As I continue to be a Thorn in your side...

 o/

Yet another Thorny prospect...

As the year winds down, not all has been quiet on the Battletech front. Earlier this month, Kushial and I played a pair of Classic Battletech games on his birthday. Being bloggers the two of us, we naturally forgot to take any photos of said games. 

The first pitted my son Frankie's Fast & the Furious Alpha Strike Jade Falcons vs. Kushial's 'Yowza! Brigade'. The Falcons lasted longer than I thought they would, but ultimately could do little vs. a bunch of Rommels and Goblins and I eventualy ran up the white flag. I took out two goblins and a lone Urbie in exchange for the loss of three Clan light mechs and several elementals. 

The second game featured my new Rasalhague force (still sans Axels) vs. his ELH. This one was more of a traditional brawl with heavy losses all around. My FFR troops gave a good accounting for themselves (well, aside from the worthless LRM carrier), including a headshot from my Catapult K2 which dropped a Thug. Ultimately however my forces started to crumble towards the end leaving him two victories to savor on his drive home. 

Kicking a Flatbed truck off of the road is about as threatening as thing will likely get. 

Lastly, the aforementioned Axel tank lance and a lone Thorn FINALLY arrived after having to send an inquiry out to the Etsy seller a month after purchase. 'They'll go out tomorrow' read to me as 'they've been done, I've just been sitting on them as I've gotten more orders than I can handle.' 

Regardless they're here. The tanks look too big (Ontos sized), but the new Catalyst plastic vehicles look bigger as well, so may not be an issue in the long run. The tanks came with magnets and pre-molded holes for the same which was a nice touch. 

As for the Thorn, its not pretty, but far better than the cannon sculpt. With twin medium lasers and an LRM-5, you can expect this to be lobbing Thunder munitions down range and generally trying to avoid getting shot. I know the fluff states that thunder munitions aren't an honorable weapon, but the Fucking Wobblies are unconcerned by such niceties. 

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year folks, I'll see you again in 2024!

Free Rasalhague Republic's 3rd Drakøns

 o/

Pay no attention to the random minis in the background...

Here's another unit that I've painted here recently. Indeed, I only finished the Catapult and Hetzers earlier this week. This brings my recent Battletech paint jobs up equal to that of a company in total numbers (even if the factions within said company are diametrically opposed, mortal enemies).  

Currently, this demi-company clocks in at about 200 points for Alpha Strike, which is only 2/3 the allotment of our normal games (unless all the pilots and crews are stupidly skilled). So I ordered a lance of Axel heavy tanks off of Etsy to bring this force up to both a full company in strength & 300 points. 

Any resemblance to the modern day Leopard is purely coincidental...

I'm not sure how many points these would currently amount to in Classic Battletech, but I'm sure Kushial will give me an opportunity to find out sometime in the near future...

Clan Jade Falcon Omega Galaxy

 o/

Blinded by the light!

I painted these awhile ago and sadly didn't take photos of them when I did. Thanks now to daylight savings, its usually dark when I get home now from work. When I took these pics in my basement this evening...well, you can see just how lousy the lighting down there is. Indeed it took a lot of tweaking to make the photos not look completely dark or any more horribly washed out then they currently are.

This star is another of my son Frankie's Fast & the Fragile...Furious units. The pair of Howlers in back are the slowest mechs in this star (as is befitting of light fire support units) clocking in at a mere 14" of movement in Alpha Strike! While he likes the speed he was incredulous when he noted that his star contained a total of just 15 points of armor and structure combined!

I swear that it felt like the dopey little van on this base took as long to paint as the mech itself did!

That said, they faired quite well in their battlefield debut against Screech's...unpainted mechs. I forget what he was playing (clans of some sort I think) as it was a few weeks ago and its easy to forget when everything is bare plastic. I don't recall who won that game though my Goliath Scorpion star was almost wiped out early on as despite being more resilient. The problem with teaming up with a bunch of little speed demons like these, is that you end up being a lot easier to hit! 

Alpha Strike: Hell's Horses vs...St. Ives?

 o/

Typical.

Frankie actually stayed home with us for once this weekend. Thus, we got a game of Alpha Strike in Friday night. Looking thru my current collection of pre-existing lists, I found two which were roughly equal in points, with Frankie's being the requisite fast & the furious type of force. Points were 125-ish per side, and here's how it all went down:

The battlefield. 

The St. Ives Cheveau-Legers with 'Little Orphan Urbie' in front. The Jagermech was my CO with Hoss piloting as he always liked Jagers. 

Hell's Horses Iota Galaxy, on what their Khan was no doubt hoping would be a one-way trip.

The Stinger C & Hoss trade fire early on, inflicting 2 points apiece.

Vowing to be more aggressive this time, Frankie's locust charged up into point-blank, rear armor territory on turn two. He inflicted 3 points of damage to the Swayback, whereas the Enforcer missed the damned locust entirely!

There he goes again, doing the same amount of damage to my Vindicator, though at least the Enforcer managed to squash the little bug this time.

Hull down in the burbs.

Frankie checking lines of sight and trading long ranged fire.

The near-crippled Swayback making a glorious suicide charge into short range!

The Piranha makes it into MURDER range, fuck.

The Urbie and second, still surviving Stinger snipe at one another with minimal effect.

Meanwhile, Hoss and the Piranha took each other out. 

I really dislike the fact that in Alpha Strike you can't reverse your guns like you can in Classic.

The hellhound held the middle for most of the game. 

Flushed out of hiding, the Urbie and Stinger would also kill each other in this exchange.

I got a little annoyed at Frankie here, as he was trying to see if his Hellhound could get rear armor on my crippled Enforcer which was hugging the ruins. I told him No, and to quit being a dick, and just take the 2 points of damage to the front and win the game. 

Which he promptly did. 

In the end, the Hellhound was the last mech standing. Aside from getting annoyed with his rear armor shenanigans at the end, it was a good game. 

The myriad array of notes that Frankie adds to his lists always amuses me (which invariably includes a doodle of a dog because reasons). 

One of these is not like the others...

 o/

Here ya go, some more mechs fresh off of the panting queue:

Don't eat the green one, its not ripe yet.

The green one is a clan Baboon (AKA: Howler) painted in the colors of Clan Jade Falcon's Omega Galaxy. This is my first mini for the Falcons and will soon be joined by four more mechs for another Fast & the Furious, Frankie-styled mech star. 

I just love how all of my minis are invariably adorned in cat hair. It like its just plowed through some sort of colossal spider's web!

This Baboon, as well as another of the same in the coming batch of light clan mechs will be the slowest moving units in this new star, as is befitting of a (light) fire support mech. That said, it still will be moving at up to 14" per turn!

It doesn't look so bad when it zips past you in a blur!

Speaking of fast, next up is my Jenner which is easily the UGLIEST mech in my inventory! This mech did take out a clan omnimech in it's last game. While that sounds impressive, the mech in question was a Dasher which has barely enough armor to withstand a collision with a tree branch when moving at full speed. 

This urbie earned it's paint in that same game.

Here we see it crossing what was once runway 67 A.

This Rifleman on the other hand, ought to have been tossed into the flames of my backyard firepit given its last, stunning battlefield performance!

The Rifleman got lucky in that I was painting red mechs this week, as when it last saw the table top, it shutdown due to overheating. I was fielding it as a C model refit (which is prone to overheating) all while failing to hit most anything with the clan pulse lasers that it was mounting. It was awful.

These three bring the Combine's painted total up to 7 mechs.

Nonetheless, all I have left to paint for my (current) DCMS' Sword of Light demi-company is a recently purchased Catapult K2. Unfortunately, I'm out of the correct shade of primer for the K2 (as are the local FLGS'). 

The 100pt game experiment

 o/

Surprisingly my Javelin would survive this point blank exchange, but only to fall a turn later.

Why not right? We normally play 300 points at the FLGS, with Frankie and I splitting our force into two, 150 point halves which easily are played against one another when playing at home. That said, our 150 point home games, tend to take a bit too long for school nights (or so Mom says). We usually don't start to play until after dinner, so I trimmed the forces down to an even 100 points and starting at 6pm we finished up at about 8:30. Perfect!

Or was it?

The long range fire support units eye one another warily from a distance.

However, Frankie was less than enthused about not having a pure, speed freaks type of lance. Having not played in a good while, and only having a Wolfhound with a 12" movement and a Spider with a 16" movement, he lapsed into his noob, uber defensive mode. His lance was rounded out with a 4N Hunchback and a skill 3 Hatchetman 3F for his commander. 

While his Spider and Wolfhound went to the flanks and the Hunchback up the middle (briefly), he basically hid his Hatchetman in the back field as it was 'so slow that it was useless' (8" movement, just like the Hunchback). I tried to explain that by hanging back he was playing to my strengths, to no avail. I had two WTH-1 Whitworths, a skill 3 Blackjack BJ-1 and a fast moving 10N Javelin, making for a medium fire lance where both Whitworths halved the medium and long range modifiers. 

Urban combat, not the Whitworth's favorite place to be. 

Pointing out that only the Javelin had a greater than 8" movement on my side, and that his Hunchback was the best mech on the table, not to mention the Hatchetman's lance mates were likely screaming over comms to get into the fight did little to motivate him to bring it into range. It maybe fired 2 shots all game, and spent most of its time in hiding. 

Frankie, lamenting his poor dice rolls. 

His dice were not rolling well and effectively outnumbering him 3-4 at the outset, the end results were predictable. Not even his 6 rerolls were of much use. In the end I lost the Javelin, whereas he lost the Wolfhound and Hunchback, and the Spider was rendered weaponless.

Trying to balance out a pure, high speed lance with a more rounded one at such a low points total wouldn't be easy in my opinion. Of course he complained (every turn) that the Spider only moves at 16" a turn. I had to remind him that not every mech moves like a Mercury, not to mention I only have one Mercury in my collection. 

The final pic taken after the weaponless Spider and barely damaged Hatchetman fled the field. Frankie wanted to memorialize all of his bad rolls with a display of ones.

Note: the tanks were just terrain.

As such, I'm calling this one a bust. I'll see if I can come up with a decent 100pt speed daemon list & something to effectively oppose it. Otherwise I guess that I'll just stick with our usual 150pt lists (I don't think he has the attention span to run a full 300pt list on his own). If the games run long, we can just leave them at the end of a turn and finish up the game the next day (one of the benefits of having a gaming area at home). 

Edit: I made him a 100pt speed freak list this morning and while fast, it's damage potential is kinda meh, and its mechs are fragile as hell...

Hell's Horses Iota Galaxy Part 2...3...ish?

 o/

Honestly, I think the paint job on the Clan Demolisher came out the best of all of these. 

I finished painting up this force just in time for a game of Classic with Kushial and his favorite Eridani Light Horse this past weekend. The Clan Demolisher and Stinger C's were repaints, the Demolisher just had a generic urban camo scheme that matched nothing else and the Stingers were previously painted for The Buffet Assault Group itself. 

The light tanks are from Microworld Games and used as counts as Mithras light tanks. The actual Mithras mini looks more like a tracked and turreted farm tractor to me than a proper tank. On the tabletop the Mithras lasts about as long as a farm tractor as both died to a single volley of fire. Granted, in one case said volley was all 40 LRMs (seriously WTF?) fired from an Archer!

These three would not survive the coming battle...

I believe Kushial will be doing a more in depth overview of the game, so I just have a few pics here. This list is set up more for Alpha Strike as one of Frankie's preferred 'fast & the furious' type lists. In Classic, with all 4/5 pilots and crews save the Hellhound which had a 3/5 pilot, the above list came out to 8000 points even.

My army's MVP by a mile!

In Alpha Strike, again with all skill 4 pilots and crews, if I drop both of the Mithras tanks, the list comes out to 142 points. That leaves enough left over to boost 1 mech up to a level 3. While the Demolisher isn't fast, it is furious, having fired a dozen AC-20 rounds and hit with all but two! Only one was a cluster round and we didn't even get to that as the target had already disintegrated.

In the end the Demolisher only had a few nicks and scratches, whereas everything else still standing on the board had had the living shit kicked out of it!

Hell's Horses Iota Galaxy Piranha

 o/

This unassuming little mech is very much something to be feared!

Just a quick post to show you that the murder machine is done! In Classic Battletech I've never had much success with the Piranha. Instead its been a distraction that is notoriously time consuming to roll for, while at the same time failing to hit with most every machine gun. 

In Alpha Strike, I renamed this mech the 'Gank!' because it did just that to several of Screech's much heavier mechs.

More recently it got it's Alpha Strike debut where Screech failed to kill it before it closed to short range. In Alpha Strike, the Piranha is an absolute MURDER MACHINE! All the more so when it gets into the rear arc, potentially inflicting up to 6 points of damage per turn!

As such, this well earned paint job was long overdue. 

Celebrating a 1-shot-kill with some paint jobs!

Red Lance, standing by...

My Capellan Urbanmech 'Red Lance' is now painted in recognition of it's glorious actions in combat vs. Frankie who was fielding my Wobblies. I only have a few pics of this action which he won, though it came down to the last die roll. 

The fighting in this shot was brutal with my Urbie, Raven, and his Sentinel going down, and the Blackjack suffering crippling injuries. It should also be noted that this is on Frankie's side of the table meaning that Urbie had crossed almost the entire table!

Indeed his 'victory' was pyrrhic at best as his lone surviving Blackjack had just 1 point of structure left and a 2" rate of movement. You know it's bad when Urbanmechs are trying to run you down!

The last surviving Wobbly mech, the aforementioned Blackjack was hiding behind that ruined tower in the distance. Thus my UM-R63 sprinted (for a few turns) to try and run it down. In the final exchange of fire, my shots were off by 1 and lacking any rerolls, he won by the skin of his teeth!

Yet another Urbie entering itself into the history books!

The BEST part of the game however was when UM-R69 'Red 1' rolled a box cars to hit AND to crit killing that far-off Crab with one shot! Now I've had Urbies 1-shot-kill significantly larger enemy mechs in both Alpha Strike and Classic Battletech (the latter case was years ago in which a UM-R63 had a golden BB that took down a King Crab in 1-shot). 

The previously painted 'Blue Lance'.

As such, I painted the whole lance finishing off my Capellan Homeguard demi-company (for now). Being a Homeguard unit, tanks and infantry are sure to follow at some point.

'Red 1'  now sporting it's well earned kill marking on the autocannon's barrel. 

So many battles!

 o/

A dual to the death between two heavy recon mechs.

Well the Inner Sphere is well and truly aflame here locally, with three games of Battletech played since my last post, two of Alpha Strike and one of Classic. 

Painted up for the occasion; like any self respecting newly painted minis, they all died!

First up, Frankie and I played a civil war era game of Alpha Strike vs. Rob & his Capellans. Frankie was running mercs and I had Capellans, the St. Ives Compact. This was a fun game and our FIRST victory in Alpha Strike, huzzah! Frankie tends to write notes all over his unit roster page with all of the mech cards printed on it, and I noted when we got home that 'we won!' was written across the page, lol. 

UM-R69s providing covering fire for Frankie's advancing Mercs. 

This firefight became known as the alley of death, and decided the game. 

Later that weekend, my Whipits got their battlefield debut vs. Kushial's Davion forces. Rather than retell a story already told, you can just read his account here. 

Yeah, this about sums up that debacle.

This past Wednesday, neither Rob nor Screech were available, so instead our 300 point force split in half and Frankie and I battled each other in a 150 point game at home (after 14 months, it was the first mini game played in our new house). 

Tired after a long road march, the FWLM voted for dinner at the next Urbie Burger on the route, only to hear over coms that their Wobbly allies were pulling up at a Dunkin Davions instead. Naturally this disagreement lead to a fight to the death!

A nasty firefight this was. 

+4 to hit was no matter, my Guillotine turned the cocky little Mercury into a greasy smear.

The last two on the board, my Wolverine with one point of damage vs. Frankie's untouched Vulcan. This fast moving dual would cover several turns and about half of the board. 

In the end I got him though, the extra tonnage pulling me thru! That said, the Wolverine was down to 2 points of structure remaining and only a 5" movement rate.

I just squeaked out that one! He was kicking my ass early on taking down my battle armor squad and Scorpion mech by the end of turn two. Had Frankie had a battle lance with rerolls like I did, rather than light strikers with the speed demons SPA (+2" movement to all but the Crabs), odds are I'd have lost. Indeed, following the game he said 'I want to play this list again! I think I like fast mechs rather than the big heavy ones you usually give me, but I think I want the rerolls next time.' 

And there we have it folks. Not only is Frankie definitely hooked (speaking of, Kushial donated some more reading material for Frankie), but he's even found his preferred playstyle! This makes me a happy Dad.