Wednesday, February 17, 2021

Operation Golden Ratio: episode 00

"Minutes ago, a sudden firefight took palce right here on Space Station Donacimiento, in subsector six. A tactical unit of Tunguska highly skileld operatives broke in, exploiting the maintenance status extablished in the subsector after yesterday's biotechvore hazard event. 

We have reason to believe Tunguska's hackers were looking for sensible data about our projects. Luckily one of our clients, Aleph, was not convinced by yesterday's incident and had deployed an OSS quick response commitee to welcome potential intruders. 

Here is the footage recorded by our dronbot during the clash. 

We have reason to believe the Nomads were repelled before gathering level 1 information, but this is far from a success: this accident offers Aleph the perfect alibi to question our delay in delivering Project Laocoön..."


This 300 point mission was Acquisition, from ITS season 12 supplement
After a rough start, Aleph won the match by a few inches. 
Here is the post commentary from both players, with group shots and lists.
Aleph - Operations Subsection of the SSS
Really a fun game. Infinity always gives you a chance to turn the tide and this time luck was by my side. I overestimated the need for orders and specialist, which led to some serious mistakes. 

Some considerations on how I used my list and how I may have changed it: 
Yadus had to die
No mimetism, no visors and very expensive: these are toys you don't want to have that exposed on a reactive turn. I learned my lesson and understood more about their weaknesses.
Avoid the 4-core
Seriously, what's the piont in a four model core fireteam? My Dakinis sat doing nothing for 3 turns straight. I should have brought an HMG dakini but I didn't have enough SWC, so the second best thing to do would have been to discard the 4-core completely, make a 2-core with the Deva hacker and the paramedic Dakini and use the remaining points on something tactically relevant: Naga, Garuda...you name it. There were plenty of options but I was blindfolded by my "fireteams are good" bias. 
It's a Queen's gambit
I don't care if the meta or cost efficency drives you towards other choices for your lieutenant, the +1 order Lt. Asura hacker is still a great choice to me. Being incredibly resilient, she's a beast on 1 vs 1 and she will always be pivotal to create space for the rest of the team when things go wrong. Of course, taking enemies one by one is very order consuming, and I think this is the reason for the lack of love from the community: it's not about the profile, it's about entrusting her with so many orders when the sh*t hits the fan.
Nomads - Jurisdictional Command of Tunguska
All-in and fairly ignorant double Kriza limited insertion list with strong 5 men link and a couple troublemakers. 

Grenzer mon amour 

After taking regular beatings from Nisse and Kamau snipers in 5 men link teams it's time for the Grenzer MSR to strike back. Hitting on 19 most of the time (range mod + big team + ignoring cover and mimetism) with burst 3 make it quite successful in the FtF game. 
Exploded Yadu HMG in suppressive fire, Yadu HRL and PROXI Mk2 MSR. 
Well done. 

Krizas, good but not enough 

Krizas are cool and look good on the table. However, it really shines in grinding cheerleaders and so they do not add too much value against OSSS. One was roasted by HRL blast failing miserably 3 50-50 ARM rolls in a row. The other was engaged by the Asura, it stalled for a few orders but then NWI and Sophotec support tipped the scale in favor of the robot girl. I need to get better at deploy and pick the right fights with these guys. 

OSSS can hack too O.o 

Game was lost when the Asura isolated my Interventor LT through a repeater Mary Problems had placed with her Pitcher. It took a couple orders and some bad luck on my side but still placing that repeater with my second last order as a reactive turn threat was not a brilliant move. I should have saved orders to try to Trinity the Asura to death. Instead the Proxy FO isolated Mary Problems lobbing E/M grenades and then the Asura was able to go 1-Vs-1 on my LT. Heckler's Jammer was quite ineffective.

Bring a Zondbot instead of a Paramedic

In this game "Isolated" state was a game changer and having possibility to recover from it looks more important than recovering from unconsciousness. Ideally you would have both, but seems better to have a zondbot to extend the engineer reach. 


What next?
As you can imagine, this firefight will sure have drastic consequences. Let's see what the Scientific Executive of the Station has tweeted right after the clash:
Truth is something strange is happening in the PanOceanina research labs of Space Station Donaicimiento: Operation Golden Ratio has just started!

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