Rescue Mission

Mission: The Union has crippled and OGRE, Commonwealth Special Forces rush to rescue the OGRE.


Union objective: Hold off Commonwealth forces
Commonwealth: Get repair bot to OGRE, protect it for 3 turns while it uploads retrieval package.

Win conditions:  Commonwealth, recover OGRE, Union, destroy both repair bots.
Special rules:  Repair bots act as Dependents for shooting, casualties etc.  Power Armour (commonwealth) is +3 save, Carapace Armour (Union +2 save).  Union are Regs (D8), Commonwealth Vets (D10).  Commonwealth use drones, no sneak moves.

The two sides line up for the dash

Weapons team lurks forwards

More follow

The Union forces mass

PA advances on the left

SPLAT! Union weapons team goes down

 

On the right PA advances more slowly

A Union ambush team lies in wait

Err, not for long, first the interrupt

Then firing in turn means no Union fire team

On the left another weapons team advances into a covered fire position

Supporting troops advance behind

On the right more union forces advance

Including the Union commander with Standard bearer in the distance

 

Commonwealth forces advance cautiously, so far the Union commands most of the field

Ambush! Reinforcements appear behind the PA unit on the right

KAPOW! a good interrupt, looks like the PA are hit hard, knocking down two suits and destroying the accompanying droid

Uh oh, the PA respond brutally wiping out the ambush team

One Medical test later (PA suits have med suite), two PA suits stand back up

On the right the onslaught continues, the PA mow down the Union forces

The advancing Union commander must do something, the PA appears to be unstoppable

Huzzah, reinforcements

Not for long... ...ineffective firing on the PA and in return the PA are less kind

Meanwhile a repair droid reaches the OGRE

The battle space has completely changes, the PA hold the dominant position and are seemingly unstoppable and to make it worse they now have a repair droid in contact with the OGRE.  Time for the Union forces to get their mojo on

PA roll well for tech link-up, the droid starts uploading the mini-brain recovery package - this will take three turns to complete

A shiny 'Traveller' Dice denotes this

Needing to do something fast the Union squad on the far side of the OGRE begins an assault over the top

Over watching PA on RHS don't do such a good job of stopping them

Time is ticking, and no Union reinforcements, things are getting desparate

Union forces continue their assault

Which does not go so well, over watching PA guns most of them down

Game over man!  The droid uploads the recovery package and the OGRE stirs.  The Union forces are shattered beyond hope of victory, the PA is pretty much unscathed

 

  A comprehensive win for the Commonwealth forces who recover a battle-winning asset

A not so quick game, I played with vets and regs with high-tech weapons and good armour.  There was a lot of shooting and a lot of saves.  This game was strangely unsatisfying though.  While I play mostly solo I was still frustrated at the difficulty of knocking down the PA troops with relatively good reg forces.  I've been thinking about this a bit and chatted with a friend about it the other day:

I think the problem lies with the number of dice rolled.  When rolling for armour saves the target Regulars rolls all their dice, if they are one dice type up (D10 vs D8 in this case) then the large number of dice rolled (up to the max) will mean that they will almost always save a couple of shots.  Combine this with shooting always having a couple of effective shots for the same reason, means that, unless large numbers of Insurgent shots get through the Regular troops will always win by attrition.  This got me remembering talking to some of the Ambush Alley crew at Historicon; if I remember right they mentioned that this had come up in play testing Tomorrows War/FoF.  I think the solution was to impose some kind of dice limit along the lines of # effective shots = # of save rolls.  I'm going to check the AA forum and explore this further as this unbalancing with scifi kit makes me wonder if these are the right rules to be playing this kind of game.

 

On the other hand, It was great fun to pull out some old toys to play with. The Union forces are a unit I painted years ago for a campaign I played with an old friend back in NYC.  We were playing Princess Ryan's Star Marines (a fun rule set), we were kind of fighting to control Manhattan.  PRSM likes to insert from Orbit so this unit is the Bronx Drop Legion, they have Star Wars Escape pods as drop capsules and heavy carapace armour befitting their role as shock troops.  They are yellow as I just wanted to paint a bright coloured unit.  The commonwealth are NAC powered armour that I think have only been used in one other game, an aliens game at a GZG East Coast Convention. The OGRE I got years ago at a GZG ECC.  Joel Frock made some and ran a game using a bunch of them.  This one's been sitting on a shelf for a while waiting to be used in a game.  Despite this it has had some 'battle' damage as my then one-year old made a grab for it one day and it fell to the floor, bending guns and snapping laser barrels.  Fortunately I was able to get some replacement guns off Joel and bring the might OGRE back to (nearly) pristine condition. 

Kudos to anyone recognizing what spare part the Commonwealth drone is made from!

And again, photos are not ideal, the light in the basement on an evening is not so great and my old camera may not be up to the task.

A Teaser!

The Union Finally did it!  They used a massive ortillary barrage to kill a cybertank.  We think a combination of shockwave and extreme EMP overloaded the 'brain'.  Your mission, get to the tank and plug in a repair bot, upload a 'mini-brain' to enable us to recover this asset. 

Expect strong a strong Union push to the seize this cybertank...

OutBreak

The Plague came first, everyone had seen the movies of course, but the first time you see a real zombie it  really puts a scare in you.  We know now that they seeded it, some kind of alien bio-warfare, it was just too fast, too widespread to have arisen naturally.  Between rotting from the insides out and zombies tearing each other apart the plague was much less severe than in the movies,  by the time we had a handle on it the government reckoned we lost about a third of the population.  Of course it was worse in less developed nations, but by then who cared, we had enough problems in our own back yard.

So while we were all running around capping zombies they were getting in position,  their staging base ships formed up around the moon while they prepped for the landing.  The landing everyone remembers, Gateway station was nuked then the sky fell.  Rather than use nukes in the atmosphere they dropped tons of rock from orbit, smashing most major cities.  We are now told that their intent was to destroy governments to fragment the people enabling a relatively quick pacification program, boy did they ever screw up!

The aliens timing could not have been worse... ...if they had come just ten years earlier things would have been so different.  The Wars of Secession and The Troubles in Europe had thrown a spanner in the plans of big central government buildings, many Zaibatsus had either built their own enclaves or moved off plant and the war on NewEarth had really got everyone hopping, new weapons and equipment had changing the face of war.  So, the bugs dropped into a world of pain.  Spec Ops and  Clone teams rapidly destroyed beachheads and landers, the only thing the bugs could do was drop more rocks!

Once the Third Fleet returned from NewEarth the war was all but over, the Bug baseships were no match for the new EF Cruisers.  So here we are, rebuilding and moping up bugs where we can.  Oh, and the best part, we now know where they came from - they say 'revenge is a dish best served cold' it will be cold, cold as deep space can make it...

Outbreak - summer's back and the plague has been reactivated by the warmth.  A team of clones must escort a medical team to investigate and treat victims where possible.  The clones start bottom left and must exit top right.  two teams of clones plus a leader and two dependents.

   

 Traffic is too dense so the team debusses to proceed on foot

Bugs lurk in the shadows

And build a commanding ambush position

The first team sneaks along an alley

The second runs smack into the bug ambush

Blam! dead bug

And more, the whole heavy weapon team goes down

Bugs rush to ambush the second team

 

Meanwhile the second team is mopping up bugs

 The first team moves cautiously out of the alley, bugs wait for them...

Splat!  Not a good result for the bugs

Bugs swarm the second team

Next turn first teams rushes the bugs, wiping them out

Leader and dependents follow-up

Second team continues doing what they do - Bug Stomping

More bugs swarm in

First team wants in on the glory - they rush forwards

And catch a bug squad who promptly and spectacularly decide to "advance to the rear"

Clearing the way for the second team

To engage and pin the last swarm

First team advances to clear the exit route

Deftly fending off the first interrupt...

...And the second

Then administering the coup de grace

Clearing the way for the second team and the leader/medic group to exit the board

Mission accomplished - in style

Summer is always a quiet time for gaming, now its cooled down a bit its nice to start rolling some dice again.  Over the summer I saw Battle:LA, this background is a bit inspired by that plus a mash-up of other genres I want to play.

One facet of AA I've not really tried a lot is elite units, I recently played a game at a convention where I used poor Q insurgents against Spec Ops (Vet/Elite) and had a v. hard time doing anything with the insurgents as we lost almost every interrupt roll.  I wanted to try it again, and presto - the same result.

Maybe next time I'll use many more insurgents/bugs or try adding in some elites and bug tech-toys (drones/robots etc), or maybe just throw in a swarm of zombies!

P.S. there are some not so great photos here -I have to get a  better light in the basement