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[Hanzoku]

Interesting to see this back in the air!

I can say that StratCon can be fun, but unlike regular MegaMek rules, you are heavily, heavily punished for having elite pilots and assault-weight lances. Or worse, both.

Generating scenarios based on your lance BV rather than by random roll based on a table that adjusts by lance's weight means you never get easy missions - and because the lance used to generate the hostile BV isn't necessarily the Lance assigned to the mission, your light, low BV lance might run into 30k+ enemy BV because they rolled forces based on your elite, assault weight lance.

What made me give up on it was one of the special missions rolled, where you needed to deal with enemy rioters composed largely of infantry with some IndustrialMechs mixed in. And an enemy force. And enemy reinforcements. And enemy aerospace forces. Did I mention the rioters were 108 units strong, with a reinforced battalion worth of enemy 'Mechs on the field versus my company (because I got lucky with reinforcements) and an allied lance?

Slogging through that mission took me about 12 hours of play time across three days, and it was only doable because the mission parameters were inhospitable to infantry, so they all got wiped from the board on turn one. But a 40 on 16 fight was a slog and a half on its own.

[Fishbreath]

Interesting—I didn't run into anything that felt unfair, even with three high-BV lances. (Drake and Co., obviously; Rook's lance is pretty up there, and wherever Simona and the Stormcrow go gets pretty ridiculous too, what with the ultra-elite pilot and the Ultra AC/20.)

I have the battle generation settings cranked down to 'very easy', since I don't have the chops to beat Princess without heavy losses on roughly even ground, and I think that bears on when the StratCon generator stops adding OPFOR. Most of the fights I've seen have felt pretty balanced.

[Fishbreath]

Early November, late November... what's a few weeks among friends?

After fixing a bug that prevented manually creating an Against-the-Bot StratCon contract for Part 2 of the Ares operation, I got down to a bit of writing...

Readying Our Forces
The more reflective Bastards might muse on the irony of waging war on the world where the Ares Conventions were signed. The historically inclined ones might shrug, and note that the Bastards are assigned to the assault on Ausapolis (a manufacturing hub), rather than New Olympia (the capital, where the Conventions were signed back in the day).

Having secured a landing point and ushered in some of the main body to take over security, the Bastards get two days of not-exactly-downtime, while the techs patch up the mechs, the doctors patch up our wounded, and everyone pitches in to unload all the cargo the Davions schlepped groundside for us.

Organization
Drake slings some crates too, but also spends some time with pen and paper musing over the Bastards' organization, and in particular, the notion of lance roles. With a bit of rejiggering, each of the existing lances falls into a clear role.

Drake's Destroyers and Rook's Raiders are classic fire lances: largely mechs that can deliver a punch from well beyond the range most opponents can return it, along with a bodyguard or two to keep harassing units away. Drake's Destroyers center around Drake's Awesome, with Pepper's Archer providing backup long-range firepower, and Euchre and Woad swinging between additional power at range (with ER Large Lasers), and close-in protection (Woad in particular). Rook, with ER Large Lasers and Artemis LRM-15 launchers in her Stalker, provides most of the long-range firepower in her lance, although all her lancemates except Carcer in the Flashman can contribute at nearly the same distances.

Fourth Lance and Bear's Bruisers are classic battle lances, heavily armored and generally armed to do best at medium range and in. Although Drake is probably the scariest single combatant among the Bastards, the Bruisers are probably the scariest lance: the Emperor and Crockett, both relatively mobile assault mechs (3/5/3 movement), can hit hard at range with LB10-X autocannon solid shot, then switch to cluster shot to scour away internals. Teddy Bear's Vulcan may not be the newest or shiniest mech on the field, but he pilots it with daring and extracts the very most from it. Fourth Lance has Double Dog's Warhammer and Khad's Thunderbolt to anchor it, with two light mechs (a Raven and Severe's Koshi) to harass enemies who focus too hard on the heavies.

Finally, Ortega's Outriders and Sixth Lance play different instruments in the Fast Lance band. The Outriders are more purely scouts, with smaller, lighter mechs, more jump jets, and fewer weapons. Sixth Lance plays the role of cavalry lance: the Trebuchet 5S and the Ryoken hit like trucks without slowing down, supported by a Dragon and a Phoenix Hawk.

That suggests some good pairings: a battle lance and a fire lance, one to soak up damage and the other to dish it out; or a scout lance and battle lance, one to distract, and the other to destroy.

It also suggests a small tweak to the order of battle: Drake crosses out the 'Flashman' next to Carcer's name, and pencils in War Dog. Captured during the battle at the airfield, the techs have whipped it back into shape in record time. It ships a Gauss rifle as its primary weapon, backed up by a large pulse laser and a pair of medium pulse lasers to ward off any fast mechs getting too close. The accuracy bonus inherent to pulse lasers helps to offset the smaller absolute number of secondary weapons.

Planning
In the nearer term, the Bastards have a planet to capture, and we'll come to that momentarily. Looking further ahead, I see three things approaching on the horizon.

First: expanding the unit to a full battalion, three full companies. We already have the units to do so sitting in mothballs: 14 mechs, including two Awesomes, a Marauder, a Quickdraw, an Archer, the Flashman, a bunch of random Phoenix Hawks, and more. The limiting factors now are pilots and time, the latter required both to find pilots and to bring them up to the lofty standards the Bastards have set.

The full mech roster. Yellow means 'unrepaired damage', dark purple means 'unassigned', light purple means 'mothballed', blue is 'refitting'.

Second, kind of an add-on to the first: refitting our massive array of Phoenix Hawks. We're up to six, split evenly between the stock PXH-1 and the upgraded PXH-1Kk. I propose we standardize on a PXH-1OB: the same 6/9/6 movement profile as the PXH-1, with the armament of the PXH-1Kk (an ER Large Laser, plus two medium pulse lasers, and possibly a small laser), and ferro-fibrous armor to bring the weight back into the realm of possibility. I find that I really like the armament fit on the -1Kk, but losing the jump jets makes them a lot less flexible tactically than the -1.

Third, and longest-term: locating a gently-used Mule (or not-so-gently, maybe, if the price is right), and finding a shipyard somewhere in Davion space that can refit it for us, into a home away from home suited to carrying three dozen mechs, their support personnel, and enough cargo to keep them in the fight.

Planning (Sooner)
This is the contract:



The terms are good: independent command gives us very broad latitude to pursue our mandate ('capture enemy facilities in support of the invasion, beat down Capellan resistance along the way') as we see fit, high battle loss compensation means we can be relatively aggressive without a lot of financial risk, and continued access to the Davion logistics train means we can actually replace a lot of the LosTech/recently-FoundTech parts our newer mechs use.

I elected to bump two of the enemy characteristics down by 2: the Capellans are at Regular skill and Advancing (i.e., high) morale, but their equipment remains at the A level, which ought to be good for salvage.

This is StratCon.



Or at least, this is the main StratCon interface. A pair of these hex grids represent Ares. This is the first; the second is only 5x5 instead of 8x8 like this one. In the right-hand pane, there are a few things to note. First up: campaign victory points, the measure of success for most contracts, but not for ours. With Independent command rights, we are only responsible for completing the strategic objectives before the contract expires.

Next is support points, which are most readily spent to deploy extra lances to reinforce a battle. (We can burn a VP to do the same, or send a lance with the Fight role directly at the cost of potential negative effects during the battle, or deploy multiple lances to the same place on the grid.) Support points can also be converted to bonus parts, which let us bypass procurement restrictions. An example would be a crit to one of Drake's Clan ER PPCs—by burning a bonus part, we can convince our employers to part with something extraordinary, although we'll still pay through the nose for it. (By GM fiat, if nothing else.)

Finally is deployment period: the number of days it takes for a lance to go to and return from a hex on the map. Sending units to Sector 1, which has a 2-day deployment time, will remove them from the list of available units until they return after two days.

Deployment is particularly important, for an independent command such as our own: we have a list of objectives, and we have to find them to complete them. Finding them is best done by deploying lances in the Scout role, since they'll reveal one hex, plus the six hexes surrounding it.



For completeness, here's Sector 1. (Because programmers, the sector in the previous screenshot is Sector 0.) The full map in both sectors is grayed out because it hasn't been scouted yet, but you can more or less see the underlying terrain anyway. Hexes 0000 to 0002 and 0004 are swamp. 0100, 0201, and 0301 are urban areas. 0101 and 0403 are hills. 0303 is savannah. 0204 is badlands. 0203 is mountain. 0202, 0401, 0302, and 0402 are different kinds of sea. 0200 is forest.

I think that covers all the types of terrain in Sector 0, as well, except for desert (0504, 0505, and the like).

TO&E, MechWarrior Claims, Mech Assignments
The rejiggering from above mostly happens in Assault Company—bringing Khad and Double Dog into the same lance to give it a heavy core, moving bin Ala' al din to Rook's Raiders for more LRMs, and gathering the faster mechs in Sixth Lance, under the just-promoted Sergeant Faceplant Farooqi.

• Advance Company
  
  • Drake's Destroyers (Fire Lance)
    
    • Major Huri "Drake" Halit (Mephansteras) - Awesome AWS-DRAKE
    • Cpl. Ferdinand "Woad" Kohler (A Thing) - Grasshopper GHR-5KOB
    • Pvt. Jan "Euchre" Kojic (EuchreJack) - Lancelot LNC25-0B
    • Pvt. Abdul-Hafiz "Pepper" Popalzi (mrkilla22) - Archer ARC-2K
    
    
  • Ortega's Outriders (Scout Lance)
    
    • Lt. JG Jose "Milspec" Ortega (milspec) - Crab CRB-30-UK
    • Pvt. Kevin "Blinky" Stirzacre (moghopper) - Ostroc OSR-2D
    • Pvt. Erine Forakis - PXH-1Kk
    • Pvt. Ik-jun "Wojtek" Frajtov (Blaze) - Phoenix Hawk PXH-1
    
    
  • Bear's Bruisers (Battle Lance)
    
    • Lt. SG George "Linebuster" Atkinson (Hasek10) - Emperor EMP-6A
    • Lt. JG Tedros "Teddy Bear" Jamil (Knave) - Vulcan VL-5T
    • Pvt. Ed "Hanzoku" Yuksel (Hanzoku) - Crockett CRK-5003-1
    • Pvt. Xue-Min "Wizard" Que (Rince Wind) - Guillotine GLT-4P
    
    
  
  
• Assault Company
  
  • Fourth Lance (Battle Lance)
    
    • Captain Sung-min "Double Dog" Dare (a1s) - Warhammer WHM-6R
    • Sgt. Philippa "Khad" Khadjikyriakos - Thunderbolt TDR-5S-T
    • Pvt. Lise Selvåg - Raven RVN-2X
    • Pvt. Mats Johansen - Trebuchet TBT-5S
    
    
  • Sixth Lance (Cavalry Lance)
    
    • Sgt. Elroy "Faceplant" Farooqi (NickAragua) - Dragon DRG-5N
    • Pvt. Gwenael "Kicks" Hernandez (Sheyra) - Phoenix Hawk PXH-1Kk
    • Pvt. Catherine "Severe" Payne (Burnt Pies) - Koshi/Mist Lynx
    • Recruit Simona - Ryoken/Stormcrow
    
    
  • Rook's Raiders (Fire Lance)
    
    • Captain Mariamu "Rook" Ishikawa (Culise) - Stalker STK-3Fb
    • Cpl. Damayanti "Carcer" Ngo (Dorsidwarf) - War Dog WR-DG-02FC
    • Cpl. Margita bin Ala' al din - Trebuchet TBT-5N
    • Pvt. E-Shei "Ker-Ker" Ec (Kanil) - Lancelot LNC25-0B
    
    
  
  

Action Items

• There is an Elite (2+ gunnery, 3+ piloting) mechwarrior named Dobromila Vdovin on the personnel market. She also comes with a Rifleman RFL-3N, which is probably not what we would want to keep her in, if we bring her on board. Should we hire her?
• How should we approach the upcoming contract?
  
  • First axis: should we be careful, bold, or somewhere in between? Bold would be scouting aggressively, keeping Fight lances in reserve, and accepting a lot of battles quickly. Careful would be scouting on a less aggressive timeline, and sending a backup lance with our scouting trips.
  • Second axis: should we focus on Sector 0 first, or Sector 1?