Infinity Mission Focus: Rescue

Welcome to another episode of this series focusing on Infinity Missions. After the trickeries of Unmasking, we now examine the delicate dynamics of a mission where helpless civilians are involved: Rescue.

In this mission, each player must reach and escort to safety four civilians. Points are scored at the end of the game and take into account who has rescued the most.

Skills, weapons and equipment 

❌ Minelayer: despite being pretty useful in every mission where your opponent has to reach stuff on your side of the table, this skill here goes the extra mile since you've got a lot of road to cover to score points so you want to save as many orders as you can. 

🤖 Tinbot: high infantries are indubitably well suited for this mission since their high armor and wound/structure values but they will have to get their hands dirty to reach civilians and bring them back so make sure to cover them with tinbots if you have the chance. 

Picture by @ponty_painter. Tinbots can help you in various ways but the most common configuration is firewall, boosting your defences against comms attacks. Pretty useful even when you're a Mobile Brigada with BTS 3.  

🔫 Shotgun: +6 within 8". Even a light shotgun unit can effectively make the difference when defending, resorting to impact template if it looks like their last ARO. 

Trinitarian by Cristian Il Corinzio. For 1 SWC and 28 points you get an unhackable specialist minelayer with boarding shotgun and various layers of superior deployment: what else?

Behaviours and tactics 

🍾 Building a bottleneck: since civilians are 8" from each other, you may consider useful to mine the space between two civilians in order to deter your opponent from reaching both. In fact, just one mine may be a risk they'd gladly take to have access to two civilians. So let's follow another logic: if we mine the external corridor between the end of the table and the external civilian our opponent would take a mine to have access to one side of one civilian and that's really unlikely. If we do the same on both sides we are reducing the table of our opponent, forcing them in a 24" board that we can control better. Chances to apply this tactic ultimately depend on the table elements, but in general putting low energy constraints to your opponents helps you steer the game where you want.

And when the bottleneck is ready, you just wait for your enemies to show up! Hidden/revealed Swiss Guard by @stefanodrei11

📊 Fireteams: the mission specifies that units in a fireteam cannot sync with civilians. Should that turn you away from fireteams? On the contrary! In fact I suggest having as much as you can to save movement orders. If you have one duo, one haris and one 3-model core you can dedicate one entire fireteam to 3 of the 4 civilians. Since civilians are 8" from each other, it means you'll easily reform fireteams to hold the line while you escort them to safety as long as you have enough wildcards.

Kosmoflot troopers by @mikipaintstudio: Rokots can make an interesting, cheap and effective Rescue core fireteam with access to a set of bloodthirsty wildcards with either Superjump (Volkolak) or Climbing Plus (Cadin "Firststrike" and Wolfgang Amadeus Wolff).

🧗‍♀️Climbing plus & superjump: these skills really cast a new light on maps and players unfamiliar with them may have a hard time chasing enemy troopers with rescued civilians. 

Final thoughts 

Despite all the minelaying tactics we've discussed above, I can guarantee you'll face hidden deployed snipers like this Hexa, a Knauf-based conversion made by Uopo.

To leave or not to leave no man behind?
This mission is somehow similar to Capture and Protect but forces you to spend a lot of orders on movement and each time one of your trooper goes down you must carefully evaluate if spending orders to put them back up or continue with the rescue of another civilian. Therefore, I believe linked paramedics can be as incisive than a doctor with peripherals here, since all armies kinda have linkable paramedic options. This is also a mission where big linkable bots like the Vostok Sputnik or the Rudra Gunbot can shine, despite their inability to sync with civilians.