Alright Druze hivemind, I took my Druze after 11 games to Rumble, for a total of Sixteen games, 3 losses, 1 minor, 1 major victory. I'd like to ask some questions about my last loss, as it's the one that damn near made me stop playing infinity. Scenario: Capture and Protect My army: DBS (Obviously) Opponent: USAriadna. Deployment, I have first turn and first deployment, so I try and be as defensive as possible so my heavy hitters can hopefully take out any surprises. His deployment: A five man link team of shock sniper rifles and one regular rifle grunt team, two bikers, and some others, but the five man link, and thne four heavy flamethrower, inferior infiltration grunts become the star of the show and he deploys them right on the edge of my deployment line. Manages to stick 2 out of 4 I ended up tabled on my turn. How the hell do I deal with that?
Do you have your list handy? Ariadna is a tough one between the hardy troops, templates, order spam, and possible camo. When you're dealing with big groups, templates, templates, templates. HRL, missile launchers, chain colts, and spec fire grenades. For the snipers, you have to make a decision if you want to contest that lane, then once you do you have to find the most cost effective way to deal with it, which also depends on the terrain and rangebands you can get into. HMGs or the marksman rifle with x visor, depending if you can get within 40" or 32": Spoiler: Marksman rifle vs grunt sniper Druze Shock Teams - Custom Weapon vs. USAriadna Grunts - Sniper Rifle Active Player 36.19% Druze Shock Teams inflicts 1 or more wounds on USAriadna Grunts (Unconscious) 9.18% Druze Shock Teams inflicts 2 or more wounds on USAriadna Grunts (Dead) Failures 39.00% Neither player succeeds Reactive Player 24.81% USAriadna Grunts inflicts 2 or more wounds on Druze Shock Teams (Dead) Out to 40" Spoiler: HMG vs Grunt Sniper Face to Face Roll Druze Shock Teams - HMG vs. USAriadna Grunts - Sniper Rifle Active Player 59.16% Druze Shock Teams inflicts 1 or more wounds on USAriadna Grunts (Unconscious) 27.61% Druze Shock Teams inflicts 2 or more wounds on USAriadna Grunts (Dead) Failures 27.30% Neither player succeeds Reactive Player 13.53% USAriadna Grunts inflicts 2 or more wounds on Druze Shock Teams (Dead) Out to 32" The marksman rifle is better than the HMG (not enough that you should skew lists for it) beyond 32" vs a sniper, but within 32" the HMG is the ideal and dominant weapon and you should push to solve them with it. A peacemaker with an auxbot can alpha strike quickly and try to deplete the order pool if you have first, or slow down those infiltrators on the reactive turn. Not going to lie, it's a tough matchup, but every game with DBS is a puzzle that you have a lot of tools to choose. The hardest part of DBS is knowing your toolbox and utalizing it to its max capacity. Ariadna takes away half our infowar game, but you can turn around and go remote heavy and buff them up. One thing to keep in mind is that ariadna has TERRIBLE bts, so the EM grenade launcher is especially deadly. Even if you don't kill enemy troops, isolating them, breaking their fireteams, and disrupting your opponents order pool can go a long way in making his turn unproductive. Remember, you're playing to win the mission, so every choice you make should keep that in mind. Isolate/kill whatever specialists you can and make him work for that capture. Hope this helps
I wish I had a picture of the table set up, but essentially he piled his snipers ontop of a building on his deployment zone so they could see my entire deployment zone (A problem with the board, and I guess something I too would have exploited.) I wish I had access to his list, but sadly I do not. I know it consisted of, as I said, 4x Infiltrating Grunts (Shock Immune) with Heavy Flamethrowers 5x Link Team with 4x Sniper grunts with shock sniper rifle 1x Grunt with rifle (All grunts are shock immune so my Shock Marksmanship rifles were fairly useless eye-candy.) Two x Recon Bikers 1x Dozer Engineer w/traktor mule control device 1x Baggage Mule There were a couple of other models that I did not recognize Tournament List 2 ────────────────────────────────────────────────── 10 DRUZE (X Visor) Shock Marksman Rifle, Chain-colt / Viral Pistol, Knife. (0 | 27) DRUZE (X Visor) Shock Marksman Rifle, Chain-colt / Viral Pistol, Knife. (0 | 27) ARSLAN Lieutenant MULTI Rifle, Light Shotgun / Viral Pistol, Knife. (0 | 36) DRUZE Hacker (Killer Hacking Device) Combi Rifle + Pitcher, D-Charges / Viral Pistol, Knife. (0 | 25) DRUZE (X Visor) Combi Rifle + Light Grenade Launcher (E/M and Nimbus) / Viral Pistol, Knife. (0.5 | 27) DRUZE (CH: Mimetism) MULTI Sniper / Viral Pistol, Knife. (1.5 | 32) PEACEMAKER Heavy Shotgun + AUXBOT_3 / Electric Pulse. (0 | 21) AUXBOT_3 Heavy Flamethrower / Electric Pulse. (- | 4) ANACONDA HMG + Chain-colt, Panzerfaust / CCW. (2 | 64) OPERATOR Spitfire / Pistol, Knife. (- | 0) BRAWLER Engineer Rifle + Light Shotgun, D-Charges / Pistol, Knife. (0 | 20) BRAWLER Doctor (MediKit) Rifle + Light Shotgun / Pistol, Knife. (0 | 20) 4 SWC | 299 Points Open in Infinity Army I think I should've gone with my Saito/Bashi bazouk list, but I chose this one thinking that the Peacemaker could clear out a lane for either the Anaconda or the Druze fire team to collect the flag. Instead, I got punished for daring to activate anything in my deployment zone.
In my games of Rescue versus shock army and cap & protect versus Merovingians Saito pretty much won them. In each of those games he took an entire turn’s worth of orders to lay smoke cover from out of sight and go from his infiltrated position, grab the objective and Haul ass back as far as he could go. Some tables don’t allow this easily, so I was fortunate that the ones I was on had a semi covered approach.
I always like to have an infiltrator or AD up my sleeve for exactly this situation being able to shoot the infiltrating Grunts in the back is too useful. Though Bashis aren't that useful here due to AD1 and short range weapons a Hunzakut will shred the Grunts letting you bring your links to bear without getting flamed. Sounds like you were mostly a victim of bad table layout though, not much to be done about that :(
Yea, being able to draw LOF from DZ to DZ is a pretty big table construction no-no. I would say that seems like a pretty large contributor. I say this without having watched your game, so take it with a grain of salt, but the first thing that jumps out to me in your list is that it's 10 orders. On turn one against an opponent that you can't bully out of a situation, it leaves you barely any mobility to try and approach the situation a different way. Playing against Ariadna exacerbates this because their calling card is making effective trades, and all they have to do is trade up a few times before you aren't in a position to win the game anymore.
Funny thing: I had a very similar experience (wide open drop zone, enemy sniper covering it all, and Grunts up in my business) at a satellite tourney last year, but I was playing OCF. It makes for a shit experience--you're forced to spend the whole damned game doing damage control--but there's very little to be done about it except encourage your TO to be more mindful of table layout in the future. Be diplomatic if you say something though, those guys have a lot on their plate already and rely heavily on the community to provide the event tables.
The thing is, at Rumble, the tables are set up by the people who bring in the tables, the TO's really don't mess with them unless they see something stupidly wrong (A fire lane that goes through the entire table, etc, etc.) So, it's not their fault. It just sucked I was on that table, Haha.
Yep, that's the same thing I've seen at the tourneys I've played in. The buck has to stop with someone though, so TOs should do a walkthrough and check the tables before go time. Often, all it takes to fix these things is a handful of CB's card-stock shipping containers or other cheap scatter terrain. Terrain layout has a huge impact in Infinity, so it's worth making sure it's done right (in this guy's opinion).
Yeah your list also looks like it would be a lot more effective with Scarface and Cordilia instead of the Anaconda and Brawler. The Duo bonus on Scarface is a real gift that's hard to pass up on. I would be even tempted to put in Valerya on top of it even if she is only able to boost the Peacemaker in that list. The back up linkablility is pretty awesome for a list like that. And the Brawler Sniper would probably profit you a tone more against Adriana instead of the Druze one too!
Well, if the infinity community had not bought out the world's supply of Scarface and Cordelia.... Haha, Valerya's good, had a game of Power Pack before that, and she was definitely the MVP when my opponent's interventor tried to come and play, and made a Kriza's day pretty bad as well. Yeah..I was simply banking on most of my opponnets not having MSV1-2 so Mimetism and Power 16 ARO was keeping the Druze sniper in the list, but the brawler with MSV2 is growing on me.
You know, I love the new Proxy rules, but as someone who grew up in the world of WYSIWYG Warhammer tournaments all her life, I have a hard time using proxies, even when I have to for Brawlers, haha.
