Aw man, after a terribly complicated week, I finally managed to get another match going.
Once again, I was doing a smaller mech army against what invariably ends up being a Vee army. I'm slowly trying to make the Battle Value on my "lighter mech" army so that I'll be fighting against something that isn't vehicles, or at least vehicles who aren't drive 8, flank 12... Unfortunately it's still not working! Vees appear to be common almost up to 4000 BV!
This time, I was up against:
- Mechanised Tracked Rifle Platoon (Heavy Flamer)
- Mechanised Wheeled Mortar Platoon (Heavy)
- Motorised Rifle Platoon (Elephant Gun)
- Bulldog Medium Tank
- Maxim Heavy Rover Transport ** DESTROYED, then CAPTURED **
- Pike Support Vehicle (AC/5) ** DESTROYED **
- Saladin Assault Rover Tank (AC/20, 3/5, 8/12 movement) ** DESTROYED **
Let me describe to you that Saladin. It has insane movement - about as fast as any mech you can field. Then, its crew is a 3/5, which means its base to-hit number is 3 rather than the more usual 4. This is a variant that has extra armour. And then, it has an AC/20, which means that if it hits (and it's likely that it will since it can get so close so fast), it does 20 DAMAGE!!!
Let me put this in terms of the lighter army I was fielding. I had a CDA-2A Cicada, which is a pretty light mech with 2 medium lasers and 1 small laser. One shot from the AC/20 on an arm will: take out the armour, destroy the internals of the arm, then transfer to the side torso, and destroy the entire side-torso as well.
With ONE shot.
I had amazing luck, though. He did get an early AC/20 shoot against my Mongoose, taking out the left torso, and thus one of the medium lasers. All of his subsequent AC/20 shots failed, however, because I kept moving and keeping my distance. He usually only got AC/20 solutions on my mechs for 7+... he hit that one, and missed 2x7+ and 1x8+, so luck was still on my side.
Early on, he rushed his Maxim into the middle of my troops. It has 3x MG on rapid fire and a bunch of rear and side facing weapons. The firepower was definitely a fair bit distributed. His Saladin also needed to be fairly close for the AC/20 range. He kept them moving really fast, and I lost sight of them in some of the early turns. Since they are hover tanks, they could go onto a nearby lake that had hills surrounding it. The problem with that is that I'd lose a lot of movement points climbing hills, without knowing where he was, and wouldn't move as much as I needed to keep him from hitting me.
I had one Phoenix Hawk (or was it SHX?), which was my slowest unit. It had an AC/5 with 10 rounds of precision ammo, which made it easier to hit the fast units, but I couldn't really get very close. It also had a medium laser, one LRM 5 rack and an SRM2 rack. Not amazing, but definitely useful for trying to crit. Unfortunately, because it was slow, it was hard to get very good shots on his fast Maxim and Saladin. The upshot was that I had an incentive to keep my units together, around the PHX.
I kept running around not too far from the PHX, making sure to be hard to hit, and he eventually came in closer again with his Maxim and Saladin. He wasn't overly careful with his Pike or Bulldog, so that I got my Mongoose in a flanking position for some side-hits. He saw the Mongoose go away, and decided to move his Saladin and Maxim back in. That meant I managed to move my OstScout and Cicada in close, and the PHX also got some nicer to-hit numbers.
Most of the crits I'd done up to this point weren't really helpful. -1 MP here, or -3 to driving skills to his mostly already stationary units. However, when he moved in his Saladin, I managed to focus fire from two or three mechs on it. The fact that I had initiative and that he had to be close for good shots meant that from then on out, every turn I managed at least 1 or 2 mechs in a position to kick him.
It was the kicks that won me the game - his armour was already weakened, and I always got him from the sides that were already damaged. His Saladin exploded when I hit the fuel tanks, and while he ran away with the Maxim for a turn, I ran in right next to his Pike with a few mechs and focused fire on that. Since he had barely moved the Pike, it was a pretty easy hit frm sides and back... it exploded with one of the crits.
The Maxim was pretty damaged by then, my leftover weapons had ben firing at infantry, which was starting to become much less effective, and then it was just a matter of ignoring his retreating Bulldog (with 1xLRM20) and mopping up the Maxim.
At the end, my Cicada had 1 armour on both his legs (really close to being incapped), the Mongoose had no left arm or left torso and had one internal point on his center torso (really close to being destroyed). Many other mechs were out of armour in a variety of places (really close to being critted). His damage on me was really spread out. Most of his crits resulted in absolutely no damage to me, except for two jumpjet hits on my OstScout, and an engine hit in the round that I won. His AC/20 didn't really hit any significant shots (except for the Mongoose, which I love), all his crits on me were useless, and while my initial ones didn't affect him, the ones I got from kicking his vehicles took them out entirely.
All in all, luck played the major role in winning this. I kept my mechs moving so that he never really got anything below a 7+ to hit me, but he played much better. One extra hit from his AC/20 would've changed the match, or a crit to one of the many unarmoured sections of my mechs.
Oof. Long post, sorry guys
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Topic: Battletech campaigns & multiplayer (newbies welcome) (Read 43278 times)