Alpha Strike

Last night was an Alpha Strike night at our club and, lacking anything else to play, I joined in. 

We played an attack/defence scenario, with each of teh five players controlling 150pts of mechs. Colin and I defended against three attacking lances. There were three objective counters up for grabs. 

Here's my group deployed, using buildings for cover. 

Advancing attackers. I focused on Caesar's group, whilst Colin faced both Craig and Ed. We didn't coordinate our defence very well. 

Colin's mechs. The attackers are advancing in the distance. In fact Colin got off to a great start when one of his first shots scored a critical on big enemy mech and blew it up. 

Caesar attacked piecemeal and I was able to concentrate fire on one of his smaller lead mechs. 

That too blew up. 

More worrisome was this big mech (and Atlas) that advanced straight down the centre. I managed to score a few long-range hits on it but realised I was going to have to concentrate fire on it at some stage. 

Caesar watching as a lucky critical blew up his Archer. This was providing long-range fire support.

In all we scored three Instant Kill criticals during the game. 

I had two Jenners. They weren't tough but were fairly shooty. One was on its last legs so I jumped it int teh rear of the Atlas, overheated it as much as I could to boost weapon power and scored a decent amount of damage on the behemoth. I then got destroyed, but that was going to happen no matter where I was. 

Small enemy mechs kept leaping into my area and shooting the rear of my mechs, but we kept fighting. I starting overloading weapons to score maximum damage on the advancing Atlas, hoping to prevent it from holding the objective

On the other side of the table Colin was getting overrun. I mean he was outnumbered two to one. 

We went into the last turn with Caesar's Atlas and my Awesome fighting it out on an objective. The Atlas had lost all of its armour and wasn't looking happy, but the Awesome was fairly beaten up as well.  However we'd lost the other two objectives, so the attackers won. But we made them pay.

To be honest I'm not sure a straight stand-up attack/defence worked here, as the defenders don't really get any defensive advantage. There was plenty of cover for the attackers so neitehr side had any kind of terrain advantage. The only edge either side had was that the attackers had 50% more mechs. 

But we'll work on this concept some more. Ed has some interesting toys that might make for a fascinating future game. 

IPMA Annual Show - Alpha Strike

On the Sunday of the IPMA Annual Show we put on two more games. One group ran a two-table Team Yankee game which featured Soviets and East Germans fighting Americans and west Germans. I believe each table was a separate game, but artillery and air assets could be assigned to either and the games were run simultaneously in terms of turns. 

Meanwhile Caesar and I put on a game of Alpha Strike. This was the game we tried out a week or so ago, with two forces of mechs looking to grab energy pods from a power station in the centre of the table and get them to a summoned drop-ship. Here's the power station:

And the overall table set-up. I can't remember how many points we had on each side, but I had around 14 mechs and vehicles, whilst Caesar had 16.

I didn't record a detailed blow-by-blow account of the game because (i) I was trying to remember how to play and (ii) I was very, very tired. However it was an interesting exercise in sending some mechs to grab the objectives (which would then slow them down and which also prevented them from firing whilst they collected the items) and covering them with fire from other mechs. 

Once again Daren acted as our public face, explaining the game to anyone who took an interest. However Sunday is a quieter day at the show, so he had less to do. He's reading here - not asleep. 

You can see plenty of mechs in play if you look closely. At this stage we were just approaching the power station. 

We had a lot of fun setting up the terrain. The loan of a load of small construction vehicles suggested a construction site should be a feature. 

The power station walls and guard towers suffered from the early firing, although one of my mechs simply jumped past them. You can see that we both made plenty of breaches. 

We advanced into the objective, with larger mechs providing fire support. 

The first casualty - I lost a Locust. Not unexpected. 

My right flank - two decent mechs and a heavy tank. They did a grand job whittling down Caesar's forces on that part of the battlefield. 

Later in the game and you can see the smoke and flames of destruction on several mechs. 

At this stage we worked out that the rules for evacuating the objectives via drop-ships weren't entirely all they should be and lacking the time or energy to create some new ones on the fly we called an end to the proceedings. We'd had a good day's fighting at a relaxed pace and with plenty of time to talk to observers, so the game had achieved its objective of providing something for people to look at. Something I learned a long time ago at a UK show is that a demo/display game just has to look like something's being played. If a game really is being played then that's a bonus. 

For the record, Caesar was probably winning. 

There was a lot of lovely plastic modelling on display at the show, and I contrived to photograph very little of it. 

My favourite was this dinosaur with some accompanying tick-birds. I'm a sucker for a nice bit of paleoart.

I also liked this Minmi diorama.

And who wouldn't be thrilled by a 1/35 scale Soviet T35?

I'm also an Eagle Transporter fanboy - it's the best spaceship to appear in film and TV. The perfect balance between looking cool and looking realistically functional in my opinion. 

Finally, I have no idea what was going on here, but it featured a cat, so I had to take a picture. 

Two of our club members had entries in a couple of categories and did OK - no wins but certainly some commendations.

Once again we had a successful couple of days of gaming, introduced the hobby and our club to a load of people  and had a good, if exhausting, time doing it.

Alpha Strike Test

With the Illawarra Plastic Modeller's Association annual show fast approaching, last night we ran a playtest of the Alpha Strike scenario we'll be presenting on one of the days. 

In the centre of the table is a power station. With it being on a dangerous world, it's defended by walls and gun-towers. Two groups of mechs are looking to 'salvage' parts from it before calling in drop-ships to whisk them away.

That's it. That's the scenario.

One group of mechs at the bottom, another at the top. 

Our first target was the wall. It can be jumped, but it's easier to shoot holes in it. Though not, as we found, too many, as the wall is useful cover for the mechs supporting those members of their side sent in to grab 'salvage'. 

You can see a few walls and towers have gone here. I set up my mechs to provide some fire support. 

Others rushed in to grab stuff.

I didn't take any photos after that, but there was plenty of shooting, a few mechs blew up and some salvage was collected. We had to finish before we got to the final stage of the game - calling the drop-ships. Once a side things they have enough stuff they can call for extraction, but the ships will appear on a random edge and only linger for a few turns. So the mechs with stuff have to make a run for it in order to get their loot away. 

Basically we'll test that bit on the day.

(To be fair this is a demo game, so as long as it looks pretty, dice are being rolled, pieces are moving and stuff gets destroyed no-one is going to be bothered if the scenario is a bit shaky. The scenario is just for us.)

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 the square. Daniel was my immediate opponent. He had a small squad of skilled mechs and some meaty tanks. The tanks went in for the 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 the square was better than not being in the square the 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 the 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 the 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!

Alpha Strike

We played Battletech: Alpha Strike last night. There were about 8 mechs on each side fighting over three objectives and I've already forgotten what I had. They were red and reasonably well-armed and stompy. Darren had some lighter, faster red ones. Caesar and Daniel had a similar-sized force in purple and light-blue.

Here's some opening moves.

I love Darren's little MDF houses, from a manufacturer that no longer does them.

There was lots of fire exchanged over the housing, and surprisingly few hits. Sadly my Orion in the foreground took one of them from a particularly nasty mech (Kodiak, I think) on the other side. Took lots of damage.

We'd been late starting and after a few turns of movement we were running out of time. We held one objective each and were both looking at the one in the centre for a win. Caesar jumped a mech onto it and Darren jumped a mech behind that mech. We were set up for an epic finish.

Caesar's mech held up pretty well, but was taken down by a long-range indirect shot from a mech on the other objective we held. This left Darren's Jenna in control of teh objective giving teh red guys a 2-1 win.

Most of the mechs were still up and running (a few only just, it's true). A testament to how awful everyone's shooting was.

I actually started to get a handle on some tactics in this fight, making use of cover rather than just charging in. Didn't do me a lot of good, but certainly an improvement on previous games.

Big Battletech

The thing about Battletech: Alpha Strike is that the mechs and rules are massively simplified, which enable to play with far more toys on the table. Which is how, last night, we found ourselves playing a game with three players a side and over 70 mechs on the table.

Darren put together some lovely terrain. Scattered across the table are the red mechs - some kind of corporate samurai faction. This was their light company; off-table you can see the other two companies (medium and heavy) which would come on as reinforcements.

Opposing them was a group of mercenary mechs (the beige figures entering from the foreground). They had to fight their way to some objectives on the far side of the table. Initially all that stood in their was were the red light mechs.

Frankly we (for I was part of the mercenary team) made heavy weather of them. Specifically I did, showing a spectacular inability to hit them - for example over a couple of turns I took twelve shots at one opposing mech and score two hits. In one volley I rolled 2,3,and two 4s on 2D6 as my rolls to hit. It was pathetic.

We did manage to push forward on the flanks where there weren't so many enemy mechs.

Of course the reinforcements turned up before we'd even made a significant dent in the starter. Here two of Stuart's light mechs regret their decision to push forward so rashly, although you can just see a third that's jumped into the rear of the advancing reinforcements.

I sent a lance of heavy mechs down the other flank. They weren't fast, but with no opponents to shoot at they could sprint.

A view of the centre. In the foreground my other heavy mechs continue to fail to hit anything regardless of range. In the centre our other mechs gang up on some enemy lights.

A wider view. Top left you can see my flanking force pretty much at one of teh objectives, with the Red Perils reacting to it. Enemy lights are being mobbed in the centre, but there's a lot of heavier reinforcements on the way.

Weight of numbers (as well as weight of weight) actually does its work and a lot of enemy lights are finally polished off.

But this is what we'd now have to fight through. 

It was all a bit much. And it was getting late. So we called off the attack.

It was a fun game, although we were running a lot of stuff with some very inexperienced players, so the game didn't play as quickly as we'd hoped.

Thanks to Darren for putting it all together and to everyone else for an entertaining evening and for not mocking my terrible, terrible die rolls too badly.