The Great Download Caper

In the far future world of Battletech, only one building in the galaxy holds the complete musical archives of Australian band 'The Cat Empire'. And the company that owns it plans to erase it!

Five squads of mechs descend on the city to take the music before it's wiped. The more that each squad can collect the more valuable a resource it is for them. If other squads can be prevented from downloading then its value increases.

The stage is set for a five-player game of Alpha Strike. Each of us had 250 points of mechs and vehicles, and our objective was the cobbled square in the centre of the board.  At the end of any turn a side had at least one mech or vehicle in the square they would get 100 points. If they were the only player to have anything there then they would get 200 points. At the end of four turns, whoever had the most points would win.

Here's my stuff. I've forgotten what I had. A couple of things with Hawk on the end. Some tanks. A VTOL. The big one is an Atlas. Beyond that? Nah.

Ed and I used our speediest things to get a presence in the square on the first turn. Everyone else advanced close and moved into firing positions.

There was lots of firing. My VTOL was the first casualty. But I ended the turn with a light mech in the square, so got to download a couple of albums.

Things began to hot up in teh square. Daniel was my immediate opponent. He had a small squad of skilled mechs and some meaty tanks. The tanks went in for teh downloads and the mechs provided fire support. I just kept feeding things into the square as quickly as I could.

Some action on the other side. It's hard to tell who has what. Daniel and Craig brought their own toys, so they could be identified. But Ed, Frank and I just used Ed's models which are a mix of three colours but with all of us having units of each one. We remembered whose models were whose but it makes for confusing photos. 

Anyway, here's Ed's forces taking on Craig's stuff. I think the yellow mech in the distance is one of Frank's.

Because being in teh square was better than not being in teh square teh fighting got very up-close and personal. Craig kept forgetting that his light mechs were fire-support ones and had no short-range capability. At least twice he ran them into the rear of an enemy only to find he'd gone too close and couldn't shoot.

It was really serious in my corner of teh square. We were all shooting and frantically downloading and I don't remember how anyone else was doing but I was running out of kit.

However I stuck it out to the end.

It was obvious from the first turn that no-one was ever going to have undisputed control of teh square. And that it was unlikely that a single player would have all of their in-square assets knocked out at any point. So it boiled down to which players had had stuff there for the most turns. Ed and I drew for first place, with 400 points - our early game dropping off of fast light assets paid off there. Daniel and Frank were a turn behind us so got 300 points. Craig had lots of fun shooting people up, but seems to have forgotten the objective and scored 200 points (I think).

So it was possibly a flawed scenario, but it gave a fun game, and I think we worked out an alternative version with more scope for movement, albeit with more of an element of luck.

Thanks to Ed for setting everything up!