Deadzone/Firefight Slow Grow

So its been a while thanks to my inherent laziness and work getting in the way!

So in the time I’ve not been reporting back what have I been up to:

Miniature progress: Not enough! I have been trying to get the 20 lads finished that come in the Firefight box – I have 13 built now, 2 bodies are built needing arms and the remaining 5 are still fully on sprue.

My plan is get them all build then start painting them in batches of like equipped lads.

The Pathfinders have skin now but I’m not happy with them as I didn’t water the paint down enough so its just blobbed on. I’ll go back to them soon.

Games: I’ve played 3 games – 2 for the campaign and then a bonus one as we had enough time left over from our first game we squeezed in another.

The games in months 2 and 3 were both 150 pts. After playing the first game in March I was happy enough with my list/couldn’t see any obvious gaps that needed filling so I just took the following list both times:

Enforcer Sergeant with pistol and fist.

2 regular enforcers

1 flamer enforcer

1 busrt laser enforcer

1 normal pathfinder

1 sniper pathfinder

1 peacekeeper with defender shield

All coming in at 149 pts

Game the first: v Mazon Labs.

The scenario was xxxxx where the objective locations are rolled for each turn and you score 2 for being in the same cube as it at the end of the turn.

The game went well – neither of us were rolling that hot which was a shame. I did manage to take out his tentacled creature in 2 turns of shooting which was pretty good (too many limbs and the threat of physic attacks, no thank you!).

I managed to kill a lot of his 0 vp chaps, but was continually thwarted in trying to kill 1 trooper and his robot think with a burst laser on its back (or some kind of suppression). Over the course of the game he managed to kill a couple of my lads – but after the dust had settled I was on top with VPs, but not enough to call it a victory unfortunately (20 v 16).

Ok, with the team picked I went for game 1 against Forge Fathers.

I was using magnetic tile toys as terrain which was planned, and Haribo for my tokens which was not. Items were tokened courtesy of my opponent.

We chose scenario 1, the board was set up as seen below.

I won first turn thanks to my Pathfinder Sergeant’s low recon target with 2 more successes than my opponent, allowing me identifying the Intel pre game.

I then used the scout abilities to make my pregame run action for those that good, securing said intel for 2 vp’s thanks to the Hacker ability. Amazing start!

The first turn was fairly quiet, mostly both sides just manoeuvring forwards. I did manage to get onto the closest 2 vp objective tile. I managed to take a single shot on a dwarf but thanks to his leaders special ability he was able to recover his one hit easily.

Turns 2 and 3 blur into one.

I lost the pathfinder on the objective to gunfire but my burst laser chap moved along and opened up on his flamer dwarf and lit him up driving his buddy to floor beside him. In the middle, thanks to a command dice i was able to bring my sniper up and take a long action and take out his leader. His Power armoured dwarf charged my sniper who managed to survive.

Then I made my first mistake. Scouts are not good at close combat to the surprise of no one, but I decided to charge my Sergeant in to try and save the sniper – to a draw, fine. However I had a CC command dice so why wouldn’t I use it.. because my sergeant got killed that’s why!!

Anyway when the dust settled the points were still not too bad, I was still winning having lost 2 scouts and the sergeant.

In the final turn his last militia ran a hail mary run and ran top the objective and kill my burst laser chap, which was a bummer!

I managed to run my sniper our of the cube for a hit and took a shot… one hit that was removed thanks to lifeguard…. but it was ok I had shoot command dice there was hope.

I then made my second mistake – I forgot you could use the command dice to take a long shot, depriving myself of 2 dice. As it was I caused 1 wound so by law of averages if I had I might have got that illusive 2nd kill shot.

His Armoured dwarf then shot my sniper winning the game 12-10.

I was left with just one enforcer who as you play the rest of the turn before calling it fluffed his shot at the guy so then had to return to command to explain what he had seen!

So having settled on Enforcers what to do first.

Originally I had built the Peacekeepers from the starter box, but when asking on the UHH I was advised against an all out Peacekeepers team  so back to the drawingboard!

I had the Pathfinders and already had the Sniper built so Scouts to the rescue!

I needed to add a couple of enforcers to bring me up to the full points. I dropped the 5th Pathfinder but it meant I could bring a burstlaser so that seemed fun!

I have started putting paint on them. For paint scheme I made the mistake of asking my eldest showing him several possibilities both from what I did using the damaged enforcers I still had around… and then went further and showed him the paint scheme Black Jack Legacy used in his guide to Firefight (the series is well worth a watch if you haven’t), and he chose…. Black Jacks!

I’ve made a start but its early days as yet…

So, new year and a new campaign was planned at my local club, this time for Mantic’s Sci fi offerings.

Its Starts in Feb with Deadzone at 100 pts, rising to 150 for two months and then 200 for the final month.

Then in June we switch to Firefight, starting with 750, then 1000, 1250 and finally 1500.

So what faction to pick?

I picked up the Firefight box set last year as well as the Deadzone 3.0 rules.

I had the 2.0 box set – the enforcers were built and hadn’t survived the time or a house move, the pathfinders are largely still on the sprue and hopefully the DOG drone is repairable.

I also have 2 striders – although I picked one up a while ago its still untouched so could be drafted into whatever i want it to be.

Finally I have box of Enforcers command.

For the Marauders in addition to the forces in the box set i have several GW Orc minis that could be subbed in including a nicely painted dreadnaught I picked up from Ebay.

Finally I have some Dino minis from the Raygun raptor range that could be subbed into a GPSC force – after all the corporations combine various alien races so why not Dinos. I have no range appropriate vehicles though, so either they have to use std human striders and Jackals down the line.

SO I have options, but looking at trying to actually have a painted force to play with for once I think it needs to be the enforcers. I have some of these lads already built so i can move closer to applying some paint but we’ll see how that goes!