Durgama Takeover

The shuttle flew low, skimming the treetops of Durgama.

Lt. Sera Arzumanyan spoke over secure comms to her squad, rather than shouting over the engine noise.

"Let's review - we're escorting an independent investigator into Darpan. If we run into resistance we have two volunteers from the Hafza Unit to act as decoys and scatter. That will hopefully throw off any would-be interlopers while we deal with getting past them."

She scanned the small cabin, trying to read faces for understanding.

"We don't know what we're going to run into when we touch down. We don't have consistent intel in the jungle coverage. Trust in what we've practiced, and follow orders. Yalaz and Kateb will run forward with the investigator and the decoys, the rest of us will be covering them from further back. We're almost at Darpan now, get ready."

Above: a couple of deployment photos.

This might not be totally sequential, I don't remember very well now which action took place in which turn. I'll focus more on what specific models or groups of models did.

DethKatt had first turn.

I deployed to cover approaches to the consoles as best I could.

DethKatt opened by moving up her Squalo and starting to lob grenades at my Ghulam sniper. I managed to dodge them apart so she couldn't cover multiple with the template, and ultimately survived.

The Squalo started to advance and first challenged my Azra'il with its MULTI HMG, and did remove the Azra'il without much trouble.

The Squalo then pushed forward more to see my Djanbazan core across the table, putting the range more favorable to me. The Squalo spent order after order firing on the Sniper, and I eventually knocked it Unconscious with my ARO.

A brief aside: I have notoriously bad dice luck. This is common knowledge among everyone I play any game with. There are very few people I would say generally have worse dice than me. DethKatt is a wonderful opponent and I have enjoyed every game we've played. I have also felt so much sympathy for DethKatt every game we've played, because there has always been a pivotal moment where her dice utterly betrayed her.

In this game, that moment was when DethKatt used her Monstrucker to try to repair the Squalo... and destroyed it. After spending all of her command tokens. It was brutal to watch.

Meanwhile on the center of the board, DethKatt moved a Bulleteer Heavy Shotgun and SMG Motorized ABH up to guard the center console, and the Knight of Santiago that was moving as a Duo with the Squalo secured the left console.

I brought in my Bashis to try to clear the center, but I forgot about the Liberto on a rooftop, and lost the first Bashi. I shot at the Liberto with my Djanbazan sniper and it survived, but it dropped prone, opening the path to the center. I brought the second Bashi in and killed the ABH. I then had some options, and not a lot of them good for clearing the Bulletteer. I decided to try to remove some orders with the Bashi and traded it for a Bolt Hacker as we templated each other.

I then considered if hacking is the right way to stop the Bulletteer. The Al Hawwa' on the right was closer, but would probably be in LoF before hacking range. Instead, I moved my left Al Hawwa' into range on the other side of the blue building, so that if it tried to move next turn I would be able to hack it.

The dispute on the left/center heated up. I was able to Isolate the Knight of Santiago, and spotlight and shoot down the Bulleteer, and then finish off the Knight. DethKatt does kill the nearby Decoy, though.

I pushed my Djanbazan up, secured the right console, but failed to push the button by the end of my 2nd turn.

Turn 3, Joan came into play. She moved up to the center, and killed my Djanbazan SMR, and took an overwatch position in the middle.

In turn 3 I moved up the right Hawwa', pushed the button, revealed a Decoy, and killed it on my second try with one of the Hafzas. I tried to be clever and hit Joan with a template from one Hafza while moving the other to the console, but they both went down to a Nanopulser I forgot she had. In retrospect I should have just sacrificed one to push the button. I now didn't have the orders to push any more buttons and sunk the last few into trying to kill stuff for victory points. In the end the game was a draw, with me narrowly having more victory points up.

Above: a few shots of the closing maneouvres

Again, I've enjoyed every game I've played with DethKatt. I couldn't ask for a more courteous or friendly opponent.

The Squalo going down in her active turn was brutal and changed the whole direction of the game. That thing had the potential to really put the hurt on me. The Sniper did have good lines on all of my potential DTs, so trying to remove it was probably still the right move. Coordinating with the Liberto might have been a good way to do it.

I don't think I used my Bashis terribly well. Aside from forgetting about the Liberto, I needed more specialists in the center toward the end and they may have been handy to have in the end.

Overall, a great game. I really enjoy all my Draws, and it's often hard to see glaring mistakes since those usually lead to more skewed games.