My partner in crime for the Joint Operation tourney was Tim from Miniature Tim. He ran his heavy infantry heavy Yu Jing and I ran remote/infowar heavy Nomads. We knew this tournament would be a serious departure from our friendly games in the local area. What we weren't expecting was the serious time crunch. It really isn't easy to place 600 points of models and move them around quickly. Cramming 600 points into 3 game rounds in an hour and a half is really rough. Especially if you aren't as experienced as many of our opponents.
The first scenario was Frontline and our classifieds were telemetry and data scan. This scenario involves moving up the board and claiming swathes. Our opponents were from the Warsenal crew and ran Pan Oceania and Morats. The game started out bad with the PanO's Bagh Mari link team blasting it's way through the center of our line. The Morats moved up the flank but really couldn't see much. While TIm and I really had a hard time moving p the board, we claimed some credit. We downed almost the whole link team from PanO as well as Kornak and a Sogarat from the Morats (and put a wound on the other sogarat. Regardless, this game did not end well. The Medchanoid ran a muck and literally doctored EVERYONE back to health. We lost the game 10-0 with no victory points.
The second scenario was Cold Sleep. This involves claiming tech coffins and linking consoles but, like Frontline, isn't scored until the end of the game. For this game we drew the classifieds, HVT: Designation and Data Scan. Our opponents were Kyle and JR from the Warsenal crew playing their Nomads and JSA. On a side note, this game was played on the awesome Antenocitis Workshop forward base terrain and that part made me absolutely giddy that I had pledged for the kickstarter. The game started out well enough with Tim and I grabbing two tech coffins and a console and taking out a couple models from the JSA group. The ultimate fight was our heavies on the roof versus their link team and an intruder pulling smoke shenanigans. Ultimately they won that fight. By the end of the game we fought hard but lost when a lucky missile strike killed a group of models about the spring onto an objective. End result? 10-1 with roughly 200ish victory points. At least we scored a point that time?
The last scenario was Quandrant Control and we played against some local Chicagoans using MRR and Combined Army. Our single classified was HVT: Designation. This game started off decent but quickly spiraled out of control. In large part this was due to our lack of our experience playing against Ariadna and knowledge of their units. The Moblot that came around the corner and killed 4 of our models, including my lieutenant, with a D.E.P. hurt us hard. Our first turn was largely spent dealing with clearing my loss of lieutenant and their Fraacta in the backfield (that only managed to kill the EVO Repeater). Later turns saw us break them down and move out to claim quadrants but by then we were pretty depleted. We did manage to get our classified but with only two turns played we only scored 1 point for equal table halves. This left the game as an overall loss but not as large as previously. Final score was 5-2.
So we ended the Joint Operations Tournament after three rounds with only 3 points to our name. Not exactly a good showing from the Gateway crowd. At the end of the day I think our lists just had too many tricks and not enough synergy. Sure my infowar could protect Tim's heavy infantry. Yes, my remotes allowed me to open up the board to my hackers. However, several of the remotes could do anything. I had 21 points tied up in remotes that couldn't actually harm the enemy other than being repeaters. I didn't have enough ways to deal with smoke. I had issues with mobility. Tons of issues I never experienced before because of my limited gameplay experiences.
I regret not taking more pictures of my opponents, the tables, and the games but, the Joint Operations tourney was positively crazy. Each side rushed like mad to complete their turns and there was precious little time to strategize, much less take pictures. Tomorrow I'll discuss the grand tournament and Thursday we'll wrap up Adepticon coverage altogether.