The Campaign for Azmodov 7: Recce Phase

The skies burned as the Chaos forces arrived over Azmodov 7, and soon the drop pods where screaming down towards the surface.  On the ground, the forces of the Pax Arcadia rushed to the hotspots, where the first wave of heretics landed and started to look for landing points for their armies...

The first scenario of the mini campaign Nemesis and me are going to be playing for Future War Commader, the Recce Phase is the first of the Colonisation scenarios in the book, and the full fluff for our little campaign can be found HERE.

We settled on 1500 points for this first game, giving us not to big a force each.  I went for mobility mostly, as my force needs to reach table edges AND return to the deployment zone for victory points as a result.

Nemesis brought a large infantry post, who where split amongst it's two HQ's, while his CO brought along the armoured support.

And so the forces deployed on the purposefully rural area table, to represent that the recce phase started in rural outskirts of the planet...

Turn 1

I had the first turn, and used my orders to race my fast units to the sides of the tables in an angled trajectory, so that I can 'tap' both table edges at the same time if needed, and go for those points first.

But the Pax had set up an ambush, and this reulted in the loss of the first squad of bikes from my force as their heavy blasters blazed away.  One of my Land Raiders responded though by taking out an infantry unit in the return fire.

Soon, a Rhino reached the table edge, netting me the first point from the game.  Could I build up a lead before the Pax points where calculated at the end of the game?

The Pax forces started to arrive on the table with their Mobile deployment, meaning the race was on to try not only to reach, but also survive the return to the DZ...

Turn 2

With the heavy units of the Pax force all concentrated at the southern edge, suppression and opportunity fire where the name of the game down there.

On the eastern edge, an infantry force also arrived and started to move towards the table centre, to coordinate with the infantry brigade that had arrived north in the previous turn.

But with two more edges now reached, I got up to 3 points of the potentially 4 points to be able to be scored from the table edges.

Turn 3

The southern battle kept raging, and the Emperor`s Children slowly started their fall back to the DZ, in order to hopefully secure that area for the points. The same happened at the other side, with the assault marines falling back to the safer position in the woods.

Nemesis then rolled a serious blunder, resulting in his CO being stuck with a -2 command penalty for the next turn as well.  Over the whole game, he blundered a staggering three times (though he did get double orders twice as well, something I neither had for both accounts).

Turn 4

Time to call in the first of my 2 Orbital Bombardements, and a pin point barrage scattered a minimal 2 cm amongst his infantry squads on the southern edge.  It caused some casualties on his force, but not as much as I liked for an 8 attack per stand barrage...

My southern force was slowly being swamped and flooded, though the Land Raider there took no less then 3 turns to take out, making save after save...

Turn 5

The second orbital strike hit home, but as it was against armoured vehicles, it did not that much effect at all.

Unfortunatly, the Land Raider on the north side got supressed by smart missile opportunity fire, or he would have rolled into the DZ and won me the game.

A squad of marines bravely tries to hold their ground against the Pax armoured might coming up...

Turn 6

The last turn, and I knew I could at best draw.  My only chance to win the game would be if I get the Land Raider back in it's DZ, but it got suppressed once again after missing all it's shots on the Smart Missile infantry.  I then went to extreme gambles by trying to jump the assault marines to the last remaining edge to grab that fourth point and draw the game, but they stranded halfway...

Ironically, the Land Raider was subsequently destroyed by low infantry fire, those armoured bastions that stood in the way of the Pax forces for the whole game now failed me.  And al chances of a draw gone as now my jump marines where out the DZ and one stand survived the Pax onslaught with a few hits remaining...

So the scenario ended, with me scoring 3 VP's for tapping three edges, while Nemesis grabbed 4: 2 for the one edge I didn't reach; and 2 for destroying double the points of his own losses.

The Pax commander radioed in to the central command, to report that the scout patrol had been contained.  But they knew that some units had reached the edges of the area, and the chance existed that signals had been send to the ship in orbit.  So would the Heretics be back?  Undoubtly, but what would they have learned, and what and when would the assault be coming from... or be targeted at.