Asteroid Blues

The situation was perfect, even now in all the chaos and anarchy of the Combined Army's terror attacks the human factions were still at each others throats.

Troops of the Yu Jing State Empire were moving through the Japanese bottom "hunting for Shasvastii agents". Of course, there were Shasvastii agents at work in the Japanese Bottom, but every news outlet in the human sphere would see this as yet another legacy of The Uprising.

Legate Tiberius reviewed the situation with a cold impassion, he would crush the japanese populous in the lower sector between his forces and the advancing teams of the state empire, the human sphere did not have to know about the speculo agents he would be extracting under the cover of the carnage, painting Yu Jing as villainously as his own forces and denying them their prize at the same time.

L. TIBERIUS - M.Drone, Ikadron; anchor the right flank.

+AFFIRMATIVE+

L.TIBERIUS - Enemy forces have spread into a cordon to sweep the area, they have little rearguard. Allow them to pass the line of planters, then we will begin the operation.

3...
2...
1...

O. KO-DALI - Straffing the rear of the enemy line.

L. Maul - Tiberius, I have found the Japanese envoy below you.

L. TIBERIUS - Target eliminated, confirm the identity of the last target, then remove them. Access the civic database and forward the findings onto the infiltration teams, these humans will make fine disguises for shasvastii operatives.

L. TIBERIUS - All units, we have the target data, we have eliminated the target and we have the enemy surrounded, prepare for counterattack.

L. TIBERIUS - All units push forwards, we have what we need.

The M.drone pushed forward firing as it went and eliminating the enemies repeater bot, eventually it reached the central plaza and engaged the remaining Zhanshi, finally dropping one and driving the others into cover. Legate Tiberius peered down over the remains of the site before training his scatter laser on the car sheltering the Hac Tao, laying down a hail of suppressive laser fire. The last decoy cowered as the last unidrons flechette launcher only managed to wing it.

The remaining Yu Jing forces had been split in two, the Hac Tao advanced on Tiberius through the storm driving him back but it was too late, the shasvastii agent had been extracted, the Combined Army had struck their target and broken the brunt of the Yu Jing push, he sank back into the shadows.

The reports were already coming in about Yu Jing atrocities being committed in the Japanese bottom. The Hac Tao retreated, behind him the bar exploded hit again by the unidrons fusion cannon, worse it was drawing in more journalists, who would inevitably find the bodies of numerous Yu Jing soldiers and dead Japanese, no doubt the news tomorrow would be a shit storm.

Legate Tiberius watched as his remaining troops swept the area for remaining civilians. The fusion Cannon unidron had been given orders to simply destroy as much of this area as possible until it ran out of power in its cells. The umbra however withdrew with his prizes the speculo agent and the stolen identity data, the Aspect would be pleased.

Well this game ended up being a blood bath, Brownie didn't cover his back line well enough which I managed to exploit well with kodali, this was rather mitigated by his ability to pass armour saves on zhanshi even if his Hsien did just crumble like it was a holo-echo, so basically I traded 4 orders on a hsien and a monk when what was expected was also three zhanshi and then hopefully suppression fire in his rear line. On the opposite side of the board things went exactly as i'd hoped, the fast drone and Umbra triggered all the consoles and my datatracker/Lt then spitfired the designated target.

Brownies turn 1 was a pretty good comeback from that, using combined orders to kill kodali and using his smoke and rather full order pool to get his Hac Tao into a great offensive position, driving thje legate hacker into the line of several Zhanshi where they also overwhelmed him with weight of fire.

My second turn I mostly pushed to get rid of the hac tao who survived being peppered with a light shotgun and hid, I thought Kermit the frog would have better cover than he did and that I'd have had another order there to put some 5 man linked plasma on the hac tao but I'd miscalculated which really cost me that link.

Brownie in his turn then got his hac tao stuck into the meat of my list killing dogged unidrons, I was expecting them to do a little better if I'm honest but it's a hac tao in cover which broke my link, really i needed Ko dali to deal with him but she was a scattered selection of bits at that stage. He finally got his su jian out which had been pinned by a variety of sources, the shotgun run was brave and he was pretty unfortunate to get hit by the Missile launcher and fail all the saves, being a su jian it was still standing due to the Rem pres extra unconscious state and the triggering of NWI. I decided to stop the picture editing after the umbra spitfired it to pieces since the res of the game was the unidron missing the last decoy, the M-drone rushing forwards to kill orders (and everybody involved failing to do anything), and then brownie attempting to kill my suppression fired umbra who I'd left out as bait to stop him trying to get a console, which then just fell back. There wasn't really much to see.