Battle report - 5 Aug 2019 - BattleTech

To be strictly honest, I spent most of my hobby time yesterday helping load up a van and getting stuff back into the St. Johns Ambulance building for the club, but I did manage a quick BattleTech skirmish with Dan, Rod, Chris and AndrewR...

For giggles and at my suggestion, I took my favourite 'mech, a BattleMaster, which is 85 tons of lumbering death with 6 lasers, a PPC, an SRM-6 pack and serious heat management issues (firing the full weapon load generates 32 heat of which it can only dissipate 18), and the four of them took 95 tons of assorted high-speed lightweight nuisances (Locust, Wasp, Jenner and Stinger, if memory serves (not sure about the Wasp) - good old classic 3030 pre-Clans tech).

Now, for the record, and not making excuses, I'm out of practice at the board game EVEN more than I am at the online text-based sim that used to run on various BattleTech MUSE's (at which I was actually pretty damn good) - particularly, the MUSE sim doesn't rely on initiative and is a real-time game. My unit on BTech3056 used to run this scenario (or a variant on it), affectionately known as 'Rat Pack', as a means of getting people to appreciate that light 'mechs are fun and dangerous in groups, but it does balance better as a scenario with real-time/simultaneous movement. As it was, I lost initiative every time (with hindsight, we should have rolled per 'mech, not per side), and hence was pretty much guaranteed that (moving first) I'd end up surrounded by a swarm of lightweights getting (as the saying goes) nibbled to death by ducks.

Despite the crappy initiative rolls, I did wind up making a real mess of Rod's Jenner (BattleMasters kick hard), but I was down to almost no right side (leg, arm and torso) armour, half the rear armour gone, in serious heat trouble (to the extent that I only fired two lasers on my last turn), and had taken enough head hits that when Dan landed a Death From Above that I failed the pilot check and face planted the 'mech... Game over.