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Atlas Hugged posted:I'm playing 500 points of Alpha Strike this weekend. Enjoy driving them insane. Also take pics.
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Feb 29, 2024 14:02
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| # ? May 31, 2024 11:17 |
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Arquinsiel posted:Finished Falcon Rising and TBH it's the best of Thurston's books. It actually does a lot to setup the metaplot of the Clan storyline heading forward, and it's... just fun really. Exodus road seems to have a lot about killing civilians. About halfway through rn
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Feb 29, 2024 14:13
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Smoke Jags gonna Smoke Jag  TBH one of Pardoe's better books.
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Feb 29, 2024 19:08
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Damning with faint praise.
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Feb 29, 2024 20:15
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My opponent insisted that because he was Clan he didn't have to agree to Forced Withdrawal because they fight to the death. I've read the rule and flipped through other references to it, but I am not sure exactly where that is mentioned. Closest I could find was something called "Esprit de Corps" but that appears to be a Special Command Ability, which I don't remember agreeing to use. So there was that. I noticed I selected the wrong Warhammer IIC variant (I ran the missile boat 2 in my brawler star formation when I meant to pick the brawler 13 variant), but because I only had the one stat card, I punished myself and didn't use any Lucky rolls the whole match. This meant I was 3 snipers to my opponents 6. All or most of his mechs had 16-18" movement and TMM 3. I've never won such a lopsided match in my life. His mechs were paper thin compared to my absolute tanks. I didn't even roll that well. I just had to get close to average expected outcomes and I shredded through his entire list despite them not going home. Since I was Clan, naturally I didn't have to retreat either per his interpretation of the rules, and I had a hell of a lot more structure than he did. Here are some photos of my mechs poking about looking to see if there are any targets left.     
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Mar 1, 2024 14:06
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Total Warfare p. 275: ”Retreat Clan MechWarriors despise their Inner Sphere counterparts because they consider Inner Sphere armies dishonorable warriors fighting in inferior ’Mechs. Therefore, Clan warriors consider retreating from Inner Sphere opponents a disgrace almost beyond redemption. When allowed to choose whether or not to flee a losing battle, many Clan warriors prefer to fight to the death. At Honor Level 1, a Clan warrior never retreats. At Honor Level 2, Clan warriors may retreat from enemy ’Mechs that are using advanced technology, but never from ’Mechs, vehicles or infantry units using 3025 (introductory) technology. At Honor Level 3, Clan warriors may retreat from any vintage of enemy ’Mech, but will not retreat from vehicles or infantry units. At Honor Level 4, Clan warriors may retreat at will.”
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Mar 1, 2024 14:24
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That's Total Warfare though and not Alpha Strike. I thought the game systems were entirely divorced? He's also never read Total Warfare.
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Mar 1, 2024 14:37
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Forced Withdrawal is an optional rule, but it's on for everyone or it's on for no-one unless you're doing some sort of GM'd scenario. The side using forced withdrawal is at a disadvantage against the side that isn't.Alpha Strike Commander's Edition: Page 126 posted:FORCED WITHDRAWAL Emphasis mine. There's nothing in the rules about asymmetric forced withdrawal. In normal play everyone uses it or no one does.
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Mar 1, 2024 15:35
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I didn't even know Alpha Strike had forced withdrawal rules, they really exist so that Classic games don't last forever with crippled machines desperately trying to core each other out with their single remaining small laser.
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Mar 1, 2024 15:41
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FishFood posted:I didn't even know Alpha Strike had forced withdrawal rules, they really exist so that Classic games don't last forever with crippled machines desperately trying to core each other out with their single remaining small laser. They're even in the introductory rules! The scenario section emphasizes that you use them.
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Mar 1, 2024 15:50
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FishFood posted:I didn't even know Alpha Strike had forced withdrawal rules, they really exist so that Classic games don't last forever with crippled machines desperately trying to core each other out with their single remaining small laser. Understandable, but otoh this is the funniest part of Classic
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Mar 1, 2024 17:25
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The original designers clearly imagined everyone would just do that because they wrote a lot about how mechs are rare and losing yours is terrible. They forgot that players hate to hit the "give up" button.
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Mar 1, 2024 17:30
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Defiance Industries posted:The original designers clearly imagined everyone would just do that because they wrote a lot about how mechs are rare and losing yours is terrible. There's definitely a disconnect between the fiction and the game there, too. If I was a 'Mech pilot and my leg was blown off you can bet your rear end I'm bailing out, but players are incentivized to keep fighting until the very end.
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Mar 1, 2024 18:58
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Atlas Hugged posted:I've never won such a lopsided match in my life. His mechs were paper thin compared to my absolute tanks. I didn't even roll that well. I just had to get close to average expected outcomes and I shredded through his entire list despite them not going home. Since I was Clan, naturally I didn't have to retreat either per his interpretation of the rules, and I had a hell of a lot more structure than he did.
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Mar 1, 2024 21:16
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Atlas Hugged posted:That's Total Warfare though and not Alpha Strike. I thought the game systems were entirely divorced? He's also never read Total Warfare. Huh, you’re right. I kinds figured such a strongly fluffy concept would be a given in either system. I guess that’s not mentioned anywhere in Alpha Strike rules, then.
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Mar 1, 2024 21:57
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Alpha Strike is more game-y, with the expectation being the rules (standard and optional) always affect both sides equally.
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Mar 1, 2024 21:58
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FishFood posted:There's definitely a disconnect between the fiction and the game there, too. If I was a 'Mech pilot and my leg was blown off you can bet your rear end I'm bailing out, but players are incentivized to keep fighting until the very end. I would never bail out. ...I'm the Landgrave von Kelestra Valley, I would wait in my cockpit until one of my retainers came to transport me back to my estate.
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Mar 1, 2024 23:28
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FishFood posted:I didn't even know Alpha Strike had forced withdrawal rules, they really exist so that Classic games don't last forever with crippled machines desperately trying to core each other out with their single remaining small laser. In my school club campaign I've been using forced withdrawal rules. Pirates automatically retreat. Clans and Inner Sphere regiments have to roll on a 'courage check' whether they withdraw or not each time they take structure damage. Same with the merc company the kids are running. They bought Chameleon on their last trip back to Galatea. I also let them revive one killed pilot by claiming the killed pilot was really a clone of the actual person. ... I may have to freak them out with Wobbies eventually.
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Mar 2, 2024 00:22
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Have you given them edge points? It's definitely worth doing to let them try save their favourite pilots.
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Mar 2, 2024 01:45
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Arquinsiel posted:Have you given them edge points? It's definitely worth doing to let them try save their favourite pilots. I'll have to look into that, thanks, this is my first campaign I've ever run in Alpha Strike (or anything really).
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Mar 2, 2024 13:50
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It's really simple. Each point lets them force a reroll. Can be a shot, a crit chance, a shutdown, or the location the other side rolled for a hit. Or whatever Alpha Strike uses to determine pilot survival.
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Mar 2, 2024 16:46
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Slowly progressing on the urbie LAM, two more forms to go, now that I have the mech form finished to use as a reference.   e: microset and microsol are loving magic, these decals are ten years old, give or take a bit. Officially licensed, from the Robotech RPG Tactics kickstarter (May Kevin Simbieda die alone and unloved) NinjaDebugger fucked around with this message at 17:44 on Mar 2, 2024 |
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Mar 2, 2024 17:28
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Arquinsiel posted:It's really simple. Each point lets them force a reroll. Can be a shot, a crit chance, a shutdown, or the location the other side rolled for a hit. Or whatever Alpha Strike uses to determine pilot survival. That’s not a thing the game really tracks, at least directly.
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Mar 2, 2024 17:38
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Then it's even easier to abstract away to prevent kids getting sad about losing their robot driver.
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Mar 2, 2024 17:54
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Pilot and unit survival post-game is still in the Alpha Strike Companion (not currently in print). If you want the specific pages for it DM me. I've used it for a handful of events and it's brutal so it's a good opportunity for Edge an you can use it to have baddies show up in later games still messed up.
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Mar 2, 2024 21:23
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Mention of the Companion led me to wanting to take a look at it and the original Alpha Strike rulebook. Never read those and don’t know the differences compared to the Commander’s Edition. But I looked at the contents online and guess what I saw - Clan honor. I tracked down a questionable full PDF of the rulebook and it totally has Alpha Strike rules for Clan honor, including ignoring forced withdrawal rules. It turns out Atlas Hugged’s opponent was actually right, just several years out of date.
a cyborg mug fucked around with this message at 22:27 on Mar 2, 2024 |
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Mar 2, 2024 22:21
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a cyborg mug posted:Mention of the Companion led me to wanting to take a look at it and the original Alpha Strike rulebook. Never read those and don’t know the differences compared to the Commander’s Edition. But I looked at the contents online and guess what I saw - Clan honor. I tracked down a questionable full PDF of the rulebook and it totally has Alpha Strike rules for Clan honor, including ignoring forced withdrawal rules. It turns out Atlas Hugged’s opponent was actually right, just several years out of date. Ha! To be fair though, this guy has only read the current edition.
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Mar 3, 2024 00:38
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I just had a game where my Strider H (2x streak LRM 10s) did more damage than my Firestarter U (5 medium pulse lasers and sword) and Black Hawk-KU U (7 ER medium lasers and hatchet) each did, although those two each got a kill and the Strider didn't. I sat it on a hill covered by smoke near the start of the game and expended about half its ammo or about 120 damage in total. My usual go-to for this kind of sniping, which usually gives consistent damage over the whole game if you can screen for them, is the Blackjack E (ER large laser, light gauss rifle, LRM 10) because it can jump into a good spot that it smoked the previous turn and the LRM 10 gives it the option to lay more smoke for other units. But the Strider H has much better ground speed which helps to reposition or escape from a flanker, and has a bit lower BV. Maybe a Strider H carrying a squad of battle claw/grenade launcher Tunnel Rat IVs with smoke grenades is a bit better, plus the Tunnel Rats can do leg attacks against things that try to backstab. gently caress it, in my next game I'm going to take both plus a squad of Tunnel Rats.
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Mar 4, 2024 05:04
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Smoke seems cool...does an active probe let you ignore woods/smoke? That would be a nice bonus for equipment that otherwise seems to exist just for flavor.
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Mar 4, 2024 17:54
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There's an optional rule to allow probes to reduce total woods modifier by 1 if the target is within probe range.
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Mar 4, 2024 19:06
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Strobe posted:There's an optional rule to allow probes to reduce total woods modifier by 1 if the target is within probe range. Yeah, and smoke counts as woods for the purpose of attack modifiers and line of sight, so it interacts with probes in the same way. I really like the probe targeting rule and the ECCM/ghost targets rules because they add far more utility to probes and ECM, including some interesting interplay where probes can see through ghost targets. Probes go from being dead weight in most scenarios and ECM becomes less swingy - instead of being useless in some scenarios or negating half of the other team's BV in others, it becomes something that can be defended from and that always has some utility. (In hidden units scenarios, however, my SO and I have decided that we do not use the optional rules for them because the base game's rules gives them both enough utility and is how the hidden units rules were intended to be used anyway.) These rules make some units really nice. The Firestarter X and the Black Hawk-KU G become really nice to have with their paired Bloodhound probes and Angel ECMs combined with their mobility and pulse lasers. And units with C3/ECM/AP like the Owens F and Malak Comminus work extremely well as spotters because they can not only defend from one regular enemy ECM, but also transmit the probe bonus to other units in the network! As far as smoke goes, I wrote a bunch earlier on battle armor grenade launcher smoke. BA smoke is one of the easiest and cheapest ways to make a stationary sniper easier to hit, but it doesn't help you during a moving battle in the same way that missile smoke can. Smoke missiles, like grenade launchers, fill the "target" hex with smoke, meaning you don't even make a to-hit roll and risk missing or scattering or anything like that (interestingly, MegaMek rolls to-hit and scatter for smoke rounds but just ends up deploying the smoke correctly in the target hex.) This means you can fire smoke rounds at one or more hexes as secondary targets while still firing normal weapons at a primary target without having to worry about the secondary target penalties. Unlike smoke produced by fire, smoke round have a fixed lifetime so you don't roll for random dissipation. However, they are still subject to drift if wind is in play. Smoke takes effect at the end of the phase like all weapon effects, so you can't use it to protect against weapon attacks in the same turn. So normally you have to plan ahead by a turn to put smoke in a place where you want to move or that will block line of sight during the next turn. However, if you fire smoke into the hex of an allied unit, the smoke will protect the target during the physical phase! Missile weapons that deal 5 or less damage in a full volley deploy light smoke clouds, while bigger weapons deploy heavy smoke clouds. Two or more light smoke clouds in one hex counts as a heavy smoke cloud. This means that LRM 5s, SRM 2s, and MML 3s and 5s firing LRMs will produce light smoke while everything else produces heavy smoke. This makes MML 3s firing smoke SRMs and MML 7s firing smoke LRMs the lightest Inner Sphere ways to deploy heavy smoke with one weapon at those respective ranges. However, two LRM 5s are a bit more efficient than MML 7s for deploying smoke at LRM ranges, so all those units with several LRM 5 racks and a couple tons of ammo have some good utility here. For instance, I've used the Sunder A to good effect. With 3 LRM 5s and 2 tons of ammo it has the flexibility to lay just as much smoke as you need while still being able to use the LRMs for regular attacks. But MML 7s have the advantage that they are big SRM racks, so for instance I like the Strider G. With two MML 7s and two tons of ammo, it can deploy a total of 17 heavy smoke clouds at LRM ranges while being able to throw in 7 volleys of 14 SRMs when the fight gets close. For record keeping, I feel the best way is to using numbered tokens and a sheet of paper to record which token is what strength and how many turns it has left. When I deploy the smoke, I write it down as having 4 turns remaining and then subtract 1 turn from all clouds during the end phase, removing them when they hit 0. This means they last the full three turns and I don't have to remember which ones I deployed that turn. Also, I record two light smokes deployed in the same hex at the same time as a single heavy smoke because I don't believe there is a situation where the distinction matters.
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Mar 5, 2024 02:31
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I'm generally not a fan of ghost targets - but to be fair the last time I played with them I think they were fairly different from the current implementation, and the result of it was that there were multiple overlapping bubbles of stacking +1s and it made every scenario a massive slog even between slow heavies. A +1 to hit is just so big that in a lot of cases it's the equivalent of +1 TMM when the unit mounting the ECM didn't pay anywhere near that for the equipment.
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Mar 5, 2024 02:56
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Yeah, it used to be that a high roll could create a large penalty. Now, you have to beat a target number of piloting +3 with an activation roll to get a single +1 to hit penalty on all attacks against a single ally or to give a +1 penalty to all attacks made a single enemy, with a maximum of +3 from a total of 3 sources. You can't use more than one ECM at a time per unit, either. To get more than +1 ghost targets penalty from a single unit you need one or both of Command Console and 7 tons of Communications Equipment, and they also do their own separate activation rolls so you are hardly guaranteed the full +3. These new rules seem pretty reasonable, especially since ECCM and active probes can also counter them. If players agree ahead of time to use these rules they can plan accordingly. For instance, the Firestarter X and Black Hawk-KU G that I mentioned earlier are good ways to make sure that any amount of Guardian ghost targets don't matter. edit: I mean I get that even +1 is a really good bonus, but in the games I've played (6000 BV, units bought at list BV but pilots upgraded to 3/4, essentially equivalent to 8000 BV), even when I really tried to bring a bunch of ECM I rarely saw better than +1 in a turn. The old rules were incredibly stupid but now I think they're about right. BattleMaster fucked around with this message at 03:31 on Mar 5, 2024 |
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Mar 5, 2024 03:15
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Where are the active probe rules that let them be used against forests?
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Mar 5, 2024 03:49
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LaSquida posted:Where are the active probe rules that let them be used against forests? BMM page 110, see Targeting (Optional). -or- TacOps AR page 97, see Targeting.
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Mar 5, 2024 04:06
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spotted on Randall's instagram, apparently: 
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Mar 7, 2024 06:50
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Am I memeing, daddy? -CGL I loving hate this poo poo
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Mar 7, 2024 15:52
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Holybat posted:Am I memeing, daddy? -CGL You know these packs will sell out and make CGL a bundle. I could care less as an Alpha Strike player. I got the Urbanmech lance pack myself jsut because I liked the minis and wanted to use them in an urban defense scenario.
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Mar 7, 2024 17:15
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Crazy Joe Wilson posted:You know these packs will sell out and make CGL a bundle. I could care less as an Alpha Strike player. I got the Urbanmech lance pack myself jsut because I liked the minis and wanted to use them in an urban defense scenario. It may seem counterintuitive but I do want it to sell a bundle because the money may be used for new plastics I'll actually like. It just sucks it's fueled by an unfunny meme
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Mar 7, 2024 17:53
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It's why I want them to do a new meme. Where's my box of (Mad) Cats, CGL?
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Mar 7, 2024 17:59
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