Oh, this puppy did kick back...hard. We just didn’t get the official objectives. Each side had a unit that they nominated as their commander. You didn’t have to bring them each phase, but there were bonuses if you did. The first time the Dragoon commander showed up on the field in a shiny, new Atlas III we blew him out of it, I believe on turn two. He lived, and so for the last phase he showed back up in a Templar they had salvaged, and we blew him out of that on turn one. The Dragoon’s didn’t manage to drop our commanders mech till the last of the three missions. Of course, there are less-than-heroic reasons that contributed to his safety, but I’m just going to gloss over those.
Honestly, we were doing well tactically, but they had better strategies. I could moan about how they had some things that were slightly advantageous, but really they picked the right strategies and were able to execute them well. The first game, I didn’t have people start our slower units in a place where they could respond to where the enemy went, and that hurt our firepower. It might still have been OK, but they were able to make up for a lot of what we killed, and we killed a lot, with salvage. The second game, we were just too slow. We knew we were going to be a little slow, but could have done more to at least harass their faster units. The last game, we really needed to be a little more cheesy with the optional rules that were in effect and use them to the fullest. We also probably choose to sacrifice the wrong unit. As an overall mistake, in general we cared too much about preserving our force when salvage would have made up our losses if we had given up a few more units to get the victory. The Dragoon’s players played the salvage game better than we did.
We, the Robinsons Rangers, did, in my opinion, do some things better than the Dragoons. I felt we used artillery cannons and indirect fire better, and we made more use of the different configs available for the Omni mechs in the force. I also feel like we got more out of our commander than the Dragoons did. Still, they won fair and square, and congrats to the other players for making it a hard-fought and challenging game.