Asteroid Blues

Vanilla YJ vs Morats:
Highly classified! Missions: HVT espionage, data scan, sabotage, test run.
I win the roll and opt for deployments figuring a last turn run at the objectives might not be a bad thing if i can get some early casualties.
He takes 1st turn and his reserve drop is a zerat, who goes on the half way line, is a specialist and has d-charges, within a single mov of a scenery element in my half. D’oh! I counter deploy with a ninja KHD and hope to go for a dodge engage or bog it down by making it spend orders. I use command token to deny 2 from main group.
My krakot gets dogged and TI, bounty hunter gets nanopulser.
His t1:
He goes for an impetuous smoke toss to cover off the zerat, obviously i can’t allow it so reveal with the tacbow and land the shot but takes a chain rifle instead of smoke and goes unconscious.
An amazing run of objectives get done over the next few orders with Dr Worm healing the dat for his secondary classified (experimental drug), The zerat then claims sabotage off the scenery element and data scan off the unconscious ninja before making a daring dash to do HVT: espionage and surviving the AROs.
At this point he’s done everything bar test run and only has slave bots as viable targets so they’re not getting shot! The ninja’s corpse gets chain rifled again ad is removed from play. His link fail a very long range discover on the camo marker representing Lunah.
Me T1:
Both shaolin drive up under smoke, daoying buffs ruishi and recamos with LT2 orders. Ruishi then pastes the zerat, too late to stop her amazing run.
Ruishi steps into one of the smoke bubbles and goes for the link team at long range, hoping to get slightly damaged as there is an engineers’ bot within a short skill away. of course, it flubs its roll and gets scrapped!! Test run now looking difficult as only the sensor bot and slave bot remain, both low threat.
Libertos makes a daring run to place a mine over the vanguard team’s position ready for lunah to shoot them, he inevitably goes down to ARO but mine gets placed to cover HMG suryat and Missile launcher. Lunah plays her part and gets good hits in but the morats crit their dodges, putting all the effort to waste as the mine and lunah’s shots are avoided 🙁
Group 2 fires up and the zuyong gets rolling, putting the suryat down for the first time of many this game. He gets a bead on a back-marking vanguard rifleman but it makes its save before testing to fail and gets back to cover on crit result.
As a parting pair of orders he pings a yaogat on a long corridor to my right flank and heads prone back to cover. Good work zuyong!
T2 Morat:
Dat charges forward and beats the wiebing in FTF with smoke. Dr worm keeps a-healing and gets the suryat back up for the first of many times and then heals the yaogot via pal bot, reforming both links. Yaogat sniper moves up but the zuyong wins the FTF and he saves. spending another order, he’s more successful and the DA rounds cause 4 saves, all passed! glorry to Yu-Jing and its amazing armour!
Orders are spent by back markers on mines and suppressive to no great effect on the game to round the turn out.
T2 ME:
The shaolin lead with their impetuous orders but the one on my right flank draws one too many AROs and flubs the resulting smoke dodge, going down in the process. The other remains safe in the mid-board.
The weibing drone now gets a bead on the yaogat sniper, trying to get damaged as the specops has her engineer palbot nearby but the yaogot remembers he has stun ammo loaded thanks to MULTI and doesn’t take the bait. The weibing tanks the stun rounds and returns fire with a triangulated order, the yoagat’s armour holds and the weibing goes for a change of plan. The daoying uses the LT2 to buff and recamo and then weibing proceeds to to FO him to get my secondary “Telemetry” done before gutting it with buffed and targetted shock fire.
The zuyong uses his tacaware order to kill the suryat again, putting him at the mercy of dr worm as he falls prone out of LOS. Lunah smells blood now the +3BS bonus is gone and takes out the vanguard ML with a long cross-board shot. No crit dodges this time!!
Sensing T3 is gonna be pretty pivotal I reposition the camo’d daoying more centrally, ready for a run on his HVT and any guards sent there in my final turn. The specops engineer heads into the building with a mov-mov ready for a last turn dash. The bounty hunter covers off the lane approaching the building to deter any approach.
T3 Morats:
The daturatzi comes charging into range of lunah and my kanren, chucking smoke down with his impetuous order offset weirdly so as to block off LOS from lunah to where the suryat is. The dat manages to survive the normal-roll AROs from the kanren and lunah with some excellent rolling and remains there, hulking menacingly to bleed me orders next turn (as pictured below)
With Lunah’s view now blocked, the unlinked vanguard do a co-ordinated move to deliver a paramedic to the suryat and heals him for the second time this game. He’s then pressed back into the fight and opens up on the zuyong, this time knocking him unconscious. With the way clear, the vanguards advance up leaving a nest of AROs to pick through for any daring “sabotage” runs. The Yaogat with rifle on my right flank drops into suppressive on the off-chance of a tiger turning up late-game and the kurgat gets ballsy, coming into the open on the off-chance it’d be another ARO for my engy to dodge but has his head taken off by the bounty hunter sniper.
T3 ME:
So orders are tight as i need to punch the specops a hole to get through as well as get the daoying into position to do his thing. In hindsight i should have moved them into seperate order groups with a command token but the thought didn’t enter my head until I was writing this lol!
I start off with group 2 and go with the bounty hunter. She kills the suryat (AGAIN!!) before plugging Dr worm as she repositioned. Two AROs down!
The kanren goes for a possibly-suicidal flash pulse attempt on one of the vanguard’s covering off against the spec-ops but the vanguard passes his dodge with another good roll (morat players bitch about paying for PHYS right?!?!?).
Group 1’s turn and its over to the Daoying. He uses his LT2 orders to mov-mov into hacking radius and grab “HVT:Espionage” and uses another order to ping a vanguard guarding the HVT with a datascan successfully.
I’d not been able to punch enough of a hole and had the three orders I needed for a mov-mov, mov-place d-charges and a third to detonate them remaining. There isn’t even enough breathing room on distance to chance a short skill dodge!
Hail mary it is then:
The spec ops declares exactly that order sequence, drawing several AROs but thankfully the longer range shots from my right flank go well wide and she survives the only rifle shot to hit her. Going again, its just the two unlinked vanguard rifles that can see her this time and her YJ armour holds against the one that hits, getting the charges in place. She detonates them with the final order of the game, out of LOS.
She gains 7XP to put her up to 12xp total over the course of the asteroid blues campaign.
Theres a good 50VP more kills to me, so get the moral victory even if it’s a draw on OP 🙂