What an excellent game!
Badlands was a massive learning curve for us, but I thought we aquitted ourselves extremely well. We got swamped in the first round - afterall weve never played together as a team before and it takes a while to find your feet. The second round was closer with control teetering back and forward until BiA managed to park a weightwatchers convention on cap 3 and after a full scale war over the point they had a sol and medic left to cap it. We tried to counter attack immeadiately and got owned when we should have pulled back to cap 2 and defended. A steep learning curve and we got punished for it as they capped before we had respawned. By the 3rd round we were more confident and the teamwork was starting to happen. And guess what? We started to cap points. We nailed them all as they ran to cap 3 and held it. Then we got cap 4 as well. All charged to cap 5....just as they re-capped 4 then we got caught with our whole team in their base as their scout ran through and capped points 3, 2 and after a small war over the second cap they finally snuck cap 1. And so on to round 4. And all of a sudden there was 5 of us sat on their final cap and we'd won a round in under 2 minutes. The next round went the same way with some brilliant sniper work and soldier work from octal and fury clearing house on the 3rd cap. I think the shock wore off then (or we made em mad
) and the caps over the next 2 rounds swayed back and forwards. Both rounds went to within a minute or two of the end, but in the end BiA won both. Final score on Badlands was 2 : 5 to BiA.Dustbowl - bouyed up a bit by actually having won a couple of rounds we went into Dustbowl thinking we had aquitted ourselves well so far and relaxed a bit. In short we whupped em good in the first and second rounds. We got to the third round with 18 minutes left on the clock, and then hit a brick wall. Called Jonno. After spending a good 5 minutes whaling away at the fat git we finally toppled him and managed to push through and hold the others off while we capped. Inno went all sneaky like and managed to stand on the cap for a few seconds - which pulled the all back and gave us chance to regroup and dig in at point 1. A good strong push from here saw us fight through to the final cap and actually win. Yes you heard me, we have WON a round of dustbowl. And against very good opposition too. And then it was their turn... Unfortunately for us round 1 was over in a flash. They ran out, we all died once and before we respawned they had capped. This was always my worry in round 1 as the distance between caps is so short that on a 25 second timer both points can be capped before you respawn. Still, put it behind us and move on. We got to round 2 and it all slotted into place. Hito and Octal were handing out rockets to anyone who so much as gave them a wink, innocent was in his element trying to blow a hole through the bottom of the map and the medics were hiding behind everyone with their ghostbuster guns practically overheating. And me? I was sat on the cap scratching my gut with pretty much nothing to do. And then it all went wrong....Ares connection went tits up for a good minute and he lagged out totally. We managed the minute or so with one medic and he unlagged much to everyones relief. Then he got kicked by steam. After a couple of minutes Nest from BiA went spectator (thx dude!) but with only 1 medic we had no chance at all. By teh time I had died and changed to medic it was already too late, cap 1 was gone and there were 2 medics with ubers ready and the rest of their team just flattened us. Gutted! Very impressed with how we managed to hang on in there whilst a man down and then 6 v 6. The final cap was a bit of a disaster with me having to go medic with about 30 seconds to go as ares couldnt get back in in time and therefore we only had the one uber at the start. Ares made it back in with seconds to spare, but by the time we had the team back in order they already had the first cap. We held on bravely to the final cap, but they nailed it with some 7 or so minutes to spare I think. Final score, 6 - 6 but I think we claimed a moral victory on that one (or away goals rule - havent decided yet but i wanna win something fs!). Final Score on Dustbowl - 6 : 6.
As we had got both maps out the way with time to spare we elected to play a gravelpit round. Not too many details here - Jonno owns us all sitting on cap b, i managed to get a fisting in on Nest so that was me happy, inno and I both failed to impress as demo's and I realised cap A may as well not exist because if you go there you lose B too. However, we won the first attacking round with some excellent play from hito, octal and the medics who managed to kill everyone on their team at once. The respawn timer gave us chance to dig in at B which we duly capped (inno grabbing A in the meantime), fury did a good job of nailing them as they left C trying to boot us off, then myself jason and fury sat on C trying to keep them occupied at their respawn exits while the others capped - jobs a goodun'! From there it went kinda downhill, we didnt really have a plan for gravelpit and ad-libbing only got us so far. We pushed them fairly hard and managed both cap A and B each time. We just ran out of time on the last attack and failed to cap C leaving the door open for them to squeeze a win out. Final Score on Gravelpit - 5 : 6 to BiA.
Overall score was 13 - 17 across the 3 maps. I must say I am very very proud of how we played tonight. We gave a damn good show of ourselves and I think this should go a long way to putting the KM and DA disasters out of people's minds.
The icing on the cake was BiA asking us to make the gig a regular practice for our clans. Apparently were the best theyve played by a margin. I couldn;t have asked for a better thanks for the game than that. Cheers BiA, a fantastic game and were all looking forward to playing you again next week!
Thanks to all who signed up and showed up, very well played all of you and well done for putting up with me shouting out orders at you all
![[beer]](./images/smilies/party-smiley-012.gif "beer")
.The team who played tonight are below:
PiLsY. - Fat man, exploding demo. "Generally just a loudmouth."
Hitoshura - Soldier, Scout, Demo. "Where's my medic?"
Octal - Soldier. "Bugger! Run outta rockets again!"
Innocent - Demoman, Scout, Spy. "I need a wee."
Ares - Medic. "Where's everyone gone?"
Jason - Medic. "Did we win?"
Fury - Sniper, Demo. "Shhhhh - he's huntin' wabbits..."
