I forgot to take pictures for you guys, but here's the low down on my game. It was going to be my Marik Militia and another guy's Sword of Light versus Smoke Jaguars, but the Sworder had a medical emergency and couldn't make it. So it was my aforementioned lance versus a Dire Wolf A, Timber Wolf A, and Mad Dog C, all with 4/5 MechWarriors. We played on 2x2 mapsheets which had more woods and hills than my opponent would have liked.
We started off on the long sides of the board -- my choice, because he outranged me like crazy -- and I played super-duper cagey the first, like, three or four turns. There was hardly any weapons fire because after he declared his dueling targets, I did my best to ensure that his 'Mechs couldn't shoot at their assigned targets (and he played zellbrigen correctly!) either due to too many intervening woods hexes or just making sure the to-hit numbers were too high.
He had the Mad Dog on my left flank, the Dire Wolf in the center, and the Timber Wolf on my right. I sent my Anvil and Grand Titan up the left, the Wolverine on the center-right, and the Locust did an end-run around the extreme right flank. When I committed, I hit him as hard as I could. The Anvil ran down the Mad Dog; thanks to my pulse bonus, I tore him up while he was only able to wing me a couple of times with gauss slugs. He kept giving ground trying to keep the range open but I eventually ran him down and got into his minimum range.
In the center, I diverted the Grand Titan and Wolverine to the middle. He had pushed the Timber Wolf forward, moving off of a perch and across a river to start drawing line of sight to the Titan, which put it in the perfect position for me to bring all three of my other 'Mechs down on him in a circle. The Timber Wolf got pummeled over the next three turns -- including suffering a couple of kicks from my brave (read: crazy) Wolverine pilot -- and eventually took a couple of engine hits that forced him to drop a PPC from his firing plan. In the meantime, the Wolverine did take a few errant pulse laser shots from the Dire Wolf, but the Grand Titan got the worst of both OmniMechs' anger.
By this time, the Locust had eaten a few good die rolls' worth of pulse lasers and lacked both arms, reduced to just running around its medium laser and being an annoying initiative sink. The duel between the Anvil and Mad Dog had moved into my opponent's backfield along his home table edge and in a moment of clarity, I realized that I prefect shots at the stationary, overheating, torn-to-pieces Timber Wolf in his back with the Anvil. The precise application of pulse lasers to the rear armor (eaten open by the Wolverine's jumping back strike antics) resulted in a third engine hit and the only confirmed kill of the game.
Moving into the double-digit turns (we played, I think, 11 or 12 turns in about six hours), the Anvil turned back to his fist-fight with the Mad Dog and promptly ripped off one side torso and opened up the chest armor; in return, the Mad Dog managed to land a couple solid hits and disabled one of my pulse lasers. The Grand Titan by this time was completely stripped off its left and center torso armor and was pretty banged up having fallen twice, but combined fire from it, the Wolverine, and a contributing five-pointer from the Locust to put the damage total over forty for a +2 to the resulting piloting check put the Dire Wolf on its butt.
The situation at this point was: Grand Titan: functioning, but not for long; Anvil: functioning, but hurt; Wolverine: short a ton of armor, but still alive and kicking; Locust: armless but still hard as hell to hit; Timber Wolf: dead; Mad Dog: one, maybe two more rounds before it was toast; Dire Wolf: armor torn up, but still 100% operational. However, the Dire Wolf was effectively surrounded and though it would take a long time to die, it still would have died (especially with the Wolverine tied to its rear). We decided to call it as a House Marik victory!
MVP of the game? My opponent's dice. The turn I committed hard to killing the Timber Wolf, he whiffed hard on a lot of his attack rolls. I managed to keep his to-hits above 7 most of the game, but even on 6s and 7s that turn he whiffed 'em. That gave me an extra turn to eat his lunch at point-blank range. Runner-up goes to the Anvil, which kept the Mad Dog tied up all by his lonesome the entire game; keeping those gauss rifles shooting on 8s and 9s at point-blank range instead of pouring slugs into my Grand Titan on 6s and 7s was key to it surviving long enough to help savage the Timber Wolf. Honorable mention goes to the Titan's LRM-15, which landed a full salvo on-target two turns running (thanks to the Artemis FCS).
All in all, it was a good game. My opponent took my superior maneuvering and his bad dice in stride with a rueful smile. I felt like it was one of my best games in a very long time due to how well I positioned my units, but in the future I need to pull my long-range guns back out of the box. Being forced to close under that kind of long-range fire was harrowing despite my general maneuverability advantage and I think a few light gauss rifles would have helped off-set the issue a little!
