Thoughts from Luke Weston

Overview

Experimenting with Corregidor whilst playing unmasking whilst also testing the staying power of samurai.

So for this month’s mission I had two options of things to write about so I decided to just do an overview of both good points and bad points from 5 games I had recently. All fivegames featured higher than average armour, and over them I was able to experience the highs and the lows of higher armour units. 

Here in the UK our local area of south wales was able to organise the UKs first 3 round ITS (post national lock down) and we hosted it at Dukes gaming in Pontypool. 

Our three missions were countermeasures, firefight and supremacy and I took JSA and focused on heavy infantry link teams. 

The highlights of the three games were:

A shikami running up and dismantling a dakini link team 3 times at the beginning of each turn ( I never normally run shikami and this was SWEET)

Being able to run two harris teams both with guns and both defensively being able to take a hit and guts back into cover. A daiokai tanking 2 orders from a minuteman AP HMG and then failing guts into total cover is brilliant. 

The lowlights of the 3 games was my 2nd game of the day. 1st turn my opponent gets a repeater into range of my link team and then isolates 3 of the link team putting me into loss of lieutenant 0 risk and this happened for 2 turns as I tried to repair the link with my engineer. With great armour comes great vulnerabilities. Whilst I think he had a bit of a silver bullet for my list I should have left more stuff up to try and ARO against the remotes moving up.  

The next 2 games were with the same list for 2 different missions. Powerpack and unmasking. These games were played against spiral corps and O12 respectively. 

Against O12 I decided to keep the tags in a duo and found the efficiency of moving them both with their tactical awareness orders was fantastic. These units were essentially my only gun fighters for the entire game. One tanked around 8 armour saves from  TR bot. With the unit I also used the blitzen in reactive and even used the pilot to connect a console and discover a HVT.

• 

• 

In my power pack game I was able to push them into the mid field and put them both in suppressive locking down the consoles and controlling the entire board. One passed several AP marksman shots. My only fear was failing guts as the gekko don’t have courage. 

Post Games Analysis

With JSA I think I can’t take a 5 man samurai link without yurika oda there to help repair them when they get isolated. Losing my LT level 2 spitfires orders severely hurt my order efficiency with the daiokai. 

In my games with corregidor I think the geckos still perform best in pairs. I have played them as single units in the past and found them to be a little lacklustre. When paired up their order efficiency and resilience is very demoralising for an opponent that just didn’t have the fire power to easily take them off the board. Their only let down as a unit is being BS13, up against visual mods I found they were struggling to make hits stick above their dodging or even shooting ability.

The skew of having two tags is awesome. Against someone that isn’t prepared for them they act as a force multiplier crushing. However against someone with even a  mildly offensive repeater network (fast pandas, pitcher etc) they will easily be isolated and disregarded. 

I hope this wasn’t too wordy and rambling. I wish I had taken more time to take pictures and notes on my games but I was far too excited to be playing real games with real people in real life ha!

Luke