Moderated Mendoza
So after facing George’s Military Orders on the ice table…
I’m now facing Erik (Zelaponeepus)’s Military Orders on the ice table.
Joel (Paladin_Eks) was my other opponent this round, and he was kind enough to take deployment when I took deployment so I could again be on the same table side for both games.
Overview
- Mission: Critical Mass
- Forces: Nomads versus Military Orders
- Deploy First: Military Orders
- First Turn: Military Orders
We rolled Critical Mass for this game, with the “kill more specialists” change that came after these two games:
I’m playing the same triple-Hellcat list that I took against George. See the link above to see my discussion of it.
Hard Mode
GROUP 1
7
1
GROUP 2
MODERATOR (Lieutenant) Combi Rifle / Pistol, PARA CC Weapon(-6). (0 | 9)
PUPPET MASTERS (Minelayer) Submachine Gun, Shock Mines / Pistol, CC Weapon. (0.5 | 14)
PUPPETBOT (BS Attack [Shock]) AP Marksman Rifle / PARA CC Weapon(-3). (0 | 14)
HELLCAT Boarding Shotgun / Pistol, CC Weapon. (0 | 24)
ROBIN HOOK Rifle(+1 Dam), Tactical Bow(+3 BS), Drop Bears / Heavy Pistol(+1B), PARA CC Weapon(-9). (0 | 23)
MORAN (Repeater) Combi Rifle, Flash Pulse, D-Charges, Crazykoala ( ) / Pistol, CC Weapon. (0.5 | 17)
BANDIT Light Shotgun, Adhesive Launcher / Pistol, DA CC Weapon. (0 | 22)
1
JAZZ Hacker & BILLIE undefined / undefined. (0.5 | 25)
BILLIE Flash Pulse, E/M Mines / Pistol, PARA CC Weapon(-3). (0 | 7)
ARMAND (Multispectral Visor L1) MULTI Sniper Rifle, Nanopulser ( ) / Breaker Pistol(+1B), Shock CC Weapon. (1.5 | 39)
STEMPLER ZOND Combi Rifle, Flash Pulse / PARA CC Weapon(-3). (0 | 16)
MORLOCK Chain Rifle, Smoke Grenades / Assault Pistol, AP CC Weapon. (0 | 6)
LIBERTO (Minelayer) Light Shotgun, Shock Mines / Pistol, CC Weapon. (1 | 8)
6 SWC | 300 Points | Open in Army | Copy Code
Erik’s got a pretty similar list to George in that he also has three Trinitarians and a Knight Commander. The difference is that he stacked up a pair of Crosiers with the Knight Commander as his link instead of the Teutons. The point savings gives him not just MSV2 but also a Sepulchre Knight, Mendoza instead of Dart, and a Peacemaker.
Erik (Zelaponeepus)
KNIGHT COMMANDER (Lieutenant [+1 Order]) Combi Rifle, Light Shotgun / Pistol, Shock CC Weapon. (0 | 28)
CROSIER (Multispectral Visor L2) Spitfire ( ) / Pistol, CC Weapon. (1 | 22)
KNIGHT OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE (NCO) AP Heavy Machine Gun / Heavy Pistol, Shock CC Weapon. (1 | 56)
TRINITARIAN (Minelayer, Forward Observer) Boarding Shotgun, D-Charges, Flash Pulse, Shock Mines / Pistol, CC Weapon. (1 | 28)
PEACEMAKER Heavy Shotgun / PARA CC Weapon(-3). (0 | 20)
AUXBOT_3 Heavy Flamethrower / PARA CC Weapon(-3). (0 | 4)
MENDOZA (Forward Deployment [+8″]) MULTI Rifle(+1 Dam), Grenades / Pistol, DA CC Weapon. (0 | 57)
TEUTONIC KNIGHT (Specialist Operative) Submachine Gun, Panzerfaust / Pistol, DA CC Weapon. (0 | 21)
Teutons are still too good to pass up, so there’s a Teuton SO in there just to round the list out.
Deployment
Given that I took deployment, Erik chose to go first. In the car ride to the tournament, we had been discussing what he should do in Critical Mass, and I suggested he just make the PH rolls to try and get through the Confused Deployment. He’s going first so he can actually recover reasonably if he fails a roll. Unfortunately for him, he proceeds to fail all three Trinitarian rolls and the Peacemaker roll. Mendoza manages to make it and parks himself right on the centerline, which I think is quite dangerous.
Erik basically put all three Trinitarians across his deployment zone, the Peacemaker looking backwards watching for Hellcats, and then he split his attack pieces on the left and the right. The Knight Commander was holomasked as a Infirmarer so there was no legal, visible lieutenant profile. This was a fact that was lost on me, as I was distracted by Joel’s double JOTUM list on the other table. The Sepulchre Knight was Erik’s hold back.
With Mendoza in the middle, I knew I had to put a Moran watching him. I had two attempts, and succeeded in my second attempt to put a Moran in repeater range, with the first Moran in the back looking at the beacon. I was really worried about the Teuton rocketing forward, so I put Robin Hook, the Stempler, and a Morlock (that rolled 8-4 MOV) in the way.
I didn’t have a good feeling about the left side of the table, so I put the Moderator Lt in the safety net I had built on the right, and then put Jazz and Billie in the back to sort of have some presence on the left. The Puppeteer set up a mine to further protect the Moderator (and pretend to be an Intruder), and the Puppets went on the ground floor in the middle.
I attempted to throw a Bandit into the midfield too, but failed the roll. Erik then put the Sepulchre Knight on his left in total cover, and then I put Le Muet down to cover the center of the table.
Turn 1
Top of 1 – Military Orders
I take two orders from Erik’s only pool and settle in to weather the storm. He starts by shifting the Crosier Spitfire into view of Le Muet in an attempt to remove my sniper. We’re outside of 24″, so that at least helps me. I land a hit but the Crosier passes ARM and scoots away to safety.
Erik wants to unstick Mendoza, and he starts by using the Sepulchre Knight to take out the nearby Koala. This is a pretty big coup for me, in the sense that I’m forcing orders to be spent without losing any orders of my own.
Erik then throws a grenade with Mendoza, trying to spec-fire kill the Moran to unstick Mendoza. This goes horribly and while dodging succesfully, Jazz immobilizes Mendoza.
The Sepulchre Knight takes a shot on my Moran that’s watching the Beacon to force it into cover, and then Erik manages to shuffle the Beacon back two inches before passing turn.
Bottom of 1 – Nomads
Shockingly, nothing is dead? My objective for this turn is to move the Beacon back into the quadrant with the Moran and try to take out some of Erik’s limited orders. I’d really like to get rid of the Trinitarian that’s watching the Beacon so I can move it unopposed. But first, there’s the matter of that Teuton. After my Morlock makes it to the high ground, I fire on the Teuton with Le Muet. Everyone’s on 16s, but the Teuton rolls higher and breaks LoF.
I’m really worried about the Teuton so I park the Morlock on its approach path.
I really need to remove that Trinitarian, so I bring on a Hellcat Spitfire to try and clear out some of the stuff guarding against AD so I can drop in a Hellcat BSG on the Trinitarian. It takes me two orders to take out the Peacemaker the first completely unopposed, and then I can’t take out the Teuton from outside of 8″ shooting it in the back. Not even a wound! Ugh.
At this point, my orders are too low for me to try and sort this out with Hellcats, so I just need to brute force the Beacon back over the midline into the quadrant that the Moran that’s covering Mendoza is in. I throw the Morlock under the bus to get smoke down on Erik’s side of the Beacon, denying LoF to the Trinitarian FO that’s watching it. The Sepulchre Knight pastes the Morlock, but it did its job. I’m just glad I made the smoke throw!
I use the Stempler’s tac aware to rocket it into position and then get just enough movement on the Beacon to get it over the line into my quadrant. I’m also annoyed with myself for not having thought of using the Morlock earlier. I could have just shot the 8-4 Morlock into position to get smoke on the Beacon and just spent all my orders on Jazz moving the Beacon out of the smoke to where the Moran could see, and really lock the Beacon down. A tournament is not really the best time to miss this easy bit of analysis either! I was too interested in dropping in Hellcats as the “easy tool” but it was actually worse in terms of order count.
I think I could also have been more aggressive with the Hellcat BSG and attacked the order pool directly instead of going after the Trinitarian. Erik’s Crozier link was pretty vulnerable. Definitely this turn suffered because I was spending a lot of mental energy on the other game trying to deal with double JOTUM. Still, I managed to recover the Beacon into one of my quadrants, and that helped a lot.
I’m really regretting having Le Muet where he is, because he’s not able to interact with most of the table–it’s funny how that sort of thing happens. You think the deployment is good, and then when the game actually starts it’s pretty sad. This is 100% due to the fact that I’m playing two games. I had to cut something to keep momentum going on both games, and really analyzing all the angles for Le Muet didn’t make the cut. He would have been the perfect tool to ace the Trinitarian watching the Beacon. I probably should’ve just spend the orders to reposition him.
Turn 2
I’ve got two points because I moved the beacon near my Moran.
Top of 2 – Military Orders
My Hellcat is watching the Teuton, so Erik cancels the order. Erik chooses to use the Sepulchre Knight to take out the Hellcat, which is great for me, because that basically wastes so much movement–Erik has moved the Knight back and forth back and forth all game so far, and not really moved into a position to attack into my order pool.
The Crozier spitfire easily removes my over-extended Stempler. Boo.
Mendoza had reset out of Carbonite as I moved the Stempler around last turn, so he tries to grenade my Moran again with the same result–a successful dodge and a successful Carbonite from Jazz.
All of this and the fact that Jazz and my Moran are still watching the Beacon means Erik is unsuccessful at moving the Beacon, so he shifts his Crozier link forward and passes turn.
Bottom of 2 – Nomads
Alright, there’s a vulnerable spot now that I can drop a Hellcat BSG in, so I do it near a Trinitarian on the Erik’s right.
Erik shoots so I double template and we trade.
Now I can drop in the last Hellcat to take out the Trinitarian FO that I’ve been trying to kill this whole time, and of course now is when the Hellcat fails the jump and just chills in my deployment zone.
The Croziers are stacked up near the Libertos, so I can definitely punish their placement. I need to clear out the Crozier Spitfire first, so I send in the Puppets and take it out with the AP Marksman puppet.
I roll the Libertos around the corner and ask for AROs…
Erik dodges, but they’re facing the wrong way, so I decide double template is worth a shot, especially because he revealed the Infirmarer to be his Lieutenant!
The Libertos takes them both out, somehow surviving all the AROs from the nearby troops! At least we get to Erik’s beautiful Knight Commander all painted up! I move my Bandit into the midfield and with that, pass turn.
Turn 3
I’ve got 4 points since the Beacon’s been in my quadrant for two turns now, and the SPACEPOPE shows up!
Top of 3 – Military Orders
Erik’s in loss of lieutenant now, so he’s gotta pull out all the stops. The Teuton comes back into view of Le Muet and again I can’t hit it.
Mendoza is the correct choice now, so Erik sends him in. Mendoza climbs off his platform and has to contend with a shotgun template from the Bandit and a flash pulse from the Puppetbot. He elects to reset against Jazz’s hack, and that ends up saving him along with his ARM and Mim -6.
Mendoza keeps going and again passes enough saves and gets past Jazz’s hack to retrieve the SPACEPOPE. I do manage to stack one wound on him courtesy of a template from the Puppetbot.
He even manages to retreat and get halfway up the ladder in total safety!
Bottom of 3 – Nomads
Well, I’m winning with more specialists killed and 4 points from controlling the quadrants in Turn 1 and 2, but this is a tournament. Gotta have all the points. I try to clear out the Teuton, which is in the way of the approach to Mendoza. It doesn’t work, because the Teuton is apparently unkillable.
I re-carbonite Mendoza, finally.
I force the Teuton back with more fire from the Puppetbot, and then I have to take care of the Sepulchre Knight.
With the Teuton still up, I can’t really push the Puppetbot forward safely, so I jump Le Muet off his perch and start taking shots. Le Muet finally comes through for me and takes out the Knight!
I attempt to lock up the Teuton with an ADHL shot from the Bandit, but it just powers through the glue…
so I just beat down Mendoza and secure the Space Pope with the Bandit.
With that, it’s a
8-0, 224-76 Nomad Victory!
Post Game Analysis
That was a really fun game, in spite of the Hellcats not doing much. Well, I take it back–the Hellcats kept the Sepulchre Knight boxed into Erik’s deployment zone all game. I don’t think I did anything particularly big-brained this match, I just (eventually) carefully used my tools to get the mission done. Really the issue was Mendoza being just stuck the whole game on his little catwalk, and that was the whole problem.
There were two main issues with this:
- Mendoza didn’t need to be all the way forward, don’t let me get him in a Moran zone for free. It’s not like Erik doesn’t know I play Morans in vanilla Nomads. He recently sold his PanO and I think a large part of the reason is because I kept killing his Locusts with Morans.
- Don’t try to use him to get himself out of the problem, there’s plenty of other tools
So given that deployment would have already been locked in, how does Erik recover? Well, I think he re-camos one of the Trinitarians and then walks it all the way up behind the Moran and kills it. He can even be moving the beacon as he’s going, because I don’t really have much watching it other than Jazz. This would take his whole turn, but then he’d have units in two quadrants that I now have to deal with, and Mendoza is unpinned.
I think he also spent a little too much time trying to get the Croziers into position to take on Le Muet, that was a big issue as well. In fact, I think a lot of his movement was pretty inefficient. If we look at the deployment, the Sepulchre Knight never got farther than the crystals right outside his deployment zone, and spent a lot of time walking backwards.
Also, the Croziers ended up in front of where the leftmost Trinitarian was. So really, nothing aside from the Teuton got and Mendoza got past 12″ from Erik’s table edge. That’s why I won the game, because Erik just didn’t control the midfield. Mendoza can’t just “be the midfield” all by himself, especially under hacking coverage.
I hadn’t really intended it this way, but now that I’m looking at it, Le Muet was preventing a run down the right table side (from Erik’s perspective) by the Croziers, which would have been problematic for me, and the threat of triple Hellcat (both actual in the case of the spitfire and perceived) kept Erik carefully guarding his backfield.
All of this conspired to basically negate his forward momentum, keep him boxed in, and force him to try and leverage Mendoza to get him out of trouble. Mendoza almost did, to be frank, once he just YOLOed forward to get the Space Pope we saw how beefy Mendoza really is, just ignoring Jazz and all the templates coming his way. Probably not statistically likely, but hey, it’s a hail mary, it’s nice to see it mostly work.
We talked after the game about how Erik could have used the Trinitarian on the first turn to just force the issue and move the Beacon against my AROs, maybe first knocking the Moran in my DZ back into cover first, and then just advancing the Teuton forward to try and harass me. He tried to do too much and ended up not having the orders to do it all, and then I pulled him backwards with my Hellcats.
He did love the mission though, as do I. This is my third game of it, and I think the “specialists killed” is the right edit. It’s pretty clear also that owning the midfield is so important, even more so because of confused deployment. You could say that I got lucky in landing a Moran on Mendoza and that’s why I won, but I had two to try, and it’s basically a coin flip. Erik was unlucky that none of his Trinitarians made it, but as I told him in the car, coordinate re-camo and move forward. He didn’t deploy to make that happen, but he could have, and then it’s a much different game where I have to use the Hellcats to break up the midfield, which probably isn’t quite good enough.
He also vastly underutilized the Sepulchre Knight–it’s quite resistant to hacking, being immune to Oblivion and having BTS 9 against Carbonite is very, very difficult to deal with for Nomads. I’d have had to just try to AP it down with the Puppetbot or something, and he could have made that hard with Holoechoes. I suspect that a lot of the issue here was lack of familiarity with the mission and with his faction, so there’s that to consider as well. Thanks to Erik, and thanks to you for reading, as always.
Pingback: Doublemint JOTUM – MERC Recon