Solaris VII event After Action Report

 o/

Hockey games aren't this ugly...

This past weekend was the Solaris VII multiplayer event at out FLGS and it was...alright. I got to meet prettymuch all of the local BattleTech crowd, roll some dice, bullshit with the gang, shoot stuff and of course, have my pink panther be the first mech present to die. All the usual stuff. 

Scott (center) was the primary organizer as with assistance from his buddy Barry on the left there (who's voice sounds a lot like Joe Pesci), and Wyatt to Scott's right. In the foreground you can see Ace & The Master Chief, both ready to rumble! Much to my surprise, no one had every  heard of Ace Darwin's Whipits, or had ever seen anyone with a pink Panther before. 

The whole crew going from left to right: Ian (who sounds surprisingly like my friend Charlie back in TN and is taller than even I am!), Badger (yes, that's his real life name), and again Barry & Scott. 

To the right of Scott is Joe & Chris, Wyatt seen in the 2nd photo above and Jason whom I didn't get a pic of had already left by this point)

And lastly Nick & Dylan. 

The guys who organized the event played in it as well, and given all of the work that they put into 3D printing and painting the terrain, coming up the scenario, etc., why shouldn't they? 12 players, Tech level 1, 3020s era, at least 2 mechs totaling no more than 120 tons (only Chris opted to field a light lance lead by a Crab). 

The initial set up, the blue hexes around the edges being numbered and randomly rolled for. Somehow Ian ended up all on his own on the lefthand side. 

The scenario involved a lot of automated defense turrets that really seemed to bog things down in my opinion. I get what they were aiming for, to force the players into a scrum in the middle, rather than sandbagging in the outfield. However the turrets ate up a lot of time, effectively took Dylan's Orion out of the game on turn 1 with 2 engine crits (notta good experience for a new player). Nick's guillotine took a gyro hit as well.

The Solaris VII, mechs vs turrets game begins...

So many turrets, dear god in heaven, get inside the walls!!

Also, with only Ian on the left side, once his two mechs entered the city (they had a short, straight shot inside the walls), the turrets on that side of the field spun around to attack the nearest target, leaving Nick's Guillotine on our end, and Dylan's now lone surviving Vindicator on the other to run like hell! In total, with 15-16 turrets outside the arena, 2 guarding every gate to the arena and one in the middle, that's like damned near 30! It was a bit...much. 

Yes, exactly.

Armed with a variety of weapons, varying rolls to activate, turrets surrounded by mechs were easily taken down passing out VPs to all who shot them, whereas on the other side, bereft of targets the turrets were ganging up on the few mechs unfortunate enough to be in LRM range.

Skidding at full speed into a wall is a lot of fun, so long it isn't your Wasp doing it! Luckily Ian's other mech was an Atlas. 

At this point, Ace already had no front center torso armor and Chris' Locust at the top was missing an arm or two, and that buttered Crab had seen better days as well. Chris pondered having his Locust run around inside the city, activating all of the turrets. I told him it was a good idea so long as he yelled 'LEERRRRRROY JENKINS! He said sure...why? Ugh, that...hurts...so...much (and I didn't even play Everquest)!

Once inside the city, the wall turrets started to pop-up, and start to attack WTH? When there's already a scrum in progress, who wants to get taken out by a wall turret shooting you in the back?

At this point it was about time for me to go. Originally when I signed up for this we had no plans for the day which was fine as I figured this would take forever with 24+ mechs on the field, commended by a dozen people. However a week and a half ago Frankie heard that a rodeo was in town and so we were going to that in the evening. Thus at the end of turn four, 4.5 hours into the event, my Charger alpha struck into a Blackjack, delivering a 37 points of 'laser good byes', while Ace's Panther disintegrated in the clusterfuck at the wall. Nick checked out as well, not sure if he had plans (he did mention Octoberfest) or had just had enough.

Till we meet again Mr. Blackjack...

As soon as we walked out of the shop and the door closed he turned to me and said: 'So, thoughts?' As I'm sure you can imagine  my first thought was: the turrets need to go. My other thought was to freeze the initiative for the game, or at most reroll when someone dropped out. Instead every turn we rolled for initiative. Followed by roll offs for all of the duplicate rolls, and so on and just that alone was like 10 minutes a turn wasted.  

Nick agreed. Turret combat isn't want Solaris should be about. Again, I get what they were going for but it was just too much. Nick commented that they wanted to really get into the crunchy details whereas at an event like this, streamlining things is better. 

So many thoughts...

Anyways we left, the fam and I went to the rodeo, ate fair food, and here & again I checked my phone to just see 'still going' updates, and after we got home and were chilling out a bit before going to bed, the discord notification came in that the last mech standing was declared at 10:45pm (the game started at 12:30PM), with Scott the winner. 

Hrmm...I know I wasn't there for the last 6 hours, but I always find it a little suspect when an event organizer wins his own event. Those still in attendance didn't have anything but praise, so no foul play appears to have taken place which is good. But still I can't help but wonder...

Reading back thru, this post came a bit more negative than intended. The FLGS is wanting me to help organize an upcoming Urbie Derby. So I guess my turn in the sun to be complained about is coming...

To battle once more!

 o/

That's me on the right where my grey beard is looking suspiciously like mutton chops!

Happy Labor Day folks! Wow. Its been....EIGHT months since I last posted. What the actual fuck? I had a game or two get cancelled earlier this year due to real life and all of that nonsense. Then, my beautiful wife got a job in Charleston, South Carolina. So everything got boxed up and shipped outta Tennessee to our new home. Working remotely I've been going a bit stir crazy as my only hobbying here of late has been painting 40k minis.

I took this pic one evening after about a 10 minute bike ride from my new house.

In the Charleston area, folks use discord to set up games and being an older player (damned near 50!?!) I was avoiding that but finally joined one. Honestly it looks like a rebranded AOL chatroom to me, but after asking around a bit and getting added onto a few more servers, I replied to somebody looking for a 2500 BV, 3020s era Classic BattleTech game and he accepted. 

I was going to post that this was my first miniature game outside of Tennessee in a quarter of a century. However I just remembered that we used to go to the Atlanta Gamesdays and play in tournaments, so it was more like 15ish years or so instead. Doesn't quite have the same ring to it. Moving on...

There was a temptation to just bring (5) Urbies, but I didn't want to be that guy on my introduction to the South Carolina BattleTech scene. Nick, my opponent laughed and said he'd never considered that and likely would have wanted to cuss me if I had. He brought a battlemat, 3D-printed and painted terrain as well. After we set up the terrain we created a scenario on the fly where he was attacking and I was defending (due to having an Urbie) a large storage tank in the center of the board which had 100 points of structure. 

Here's how it all went down:

The battlefield, the large dropship-looking objective in the middle. 

The Urbie trying to gain altitude for a better advantage in terms of LoS.

As usual, the first few turns were just to advance into range, though the Rifleman was already pumping rounds into the objective much to my dismay.

The Capellan Confederation's Tikonov Lancers launch their raid!

Trying to get lines of sight. The problem with 4/5 pilots across the board (both sides), is that it is hard to hit anything at range. Except of course a large, immobile (-4 to hit) structure.

I'm faster than you! To-hit modifiers kept the Spider from shooting the Wasp, but it did deliver a nice, 3 point punch to the back of the Wasp's fragile head!

Still hammering the objective, a 40K-esque close combat scrum breaks out with my Hatchetman getting into close combat for the first time!

At this point, we gave up on the scenario as the to-hit modifiers made it impossibly easy to win for the attacker. Thus the game descended into the typical 'let's just kill each other' slugfest. The Spider kept punching holes in the Wasp, but stopped when I buried the hatchet in the Wasp's SRM-2 ammo bin!

The combatants scatter, the Phoenix Hawk goes after the Urbie with my Commando (the lousy AC-2 variant) in pursuit. The Spider and Hatchetman kept on after the Rifleman.

Caught in a crossfire, the Rifleman pummels the Hatchetman and in doing so overheats badly!

The Rifleman overheats so much that his ammo cooked off! It was partially my fault as the Hatchetman's AC-10 caused 2 engine crits! That said, the (now) Hatchetlessman also failed his piloting check and hit the ground hard enough for it's pilot to take a snooze for the next 5 turns! It was practically a double kill. 

On the other side of the board, the Phoenix Hawk shot up the Urbie enough to hit the last 3 rounds of AC-10 ammo in the Urbie's bin, obliterating the little guy! 

Not sure if this was a fair fight. The Commando's medium laser arm was gone leaving in point blank range with an AC-2 that was best deployed as an instrument of blunt force trauma (if 2 points of damage can be called that). The Spider just has 2 medium lasers and like the Commando hits like a wet noodle in close combat. The Phoenixhawk on the other hand was nice and toasty, and missing a jump jet or two. 

Unable to outrun my mechs, another scrum ensued for another half a dozen rounds or so where the spider kinda flailed about uselessly in the background while the Commando did the same to the front before finally going down to a lost leg. 

That said, they held up the Phoenixhawk long enough for the Hatchetlessman to wake up, get up and run across the field to deliver a game ending AC-10 Headshot!

Well that was a lot of fun! The original scenario not so much, and when I suggested that it was going down fast enough to play two games, switching roles of attacker and defender that we opted to just shed the scenario entirely. Both sides up until that point had taken minimal to no damage, so it was akin to starting over anyways. 

My opponent Nick was a blast to play against, and I look forward to future games with him. He'll be outta town for a few weeks for work but we already have tentative plans to play upon his return. Also the FLGS' owner was all about building up the local BattleTech community, and was asking about running events. Personally I've never been involved in one of those, but I sent them a link to the Comstar site in my blog roll at right. Those guys run pub tourneys all the time in England.

So hopefully they will be running some similarly styled events in the future. Its taken me a few months in in SC, but I finally think that I'm starting to find my local gamer community! I was also asked about playing Alpha strike and gave a few pointers on that (prefaced with the fact that I am a bit rusty on those rules as well).