Get to Da Chopper!

Yesterday I traveled into Bristol and met up with John in the Old Duke for some more Deadzone action. This time we played out a co-op mini campaign that saw our Strike Teams join forces to battle out four games against AI plague zombies.
We each picked out 150 points of troops and then started with a sub-set of that group. My 150 points of Marauders was :

Bolts
commando * 5
Grunt Bot with Flamer
Commando Specialist with Flamer
Ripper Mauler

I went with Bolts as he has armour 2 and I was working on the theory that the Plague would not be packing much armour piercing. Flamer are always handy against mob opponents so two of those looked like a good bet.

The first scenario was a 50 point each game so I started with 3 men and John who was playing the Enforcers only 2. The Enforcers aren't cheap but they pretty much all come with armour 1 so are hard to kill, their jump packs also mean they can zip around the deadzone with ease as well.
My list was Bolts & two Commandos.

We started off in the middle of the map and had to kill at least 4 zombies before we made an escape. The AI worked such that the zombies had a reasonable chance of moving after each model activated and then made towards the sound of fighting / gunfire or if they could see someone.

The scenario itself was a bit of a bloodbath my my Marauders losing both Commandos and the Enforcer leader dying as well, only two people escaped the field to raise the alarm.

The next game upped the points to 75 each but we could not field any of the troops lost in the previous game so I had Bolts, the three remaining Commandos and the Specialist with Flamer. John added a Flamer of his own, some melee chaps and a heavy burster laser. We need to uncover a marker that represented a working radio transmitter  and then escape. This game went much better and I don't think we lost anyone with our troops laying down the hurt on the zombies and one of Johns jet pack chaps managing to nip in and uncover the correct marker on the first attempt.

Game three saw our combined forces trying to make our way to a pickup zone, this allowed us to field everyone who was still alive so I added the Grunt Bot with Flamer and Ripper Mauler to my forces. We spent a lot of time in melee so having so many strong melee units helped my guys out considerably.

We split into two groups one on each wing and set about getting stuck in. By now we had a good understanding of how to use sound and motion to draw the zombies into groups that could be mass attacked and keep them from mobbing us too much.

We did get several waves of reinforcements but our combined killing power was too much and despite a few close calls we progressed nicely across the table and again I cannot recall anyone being killed.

The final scenario saw us attempting to get to a raised landing platform and then call in the rescue craft. This could be called in as long as we had at least one model on the platform and no zombies occupied it. Any models not on the platform when the rescue craft arrived would be left behind.

Johns chaps had the advantage here as their jump packs meant they could easily make it too the top of the platform with a couple of sprints onto nearby buildings (all building where brought by John who had done some excellent work on the painting and posters on them) whereas my Marauders would need to wade through the zombies to make it out.

Right, should I be off then ?

Once again the Grunt Bots and Ripper did good service with them being able to punch a lot of zombie face on the way to the platform. John as expected made it on mass to the platform ahead of my Marauders but opted not to call the e-vac until I had arrived. It was not all good news however as I lost the Commando Specialist to a zombie and another Commando was left on the ground having gotten caught up with some zombies on the way.

All in all a good way to spend the afternoon and we managed to get four games in without really hurrying at any point. There are also some scenarios in the Nexus Psi book (that had this mini-campaign in) that allow for the introduction of AI zombies into a normal pvp game, which would be very interesting.

This week on the painting table I've been working on more zombies of my own and the bases for the Pestilence section of the Four Horsemen army. I made use of some new Green Stuff World shrubbery tufts. These are pretty long but can be cut to length and then super glued to the walls. The next step is to add the zombies and other beasties onto the bases and then add some marshy water effect to complete the bases. Having completed all the normal troops for this section I have started on the monsters and Pestilence himself and some zombies for the Vanguard force.

I also took delivery of a laminator today and tried it out on some Blood & Plunder ship cards, I can see a lot of plastic covered items in my future, hurray!