ITS mission breakdown from a TO’s perspective

This is a post from years ago that I forgot to publish. 

As a tournament organiser (TO), what I want from the mission mix at a tournament is one of two things:

1.       An extreme bias towards a particular kind of list e.g. I would set show of force, frontline and annihilation for a tournament where I wanted to see a lot of TAG and HI lists (probably running the limited insertion rule).

2.       As diverse a mission mix as possible to make list building hard even with the generous 2-list approach Corvus Belli uses. The idea here is that each mission should lend itself to a slightly different kind of list e.g. TAG, HI-link team, link team surrounded by orders and infiltrators, infiltrator spam and specialist spam.

a.       Critically for (2), you don’t want any mission to invalidate any particular kind of list. So for example, you want to avoid Biotechvore because it basically invalidates everything except HI-link team and double link team approaches. Everything else just melts, especially because of the exclusion zone.

Below, I’m going to break down how I understand each ITS mission in terms of (1) and (2) above. 

Before that though. I want to quickly make the point that CB doesn’t seem to approach ITS in the way I have described in (2), which I think is the best way. Instead, their approach seems to revolve around two things. First, they adjust the mission mix slightly each season so that a 5-round tournament slightly favours one particular build in line with whatever narrative or new book they’ve got out. For example, the 2014 season was full of things like beacon race (now extinct) that favoured specialist spam (though not necessarily infiltrating specialist because of exclusion zones). 2015 was also oriented towards high-order counts, but with the spec-ops rule in effect, Qapu Khalki had a huge edge (because of Hafzas being able to take a viral sniper and link with anyone). This season we have TAG-line and the mission mix is all about ground control, which favours HI, TAGs (the good ones) and Hassassins. The second thing CB does is include missions that invalidate certain builds or almost require specific units. For example, rescue makes multiterrain quite important, all the exclusion zone missions make factions that rely on infiltrators like Ariadna and Nomads significantly worse, and all the missions with inner area make AD fairly redundant. I find it very hard to craft tournament mixes with these missions because while they encourage diversity, they also simply neuter some factions. I don’t like that. I am hoping that season 9 includes a few more specialist and infiltrator oriented missions and maybe something that hurts link teams.

Without further ado, the missions!

Annihilation

You’ve got a classified worth 2, but this is really just about killing your opponent, or rather, not dying yourself. The best lists in Annihilation tend to be both hammers and anvils, like Phalanx, Avatars and Janissaries. The other approach I see is the hide-and-seek build where you mostly run away and hide but occasionally trade a cheap guy with a flamerthrower or boarding shotgun for something worth many more points. Hassassins are the kings of this stratagem.

Biotechvore

Similar to annihilation but having an anvil is much more difficult as it melts, and it is critical to get forward out of your DZ, which makes TAG+filler builds less effective. Double link-team builds tend to do well here (again, Phalanx), as do limited insertion HI builds. Order-spam dies a horrible death, so if you hate people running high order counts, include BTV.

Decapitation

This is basically annihilation with an especial emphasis on having a tough lieutenant. The main difference is that there are two classified objectives worth 2 points each, which means having a spread of specialists is quite important. A good choice if you want people to bring specialists but don’t want to include highly classified. This is a great mission for beginner-friendly tournaments as the loss-of-lieutenant rule does not apply, which eliminates the possibility of one-sided matches.

Show of force

This is my favourite of the ‘kill everything’ missions because it grants a rather substantial bonus to TAGs, who otherwise aren’t very good. If you don’t have a TAG it is still easy to win but not to get the big win (>5 points). There is almost no need for specialists in this mission, so link teams and huge numbers of infiltrators with boarding shotguns tend to be the other two builds that see success. These can efficiently hit the panoplies and kill stuff.

Frontline

This mission is also mostly about killing stuff, but some factions can focus more on holding appropriate quadrants at the end of the game. Hassassins is the obvious one, where impersonators can deploy directly into the relevant slices and be very hard to remove as the game goes on. TO camo can play a similar role, deploying on the 24” line and moving to the frontline with a single move-move order. Air drop can also be helpful with a 25-35 points walk on at the death. If you’re playing the murder strategy instead of this cunning hide-and-seek strategy, the typical approach is either a beefy link team that can congo-line and hold two quadrants, or a TAG plus baggage bots where the TAG goes to the frontline while the bots hold your backline.

Quadrant control, Safe Area and supremacy

These are very similar except that safe area and supremacy require a few more specialists than quadrant control. The hide-and-seek approach still works, especially as infiltrating, camouflaged specialists are ideal for holding/pressing buttons in safe area and supremacy. The beefy link approach also works quite well, as they can occupy the centre and spread out as needed to hold quadrants. One major difference though is that TAG builds are much weaker here as they struggle to hold more than one quadrant at a time.     

Deadly Dance

In its current form, this is a shit mission. So much comes down to what quadrant you get on turn 1. If the role sees your opponent only have to move into their DZ while you have to venture across the board, you’re going to have a very bad time. Until this gets fixed I won’t ever use it.

Firefight

With all that said, here are the missions that I am using at an upcoming tourney designed to test competitive players:

1. A mission oriented towards killing stuff, preferably with a bias to TAGS: Show of Force
2. A mission that forces to you take (close to) all varieties of specialist, but not necessarily spam them: Highly Classified
3. A mission that is better with a flood of specialists: tic-tac-toe
4. A mission that requires ground control, rewarding baggage, link teams and hide-and-seek style lists with a lot of infiltrators: Supremacy
5. A middle of the road mission that requires pushing buttons but can be done with a few specialists and requires plenty of killing: Cold sleep

My concerns with this mix are two-fold. First is that tic-tac-toe is actually not great for specialist spam because a tough link team can break your three-button line at the end of the game and swing the score dramatically. I would much prefer something like beacon race here, and will be looking for something better from ITS season 9.

Second, to make up for this I have included 2 missions that reward more specialist-oriented builds, namely cold sleep and supremacy. I like supremacy a lot because I think it allows a lot of different builds to function, but I would prefer to use it as the 'middle of the road mission' and include a more dedicated ground control mission in the mix.

Hopefully season 9 brings some specialist oriented missions and some tweaks to deadly dance. I would love to be able to include a 'random AF' mission as #5 instead of the all-rounder mission, but all the random missions right now have exclusion zones (rescue, BTV etc.). Fixing deadly dance to be crazy random with button pressing would help me a lot.