Unfortunately, life over the past 2 weeks was hell and hobbying as I know it ceased to exist during the span of it. Worse yet, just prior to the shit hitting the fan (literally, the night before...or perhaps the night prior, see? it's a bit fuzzy to me) Screech came over for a 12k point game of Battletech. However the game ought to be mentioned as it was the first time EVER (to my knowledge), that Screech fielded Inner Sphere mechs!!
This caught me by complete surprise as expecting the usual Clan Nova Cat onslaught, I'd prepared an elite, 3060s Capellan augmented assault lance. In return he was fielding all of the plastic mechs out of the new
Game of Armored Combat boxed set (and thus all with lostech weaponry and heat sinks).
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| I introduce to you a new mech: the Corvair. Which end is the front? Yeah, we don't know either... |
I don't recall what variants Screech used, but coming from the boxed set and it's record sheets, I'm assuming they were all base models, and piloted by Lyrans-his favorite of the Inner Sphere's factions. On the other hand I had an Atlas AS7-K, a stealth armored Cataphract CTF-4L, two of my own modified Awesome AWS-8Rr (adding CASE for the ammo, Artemis IV for the LRM-15s, and swapping the large laser with a large pulse laser, all coming at the expense of several superfluous heat sinks), and lastly a pair of Liao Condor hover tanks.
The following is my usual photo-dump with vague recollections that...in truth won't be much different (I guess) than my usually half-assed bat reps.
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| I rotated the map 90 degrees from our last game, which meant advancing across the table would be at a diagonal, with the hex grid instead matching the roads only in the left-to-right direction. It turned out to be difficult for maneuvering for the both of us. |
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| My augmented lance, under the name of the Blackwind lancers who's color scheme is quite similar to that of the Atlas (as it turns out, the 16th Lyran is a Republic of the Sphere era unit, necessitating a search for an earlier era unit with a similar color scheme). |
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| Our scouts initiated with a fruitless exchange of quite inaccurate medium laser fire. My Atlas however pumped a gauss round into the left torso of his Locust! The hit tore off the entire torso as well as a chunk of center torso armor. |
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| Hovertanks aside (which were running amok) my line was fairly static, whereas Screech's forces were on the advance, needing to get closer to engage with their (generally) shorter ranged weapons. |
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| It matters not at how good the pilot, or advanced the weaponry. My dice ensured that these two lights survived their close range firefight with my assault mechs. Worse yet, he scored a snake eyes to the front and rear of the Awesome on the right, resulting in 2 engine hits! |
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As I recall, this is where the Awesome literally stomped on my Condor! Surely that has to be seriously demoralizing to the crew...
Also note that Catapult up on the building, we'll come back to that soon... |
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| My Awesome is clearly quite popular with the enemy. |
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| However, in a brief round of hand to hand combat, my Awesome finished off the Wolverine, my first mech kill in quite awhile! |
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| The as yet untouched Catapult took about 20-25 points of damage this round, a gauss slug and LRMs I believe. Subsequently failing it's piloting check, it fell three levels and upon landing sustained another 20+ points of damage!! |
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| ....and following that spectacular event, we called it a night. |
In the end, as the hour was late, we called it a night and Screech ran up the white flag. The Wolverine was destroyed, the locust and Catapult crippled, and the rest all damaged in one way or another. In return my tanks both had suffered heavy armor damage though curiously neither any motive or regular criticals of any sort. The two Awesomes took a pounding, but the only internals came from the two lucky snake eyes and subsequent engine hits to the one 8Rr, though given the still numerous heats sinks, it wasn't all that hindered. The Atlas had little more than a few dings, whereas the Cataphract hadn't even been shot at as with the additional stealth added to-hit modifiers, Screech commented that 'it wasn't worth shooting at'.
I'd like to play against his Inner Sphere forces again, but with 3020s era mechs of my own, making it a true 'fair fight' rather than just relying on my bad die rolling to hold the superior equipment in check.
