What if I deploy 2nd and go first….
By Luke
Overview
- Mission: highly classified, supremacy, rescue
- Forces: OSS vs cosmoflot, corregidor, ISS
- Deploy First: OSSS
- First Turn: OSSS
My lists:
List Building Strategy
When I started building these lists I planned to push the skew of holding troops back and maximizing it. In aleph this is more pronounced with the proxies unit and multiple lieutenants with the strategos skill. When I build lists for tournaments I usually start by trying to group each mission by requirements or mission type (killy or specialist based). With these missions I found that I was better separating the missions by the deployment rules. In this case rescue has an exclusion zone whilst the other two have no restrictions.
In both lists I usually start with 2 netrods and 2 flash bots. In the case of supremacy I wanted infiltrating units so I maxed out on nagas and made 2 specialists for highly classified. I added the generic proxies I wanted, the obligatory sophatect and a dakini link team. This made a fairly rounded out 16 order list.
For rescue I knew I would be limited to my deployment zone and wanted to use the marut as I had spent a lot of time sculpting some flames on it and I am very proud of it. I knew I would have to fight out of the DV so I went with the standard dakini sniper, swapped my proxies mk2 profile for the sniper profile and built an obligatory dakini link team. This time I added a deva killer hacker to maybe protect the marut from other hacking heavy armies. The plan was to have the marut and the motorized bounty hunter run up and grab the civilians once the opposition had been suitably pacified.
One unit I have been really rating and it makes both lists is the minelayer naga. It’s basically 2 mines and is a fantastic alpha unit.
If you were an omniscient, omnipotent, megalomaniacal computer program wouldn’t you want your physical representation to be a flaming beast that everyone can see, striking fear into all that oppose you?
I must apologize for the quality of the pictures. I left my phone at home and only had the very poor quality camera on my tablet.
Round 1 – Highly Classified – Kyle Katarn
My first round game was against a local player kieron. He was playing Cosmoflot. He has been playing them fairly hard lately taking a break from his usual nomads or 012 and he’s been trying to make some different lists than their usual builds.
Our classifieds were – nano-espionage, sabotage, predator, follow-up
My personal classified: data scan
My opponents classified: extreme predjudice
After winning the Lt roll I went first and held back the proxies and sophatect with their yudbot so I would be able to run up and get the easy sabotage classified.
My main deployment concern was with defending my obvious LT with a lot of units pointing backwards especially the basic dakinis. I left the naga hacker up high to tag people with spotlights and both the naga and mk2 proxy I left on the ground to gun stuff down.
I also planned on using the mk2 as an alpha strike unit to try and assassinate the only HI unit in kierons list to try and stop him from getting follow up. I succeeded with sabotage, killing the Volkolak and a few of kierons ARO units.
The game went really back and forth and I was able to get predator by punching some unconscious models whilst also trading my mk1 proxy to get nan espionage.
My takeaways with being able to keep so many units back were that after the bulk of my opponents deployment I was easily able to see routes on the table to complete classifieds whilst also deploying my mk2 to exploit a deployment weakness.
This ended up with an 8-4 win to me.
Round 2 – Supremacy – Genghis Cohen
Here I lost the Lt roll and was forced to deploy first. I chose to go first but realize that I could have probably survived a ‘big brain’ alpha strike which I was scared of. Here I held back the proxies and naga boarding shotgun so I could exploit deployment weaknesses and assassinate key units.
My opponent Jasper turtles up most of his points in a link team in the corner behind a few camo markers and a jaguar link team.
On the image below I deployed my proxy mk 5 inside the central building below the naga hacker where he could push up through the building.
My first turn went fairly well where I zoomed the naga forward and did some nasty aro bait stuff walking into base contact with the link team forcing the ARO. This allowed me to place 2 shotgun templates down over Jazz and an evader. I killed jazz and wounded the evader. I lost the naga in the process.
I then used the mk5 proxy to discover and kill a sobra hacker hiding inside the central building nullifying the hacking presence Jasper brought. I moved a few units up into the middle zones and pass turn. Jasper spends his turn moving some units around to take back the zones I have taken from his side and he brings in a tomcat to kill one or two units and score the zones on his side.
This goes back and forth for a few turns with us both scoring two zones until the last turn where Jasper levies his turn advantage and he is able to outscore one of my zones. I do a nasty trick of dodging a flash bot into ZOC of his brigada LT and isolating him which helped soften Jaspers 3rd turn.
Jasper played really well but I know I should have gone 2nd to win this one. Being able to keep the naga hacker and proxies in reserve would have been my choice in that scenario to try and slow down the alpha strike. 5-3 Loss
Round 3 – Rescue
Here I pair up against a local player again Darren. He is a bit of a black hole around our meta for being an Uber strong player. He has started taking much softer lists recently which is a mixed bag of good and bad.
He is playing ISS because they are the weakest of the Yujing factions with their limited links and pretty limited access to traditional anti-armor weapons.
He used to be a huge proponent of OSSS and vanilla Aleph, and took the marut A LOT. This was some nice payback for some of the naughty things he did to us with the marut.
So here I finally got to take my marut list and I won the Lt roll. I took the first turn again and held back the marut and proxies again. Darren held Major Lunah in reserve. I had a fairly spread deployment with the Dakini sniper commanding a major fire lane, the proxy sniper on top of a building ready to take down a TR bot and then post as an ARO. I put the proxy mk5 and marut on the right flank to head for some more readily accessible civilian targets. Darren counter deploys me with lunah fantastically. She is watching my proxy sniper whilst also watching a companding fire lane whilst my marut can’t get a shot on her. I was pretty impressed. In my first turn I used the marut pretty extensively, to go and knock down the TR bot, knock out the wuming hmg and collect a civilian to take back to my deployment zone.
Darren spends most of his first turn moving the sophatect up to revive the downed wuming whilst reviving the TR bot.
I spend the next turn using the dakini sniper to try and kill lunah. After dying twice and being revived by the proxy engineer I was able to put her down, use the proxy sniper to kill the TR bot and pass turn with my AROs up.
Darren spends the next turn trying to move out of his deployment zone but faces some pretty tough f2f rolls, losing some more of his guns.
He resigned from the game knowing he didn’t have many options and we judged what I would be able to achieve with my 3rd turn, and decided on 8-0 to me.
This game felt a bit of a white wash. The combination of proxies and strategos lieutenants is a bit strong in my opinion. Especially when you consider it can stack with the strategic command token use. It almost feels unfair.
Post Tournament Analysis
Turns out holding back a third of your army is pretty good…
This was my first big outing using OSSS and my 4th – 6th game with aleph in total but I am really beginning to see just how powerful keeping multiple units back can be. I think the held back unit has to be a certain type that can be exploited however. Such as proxies, oberfall,puppet bots, oniwaban, impersonators etc. Basically any alpha striking or scalpel unit. Or in the case of my first game, my sophatect to maximize my chances of a classified objective.
I think in the future I will try spending a command token and properly paying for the privilege of keeping 2 units back.
I ended up taking 2nd in the small tournament.
Cheers for reading