There's a muton under my coupon!

Last Thursday the Deadzone campaign also saw an additional game played.

It was fourth mission out of total of ten.

And it was fourth mission in row with Infiltrate goal - a duplicate of the mission where you only get points from infiltrating. Oh my.

My 70 point Strike Team was:
1x Stage 3A Ethereal General
4x various Stage 3A Muton troopers
3x Plague Hounds
1x Muton HMG Heavy Plasma with Extra Ammo
2x Plague Celatid Swarms

I only wish my mutons were as good in infiltrating in actual game as they are infiltrating into strike teams. There's one extra Stage 3A trooper there that should've been left home. But I guess all is well, for in the end that muton paid for its trespassing with its life. As did plenty of other plague models, too. Survive 7+ Plague Swarm makes every first generation infected evil masterminds cry.

Enforcers had:

1x Sergeant
1x Assault Enforcer
2-3x Enforcer
1x Enforcer Engineer
1x Recon Drone
Extra ammo?

Enforcers didn't get caught in the pictures so much that I could have easily backtracked their exact composition, but it was something like this. Their mission was kill plus infiltrate, so not that easy either.

Plague started activations, and since there was this big hill in the middle of board I thought it'd be a good idea to go hide behind of it with just about all of my troops. The hail of bullets that came down from the other side of the table was quite staggering. Most, if not all, Enforcers made a Blaze Away attack at various cubes, suppressing pretty much everyone. There's a pretty picture about it. Now, if I only had had some Steadfast cards things might have went differently.

Stuck as I was in the middle of board there was little I could do other than hope for a turn where my troops weren't distracted by snails and ants. One Stage 3A muton trooper managed to get to melee with some Enforcer, and eventually killed him. Considering my earlier achievements during this campaign, I was happy to kill one model.

Right after killing the Enforcer and taking a free move action to move into cover, the heroic muton was summarily executed.

Second picture shows very few models - but they're not dead yet, I swear! You can see the pincers of one of the swarms in the middle, as well as a tiny portion of another swarm's base!

Commander had founda grenade at this point. Oh, and one muton at the upper side of the board found another grenade earlier in the game. That grenade injured Assault Enforcer. But yeah, about the commander. He found a grenade. Yay, a grenade.

Once my HMG muton took position at a vantage point, things started to go a little better. Though the Ethereal commander managed to lob the grenade way off from it's target, finally Enforcers started to get pinned and suppressed. And I had finally drawn a Steadfast card, which enabled Plague Swarm (with Brawler skill) to start killing stuff at last.

It killed two Enforcers right away, and that only made it angrier! And first time ever I actually did infiltrate some models. But math told me that I couldn't win the mission with my objectives any longer. I was torn between abandoning mission and killing the three remaining Enforcers for points or trying to continue to infiltrate with commander (2 points) and plague swarm (3 points.)

I don't remember what the perceived threat to the commander was, but I thought that he'd never make it if swarm didn't come to help. If Swarm would have infiltrated off, commander would have had to dance to the sound of bullets by three Enforcers.

So I abandoned mission and wanted to kill the last remaining three Enforcers, and gain roughly as many points as continuing the actual mission.

That just didn't go too well. Swarm did kill the already injured Assault Enforcer, but once it got to fight the two Enforcers on top of the blue building, the 3+ attack dice just started failing. Oh well, that's not too bad. Swarm would kill them next turn, no big deal. And then we ran out of time, that is, Enforcers drew their last card from their battle deck.

I'm not entirely sure what the heck happened at my post-game resolution. The muton who hijacked my Strike Team died, of course. Such is the price of going stowaway sometimes. His buddy lost a point of shooting skill. I guess he's not going to be the sniper with a skill of 7+.

Celatid swarm that goes by the name of "bleeder" lost another point of survival skill, so that's 7+ survival with Really Tough being the only means of protection. Both Celatids gained Veteran Dice.

Then there were my beloved dogs... Spot is a rank two dog now, and Lucky and Rumpy gained their third ranks. Lucky lost a point of melee, which is kind of a bad thing for a disposable horde type melee unit... but hey, Lucky isn't complaining. Rumpy lost another point of melee, so that's a 7+ melee beast right there.

All three dogs gained a new skill. They're becoming the academics of my strike force. They're all missing their next game. Spot took AP1 skill, Lucky became a fierce Brawler, and 7+ melee skill Rumpy got Spotter. Hey, at least now Rumpy will have even some sort of function in an operation, right?

Well. Until now this is by far my best mission in the campaign. I got five reputation points and opponent six, or something. At least not full ten points. It's almost a victory.