Intro
Emergency! Emergency! Please leave Terminal Benbow. Hlökk Station and its subsidiaries deny any responsability for damage to people or property if you don't comply immediately
...the alert went on, as the whole terminal turned to emergency mode, lighting up red lights all around the Sonic Blues and all the other docked ships.
PanOceanian elite forces took position within the terminal, urging all personel to leave and be biometrically scanned. While unaware of the alien's ship nor of their real intentions, the intelligence gathered by battleship Uluru was clear: the Shasvastii had already reached the station, and Terminal Bembow was the only one who had recieved ships in the last cycles.
Expecting heavy armored resistance and sly infiltrators, specialists from every sectorial were summoned to face the alien threat.
The air lock of his containment pod snapped and Anton took a deep breath of the station's metallic breeze: his mind went back in time for twenty years, to the night when he found a strange artifact in the ore rubble of that very same mining facility...
Mission and Lists
300 points - Looting and Sabotaging ITS Season 13 supplement
🐜 Shasvastii Expeditionary Force VS 🔵 PanOceania
 |
| Lots of proxies here...keep scrolling |
Deployment
Panoceania wins the initiative roll and keeps deployment. Shasvastii choose to go second, hoping to lure some humans into their traps.
🐜 A Thaiga creature is positioned on the left, while Aida Swanson goes forward, defending the AC2 with her viral mine. The CoC Caliban is placed in camo state between the two. Close to the Caliban, above the bridge and prone, stays the Seed Soldier. The Nox lieutenant stays behind, prone, while the Hidden Deployed Sphinx goes on the left side of the center and Victor Messer holds its right side. On the right flank, the Jayth and the Caliban engineer team up for some dirty deeds.
Classified Objective: Net Undermine.
🔵 PanOceania fills its control room on the far right with an Auxilia and the kinights duo. Behind them, the mech-enginer is ready to jump into action. The Auxilia lieutenant stays prone on the central rooftop, close to the engineer's servant and the hidden deployed Cutter. On the far left, another hidden deployed Hexa makes sure no shenigans are played to surround the formation.
Classified Objective: Test Run.
Deployment ends with the Speculo Killer and her mine close to the Knight Duo and, not too far, PanO's Black Friar.
Aida rolls a whopping 20 on the booty table, gaining an HMG. Armed to the teeth and placed right in the center, she gets a well deserved Command Token spent on her to go in suppressive.
Turn 1
🔵 PanO
The black friar goes in LoF with the Speculo and uses her biometric visor to reveal her. It takes three orders to finally reveal her and shoot her down with a merciless shock round of her Multi Rifle.
On the same side, the auxbot enters the control room to intuitive shot the mine, succeeding the WIP roll and destroying the mine against all odds.
Willing to reveal more alien shenanigans, the Black Friar comes forward to discover a camouflaged Caliban. With only three orders left for PanO, the aliens decide it's time to reveal the Sphinx, who shoots the Friar who tanks the hit with no consequences.
Now in the perfect position to strike, it is now time for the Cutter to reveal itself, making bullets rain on the enemy TAG. The turn ends with the cutter back in camo state and the Sphinx with one wound less.
🐜 Shasvastii
Impetuous Thaiga uses its free order to advance without exposing itself. The Seed Soldier pops out of the bridge and shoots one round of his panzerfaust, forcing the knight fireteam to take cover.
With no enemies in sight, the Jayth advances toward the panoply and completes the Classified objective. Aida reaches midfield and sends the Black Friar to unconscious state.
The Sphinx dives right to reach the Caliban engineer and be repaired. Spending a command token the Sphinx, Aida and the Seed Soldier go in suppressive.
Turn 2
🔵 PanO
The Cutter jumps out of its camo and starts shooting the Sphinx, destroying it. It then proceeds to go in suppression. The Hexa hacker on the left comes out of the shadows and approaches the Jayth who replies with precise E/M grenades that isolate the Hexa. The knights duo tries to unlock the situation starting with the Seed Soldiers, who luckily fell only on the last order.
🐜 Shasvastii
In the impetuous phase, the Thaiga runs out of its den to bring chaos to the enemy's right flank but its enemies are born ready and shoot it down despite its dodging ability. Caliban Engineer repairs the Sphinx who sends the Hexa to dead state with its spitfire. Victor Messer, taking advantage of a safe corridor, sprints though the map to reach a safe spot next to both the AC2 and the enemy Cutter. Every remaining order is spent trying to Total Control the TAG, who resists every hit with no trouble.
Turn 3
🔵 PanO
The Cutter moves out of Victor's ZoC to shoot down the Sphinx. Victor's ARO is uneffective and the Sphinx bites the dust once again, along with poor Jathy. The central Auxbot is sent to take care of Victor but is immobilized by his ARO and every reset attempt is unsuccessful. With the last order, the Knight of Justice reaches the panoply extracting an EXP CC weapon and suffering a wound from Aida's suppressing fire.
🐜 Shasvastii
Victor jumps out of total cover to blast the AC2. PanO's lieutenant gets in the way but is shot down. Unfortunately, every attempt to do damage is failed and the AC2 stays up strong and unscratched. With the very last order the CoC Caliban, still in camo state, reaches the panoply but is mowed down by enemy fire and also fails his WIP roll to open the panoply.
Final score: DRAW! 4 - 4
Debriefing
🐜 Shasvastii
I wanted to reach CC so bad but never had the opportunity to advance out of the careful eye of PanO's superior firepower. In hindsight, I should have gone first using the Speculo's smoke granades to cover my advance and reach midfield. Two things prevented me from doing so: to have choosen the minelayer profile and the fact that I was expecting not only the Black Friar but also more MSVs in my opponent's list. This is why I went for this suicide/order soaking deployment of the Speculo: this way I think I have avoided having enemy MSVs on vantage points. In brief I think Aida's booty roll saved me, turning her into the perfect suppression unit against any target.
🔵 PanO
I took my trusted veterans for this mission, choosing my most reliable units to get the job done. D-charges, DA CCW, forward deployment: everything in my basket was well suited for this mission. Unfortunately, Shasvastii soldiers prepared themselves more to face the opponent rather than the mission itself and were proved to be surprisingly resistant. I expected infiltrators and I was welcomed with panzerfaust shots, forcing me into a stallmate that held me for too much time into my table half. Kudos for my opponent who created a perfect area of suppressive fire in the mid table, preventing my knights to advance towards his AC2. If on the one hand the Cutter has proved its worth against every threat, the Hexa hacker is confirmed to be a profile of dubious utility, given the lack of infitration.
Outro
When the knights entered the residential complex, swords drawn, the Shasvastii had already left the area, leaving their many casualties behind. The walls of Anton's youth apartment on Hlökk Station were torn apart from the outside like a bean can. Anton himself was laying on the scorched pavament, next to an open tech-safe.
The KOJ's comlog blinked: the rest of PanO forces had just found the Sonic Blues; biohazard containment protocol was being issued, as required by the Concilium procedure.
"We found Koseacasomov, over."
Hearing the knight's voice, Anton suddenly woke up, shaken with frightening.
"It's too late" he barked "they have the artifact!".
Bonus track!
We had already decided to play this mission in order to have some fun with our TAGs, when Loss of Lieutenant announced their monthly challenge for June featuring...TAGs!
So, as prompted by their post, here are our two cents about the two Tactical Armoured Gears used in this report:
🔵 PanO
The mission was a test case for my first Cutter list. The TAG proved to be solid, reliable and incredibly lethal over medium / long distances. Mimetism (-6), cover and surprise shot, guarantee an alpha strike that imposes a -12 to the opponent dice roll. All these goodies come at a price: 97 points and 2 SWCs consume a third of the available space and force you to make difficult choices. The only flaw I encountered is the lack of a short range weapon (not even a simple pistol) which frustrates its use in presence of short range opponents.
🐜 Shasvastii
Looting & sabotaging was a great opportunity to field my Sphinx, thanks to the Armored Fury rule adding the Anti-materiel trait to its CC attacks.
The Sphinx is a great sum of all things Shasvastii: impressive mobility and top tier cloaking features. Of course, this also means it is pretty squishy and, more importantly, it performs better when taking it out on little ones. My bottom line is that maybe the Sphinx is one of those TAG to bring when you're pretty sure your opponent doesn't expect one; unfortunately its price tag (ahaha) is quite high, making it difficult for it to see the field as much as it should.
No comments:
Post a Comment