Of Smoking Boots and Big Guns.

Kyle's Sidewinders stand guard over each other.

What a fun game it was again Kyle last night!

Admittedly we were Chatty Cathies and didn't actually roll dice until about 9pm but things went decently fast after that.

We played 600tv with my NuCoal against Kyle's Southern forces. This time around I tried something new. Rather than go for lots of little Gears I opted to get a strike squad of Curaisseurs and a veteran squadron of Hussars each with extra structure boxes (for 5 each!) and +1 Defense and Attack.

What happened? Well, as we were both Priority Level 3 forces we both had a decent chance of rolling Offensive missions, which we did. I decided to put my 4 points into the Offense mission Breakthrough which needed to see a squadron within Kyle's deployment zone by turn 4 and I also chose Survive. I figured I had 2 activations in this group, if I lost either one of them the game was likely over anyhow so Survive was a

What was that behind those rocks?!

decent defensive mission to opt for.

Kyle chose Recon which ended up being the very same Strike Force that I'd rolled Survive for and Take and Hold which ended up being a section of Tank Traps in the middle of the board between two bunkers.

In deployment I opted to put my two Hussars on opposite sides of the defenses, behind the bunkers. Having never played the Hussars before I didn't want them to be blown out of the sky before I'd had a chance to activate them. I also wanted to force Kyle to try to go for the tank traps which were now in quite a nasty killing field. I then opted to put my Strike force on the far left flank. I was going to run them up as fast as I could into Kyle's deployment behind a hill that was deployed lengthwise. That would make good cover once I got there and I could skirmish in and out whicle hopefully the Hussars did the heavy lifting.

Kyle played a strategy that saw him far more spread out and hugging terrain with his Saggitarius sitting behind a large rock outcrop where it could lob it's triple linked missile pods without fear of recrimination.

Newly constructed Hussar didn't even get a chance for a
paint job or squad markings!

Unfortunately I didn't think that by bunching up my Strike Force when they had both the Survive and the Recon missions on them meant that they had a huge bulls eye on their heads. So while they certainly soaked up a lot of fire, by the time I got them behind the hill in Kyle's deployment zone a medium rocket pod managed to scatter on the 3 remaining and damaged gears and with no Command Points left I had to eat the totally wiffed defence rolls and watch as every one of my Strike gears including my Army Commander became smoking boots.

That being said whenever the Hussars so much as looked at something it left a crater where there was a gear. Those Hussars are NASTY, they aren't as tough as the Voltegeurs but lord do they have some punch! They are definitely on my painting table now!

As effective as the Hussars were, they still counted for nothing as Kyle was effectively able to win the game by taking out the strike force in turn 3 and earning 2 OP for himself.

In retrospect we both agreed that I should have deployed the strike force much more spread out, with some elements (such as the sniper among them) hanging back in the tank traps to provide additional covering fire. That's something that I need to get used to, your squads don't have to act like squads, they CAN go anywhere they want, there is no coherency needed to be obeyed.

Still, excellent game as always. Hopefully I can get some paint on my models for next week's game.