Now that I'm back from Origins and I've had a REAL night's rest, its time to start talking about the Alpha Strike experience I had there and maybe help set some expectations for the folks who are planning to play AS at GenCon. I attended both the AS Tournament and the full run of the multi-part Capellan Crusades AS event. The most important thing I can say is that I had a TON of fun playing both events, and look forward to participating again at GenCon. If you are on the fence about signing up for either of those events, and you enjoy playing AS at all, I'd say do it. Out of the eight or nine battles I fought, only one was a blowout, and that was mostly because my opponent was having some serious stomach cramps and couldn't think straight. The rest were fast-moving, brutal, and ended up being close fights.
So first, the AS tournament: There weren't a ton of people for this event, but we still managed to face a different opponent for each of the three rounds. I brought a custom force, and the other folks played forces provided by the GM, but other than in one scenario, the custom force wasn't at a big advantage. The pre-made forces were put together by experienced AS players that know what they are doing, and you can absolutely win with one. In fact, the tournament winner was using one of the GM-provided forces. I believe GoldBishiop did a lot of the force designs, and in my opinion he did a good job making effective forces that didn't really require the players to know any particular edge-cases or quirky rules interactions to make them work. In addition, here are my takeaways from the Tournament:
- The three rounds of the tournament are NOT the same. Each round had different scenario rules that favored different types of units. A force of nothing but dashers and fireballs, or one of nothing but atlases would be at a disadvantage in at least one of the three fights. Having a mix of units is useful.
- These will not be long-range sniping fights. The size of the play area is small enough that hiding a bunch of fragile missile boats at long range would be really tough to accomplish. There just isn't enough space to keep the range open and pick at people. They aren't so small that C3 is useless though, in case you were thinking about using it.
- Skill 2 units are a reasonably effective counter to stuff like Dasher H's! Winning initiative also really helps.
- Most of the forces, including mine, totaled five or six units. There was one available with eight, but it wasn't played.
- Only one fight required you to wipe out your opponent. The others had different game-ending conditions.
- There is no substitute for dice luck.
I have a couple suggestions/comments about the force building requirements and the tournament rules, most of which I discussed with RaiderRed at the con, but I'll put those in a different thread.
Now for the Capellan Crusades multi-part event: We had other folks show up for the beginning and the end of the event, but the middle part was pretty much me vs. Scotty. While the end result made it seem like the Red Lancers were steam-rolling the Rebublic, most of the fights were actually very close. I played as the Capellans for most of the day and then switched to Republic for the last battle because I really, really wanted to kill Sun Tzu in his stupid golden Emperor! To my eternal shame, I rolled snake-eyes on the crucial roll that would have put six points into his mech and enabled us to down him on the last turn. We won that scenario (the only one the Republic took that day), but I really wanted to see sunny-boy get blowed up! Anyway, this was absolutely a game that went beyond the standard-level stuff you would see in the stand-alone 2-hour AS events. It wasn't just a linked scenario, it was a more advanced game in general. We had vehicles, aero, battle armor, C3, NARC, Special Ammo, stealth and Mimetic units. We didn't use SPA's because balance is already hard enough, but it was still a somewhat technical combined-arms fight. There was even one 2-hour block that was a pure Aerospace fight. No mechs, just a big furball on a super-sized version of the Radar map. Like the tournament, it was well-run and surprisingly close on most of the fights. These are some of my takeaways from THIS event:
- Pure Aerospace fights in AS are every bit as brutal as ground fights, but I think Aerospace needs some more work. For various reasons it never felt like we had as many tactical choices and it just wasn't quite as fun as the ground combat. For example, we literally never used any range brackets except short and extreme. Also, we needed Scotty as a 3rd party just to run the book-keeping for engagements.
- The conversion rules for Aerospace fighters are crazy. Small, fast fighters end up with buckets of structure because of how SI is converted. For example a Cheeta F-11, a 20-ton fighter has 6 structure, while a Riever F100, a 100-ton fighter, only has 5. Fast fighters are just way too tanky.
- Partial cover is ONLY for mechs, not any other types of unit. I never realized that before now.
- Dark Age battle armor are EVIL! Heck, battle armor in general are EVIL! Anti-mech attacks can be brutal thanks to that through-armor crit check they get to make. There were several turns where it was a good thing the game ended because the republic BA had turned several mechs into useless metal hulks with crits from BA.
- If you just want to play mechs, play the Capellans. If you want to play with BA and Vehicles as well, pick the Republic.
- The Mad Cat MK II is a beast, and the Men Shen is every bit as awesome in AS as it is in TW.
- DFA's are still a little too risky, but Charging is lots of fun! We had a decent number of light and medium mechs that got wrecked by some fast medium or heavy charging through them like the Kool-Aid man busting through a wall.
- I repeat, there is no substitute for dice luck!
Thanks again to everyone who came out to play, and who ran these events. I had a fantastic time, and I'm looking forward to giving these events another go at GenCon!