AAR - A Scattergun Approach

Furniture WIP:  Two bookshelves secured to wall in hobby/painting room. Made a start on the wall-shelves to go above my painting table (power tools - yay!!) but my drill ran out of charge before I'd finished the first wall bracket. The battery is recharged now and I should finish them by lunchtime tomorrow, barring any mishaps.


Hmmmm, I suppose I should do the AAR from Monday's game of Gruntz with J Womack (Scattergun Gamer) & sons...

I'd set up the scenario with the NSL having landed an advance force on a planet they've laid claim to, but have since discovered that there is a pre-existing alien settlement there which puts the claim in jeopardy. They've decided to eliminate and remove all traces of the alien presence before the UNSC find out.  The Crusties are aware of the arrival of some aliens on their planet and wondering if they will be friendly. The UNSC have determined that the planet is already occupied, that the NSL have (illicitly) landed a force there and as a result are sending an intervention force to stop the NSL doing anything rash...

The NSL had two infantry platoons and one armoured platoon; the Crusties had a forward platoon, a command platoon situated just behind and a heavy platoon in reserve. the UNSC had a platoon which might come on at some point.

J's sons opted to take the Crusties; J and I took the NSL; Simon was umpiring and taking the UNSC.

Each force (NSL, Crusties, UNSC) had their own victory conditions. To keep track I decided to use some plastic "gold" coins I bought for piratey games.


The first turn saw the NSL and Crusties making initial moves. One of J's APCs had line of sight on one of the Crusty buildings so he took a shot and caused some damage (one of victory conditions).

Turn 2 saw the NSL armour arrive on table, just to add to the chaos. The Crusties had a 1 in 3 chance that their heavy platoon would come on this turn - it didn't.

There was soon a bit of a traffic jam in the centre of the NSL deployment zone...

Turn 3 saw the Crusty reinforcements and the UNSC both arrive on table, increasing the chaos mucho mucho - we only just had enough activation cards for the units that were deployed. And some of the APCs hadn't disembarked their squads...

A Crusty walker managed to score enough damage to knock out one of my APCs. It didn't blow up, but the crew and troops didn't manage to bail out. That gave the Crusties 8 victory points.

However, one of my other APCs managed to finish off a Crusty building - another 3 VPs for the NSL.

 
Lots of toys on the table!

The Crusty unit with the brown and orange tokens was the victim of friendly fire from a mortar whose round deviated right on top of them - four hits, four casualties.

We did start turn 4, but realised it had got to chucking-out time so called it quits. The NSL had managed to take out another building and some more units, just inching ahead for VPs.


To round it off, here's a pic of all involved:

Simon, me (yikes!), sons*, J
*One is Dane/Dain the other Zane/Zain - can't remember which way round!

It was a fun but very chaotic game.



Lessons Learned:

For multi-player/multi-force games cut down the number of units/points for each force. If nothing else, it will reduce the weight I've got to carry to the club!

Don't use the activation cards, or only use them to determine the order that forces (rather than units) activate.

Sort out the deployment zones so that units don't have too far to move to get into contact, maybe by reducing the playing area (which would also leave space for drinks, sheets and other clutter at either end of the table).

Friday Update

Nothing to report on the painting front I'm afraid. Tomorrow will see me finishing the two armoured vehicles and  hopefully making good progress on the Hasslefree figures.

Monday night's game of Gruntz against Simon was a cracker of a scenario. Sadly, I forgot to pack my camera so you'll have to wait until Simon actually downloads the ones he took on his iPad. I think we made a good test of the playable limits of the rules points-wise.

The scenario was a bit involved. I started with an infantry platoon with some attached support elements (250 points) occupying a bridgehead position which they had to hold until a larger mechanised infantry platoon (350 points) arrived - from Turn 4 onwards I would dice for each vehicle in the platoon to see if it arrived on table (6 for turn 4, 5+ for turn 5, etc). Simon had 400 points of mixed infantry, light armour and VTOLs on table.

We did discover a couple of things:
1) Mortars are incredibly effective against infantry, especially when the target is in the open. They're not bad against vehicles either.
2) Vehicle specialists (in my case some hover Mobile Autonomous Weapons Platforms) are very good value

I managed to get lucky with the reinforcements - the first vehicle arrived on turn 4 and it was the missile armed APC. My big mistake was that I forgot to give it the Ack-Ack perk - stupid really, as I had enough spare points to add that. the other 3 APCs came on in Turn 5. I also did well with the activation cards for the troops disembarking from the vehicles so they were able to activate pretty much instantly. Which was handy as the three standard APCs were each carrying a squad and a missile specialist, the latter promptly doing some serious damage to Simon's VTOLs.

We only had time for another turn, but it was quite clear that my reinforcements were on course to destroy Simon's force. Just as well as my bridgehead platoon was very close to being wiped out when the mechanised infantry rode to the rescue.


Last night was something a bit different. I went out for a meal. Not just any meal though - this was a gaming/blogging related meal.

Miles visits London every few weeks for work. On this occasion he actually remembered to let us know in advance and we arranged to meet up for a meal, joined by Ray and Lee. As those two were travelling up from outside London, we went for somewhere near to where they'd be coming in - a Greek restaurant on Coptic Street.

As you can imagine we had a very pleasant evening - good food, good company and lots of chatter about gaming and painting projects.

It was a real pleasure to meet Miles at last and, no, the pleasure was nothing to do with him insisting on paying for the meal.

Edit:

I've snaffled the pics of Ray's and Miles' blogs:

From Miles:

Me. Ray, Lee

From Ray:

Lee, Miles, me

Things That Go Crunch

That was the title of the scenario that Simon had dreamed up for our game of Gruntz last night.

The background:

NSL Exploratory Station Wolfgang had suddenly gone offline 4 weeks ago. A routine resupply vessel landed there 2 weeks ago and had also not been heard from since. Frau Hauptmann Pfeiffer has been tasked to lead an investigatory mission to find out what had happened and to recover the data core from the station. Leading her elite grenadier troop, she landed just outside the station perimeter and found...



.."Xenos Ma'am, farsands of 'em!"

The station was overrun with big and small bugs. Simon also had 6 spawning points and every turn another big bug or pack of drones would appear at one of them.

None in this pic - a pack of drones wiped out by heavy firepower and some good old HE

But another pack took out one NSL squad in a close assault...

Oh crap - huge bugs with huge bioweapons! But my commander has rushed to the station to download the data core

Another pack of drones almost obliterated

and another

The problem with games like this is that you get so engrossed that you forget to take pics. By this time, my commander was dead, as were her two bodyguards who had retrieved the data and made it to the VTOL pad only to be wiped out by a giant bug.

The dead pile

About to be dead #1

About to be dead #2

About to be dead #3

"Frau Hauptman Pfeiffer ist tot. Unser zug ist tot. Nuke! Nuke! Nuke!"



With hindsight, taking a platoon of power armour troops, mainly specialists and no vehicles wasn't the wisest choice, but it made for a fun game. Equipping them with full-auto capable SAWs, grenade launchers and heavy missiles was a good idea; having some with plasma rifles wasn't such a good idea. Besides, it was about time Simon won against me.


Purchasing Update:
1) The Warbases order came today. I'll be taking them to work to hit with texture spray during my lunchbreaks.
2) I got a red card of frustration today as well. I think it's the foam trays and Litko bits I ordered from Figures in Comfort. I'll be collecting it on the way home tomorrow.
3) I've placed an order with GZG for some more 6mm turrets and a couple of their 25mm figures to see how they work with the Hotwheels size cars.
4) I've also ordered some machine guns and bits from Sgts Mess.


Workbench Update:
This evening I've drilled the rivets out of the four Fast 4WD cars and the four black ones that I bought on Saturday. The metal bodies are in the stripping pot at the moment. I'm hoping to get them stripped, modded and primed before the weekend so that I have plenty of time on Saturday and Sunday to do the painting. That will give me three sets of four matched vehicles for Car Wars "Amateur Night" or Divisional events.

Challenge Day 62 - NSL Panzer Grenadiers

To give you a break from WIP pics and chatter, tonight I'm not going to post any update on the WotR archers.

Instead, you'll just have to put up with pics of the NSL Panzer Grenadiers I was posting WIP pics of last week.

These netted me 284 points. An impressive haul, but not enough to win me the race to 1500 points with Alan.


The Whole Lot

The Infantry Squads, all 18 of them

The Company Commanders

I even painted the screens of the tablet computers

The Recon Section 

...and the instrument panels of the fan bikes

Heavy Weapon Teams 

Automatic Grenade Launchers:

Autocannons:

RAM Mortars:

Specialists

These are mounted on 30mm hexes to distinguish them from squad attached support weapons.

Forward Observers:

Heavy Anti Materiel Rifles (HAMR):

Anti-Armour/Anti-Aircraft Missile Launchers:

Plasma Guns:

Laser Rifles:

Squad Attachments

These are mounted on 20mm hexes to help distinguish them from specialists. In Gruntz, each squad can have up to two support weapons attached. I've decided that all my NSL squads will have at least one Squad Automatic Weapon (SAW) attached, so have included one on each base. If their second attachment is also a SAW, then I can use the base as it is. However, if they have something else as their second attachment, I'll need a marker to easily identify it on the tabletop.

Anti-Armour/Anti-Aircraft Missile Launchers:

Plasma Guns:

Laser Rifles:

HAMRs:

All in all, not bad for a week's work.

I'm very pleased with the colour scheme for these - simple but effective.