The Irish Nationals were held yesterday in the Shannon Boathouse in Limerick. Organised by Limerick gaming store The Gathering as part of their regular con Conclave, it's the culmination of the comeptitive circuit we've been running for two years now. Basically we run a regional event in each province - the Leinster regionals are run in Dublin by me and Dwane Higgins of Plasticraic gaming, the Munster regionals by The Gathering, the Ulsters by the Wee Gamers in Carrickfergus in Northern Ireland, and the Connaught ones have moved around for both years. Last year we ran the nationals in Dublin and Garry Jackson of The Gathering won. This year the regionals were hotly contested with Garry winning the Leinster and Connaguht, Mark Hall from Dublin winning the Munster, and me winning the Ulster. We had 22 players in total, with people coming from the UK, Spain and Germany.
The Venue was incredibly cosy, it reminded me a lot of the original space Leprecon in Trinity College in Dublin occupied:
We had a Legion of Vega flag, this comes to a lot of European events
The tournament uses the CDT's BattleTech Open format, where the tournament organisers present 4-5 list options for each round that the players have to select from. Points are scored for damage dealt, a one-mech round gives a maximum 50 points for a kill, while a 2-mech round gives 50 points for killing a mech, weighted by the comparitive BV of the units, so if one mech in a pairing is 1500 BV, and the other is 2000 you get 43 points for killing the 1500 BV one and 57 for the 2000. If you don't score a kill, you can gain points for damage dealt, up to a maximum of 75% of the kill points. Furthermore there are a few conditions that count as a kill even if the mech is still operable, such as having 4 pilot hits.
The pairings were as follows:
Round 1: I was fighting against José from the Dublin crew. He's quite new to the game and we play semi-regularly. We both took the Spartan C. It was a fairly well-matched fight, I took a couple of hits early on while not doing any damage in return, but it came down to head hits - a single SRM early on followed by a large pulse a few turns later took out José's mech before too much damage had been done. You can see us in the second table from the top in this photo:
Round 2: My opponent was John Somers. John is a demo team agent and it was our third time facing off this year, and our second in a 3025 round. I had the Thunderbolt and Vindicator vs Marauder and Shadow Hawk. It was a fairly static battle, My Vindicator didn't move out of the woods it occupied on Turn 1 for the whole fight. There was a decisive round where I knocked the Marauder down and it got to 5 heat, meaning it was pretty stuck in place for a turn and I was able to monpolise and keep him on the back front. I took out both mechs with largely armour damage in return.
Round 3: I was up against Scott Young, a UK-based demo agent who I got to know at UK Games Expo. We both took the Wraith and Firefly and this was a game of lots of manouevre by comparison. I was lucky early on and hit Scott's Wraith with two medium X-pulse lasers and a kick to the same leg, scoring a foot crit. The reduction in speed and added difficulty to PSRs meant I had a slight advantage, and a streak of me hitting reliably with one or two pulse lasers while he couldn't meant I wore the Wraith down, and managed to then take out the Firefly on the last round for another 2 kills. While the Wraith only had armour damage the firefly was open just about everywhere, had lost the arm with the AMS and had taken an engine hit. Here we are deep in the game:
Round 4: The top two players were facing off and it turned out to be me and Augustin, AKA God and Davion on the forum and Camospecs. This was our ultimate grudge match: Administrator vs Moderator, Writer vs Camospecs, Ireland vs Spain! I had the Dragon and Merlin and he had the Galahad and Wyvern. I had a good run of luck early on, and was wearing the Galahad down nicely but took too many gauss hits to both mechs by the time I killed him - the mech was still alive but with all weapons destroyed and 4 pilot hits he triggered two unit destruction thresholds for scoring purposes. My Dragon was also "killed" by losing all weapons, and his Wyvern managed to capitalise on the damage the Merlin had taken, utterly mauling it. The Merlin didn't die, but not for trying and Augustin got 74 out of a possible 75% for a non-kill.
Dylan, my con travelling companion decided to back the game's winner early on
At the end of the day, my 6 out of a possible 7 kills got me enough points to hold on to first place!
Some more photos:
Me, Mark and José on the train at a stupid time in the morning
Dylan in a crowd shot
Some of the event prizes. The slate plaques include a couple of the ones from the prior year, the Thor statue is for the Bloodname competition on today, which I couldn't attend, and the Mad Cat is for the painting competiton.
Me in between games
The newcomer of the year award, I forget his name right now but he was from the Limerick crew
Scott took third place:
Augustin got second:
Garry and Martin speechifying in an attempt to make us miss our train home
It didn't work, we just about made it!
