A crack at Vedic

I'm mostly playing mercenaries at the moment, but took a break from that to take Vedic for a spin. I ran a list very similar in playstyle to my Tohaa lists, but craftier and, it turns out, not as effective. To wit:

Vanilla Nomads at MOAB

This is a summary of all the playtesting I did of my vanilla nomads lists in the lead-up to the Mother of All Battles 2018 (MOAB) in Sydney. I should note that I have been trying to make a list like this work for ages. Like at least 18 months. If you go back in the blog you'll see a lot of discussion of it. It has never quite come together. That changed a bit with Tunguska. The heckler with Red Fury filled a huge hole in Nomads, namely the sweeper piece. In the past I was having to use zeros with combis to kill stuff in the late game. Now I have this much more reliable killer. The heckler with jammer and fastpanda filled another huge hole - deployable repeaters in the midfield. Together, these guys also increased the camo shell game substantially. Finally, Mary problems gives you a potent hacker with an ideal device (HD+ is wasted without REMS and AD), and she can deploy straight into the midfield to score and never drain orders. So when this rundown begins I am working with an infowar list that you can see in the second post, below.

Tunguska drops and Nomads work...kind of

So Tunguska is out. I will do a full analysis shortly. In the meantime, some quick updates to my recent post about making nomads work.

Onyx lists

Onyx has to be one of the best factions right now. They have average matchups against the other top factions (Marut with TO snipers is especially bad), but there is so much raw power in the faction. They were good before, but with Kernau they've improved dramatically.

Trying to make Nomads work

I’m a bit bored with Infinity. I’ve played just about every faction (excepting Pan-Oceania outside of military orders, and TAGs don’t really excite me) and none of them really do it for me. I can rarely sustain enthusiasm for a faction for more than 2 months. More importantly, the more point-and-click strategies seem to have the advantage at the moment. Link teams with a few good support pieces, especially defensive ones, crush it. This sort of first-order optimal strategy does not give way to more nuanced tactics that require skill to exploit effectively. The skill requirement is there in things like Hassassins, but the payoff is not. 

Tunguska speculation

White noise is going to get me to do an interview with them to dissect Tunguska when they drop. In preparation for that, I've been thinking about the sectorial a bit. Here are some thoughts on what they would need to be viable.

Druze tactics and playtesting

Alright let's dive right in. Druze have a couple of things going for them:

How to beat Tohaa

As a farewell to the artichokes (I almost never play a faction again after I've taken it to a major tournament), I thought I'd write up the stuff that scared me the most while I was running them. People say Tohaa are OP. While symbiomates are indeed broken (in the sense that they undermine some of the core mechanics of the game), the rest of Tohaa is really manageable. The reason why they seem broken to people is that the meta currently (or has been) plays right into their strengths.

Let me start an explanation by looking at things that are really scary to Tohaa

Druze for CanCon 2019

I'm taking Druze to CanCon next year. They're pretty weak in my opinion (MOD stacks are really hard to come by, and you need to use terrible units like Valerya), and require a tonne of finesse to play. I like that. Making the final with Tohaa is one thing, doing it with Druze - now that's special. However, I won't be writing pretty much anything about how to play Druze, because I like to keep my tech not just up my sleeve, but in my armpit, especially when I'm playing a faction that relies on shennanigans. I'll write occasional tactical pieces about other stuff. I do want to have one post though about how I'm going to proxy everything. This is that post.

Short story: I want to use all of the Outrage models - Emily Handelman and her gang - in part because I paid for them so I want to play with them, and in part because the Druze models are ugly.

CanCon 2018

We had the Australian Infinity Championships over the Weekend. I was one of the TOs, but also playing (see the tournament blog for heaps more info, especially on the narrative: infinitycancon2018.wordpress.com). People seem to have had a great time, which is the main thing. I also managed to make the top table for the final round despite being totally fried and sleep deprived. Adrenaline is a hell of a drug. Lost there and ended up 8th, but I'm pretty confident in my Infinity abilities now. Which is why I'm retiring! Lists and rounds below:

Camilo Potocnjak-Oxman designed the event logo and Sam Benson free-hand painted it (whhaaaaaaat?!) onto the base of this CSU, which was the prize for best sport.

CanCon Playtesting Tohaa

This is a log of all the playtesting I did for CanCon with my Tohaa. It starts from after War of the Worlds in the first week of October 2017, by which stage I feel like I had the basics of Tohaa down, and the Totally Crit Open the week after where I placed 3rd/14 running a Gorgos in a limited insertion setting (undefeated but I had a draw in a 3 round event).

That's me in the light blue shirt at CanCon 2018

Note that CanCon 2018 has the following missions in the following order: Capture and Protect, The Grid, Power Pack, Acquisition, Highly Classified. It is a spec-ops class tournament i.e. all the missions had to be drawn from the special operations variety of missions.

EDIT: I came 8/68 at CanCon (not so great), but I was on the top table for the last round (i.e. the winner wins the whole tournament), and I played Damien Stallard in round 1 (I reckon if there was a vote people would say Damien is the best player in Australia) so I like to think I know what I'm talking about.

Tournament Report: Wayland Games Christmas Bash

This is a tournament report from December that I put off posting until now because I am a competitive bastard and was paranoid about people getting intel on my lists before CanCon. I'm posting it now.