This time we have a big shot, no less than Duke Frederick Steiner himself, leading a suicide mission against Combine’s supplies on Dromini VI. The Commonwealth forces’ goal is to stop Kurita plans, aimed at invading a number of lightly defended Lyran worlds behind the front lines and bringing a fatal halt to LCAF offensive. Regardless of the outcome of Frederick’s action, the real objective of the Lyran attack are the six Combine JumpShips in the system. Their presence hidden to the Duke himself, Loki Agents take advantage of the ground battle to launch from one of the attacking LCAF ships and cross space in silvery life bubbles to reach the enemy Jumpships, armed with demolition packs. They sacrifice their life to sabotage the Kuritan vessels and stop cold the Combine offensive.
The scenario covers a small piece of the ground raid, with an assault lance led by Duke Frederick performing a combat drop amidst Kuritan defenders placed at the outskirts of the city of Kanashimi, where 5 ammunition bunkers are located.
In the previous Scenario 7, we felt that the victory conditions didn’t do justice to the importance of the objective. The reason lies in a difficulty of balancing: if you have forces ideally of equal strength, and you give access to extra points for one side with an easy-to-kill target, the scenario becomes imbalanced. On the other hand, if you take losses into account, what looks like the main objective of the mission becomes a secondary one. The perspective becomes that of a lost cause for the defender, who cannot really hope to avoid destruction of the “main” objective, but can still pull a win if the attacker’s losses are too high – that was the case for us.
This time I really wanted to play with conditions consistent with the importance of the target. In the original scenario, the Lyrans have a 9,500BV assault lance, with veteran ‘Mechwarriors; they face a heavy command lance and five other ‘Mechs from two different lances, for a total of 12,000 BV; close to a 75% BV ratio for the attacker. With the classic old victory conditions, assigned separately for the two sides, we have the attacker winning a Decisive Victory if all the bunkers are destroyed, and a marginal one if one or two survive. The defender instead must save those one or two bunkers and destroy all the attackers to obtain a Marginal Victory, which becomes a Decisive Victory if only two or fewer bunkers are destroyed. Not liking this sort of entangled conditions, we modified those so that the attacker scores half the usual points for each kill (therefore only the modified BV value, not twice), and loses points normally. Additionally, each destroyed bunker is worth to the attacker 50% of the initial total defender’s forces points (that would be 6,000 BV with the listed forces). The defender scores normally.
In this way the attacking side would still win a decisive victory by destroying all the bunkers (with 60 armor points each, or 6 CF in AS), provided it takes out three defending units before the assault lance is eliminated. If it does so with only two bunkers destroyed, it goes almost the opposite way.
Naturally, we adapted this to AS rules and my son Lorenzo also changed a little bit his lineup, replacing a Zeus with a Highlander. I shrinked my forces to account for our usual balancing. This is what the roster looks like:
Tenth Lyran Guards, (LCAF)
Regimental Command Lance Role PV Tons Skill PVmod
Atlas AS7-D Juggernaut 52 100 2 72
Highlander HGN-733P Sniper 46 90 3 55
Awesome AWS-8Q Sniper 39 80 3 47
STK-3F Stalker Juggernaut 42 85 3 50
Legions of Vega, elements (DCMS)
Command Lance (Reinforced) Role PV Tons Skill PVmod
Grasshopper GHR-5H Skirmisher 37 70 4 37
Dragon DRG-1N Skirmisher 32 60 4 32
Panther PNT-9R Brawler 19 35 4 19
STK-3F Stalker Juggernaut 42 85 4 42
Awesome AWS-8Q Sniper 39 80 4 39
