Infinity ITS 13 season ended this past weekend and with it, the Frozen Roads campaign came to a close. Over the last month or so, I’ve gotten in quite a few games to end out the season before the new season ITS 14 begins. I’ll run through the ups and downs I had at the end of all this with running Dahshat Company for a full season.
I’ll be posting these as just highlights as I didn’t take my normal amount of pics during the games. Time to just straight in starting with Colorado.
The full Winter Wonderland map posed some funny issues that totally threw me. I was running a variation of two Libertos, two Kum Riders, Maggie, and a Zuyong Haris. Some Ghulami are around for specialists and I threw McMurrough in for good times. Sean and I were doing Looting and Sabotage were you need to get to the opponents AC2 unit and beat it down. To do this, I basically have McMurrough and my TAG, Maggie.
Sean went first and even though I deployed in ways trying to hide my troops in ways that would favor closer engagements, I totally spaced the windows in the ruins. Sean reveals a hidden deployment Cutter and takes a quick shot on McMurrough. McMurrough whiffs the smoke roll like he normally does (one would think I would roll natural 20s any other time in the game except when I need anything but it but nope). It is largely irrelevant as the Cutter crits him and forces three saves. Armor 4 isn’t good enough when you then roll the opposite of high and McMurrough is taken down in the first order. Woof.
Cutter retreats and re-camos and a haris of Kamau come forward to choke up the midfield. On my turn, I run my Kum Rider in and drop all three eventually before dying. Maggie comes out to bait the Cutter into revealing but it doesn’t work. I throw mines out to clog up more of the midfield myself. After some additional positioning, Maggie goes into Suppression Fire up the field a little.
Cutter comes in and quickly dispatches Maggie on Sean’s turn. Suppression Fire didn’t even slow it down as it took maybe two salvos to knock her to unconscious. With no engineers, my TAG, and last source of damage dealing on objective was out of the match.
The Cutter engages my other heavy gun, the Zuyong HMG and cuts him down swiftly as well. A doctor revives one of the Kamau that fell but I’m largely out of weapons at this point. Except Gromoz, TAG hacker savant. I’ve tried to hack TAGs before but it is largely ineffective for me. Desperate, I try anyway and chuck a pitcher out to the TAG and try several attempts. It actually worked! I won’t have the TAG for long and I’m low on orders so I run it back to the opponent side and drop a Techbee. I could try to have a field day and kill everything in sight but I likely won’t survive the next onslaught and have this one shot to try to blow up the AC2 unit.
Cutter runs over and I crit it but the excitement is short-lived as the AC2 unit tanks all the armor saves. I try again and Cutter whiffs and gets stunned for its efforts. How disappointing. Nothing left for me to do except hunker down and hope my repeater net slows Varuna down enough to keep me alive.
Varuna has to eat orders taking down my repeaters but swiftly does so. Then Cutter goes wide to get shots on my hackers and kills them easily. Everything is coming up aces for Cutter until he tries to take down my lone Zuyong with Combi rifle. She suddenly becomes a hero of the hour and dodges shots and finally engaging the Cutter in close combat. All of this eats up enough orders that the Cutter can’t get to my AC2 unit and it survives.
Of course, no one else did. I start turn 3 woefully low on healthy bodies and immediately go into retreat. Luckily, I have two guys out there with Courage and they ignore the retreat. One goes out and secures the Varuna High Value Target while the other takes a chance to get a Panoply item to edge Varuna out there. He succeeds like only Libertos can and I win the match 5 – 3.
Back in Texas, I got in a few more games before the end of the road. First up was a game against Haqqislam. This was an interesting game where Haqq won the roll off and chose deployment.
This map was pretty rough. I didn’t see it clearly at first but taking deployment was the right call. I set up a similar army as I played in Colorado. I swapped out McMurrough for a Hulang and put Fiddler in but dropped Maggie. I took first turn in Unmasking and watched as the last deployment piece was Knauf.
He placed on this corner and has sight lines to most of my deployment zone, with very few options for me to move freely unless I wanted to burn cautious moves all day. I likely should have done that but I opted to engage instead. This coupled with a lot (5?) reaction pieces mostly in camo was something I haven’t really seen before. And it showed. I really had no clue how to attack this problem. I tried smoking Knauf against my Rui Shi to get advantage but 5 dice to 1 even at decent odds had Knauf take down the bot. I tried with several other options running Kum Riders up but nothing could do anything against Knauf sniping and the other automatic reaction units he had in play.
My dice didn’t help me but I would have needed stupid lucky dice to overcome the obvious cluelessness I had attacking this defensive tower. The game went downhill quickly and I did all could to scrape out a single victory point against a vastly better prepared force. I lost hard at 1 – 10.
I took the same group and same mission but this time faced Aleph.
We had fun building this map, making a silly super tower on one side. I lost the initial roll again and Aleph chose deployment. I decided early on I would ignore everything I could and just rip through the mission objectives before Aleph could set up their hard hitters and pin me.
Last to deploy was the fearsome Marut TAG. It was commanding a major fire lane so I decided to ignore my forces that were cut off. I focused in and was able to get to two easy consoles, turn them on, and find the key target. With this knowledge and a few orders, I decided to cover myself with smoke and overextend. The overextension was to the key target and a decoy. The gambit paid off and I took out the key target. I used the remaining orders to defend up and await the heavy counter attack.
Aleph came in and started setting up, pushing the Marut forward and taking down a few minor troops on my side like the flashbot and Kum Rider. The real threat came from a lucky Garuda bot dropping in behind me. With all my guys not facing correctly, they were easy fodder for the ruthless bot.
I did have my Liberto throw some useless shots at him but it was mainly a distraction. It ate up a few orders so I guess that was good. The Garuda marched through and took down a few more units but ran into an issue when shooting my Zuyong with Combi in the back. The shot wounded her but didn’t drop her so she could turn around and dodge. A few more shots came in but she was able to dodge up and out of the way. The Garuda was out of orders so it was my turn to counter.
I threw smoke down to confuse the intruder and Rui Shi made quick work of the bot. I pushed around a bit more and took down another target and started moving that pinned left flank around with my Hulang getting up the field.
Aleph brought its Dakini Core into play and they started messing around with my troops, dropping Fiddler and some other critical personnel. Marut came in and knocked down my Rafiq that was hunting targets. At this point, the Marut and Dakinis were in clear command of the central fortress. On my turn, I brought up my Liberto and shotgunned down their fireline, dropping 3 of the 5 troopers.
I decided to march the Hulang up through a circuitous route and dodged into CC with the mighty Marut. The odds were in my favor here but that d20 is fickle. I ended up scoring a hit with my dreaded monofilament weapon but Marut shrugged off the strike. I tried again and hit again. This time Marut failed the save and went down. To cap things off, my Zuyong HMG took down the Aleph Lieutenant and that was all she wrote. Aleph was in loss of lieutenant for turn 3 and had no prospects to get to any console. Dahshat won 8 – 0.
The last game I played for ITS 13 was against USARF. I went back to a Maggie build hoping to find some traction with the big TAG.
I switched things up with a Lu Duan remote and a Digger. I lost the initial roll again as we rolled up the Quadrant Control Mission. I deployed first and set up somewhat defensively even though I was going first. This was also the first time we used my terrain to play Infinity out in Texas. The big blue dropship is getting painted up finally after winning it a few years back.
Things got off to a brutal start as I ran my Kum Rider up all the way into the USARF back line and suicided him to take 3 troops and wound Wild Bill. I usually take the Chain Rifle Kum Rider but this time opted for the light shotgun and the double burst came in handy with the split formation I was up against. Since I was going first and control of the quadrants is always checked at end of round, I new I had to get into the zones so otherwise I’d leave easy points for USARF to clean up.
I moved Maggie into a zone a little bit up the field and had her throw out some mines. I ordered others around into defensive reaction positions and waited for the rush. The funny thing about USARF is they all seem to have AP weapons and a lot of them had MSV to counter my smoke defenses. Turn one ended with USARF getting some unconscious guys back up and moving into control their quadrants.
I spent turn 2 not doing much. I’m not even sure what I was thinking but after the moment I had early on, I seemed to just squander resources bogging guys down into bad firefights (several that went poorly for me). I put Maggie out closer now to control more and go into suppressive fire mode while the Lu Duan also played defensive. With all the AP around, I didn’t have high hopes for Maggie and sure enough, she went down on the counter turn. I thought with suppressive fire and cover that the AP spitfire shooting me would struggle a bit but instead I whiffed all my suppressive shots while taking 3 hits in return. I then whiff all the armor saves and Maggie is down in one salvo. USARF is not dumb and they finish her off with one more order.
Then Van Zant comes in from my backfield. I know he exists and figured he would show up but I really didn’t have a response for him. Lots of hindsight things could have been done with things like not having that doctor prone and my hacker (off camera) out of the alignment but it didn’t happen. Van Zant ran through my team and wiped out my whole side in that quadrant and even though he died as well, it gave USARF control of the board and they started wracking up victory points.
I couldn’t recover with the loss of so many key pieces and the game ended with hard loss 1 – 6. A sad ending to the Dahshat forces for ITS 13.
Even though I feel like I never really played them consistently, I’m happy with my foray into Dahshat Company this past season. It took me from zero all the way to having a pretty complete fully painted force. I never got my painted Brawlers up and into play but maybe I’ll pull Dahshat back out for some one offs.
ITS 14 is out and “Thunderclap” is the name of the game now. They are boosting a specific remote (which gives a nice boost to the Rafiq) but I’m going to go back to my roots and focus ITS 14 on the evil Imperial Service Sectorial.
