Fighting on the Dock of the Bay...

I had the good fortune to pop the proverbial cherry on a brand new gaming set up at the LWGC the other week.  Notionally for Freebooters Fate it is a dockside set up with a vaguely West Indies or Mediterranean feel about it.  This was quite acceptable to our game of Anima Tactics.

Myself and Jo were to be pitted against Neil's Empire of Abel; my regular foil at the minute, and a tough nut to crack.  The first issue raised by the battlefield was the need to decide either to split our deployment either side of the dock, or to go for both sides.  As Neil could and did choose to spread out we felt obliged to follow suit, though if It'd been just down to me I'd have refused one flank and gone in heavy down the other.

Today the Black Sun Corporation had hired a large number of Wanderers from oriental lands to aid our cause.  Not strictly within our permitted list builds, but it meant we could up the game to 400 levels, a big fight in Anima Tactics terms, with both sides fielding nine models each!  Gosh.

One of Neils was an initially daunting looking suit of armour, Macbeth, and at 75 levels potentially fearsome.  Here you can see it striding towards the oriental contingent on the right.

First I unleashed the Clover killer move - Prometheum.  However, if I'm honest, I did so too early.  Although he took two minor opponents out the fight straight away, one permanently, he then got embroiled whilst vulnerable.  Sophia was just (by less than a quarter inch) out of range to buff him back to safety, which left him to get hacked down.  Must remember more restrain in future, get the Type 005's busy in combat first so that the enemy can't just jump all over Clover when he goes in.

Fortunately Neil needed to consider the same problems with Macbeth.

Our martial artists threw him around; unable to dodge as he was making him and easy to hit, if tough, target.  His 28 life points (10-12 is average) drained away to a succession of attacks from all three characters around him.  Soon he was done for, but we had ignored a little girl with a very big hammer in doing so...

Erika turned out to have a deadly attack with a 2 inch range, which neatly took out all three of our warriors.  Damnation!  With no reserves available, it was the unlikely task of the usual suspects to hold up against the combat monster that is Neil's core Empire force.

Despite the Type 005's putting in more of a fight than normal, and Promethea surviving combat with Samiel*  It was clear the gig was up, and so whilst the last Type 005 kept the gang busy, the surviving girls, as usual scarpered.

Lovely scenery, a big game, and some learning points.  Tsubasa will from now on be close to Clovers side.  Clover needs to wait until the Type 005's are in combat, and the girls back the whole show up.  With that in mind we might just break the hegemony of the Empire!  

The game attracted a lot of attention, and not just for the new scenery, so I hope to see a couple more opponents coming up in future. 

*Incidentally, there is an annoying tendency in AT to have characters or attributes with very similar names; it makes clarity in some of these reports difficult to preserve!