King of the North(ern Open)... almost

What a day. In a quick summary, it didn't go as well as it could have but I still came on the 4th place, which was pretty good! I won two of the three games and the one I lost was definitely my weakest. Funnily enough it was Supremacy and for a second time, I found myself not being aggressive enough which made it difficult to score high early in the game and easier for my opponent's last turn. Now that NO3 is over I can start writing about my lists so I will have break down of those later. 

Apparently I was 60pts (army points) away from the 3rd place, which isn't much, so I ought to remember not to throw away any units and just be careful even when I lost badly to preserve some army points. And I have also won the "best improvement" for Painted Armies, which was a nice surprise. The price for that was a free painting lesson with someone I can't remember, so that should be cool.

I haven't seen the score table yet but if I remember right the top player had 21 Victory Points and I was on 18, so it was pretty close overall. 

Game 1: Supplies - Caledonia vs Nomads
Won 7 to 2 (or 3)

This was an interesting game because my opponent had only 10 units, and only 8 on the board to start with. Sadly I have failed the Lt roll (which I haven't won all day) and my opponent went first. I did expect him to go for the objectives as I planned but he was very defensive and short on orders so he didn't do much, mainly just set up his defense. He had a Gecko TAG in the middle of the board and two Crazy Koalas guarding an objective on the right side. There wasn't much he could have done with 6 Orders after I took 2 at the start of his first turn. My first turn didn't go terribly, I have managed to take one Objective and take care of some ARO threats, but most annoying, my link team decided not to pass any WIP rolls, so I spent like 5 orders just trying to get it. Looking back I should have just sent Isobel to get the objective as she was part of the link team, her WIP is 1 point higher.

In the second turn my dice began to fail me a bit when my opponent used a HMG unit of his to take out few of my units, which led me to dropping the objective I had because Uxia went down. I was worried he'd take it and run away but again, having so few Orders worked against him. In my turn one of my Highlanders was able to take care of the people who were close enough to threaten the objective. The Koalas and other ARO threats stopped me from claiming the objective on right because I had nothing these that wouldn't have to waste lots of Orders getting there and only maybe survive. I was able to take the Objective in the middle though and Isobel took down the TAG with her T2 rifle. I can't recall my Classified Objectives but I was able to get both of them as well by now (I remember one of them was to FO an enemy).

At this point we should have ended the game because we hit the time limit but we were allowed to have the last turn as my opponent had very few orders left. He wasn't able to take the two Objectives from me (one next to unconscious Uxia and one held by Isobel) but he was able to take the objective on the right and hide behind a crate. In my last turn my FO SAS went down from a roof to grab the Objective from Uxia and it came own to my Volunteer being able to shoot the enemy trooper with the objective. Unfortunately that did not happen so I was unable to get the extra two Victory Points.

Photo from INA Facebook page, my deployment side was on right.

Game 2: Supremacy - Caledonia vs Shock Army of Acontecimento
Lost 3 to 6

I blame two things for loosing this game, being too cocky with Uxia and my dice deciding to fail so many of me rolls. With Uxia, I kept her as my reserve and there was a place that I have selected as my Classified Objective for Sabotage (it was a car) and my opponent deployed a Peacemaker Drone with his little flame-bot pal and a Knight of Montesa next to it but they were deployed in such a way that there was a blind spot outside of their LoF but very close to them, like literally on the other side of the car. I decided to risk it and Infiltrated there but failed the roll, so Uxia had to deploy in my DZ. Instead I should have just deploy in my half of the table and not risk the roll. During the game I wasn't able to deal with one of my opponent's snipers as me dice kept failing me which made me worried of using Uxia until the last turn where she died because I used her wrong. Instead of helping to secure the quadrant she went into open to get an objective and got shot down.

There isn't much to write about the first two turns because as I mentioned at the start of the article, I wasn't very aggressive and we both kept to two quadrants. The only interesting thing was a CC fight between Cameronian and a Knight of Montesa, we were both on 1 Wound each but I kept rolling low on hit dice and high on ARM saves. He then run in a paramedic into the combat and with B2 was able to win and kill my werewolf, which made it easier for him to put more models into that quadrant and take it from me. I had a plan of splitting my force into three groups, one for each board side and then my ARO threads and suicide units that I didn't count on to be scoring in quadrants. And it worked but the problem was I had nothing really for attacking the other two quadrants. In retrospect my opponent had a weak left flank which I could have attack with my link team and hold it down but I was just bit too cautious and didn't do that.

The table we were playing on:

From my deployment side.

Game 3: Lifeblood - Caledonia vs Ariadna
Lost 8 to 2

I was bit gutted after the second mission because I didn't think I'd have a chance to rank near the top anymore. I pretty much had to get the perfect game, and oh boy, did I! It was like the opposite of the second game, everything went right for me. I was paired against Greg from The Plastic Crack Blog which was funny as we were talking about having a game at some point, during the break before this mission. I failed the Lt roll (again) but everything else was kind of in my favour; my opponent chose deployment so I was able to have the first turn, he played Ariadna so no MSV Lv2 and he placed his HVT between my FO Infiltrators and one of my Classified was to FO his HVT. As usual, my Infiltrators deployed very close to the objectives and so I was able to score 4 of them right away. There were two on one roof which helped me as my opponent didn't deploy anyone there to stop me from checking them freely. Then my Cameronian was able to smoke his way in between buildings and run out pretty much in my opponent's DZ, which was a suicide mission but he did kill 3 of the 5 models he was able to chain rifle. One of them was a Dog-Face that changed into a Dog-Warrior. My sniper was also able to take out a HMG Kazak. The rest of my army was in a good defensive position. In his turn I believe Greg was able to check the two crates near his troops but I think my only casualty was my sniper.

Second turn was just as brutal. First I was able to take out all four crates, one by D-charges, one by Missile Launcher and another two by Isobel with her T2 rifle. Then one of my Highlanders on the very left end of table was able to put my opponent's hacker unconscious and while he was Dogged, he was able to Coup De Grace the enemy before he died, which was one of my Classified. One of my SAS sacrificed himself to get my second Classified, he did FO the HVT twice but too many AROs outside of cover. At this point I had 8 Victory Points and couldn't get any more as the last two boxes were checked already. Before end of my turn, Uxia was able to take out enemy SAS and a Doctor Kazak. My opponent couldn't do much, but he was able to destroy the last two boxes with his Auto-cannon Tank Hunter (though he died in the process) and his two Irmandinhos killed my second SAS.

The last turn was quick, my missile launcher killed one Irmandinhos and the other was taken care of by my link team HMG, then Uxia took out a Spetsnazs but died to the last model on the field, which was Veteran Kazak with HMG. This put my opponent into Retreat for his last turn as he had only the Veteran Kazak left alive.

I think what made the most difference in this game was being able to go first and the table set up. Which was really good. While there was a long line diagonally across the middle, it had lots of scatter in that line and then one half (on right) was very dense while the other was quite open. The dense side allowed me to easy walk around unopposed as I only had to drop smoke grenades in between buildings to block line of sight and even without smoke it would have been easy to Cautious Move across.

From my deployment side.