Horizon Wars: Zero Dark - The Heist Redux

Since my deployment failure of the last Mission, my OCD demanded I replay it. So I did.

This is now the Red Force deployment.

And this is the X Team's entry point.

The game proceeded pretty much as the previous one. Deadeye moved up and took out all opposition so Ghost could go in and do her thing. The highlight again was Deadeye taking out the Boss and 2 other bogeys with his explosive shot. 

The other was the bogeys getting close enough to enter CQB with Ghost. CQB almost guarantees one wound (at least) on either party.

Then it was a matter of hanging around, waiting for the other team members to catch up and generating complication after complication. I rolled three 10’s in a row once. It became a game of "whack a mole". A bogey would pop out seemingly out of thin air (teleportation, anyone?), Deadeye would whack him down. Then when no bogeys popped up, Ghost would do her thing. It felt... odd. Failure of mission design?

So I finished with plenty of time to spare, even with discarding 12 cards for my upgrades and picking up 3 cards for my Spook.

AAR: Following the proper Red Force deployment rules, the game now feels... odd. The Mission calls for basically a bare 1x1 patch right in the middle of the table and all bogeys and the vault door would now spawn in this small area. Hence my "whack a mole" comment. In fact, the vault door actually deployed 2" away from the original objective, losing all tension in the game. So if I play the game now with the RAW, I just need to sneak all 4 of my team close to the objective, then make a rush for it, knowing all bogeys will now spawn in this small area. 

To be fair, if I hadn’t gotten the deployment rules so completely wrong in the first place, I might not even be complaining. But now that I’ve played an alternate way, this just feels odd. Of course the deployment for this Mission is also atypical, so... let's see.

To be clear, the rules are still solid. No issue there. I guess need to finish the final mission in the campaign before making a conclusion.