I got the week off and it was time to play Alpha Strike! This would be my second game since I bought the rules last year. Troy and I both finished off new companies for the game. Neither company has been officially named yet. But mine as usual is House Liao and Troy has declared for Davion (Boo Hissssss) We decided on 450 points for the game. A meeting engagement, with an instant win if you could take out the enemy command mech. (commander secretly noted down)
Troy ran a pretty heavy company, which included 2 Banshees, 2 Awesomes, 2 Grasshoppers, a Stalker, Rifleman, Longbow, Bombardier, Catapult and Dervish all at quality 4
My Company: Battlemaster(who performed terribly most of the game), Cyclops. Cataphract, Enforcer, Catapult (co), Jagermech, Dervish, Vindicator, Whitworth, Quickdraw, Grand Dragon, Grasshopper.
To up my points all but the Enforcer were rated quality 3
So troy had more firepower but I had better shooting skills. So were he would need an '8' to hit I would need a '7'.
We rolled initiative each turn and the loser had to move a lance, then alternate. Needless to say whoever got the last move usually had a chance to exploit the situation. And of course all fire is simultaneous at the end of the turn.
We played 2 games but only did a play by play of the first game.
Game One. The Davion forces wasted no time coming across the field, except for the fire support team on the hill. After the Liao Jagermech went up in fire, the Liao support forces gave up our hill and tried to take on the advancing heavy mechs. I figured that 5 on 4 and 6 on 4 should work. Bad idea! On the Liao right the Davion Heavies tore up the Liao medium and light mechs. On the Liao left, fire support was set up by the Cyclops, Battlemaster and Cataphract, while the medium mechs danced with the Davions. But the Davion mechs were so close that I had to constantly jump so that my mechs would be harder to hit, unfortunately that made my shots harder as well.
Troy used his fire support on the hill and Awesomes/Banshees to great effect and systematically crushed all my medium mechs. Of course 3 rolls of snakeyes for crits, exploding 3 of my mechs did not help in the least.
My commander survived to flee with 2 other mechs, it was a Rout!
Game Two: Went totally different. I won initiative for the setup, so concentrated my 3 lances vs Troys 2, one of which was the fire support who had come down to play. I tried to stay at medium range and used all the cover I could to allow my better gunnery skill to take effect. Fire and withdraw, fire and hide. Concentrating one one lance at a time we cut the Davions down. In the end it was a great victory for Liao. Lesson learned.
Both games were great fun!, The first took about 2 hours and the 2nd only 1.5 hours, by the second game we had become more famliar with our mech stats.
Hoping to play the Alpha Strike campaign from the book next month.
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| 450 points of stomping power |
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| 450 points all but one mech has skill 3 |
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| Poor JagerMech blasted right off the bat |
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| Liao abandons the hill |
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| Anybody's fight still |
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| What went wrong? |
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| Very bad |
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| Called the game at this point |
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| Hold the line! Men of Liao |
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| Liao outflanking maneuver ends in disaster |
Second Game Liao Victory
