabletop quality paint jobs for bits and pieces I have sitting. The Anvil zombies are looking highly likely as an early candidate for that before I get back into that 1000 point army challenge for AoS I was doing last year...

Meanwhile, I think that the "hobby assembly tray" by the coffee table is proving excellent. It needs less clearing up than just using the coffee table, and means I can do a little bit on an easy, non metal job any time I'm around there. Currently the first actual Chaos Spawn is there, while the metal assembly on my desk has the classic Imperial Assassin all cued up.