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That sounds like fun. It might lead to some unbalanced scenarios, but the base load of mechs should help limit that a bit.

I was just perusing my Mercs pledge and it appears that I may have gone a little overboard and will have a reinforced battalion to play with at the end of the day! I predict that some of these poor guys will never see the table! They are fun to paint though.

"Slapchop". LOL!

 Gitzbitah wrote:
Impressive. An argument about whether a skilled gamer, or just a gamer is better at starting meaningless arguments. Looks like you're both winning.

You couldn't figure out that I intentionally disagreed specifically to start a pointless arguments about starting arguments? That was the joke!

 Gitzbitah wrote:
In more on topic issues, I'm getting ready for a salvage box AS tournament this weekend. We bring 200 points of force, all mechs for simplicity's sake, 6-12 to avoid swarms or death stars, and add a mech from a random salvage box each of the three rounds. We open all 3 boxes at the beginning of the event, and can field no more than 235 points. We may improve the salvage mech's skill to 2, if we desire, or leave some other mechs at base to hit near the 235 limit. Each salvage mech can be used only once in the tournament.

Wait, you know what's in the salvage boxes prior to the game, or is it blind? You open the box, see what it is, grab a record sheet and go?

Reminds me of an old "Endurance BattleTech" game a friend and I played. We got out roughly 300-ish miniatures, printed out a record sheet for each one, started with I believe two each, and every time one died/withdrew, we just went to the table, grabbed something else, grabbed its sheet, and it walked onto the table next turn. Played over 4 hex-maps, and it worked with other people joining in as well. I'm wondering if it'd be fun to do that again, but more random - mix up the sheets so you never know what you're going to get, or put all the 'Mech names in a hat or something so you draw randomly.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
"Slapchop". LOL!

I did a trial to see which style I liked best, and rather than repaint the tester I’m using the slapchop Lance for my printed models as the method hides the layer lines a bit better than the cleaner scheme I’m using on my other mechs

 Dysartes wrote:
Are there bonus points for anyone who manages to paint their salvage box mechs between rounds?

That.... is just barely possible. LOL I might just try that. Clean immediately, paint on primer after drying, and then speedpaint. Fortunately, I'm running Liao, so I just need to get tan and green on there.

Suggest it to the TO as a small bonus challenge?

Finished a Marik Militia lance, might even complete a company eventually ^^

Nice clean work there!

...kinda forgot to post this here ^^

We played this game about a month ago, with the militia vehicles I was painting (variant Capture the Flag rules, with the attacker (ComGuard elements disguised as mercs) having to go grab a black box from a lab inside an urban area defended mostly by conventional militias on a Davion world).

This is how it started (objective is the red marker):



The "mercs" pushed through some mined areas and advanced to the city while the militias jumped to intercept, with almost fanatical bravery from the infantry...



...which was rewarded by being targeted by an extremely effective AS strafer which broke hell onto them:



MVP from the militias were the *RM carriers (the SRM carriers basically deleted a couple mechs by themselves), whereas for the attackers itcertainly were the AS support and the light elements, which managed to grab the black box and run.

We've been using "pilot dice" for attacks (you roll one "pilot" die for all the rolls and then another die for every point of damage: each point of damage hits if the pilot die and the regular die beat the TN), and it really feels better than the "all or nothing" regular approach, even though the aforementioned pilot die has a whole lot of weight into the roll, and rolling a 1 on it means most if not all the damage is not gonna land. Still, we've been liking it so far.

Also, playing AS in hex maps... area effects are (or at least, feel) a lot stronger.

Earlier, I asked for advice on mechs that Clan Ghost Bear preferred. Recently I purchased the Clan Heavy Striker Star. Three of the five points just so happen to be Ghost Bear preferred mechs: Mad Dog (Vulture), Ice Ferret (Fenris), and Viper (Dragonfly) according to sarna.net. With the Fire Moth that came in the Alpha Strike starter, that's 4 Ghost Bear mechs. Now if the Executioner (Gladiator) would come back in stock at Fortress Miniatures... I'll be painting these as Rasalhague Dominion. So if anyone else is looking for Ghost Bears, the Clan Heavy Striker Star is a good place to start.

https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Clan_Ghost_Bear#Military
https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Category:Clan_Ghost_Bear_BattleMechs

 Ancestral Hamster wrote:
Earlier, I asked for advice on mechs that Clan Ghost Bear preferred. Recently I purchased the Clan Heavy Striker Star. Three of the five points just so happen to be Ghost Bear preferred mechs: Mad Dog (Vulture), Ice Ferret (Fenris), and Viper (Dragonfly) according to sarna.net. With the Fire Moth that came in the Alpha Strike starter, that's 4 Ghost Bear mechs. Now if the Executioner (Gladiator) would come back in stock at Fortress Miniatures... I'll be painting these as Rasalhague Dominion. So if anyone else is looking for Ghost Bears, the Clan Heavy Striker Star is a good place to start.

https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Clan_Ghost_Bear#Military
https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Category:Clan_Ghost_Bear_BattleMechs

Very cool! Check out master unit list as well. You can sort by faction and era. It's a great guideline for building lists. http://www.masterunitlist.info/Faction/Details/40 There's a link to the Rasalhague Dominion faction. Just click the era you favor, and it'll show you what are commonly available to the Bears.

 Gitzbitah wrote:

Very cool! Check out master unit list as well. You can sort by faction and era. It's a great guideline for building lists. http://www.masterunitlist.info/Faction/Details/40 There's a link to the Rasalhague Dominion faction. Just click the era you favor, and it'll show you what are commonly available to the Bears.

Thank you, Gitzbitah. That's quite useful.

Edit: The Hellbringer (Loki) is available to the Rasalhague Dominion starting with the Late Republic period [3101-3130] effectively making the Heavy Striker Star a Rasalhague Dominion star out of the box!

Unfortunately that means your Star will have a Loki.

As the club is murmuring about playing Alpha Strike in 10mm again, I just solidified a deal to bring these two forces back home. I put these together for a friend a decade ago. He moved away to Colorado years ago and recently offered them back to me for a bargain.

They're stock painted MechWarrior clix figs rebased. When I get these back, I'll probably add a few more Mechs from each faction from my collection. Then I'll have flexible, playable forces from:
Dragon's Fury (Kurita)
Swordsworn (Davion)
Steel Wolves
Rasalhague
Spirit Cats

Delete

So I got two of my friends into Alpha Strike, although at this point only one of them has bought his own stuff. As he prefers Clan this makes dividing the spheres of interest easy. (Though we will each be keeping all the 'mechs from our AS boxes. Besides he has the BT: AGoAC box too, so it not like he never plays IS). So counting today's game he has suffered three straight defeats as Clan. The first two games were not even close. Now in CBT, one used tonnage, not this PV system. Have any of you more experienced players used tonnage in AS for force building, and if so, what were the results?

Show me where the tonnage rating is on an AS Card. At best all there is SIze.

The problem is Size doesn't tell you anything, and this carries on when you go in to CBT and include Clan Equipment versus Inner Sphere equipment. The equivalent of PV in CBT is Battle Value (BV).

That doesn't even consider all the extra abilities which won't be represented in Size, S, M, L, Armor, or Structure which can notably affect the game.

Such as the Sarath B which can add Heat to a Target on a turret, Overheat itself, and then hit in Physical with MEL and TSM as hard as your base Atlas, yet it weighs in lighter than a Wolverine.

So, PV is important. Skill is important (and taken in to account with Skill rating). But just as important is how well you use what you have.

The MUL has tonnage right next to the PV for each unit, and prints it on the roster sheet so it’s a trivial tweak to use it instead.

The handy thing about playing with friends is that you can agree to uneven points, or fiddle with scenarios so everyone has fun. So give tonnage a shot and it should help the clan side out as they have much higher firepower per ton. But it may be too much in Clan favour.

Not everyone uses the MUL, just their Cards.

But let's compare 2 Mechs of the same weight :
Marauder MAD-3R

Timber Wolf Z

These are as separated as one can get without going in to Primitive Mechs. But you have to get the Marauder to Skill 0 to come close to matching the PV between them.

Does the AS Commander's Rulebook have rules for infantry and battle armor?

 Ancestral Hamster wrote:
Does the AS Commander's Rulebook have rules for infantry and battle armor?

Yes, yes it does.

 Ancestral Hamster wrote:
So I got two of my friends into Alpha Strike, although at this point only one of them has bought his own stuff. As he prefers Clan this makes dividing the spheres of interest easy. (Though we will each be keeping all the 'mechs from our AS boxes. Besides he has the BT: AGoAC box too, so it not like he never plays IS). So counting today's game he has suffered three straight defeats as Clan. The first two games were not even close. Now in CBT, one used tonnage, not this PV system. Have any of you more experienced players used tonnage in AS for force building, and if so, what were the results?

There's no reason to use tonnage if a balanced battle is what you're after. Even Battletech has "Battle Value" (BV) for more accurately comparing units .

Originally Alpha Strike PV was just a fraction of the BV but later they changed it to be a formula based on actual AS stats .

If you want to get advanced/historical one way to go is to look up the units in a battle in BT lore/history and refight that particular engagement.

 Albertorius wrote:

 Ancestral Hamster wrote:
Does the AS Commander's Rulebook have rules for infantry and battle armor?

Yes, yes it does.

Thanks for the reply.

Does anyone have a clue when the rulebook will be available again?
It's on the Catalyst website, but there's no way I'm paying this in postage.

I can't stand trying to learn a game from a pdf (I don't mind them for reference) so won't get the full experience (other than the boxed set rules) till that book gets to the UK via retailers.

Ask your store if they have an order for it, some may be waiting on new stock right now for a book order.

My go to store only gets them for a few days, before all sold out.

Hopefully the international distribution points they are setting up for the Mercenaries Kickstarter will improve the shipping of older materiel like the Commander's book, making it easier to order directly and/or be available at your local store.

Its entirely possible that they are reprinting the thing to include Mercs content. Alternatively distribution has ceased just for now while they make sure they have enough copies for those backers who included it in their Mercs bundles.

The Kickstarter seems to be quite well advanced, so it should be back in a few months time. The only thing I can think of causing a lot of delay is getting the fancy Universe book finalised and printed.

There's the Cookbook, too. We've seen a copy of the final print of the Universe book, but not the Cookbook.

 Gimgamgoo wrote:
It's on the Catalyst website, but there's no way I'm paying this in postage.

Postage keeps getting stuck at the max rate in their store (and has done for years now). If you drop them an email they can reset it for you.

beast_gts wrote:

 Gimgamgoo wrote:
It's on the Catalyst website, but there's no way I'm paying this in postage.

Postage keeps getting stuck at the max rate in their store (and has done for years now). If you drop them an email they can reset it for you.

Thanks. I've messaged them to ask. Hoping it's significantly lower or I'll probably be waiting till next year.

Forgot to post last week that I got a chance to play AS with a hex mat and some terrain I made up for it.



This is after a few turns of fighting, but the gist of it was that I brought two IS lances, while he brought a lance plus a bunch of Scorpions, a SRM carrier, and a Long Tom. We're at 5-10 games apiece so far and wanted to try a more asymmetric scenario and use a couple of optional rules from the DFA Wargaming pack.

A few things we observed:

-The default activation order gives a major advantage to the side with a numerical advantage and makes initiative sinking effective. In the future I think we're going to switch it from 'back-loaded' (rules as written, you only start moving two at a time once you have twice as many remaining units as the opponent) to 'front-loaded' (you move two at a time until you have as many remaining units as the opponent, then alternate one-for-one).

-Area of effect attacks get effectively a wider radius in hex games than in inch games. I can see why they did it this way- anything with a 2" template would have no AOE under hexes- but I'm not sure how I feel about it. The Long Tom was pretty brutal, but the Viking's Arrow IV artillery never amounted to much.

-Per the DFA pack, we played using the Long-Range Targeting rules by default (+1/+2/+3 instead of +0/+2/+4), and I liked this change. It's a minor tweak, but it made long-range fire feel a little less useless and lights a little less susceptible to critical existence failure at short range. Also gave us a reason to use physical attacks. We also used their tweak of +1TMM for sprinting and that gave a defensive option for badly positioned mechs.

-We used the optional rule of rolling for each point of damage and only inflicting it on a 3+. I liked the reduction in lethality and the reduced predictability of damage, but I don't like how all-or-nothing the attacks are in the base rules. We might experiment again with the DFA 'pilot die' mechanic as it produced something in between all-or-nothing base rules and totally separate attacks for each point of damage as given in the rulebook.

-Lastly, overheating to add damage seems to be a really, really bad trade unless a unit is already dead and has nothing to lose. Giving up speed, TMM, and accuracy in future turns (until you forgo shooting to cool down) just to get an extra point of damage kinda sucks. It's also odd that heat is purely linear, in that a light mech doubling its damage from 1 to 2 heats up just as much as an assault increasing from 6 to 7. At this point I'm wondering if we've been missing something major, because the overheat mechanic seems really punishing and better off ignored entirely unless you can find a water feature to sit in.

Overall still a big fan of this ruleset, but a revised rulebook to get rid of the contradictory examples and clean up unclear areas (I still have no idea how C3 networks are supposed to work, if going over half speed on a straight road is supposed to be all it takes to skid out, or if dropships are supposed to have a high chance of crashing and exploding under routine landing conditions) wouldn't be unwelcome.