My friend and I have become bored with doing the usual "run at each other and see who kills the most stuff the fastest" routine of playing AS, so we decided to acquire some of the old scenario books from the early days. I picked up Gray Death Legion and Black Widow Company for myself while also managing to get Snord's Irregulars and Sorenson's Sabres for him. He picked up Fox's Teeth which we decided to use to play test our theory on how well these old books balance out in AS.
First, we don't use any rules from the AS: Companion because I just bought it today! We'll start adding stuff from it slowly once we've both read it. From the standard rule book we normally use forced withdrawal and the randomized damage rule (can't remember the actual name of the rule right now). We felt like the FW rule wasn't really necessary or fitting for the scenarios, but the randomized damage was vital. Also, we read over the pre-mission damage states for all the mechs and decided to just ignore them. They are made for CBT and too detailed for the abstract nature of AS. As for pilots, we went with the gunnery stats given for each pilot. I printed out the AS cards for each company, Blue force being McKinnon's Raiders and Red opfor being a company from the Wolf's Dragoons. All the mechs were Unseens, the usual Marauders, Warhammers, Archers, Stingers, Wasps, Crusaders, Wolverines, etc. All fights were done using a 4'x6' board with standard wargaming terrain (sorry, no pics this time).
Forgive me for not remember the lance compositions. I'll let my opponent give those and I'll edit the OP to show them.
Skip the quote if you don't want to read about the individual missions.
Mission one of three was played from the short edges and was a simple recon mission for Blue's light lance. They had to inspect a crate of mech spare parts that Red's command lance was to be securing for their own force's damage. All Blue had to do was get a mech in LoS for a single turn and exit on either their edge or the two side edges. This mission was easily won by Blue and they only sustained 3 pips of damage. Red sustained no damage. Time played in this mission was perhaps 20 minutes, if that. It went very fast.
Mission two was an ambush played from the wide edges. Blue's set up was in secret with me walking away from the board while he wrote down lat/long coords on the board to represent his positions. I believe it was his command lance this time. Red's command lance had managed to secure the crate from the previous mission and had two mechs carrying the crate together across the map in order to exit off Blue's wide table edge. This was a great fight. The outcome of this fight determined what mission was fought next. In the end, Red's command lance manage to exit off Blue's table edge with the crate, scratching out the win, but at the cost of the CO's Warhammer. In return, Blue CO's Marauder was crippled by three(!) fire control crits. Not having the spare parts in the crate meant that damage could not be repaired by Blue before the next mission. This fight took about 45 minutes I would guess.
Because Red managed the win in mission two, mission three was the "hypothetical" mission as in the fluff of the book, mission 2 is, of course, a Blue win. It was fought from the short edges. Red's objective was to carry the crate and exit it off Blue's short edge while Blue's was to stop them and, ideally, take the crate off Red's short edge. Forces consisted of full companies, minus previous losses and including carry over damage. So Red was down one Warhammer (COs) and Blue had a crippled Marauder with three fire control hits and another mech or two with internal damage (I believe he repaired the armor damage he had after mission 2). Unfortunately, we ran out of time to finish this mission, but when it was called, it was still too close to call for either side. Red had the crate across about 1/2 the map, maybe a smidgen more, and were down to eight total mechs. Blue was down to 10 mechs I think but several were damaged and close to being combat ineffective or destroyed. I wish we had had time to finish it because it was a hell of a fight, probably the best one we have fought to date. Time played for this last mission was about an hour or so when we had to call it.
So, in the end, we are both pretty excited about using the other scenario books for AS. They could certainly use some updating to work with AS, but while playing I think we have ideas for some of the rules. For instance, you can repair damage using 1d6 or 2d6 to spread across the combatants, with 1d6 for internal, 2d6 for armor, and 2s or 12s getting a crit back.
Using AS:C, I plan on seeing what lance profiles each lance falls under and using those special rules to add some flavor to the games.
Also using AS:C, I'm going to look at each pilot's fluff to see which special pilot ability they may qualify/justify. I would think someone like Natasha or Grayson would have one or five. Perhaps some sort of command ability for lance leaders and the CO?
The maps need translating into actual terrain and some how modified to 4'x6' sizes instead of two map sheets. We just sort of winged it.
Adding something similar to Flames of War (we are both big FoW players) morale seems like a decent idea, but that may be more appropriate for standard AS games and not these scenario books.
I'm sure there's more we talked about for the the life of me I can't remember them right now. Hopefully I'll think of some more in the future.
So there ya go, my much too wordy AAR for using very old scenario books for AS. They work. It's a testament to Fasa for developing balanced books in the past and CGL for creating a ruleset that converts as well as it does. Well done to both of you (if any of you old FASA guys are reading this!).
