So I tried out the big tanks from 3145 FedSuns today, and Murphy's Dice, are they beasts! :o
The Destrier is truly a land battleship. I see now how it's meant as an offensive weapon instead of a defensive one. All it had to do was roll forward slowly and lob LTC shells at whatever struck its fancy, and people had to react to it. The whole fight devolved into trying to crowd under its minimums to avoid the big guns and hopefully pound it into submission. (In the end, they failed. Even a Kodiak delivering multiple alpha-strikes from pointblank range couldn't knock it out.) A charging(such as it is) Destrier shapes a battle more than any initiative roll, and enemies forced to respond to it either by stopping it or avoiding it can easily be forced out of position to counter your more mobile forces. And if you're forced on the defensive and you can station a Destrier or two in a position that must be taken or crossed by your opponent? May Cat have mercy on him because your Destrier's definitely won't. [skull]
The Ballista isn't quite as impressive, but still highly effective. It doesn't slow down the Destrier as much as it might seems since I could drop it off early and let it rain down Arrows from afar. If I'd had some good TAGgers escorting them, the combinations of Arrows and LTCs would have been absolutely devastating to anything that got my full attention. The trailer's immobility once dropped wasn't a problem either, since the combination of hardened armor and heavy AMS coverage easily protected it, even in the face of constant pouring of Streak-LRMs into it.
The Hardened armor saved both tanks in more ways than one - by fluke of dice, I saw more Turret(Critical) locations rolled against me today than what may have been my entire Battletech experience prior, but the protection granted by the armor meant that I never suffered anything truly debilitating. Heck, only even a single Crew Stunned crit, often the bane of slow armor units. Also, knowing that you can take a 4-tube arty salvo just fine, while the 'mechs swarming you can't? Being able to call down that kind of fire on your own units is all kinds of liberating. >:D
The Paladin was both the least and most powerful tank in my force that day. My rolls for shots were often quite abysmal(The Destrier managed to score a direct hit on itself twice :-[), but when I did hit, the firepower delivered by two full-size Long Toms is simply awe-inspiring. The lack of Hardened Armor(and the hard minimum range) kept me from being quite as aggressive with it as I was with the Destrier, and even hanging back, it was the only tank of mine destroyed, even if it took most of the day to pull that off.
I look forward to using any of these vehicles in a self-supporting balanced force, but even in a brute gunline, they were extremely impressive. One player was even forced to bring a second force in, since they all but wiped out his initial unit in only a couple turns. The next force(and all the other forces also shooting at me) was hardier, but still within my ability to handle.
