The road to NOVA: Scenarios and List building

The NOVA Open is approaching quickly (less than two months out now) and its time to get cracking at list building along with scenario break down. I will playing with vanilla Nomads, that is what I know best and feel like the sectorials hamper Nomads in the ITS 4 format (just my opinion though.)

NOVA initially was set up to use YAMs but the community asked for a switch to ITS 4. ITS 4 is made up of 5 scenarios; Supply Run, Emergency Transmission, Seize the Beacon, Front-line and Annihilation. Each of these have three type of objectives; Main, Secondary, and Classified. I think it’s best to first understand what one would need to complete the objectives in these scenarios before moving on to list building. All of the scenarios in one form or another require the use of specialists.  Specialists, with regard to ITS 4, are models with the hacker, engineer (no G: Servant though), forward observer, chain of command, and lieutenant skills. All of the Scenarios have a 3 turn limit which leads to more aggressive play and leaves little time to flounder or wait the opponent out.

I look at these scenarios and split them into two types: Token and Durability (just coined those terms arbitrarily.)

Token type scenarios involve interaction with spots on the table, markers, etc. - Supply Run, Emergency Transmission, and Seize the Beacon. Token type scenarios all need infiltrators in my opinion or fast moving specialists, whichever your faction/army has. This scenario type invariably (for me) always generates 14-16 model lists over the more standard 10 model combat group. Nomads have ample model choice to run in these scenarios with different means of deploying them (Standard, Infiltrators, and AD of various flavors.) Supply Run and Emergency Transmission suffer from being lopsided towards the player that goes first. Seize the Beacon is mainly king of the hill on the center beacon on the last turn, so much more forgiving for certain play styles and maybe it’s even better to go 2^nd.

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Durability type scenarios involve just being able to break stuff and survive while doing it. - Front-line and Annihilation. Durability scenarios seem to make you lean towards a single combat group with fighting specialists. Nomads are mediocre in this department compared to some of the other factions. What I mean is that there are not many specialist  models that also bring an offensive punch with them.

Just to touch on list building briefly before I dive into the scenarios, I plan on building a Token List and a Durability List that can deal with most any threat presented from TAG to Horde (who is bringing 20 Pretas?!? )

 After going through the first two scenarios I am going to break the rest up into separate posts (Token and Durability.)