Alpha Strike Post 3. Do I have the Way

 

Is it ironic that heavy doses of salt create fertile soil for ideas? Another clever name for this post could be Fighting the System.  It seems that in my view of boardgames, as with much of my life, I demand that it unfold the way I see them being played out in my head.  Maybe you have just finished painting a beautiful centerpiece to your army, but it got vaporised immediately, maybe you only need to roll a certain, and likely, number but it never comes up, or maybe you don’t ever win initiative, not even one time, until you only have one mech left and everyone else still has multiple lances… argh….  Oh, I like to think the ideas in this article are mine, but I have read someone else’s article a while ago talking about how to deal with the vaunted double turn in AoS, it is a discussion on initiative as well.

Spoiler alert, I was the first of three to be eliminated in the latest game of BattleTech I played. I could blame the dice as I didn’t win the all-important initiative until it was too late.  Or I could admit I was playing the game I wanted to play in my head and not the game that was in front of me and governed by a set of written rules that my imagination couldn’t change.  I think in both of my recent posts I have mentioned, or alluded to, the disproportional importance of initiative.  But maybe I should have said, if you want to play aggressively you need initiative.  If you are going to storm the center of the board and be the first on the objective, it certainly helps to move last so that you can get the best arcs on your opponent or choosing to remain out of arc entirely.  If you don’t you will just move aggressively onto the objective and then watch the opposing mech take up ideal firing positions and tear you to pieces.

But what if you played defensively when you didn’t have the initiative?  Moving your mech forward slowly, keeping them in cover, keeping them with arcs that covered both the objective and the most likely place you opponent would move?  Letting the person with initiative go to the sole objective first…  By doing this you are mitigating the effect of loosing initiative and biding your time until you do get it, at which point you turn up the aggression with what forces you have left.  At least in games you can plainly see, even if you choose not to, who has the initiative and then you can decide your actions based on a fact. In real life you need to sense if you have the way, thankfully giant war robots aren’t real...

I am sure that with this approach sometimes you will bide your time, fight tooth and nail and just die. But I for one prefer to look back on a game like that and know I made the right decisions, so then I am fully justified in blaming the dice. 

As for the game itself.  It was a three player “capture the flag” scenario where the team that moved the objective token from the middle of the board back to their starting location would win the game.  The objective token could be carried without penalty but if two opposing mechs were in base-to-base contact with it one had to be destroyed before it could be moved.  This led to a fairly silly “Rings of Steel” situation.  The flag was also located on a hill with large structures to give the appearance of a defendable position.

All three of us had a rag tag assortment of mechs that we arranged into two lances each so that we could all begin with an equal number of activations.  And yes, this time I did look at my opponents lists, and I did destroy the Archer, Huzzah!!

To be honest, I was not the first at the objective but did charge a large mech onto it to tussle with another mech who had staked a claim.  After both mechs had been shot to pieces by every other mech the captured flag was placed within a well painted ring of steel, this did take a few turns as the rule was you had to stop once you contacted the flag.  The following turn the fastest mech of the bunch was able to scuttle off to victory.

BattleTech is growing on me, and maybe with time and experience I will be able to appreciate its subtleties.  But for now, I still consider it very beer and pretzels, which are wonderful as a mid-week distraction.  But most importantly, rolling dice on a table with quality scenery, beautiful miniatures, and friends you can banter with is never a bad evening.  Oh, and this one player did use a death from above attack, and it worked….

Alpha Strike Post 2

Sometimes it takes a while to get your thoughts down on paper. Several weeks ago, I had my second game of Battle Tech Alpha Strike.  This time we each took a Battle Group (BG) comprising of two lances and a command mech.  For this game we tried the Command and Control (C2) rules as well as allowed mechs to improve their pilot skill.  Both BGs were close to 300 points.  We played the C2 a bit different from the rule book, we limited the range of the inter-mech communication to 12” and each lance was its own network that couldn’t talk to an allied lance, the commander could choose a network if they were in range. Both BGs had the same C2 networks.  We didn’t play a scenario, but hope to do it next time, this was just a “learn the rules” slug fest. 

For our deployment we both set up one lance in the center and one lance on our respective rights.  During the battle, my opponent consolidated his forces and was able to focus fire with his entire BG effectively against one of my lances at a time.  I began a right flanking with my light lance, and tried to support by fire with my other, heavier, lance from the terrain in the center. My flanking was unsuccessful, as I did not commit.  When they should have closed with the enemy, to get into their blind spots, they moved out of the line of fire. While the light lance gained some concealment from the terrain, they were not in a good position to damage the enemy until the end game when it was too late.  The lesson learned is likely that (cheap) mechs with low damage, short range weapons benefit tremendously from the additional damage when attacking into the back of an enemy mech and really should get stuck in no matter the cost.  If they are tasked with a harassing screen, they will not cause enough damage to force the enemy to react.  While I was not tabled it was convincing victory for my opponent, I would attribute it to their ability to select and maintain an aim (even if it was to methodically destroy one mech at a time) and their list building (we will get to this later).

If you are unaware of the C2 rule; essentially you take the range modifier of the closet mech in the network to the target.  This rule combined with damage being resolved at the end of the turn allows you to hang a mech out to dry and reap huge benefits for the rest of the lance.  The effect can be quite powerful, but I don’t think the rule is broken as long as both sides have equal access to the ability.  I feel it just speeds up the game with every mech hitting more often.

Know your enemy.  My opponent had glass cannons that I was not targeting, I should have looked closely at their list and figured out a target priority.  One nice thing about Alpha Strike is it is very easy to get the gist of an opponents list.  Essentially you compare hit points to damage of all the mechs separately.  The mechs that do the most damage with the fewest hit points should be the ones on top of the target priority list. During the game I was constantly surprised by how his mechs of a similar type, but different variant had better guns than mine, it wasn’t until the end that I realized they had generally less hit points. It does seem that a lance of 50% glass cannons and 50% brutes would synergize well with the C2 construct.

Initiative is still king. While there are several valuable game wide factors to consider, initiative seems to be at the top of the list. Once mechs get close, and because you can turn a mech as much as you want while it moves, initiative becomes king.  Moving out of arc provides a clear advantage and if you can pull it off with a big gun you will have a distinct advantage.  Since initiative is an unmodified roll off it essentially comes down to chance.  Some special rule allows mechs to shoot and resolve damage during movement, combat intuition.  In our game only one mech had this ability so it wasn’t a huge factor, but it was able to knock out a mech before shooting in the middle of the battle.  However, if an entire side had this ability, it could be an NPE.

Battle Tech Alpha strike is a fast and accessible game that has a rich universe perfect for narrative campaigns.  Are there ambiguous rules that need more than the normal amount of good behavior from both sides, I am not sure but probably not more then any of the common wargames.  Certainly, there are a few broken special rules but nothing pre-tournament guidance from a TO couldn’t fix.  If one were to play this competitively, I would have mild reservations about competitive Alpha Strike.  I think the narrative feel of the game would benefit from mechs having less armour and more structural points so that critical damage would have a bigger impact, however this would lead to slightly more bookkeeping and another area where variance could possibly spoil the experience, detonating ammo.

Alpha Strike Post 1

Forgive me reader for I have sinned, it has been 11 months since last I posted.  But I have a good reason, I have moved to a new country and am building a new group, I hope it's possible to mitigate sins? 

Battletech Alpha Strike is a streamlined version of the classic Battletech, which I believe is called Total War as a differentiator.  For me, Battletech’s weight, as a game, is very similar to Full Thrust, see previous post.  While the mechanics are different, I think the granularity of the rules are similar, with basic core rules augmented by special rules that go for as far as the eye can see.  As well, the model count is approximately the same for a similar game length.  As far as other giant robot games go Alpha Strike is quite like Adeptus Titanicus but all the aspects (move, shooting, robot bookkeeping) are all about half as in-depth in Alpha Strike.  However, neither match Total War.   I am not sure which one I like better as a game.  I think AT has the right amount of crunch for me, sitting between the two Battletechs.  But, as far as real-world cost goes Battletech is about 1/5^th the price.  And you don’t need to wait for them to re-release tanks and aerial units because they are all already in the game as optional rules!! Also, because the detail on the models is less they are perfect for printing.

The game we played was a 4-player free for all, something I have never done with AT.  Two of us were brand new and after setup the game took just under two hours (4 mechs each, which is very small) and we were just churning through the turns once you got the hang of calculating target numbers for shooting.

 

Because Alpha Strike is “Simultaneous” i.e. damage only takes effect in the end phase and movement is alternating (there is an initiative roll, which does become important) it is quite easy to integrate multiple players.

 

Since it was the first game for half of us, we did not play with all the special rules that the mechs had. So missiles could not choose warheads or shoot indirect, and we didn't worry about heat. In our game we were simply trying to be the player with the last mech standing, with verbal alliances being made and broken constantly. It was alot of fun, and swingy with me loosing three of my mechs off the hop but then sticking it out with a very small and fast mech to the end.

 

Essentially this boiled down to the last person who moved would try to sneak around the back of the other remaining Mechs and into their blind spots (there is no movement cost for a facing change in Alpha Strike). This also led to the very cheesy situation of sliding down the sidelines, used by those of us not interested in having a good time J

 

Rules are not the clearest and I am sure that some concept are described by more than one key word and never explicitly linked.  I think when they simplified the Total War rules they made some parts extraneous.  Perhaps like heat and fighting.  It never seems worth it to voluntarily gain heat and a flame weapon seems like it would be really annoying. That said, mechs that can over charge their weapons by gaining heat do seem to cost more.  Close combat seems always riskier then just shooting at short range, even when jumping.  Also, I am very new at the game and perhaps there are special rule synergies we missed out on.  I can see heat being useful when you are playing a run and gun list where mechs overheat and then take cover the next turn, and close combat might simply be an act of last resort once your primary weapons have been destroyed.

 

I am looking forward to playing in a more narrative style and slowly including more of the special rules.  There do seem to be some neat command and control mechanics where mechs can acquire target solutions for other members in their lance (team) making it easier for other mechs at longer ranges to hit. There is also a mechanic for jockeying the mechs, taking successive hull-down positions each (other?) turn. Hopefully this will be explored in the next post.