Dirstside II

Geoff and I had a go at Dirtside II last night, using his 6mm sci-fi forces. My rather average troops held a spaceport, whilst Geoff's elite power-armour marines were dropping by to seize control.

I had to hold three objectives - a power-generator, the control tower and the secure-storage unit.

Geoff's marines got straight into the attack, cutting down the defenders of the control-tower.

The defenders got some reinforcement - missile tanks took out a few of the marine's light grav tanks, but suffered badly from the counter-attack.

The marines took the tower.

More reinforcements arrived, in the form of two more platoons of infantry in APCs. I held them back because the marine's had rocket launchers and were keen to shoot up any vehicles that came within range.

The final reinforcements to arrive were some meaty tanks, but they arrived too late to be of any real use. Whilst I still held two of the objectives, I couldn't see how the troops I had could really hold them, and didn't feel that the reinforcements had enough strength to make a difference.

The scenario was probably a little unbalanced, but sometimes only actual play reveals that. Troops in power-armour are pretty powerful, and really my only tactic was to try and maximise firepower and hope to get very lucky with kills, whilst my troops seemed to get cut down rather easily, bumbling around with rather lacklustre command and morale. It probably didn't help that I hadn't played the game before, and it seemed a bit fiddly in places. Geoff hadn't played in a while either, so it was a bit of a relearning exercise for him as well. At some stage we'll give Stargrunt a go, as whilst it's a different scale of combat it uses the best parts of Dirtside's mechanisms, but is a little more streamlined.

I confess I rather like the idea of doing a Portable Wargame variant of this scenario.