Infinity: Haqqislam Training Day

 Adam dropped by for 300pts of Haqqislam vs Panoceania. Most of the terrain we usually use had unfortunately walked out the door, the night before. In fairness, most of it is actually Jason's. I spent Saturday Afternoon making up a new set of scatter terrain and pulled the 'Warren of Death' TM out of the garage. Then Adam and I added a Middle Eastern buildings, European Ruins, and some card sci-fi buildings form the starter set. The mission I chose to use was a rulebook mission where you get points for controlling the 2' x 1' quadrants in 'no mans land', along with bonus points for hacking consoles (one per quadrant) and also another bonus point for achieving the secret objective. Clearly Panoceania command left behind some intel in an old spec ops training ground (hence the different buildings) and have to hastily foil a Haqqislam OP to steal it....

 We had 300 pts each. I had Fusilier, Fusilier Hacker, Akali with combi, Bulleteer with Spitfire, Peacmaker with Spitfire, Father Knight FO, Crocman FO, Auxilia FO, Nisse Sniper and Swiss Guard with HMG. Adam had like 3 snipers and the Hassassin Fiday. He had other stuff too. I won deployment and he made me go first, to reduce my order pool. That went sort of ok..... the Akali came down and failed to take out his sniper and also failed to kill one of Adams infantry even after repeatedly shooting it in the back. I didn't have many orders and was worried about the enemy counter-punch until.....the Peacmaker rounded a corner, failed to shoot his hacker (yes I'd lost every gunfight so far) who dodged by hitting the dirt. But then that gave new LOS to an infantryman in Adam's backline. Yes that lone infantry man was the Lt. and Adam started turn 1 in 'Loss of Lieutenant'!

So the counter-punch was disorganised and fragmented as each model only gets one order each and no pooling orders at key points. So my Nisse ended up winning the crucial early sniper duel against one of Adam's revealed from TO hidden deployment. then the Nisse downed a second in ARO. Then Adam moved an infiltrator placed near an objective computer console. Unfortunately there was one of my TO hidden deployment models watching it and he went down hard. It was actually an awesome first turn apart from the fact Adam was ahead by two points already as he got the most table quadrants!

In turn two, I wasted about 3 orders trying to discover his impersonator, before giving up. Adam had snuck his hacker (the one who got his Lt. killed) around a ditch into range and immobilised the Peacemaker. He tried to root out the Akal on the other flank but I now knew what way to point the gun and he was giving no ground. I used my orders to move models to the board centre to make sure I got objective points this round, and also set up some great AROs. Sadly the Bulleteer went down to a lucky Haqqislam ARO from a combi rifle so both the mg armed robots where down. Worse to come once Adam got to act, the Hassassin Fiday walked through my lines and shotgunned the Lt and the hacker behind him. Only to have both pass their armour save, so he did it again and took them down. However, even with regeneration, he was on the losing side of the bodycount. His sniper came back up only to receive ARO's from three of my models, and go down again.

Then on my last turn I took my Swiss Guard (all 68pts of him) out of TO marker mode and hunted down that Hassassin and bravely shot him in the back from as far away as possible with a HMG. Sure my model may also have had a knife ready, but I didn't have a death wish. Then my Crocman finally hacked the computer console and I made sure to have models in all four quadrants. My secret objective had been to finish off an unconscious model and the Crocman had seen to that too. Adam had too few orders to stop Panoceania from sealing the data breach with extreme prejudice.

Thanks for the game, Adam. Heaps of fun and nice to see my Nisse actually beat something in a shootout. It's great to have the Bulleteer profile available once more and even the Peacemaker is pretty cool with it's forward deployment.

Thanks for reading.