Friday, June 17, 2011

The Ambush that never happened...

All is not well on Pizzler-4732, a small mining/pharmaceutical manufacturing planetoid.  Bonded employees are disgruntled, sabotage, insurrection and riots have happened.  Recently, a handful of bondsmen have hatched a scheme to smuggle weapons in hidden in supplies dropped by the regular cargo drone run.

The 'Suits' in corporate espionage have found out.  They have sent their corporate ninjas in to quash the rebels efforts.  

Ninja objectives: destroy guidance-dish tracking system (LHS below), destroy generator for system (top LHS), kill insurrectionists
Rebels objectives: Survive!

Cargo-port 4; a cargo drone is off-loaded and being prepped for return to orbit.


Crew doing their stuff...
Fueling the drone/systems checks

But wait, Ninjas lurk
At least they look snappy in their suits
Ready...
...And, sneak!
Or not, BLAM! dead rebel (failed interrupt)
No subtlety for the other Ninjas, recon by fire!
Blammo, more dead rebels (rebels having awful interrupt rolls)
Crew fleeing, reinforcements pour out of the buildings
Ninjas reach the guidance dish and set charges, worker drones keep working...
Terminate with extreme prejudice
And again
More reinforcements, looks bleak for the Ninjas
or perhaps not, Ninjas spin around gunning down Rebels (more rotten interrupts)

"High five, dude!"
"High five this!"
On the flank sneaky Ninjas destroy the Dish controls
Security bots rush in from their perimeter sweep

Blam! Blam!  Ninjas disable bots
"Are we done yet?"  Ninjas gun down almost all the Rebels, security bots rush to assist
Zap! Security bots pass an interrupt and laser both ninjas
Ninjas tinker with the controls for the generator but fail to disable it
Its behind you!  Bots reactivate
Not for long, in an exchange of gunfire and laser, one dead Ninja, one destroyed bot
Ninja falls back, pinned
Zap! the other bots toast the Ninja
Game over Man!
Carnage in the station, most rebels dead
Guidance station destroyed, but the generator is OK.
The result, both Ninjas dead, yet I'd say its a victory for the Corporate Espionage Division.

I tried something different here, I downsized the game, instead of fire teams I wanted to test out small teams/pairs.  The Ninjas were D10QD10 morale, the Rebels D8D8, so both were pretty good troops.  As with all tests real world dice skewed things, the Ninjas just rolled spectacularly at the beginning,  once the security bots appeared that oddly stopped.  Once the dice imbalance evened out the advantage went to the more numerous troops as the small units are fragile, but that's OK with me as it makes for more 'will they make it' tension.  

Next time I'll try less evenly matched troops, I'm thinking this approach will work for heroic critical mission type games, or even the occasional video-game inspired solo romp.

Saturday, June 11, 2011

The Genesis of the Clones

After the winding up of the war on NuEarth the Clavell Corporation released their covertly-developed clone program onto the military market.  The clones were an instant success, the mark 2 clone is a battle-proven and effective design.  Clad in the mk4 combat suit the mk2 clone is a highly effective combat unit at a reasonable price.
The success of the mk2 clone has spawned imitators, though none so far has proved as effective as the mk2.
Clavell Corps gene-engineers are not idle, a third-generation clone, the F-clones is in development.

The F-clone has been observed in action.  All performance analysis has been based on direct observation as no F-clone has been captured alive, or dead.  The F-clone is a leap in development of the mk2 clone, they have been deployed to date as special forces in support of mk2 clones.  Their combat skills are superior to mk2 clones and they appear to be more independent than mk2 clones as they act as leaders for mk2 clone operations.



F-clones wear an improved mk4 combat suit and use an improved mk3 clone-rifle.  In thier role as special forces F-clones have access to mission-specific equipment.

Frequently observed in support of F-clones and more recently in support of mk2 clones, is Clavell's new combat drone the 'Little Brother'






The recently developed 'Guncrab' has not been seen in combat yet.




The ramp-up of Clavell Corp's military arm has led to speculation that they intend to launch a contractor/mercenary division to challenge the dominance of units such as Hammer's Slammers.  Analysts consider the clone program a stepping-stone in this direction.

There are rumors of highly secretive black-ops clone.  An R-clone was mentioned in a leaked email,  All existence of such a program has been denied by the Clavell Corp.

The heads on the ArtCrime figs are from GZG, these are more like 1/87 than 1/100, but I like the optics and for characters in suits I can live with the size.  The robots are GZG as are the base of the guncrab, the upper came from the bits box, it is DP9 I think.

Two more pics, in development, a support unit for my clones:

 The Valkyrie suit from ArtCrime.