After a sleepy cycle in New Archeotech city, not much had changed. A few small and insignificant gangs skirmishing on the outskirts was new, but it wasn’t close enough or violent enough for the citizens of the town to do much other than continue their day to day routines.
With Emperors Day just around the corner, and all legal entities of the Necromundan Hive Primus preparing for a single hour of rest in the middle of their regularly scheduled shift, it could be that the next cycle continues to be relatively quiet.
Clark asked me to play a game the other day, likely my first at the club in almost 3 months, and I had a hankering and had a couple other errands to run in the area so I agreed. It was nice to throw down the Antares!
The club, led mostly by Clark and myself, have been writing a tournament scenario for Antares. Just one scenario. Because it has enough randomness built into it to serve the kinds of purposes you need in a tournament scenario — forcing balanced lists, keeping people entertained all day, providing plenty of opportunities for success and for failure. But we need to playtest it, because there are a lot of random elements to it and you need to make sure that all the pieces fit together. So it was also nice to get another playtest in!
And THEN because I’ve been drawing up a storm (my buildings), I folded up all the prototypes I’ve made and stuff them into a folio and threw them down on the table too! It was great to get to actually use these, as opposed to just stare at them on my desk! Clark immediately took advantage of them. He really likes giving buildings teleporters, and I think it’s a decent idea too — makes the game a lot more mobile — but this top photo is of lavamites pouring out of my two-storey building.
I managed to kill them, which was great because they can really run amuck. This next photo Clark is pushing forward to take the center, and moments later I sprint my T7 up to contest it.
These photos might be in the wrong order, but I doubt you’re scouring them anyway. He teleported 2 units of Gang Fighters into this building near my deployment zone. I had hoped that overwhelming firepower would make that a bad idea, but the building defenses and a couple less than amazing rolls in combat meant he got to keep the building, and got to use it as a funnel for his more powerful combat troops.
Unfortunately, I keep failing to learn that C3 Drop troops aren’t really amazing in combat. I mean, they’re the best I get, but that doesn’t mean a whole lot.
I took advantage of the version 2 of the rules to bring a T7 and an X-Howitzer in 1000 points and I was happy to be able to do so. I stripped the T7 of it’s gun and acc6/co8/in8 which brought it down in points, while still allowing me a mobile bunker for my squishy troops and a speedy objective contestor. Like it.
Unfortunately, not a campaign game. Or maybe it was fortunate, since I lost. đ We played a 2000 point game, the largest I’ve ever seen played, and we used a modified “Maelstrom mission” scenario which was inspired by the 40k scenarios of that name. Really liked it, although I think it needs more playtesting from people who aren’t myself. đ
I think the camera on my phone is going to shit – these photos look like they’ve had a glamour filter or something put on them?
The “Atlas”, also known as “Objective 1” came up a few times for me, along with objective 4 which is behind the temple on the left-middle of the photo, so I spent a lot of time trying to hold these guys.
In our mission, you generated 6 objectives at the start of the game. Each turn, you had one less “maximum” to work with, so first turn you either scored one or you dropped one. Greg got an early 2+1 point lead because he scored twice in the first turn, while I had to drop one of mine. Which meant he was up by 2 points, plus 1 for “opportunity”. Every objective you don’t score is a lost opportunity! This gap increased and then shrunk as the game continued, and then in turn 5 I scored 3 points to his 0 to tie it up!
The last ones generated — he had to rally 4 times and I had to take objective 2. Here’s where objective 2 was:
It’s inside the rock cluster on the right. Greg had it to score a few times over the game, so he had been holding it no problem. Rallying 4 times is a hard objective mid-game because you have to lose the use of 4 units for that turn. At this point it was less of a problem since he just had to hold and he knew exactly where I needed to go – he could just rally those units that weren’t near my objective.
At the end, a well placed Grip ammo right in the middle of the only 2 squads that could take it, sealed my fate.
Speaking of Grip, we both made good use of special ammo. I was dropping Scoot like it was going out of style! I made that Plasma Bombard move a lot, and he did an early disrupt of my planned X-Launcher firebase.
I think the Nuhu won’t be making an appearance in many lists. He’s to fragile even with the shield drones. My opponent only needing a 1 to remove most of his power.
Lastly, here’s a photo of Clark winning the Blood Bowl championships, which happened while we were playing. Damn him! But at least he was the guy who took me out of the play-offs entirely!
Unfortunately, I didn’t get to play in it. My opponent got stuck in traffic, so I watched two others play and occasionally answered rules questions wrong.
It was 1000 points, Freeborn vs Boromites. The Freeborn guy has played a few games (but not a lot), the Boromite guy had played…a couple games (maybe 1-2). He had a brand spanking new Brood Mother he wanted to put on the table, and after handling this model I totally agree!
The Freeborn firebase hides in the woods.
Unfortunately, on turn 2 the Brood Mother took enough pins to be removed from the table, even after her general did a rally order. Only so many x-launchers even a Boromite model can handle. Here she is, with her 10 pins and 2 down orders and looking a little bit like a dead spider.
Here’s the map after this game. The teal and yellow sections are the Salt Excavation Union, Local 50 and Antares Brine Commission, our two factions. I’m on the SEU. This game was fought over #18, the teal piece nearest the bottom of the map. After the Brood Mother died it was a fairly quick game after that, since they were played scenario #1 from the main book and 2 of his 9 dice had just disappeared.
The yellow cross-hatching is places were the Brine Commission are attacking. The teal cross-hatching is where the SEU is attacking. The red cross-hatching is where someone is attacking, and the attack has a defender scheduled already. So red — all good. Not red — needs someone to help out. Players can defend any attack that is adjacent to one of their factions territories. So that little teal section in #11 is, right now, totally open for the SEU to break out of their little corner and start taking other parts of the galaxy over.
The campaign system has gone through a lot of change this week. I had previously given my club mates access to it, so they could poke around and make suggestions. One fellow did, but one person is not 14 people. 14 people find all the problems in your system, very quickly. My to-do list went from empty* to zomfg-I-don’t-have-this-much-time.
(*it was never empty. It just ran out of high priority things to do. I have lots of plans, but I wanted to get this piece test-driven before I started working on anything more).
