Idea on Force Creation and Achieving Scenario Objectives

[Minnow]

I have been mulling something over and I thought I would throw it to people smarter than me.

I want to try and idea. I have been following the Arizona Campaign thread and am interested in doing something similar with Alpha Strike. I want to establish a Point Value that people have to create a Merc/House/Clan Unit. This until will need to be able to do a variety of things: defense, assault, raids, extraction, recon, etc. The idea behind this is you have an established force and based on the random scenario you get Type (Recon, Breakthrough, etc) and PV value of the mission, select units and either achieve all some, or none of the objectives of said mission. We would have mission objectives where it behoves a player to have forces other than Mechs. I would be open to putting/setting up a place to put user created scenarios to pick from if there is enough interest.

Week to week play I am thinking Chaos Campaign-esk here where there will be some unit record keeping in to keep your units in repair, acquiring new units, skill advancement etc.

The issue here is my players don’t necessarily want to put together a customized force for every game. Game night I grab Merc Unit X or House Unit Y, show up, partner off, draw a mission, roll attacker/defender, select units from my "army" and roll dice.

Taking this a step further perhaps this could be the ground work of doing a day tournament or something. In this scenario might not have repairs and what not but more about who can successfully achieve the most scenario objectives with only the units in your “army” for that day (or some other metric).

Here is an example force we played the other night - 350PV

MAD-3R
CPLT-C1
WVR-9M
PXH-6D

2x- Badger Tracked Transport G
2x- Anti-mech Jump Infantry Third Ueda Infrantry, 3rd Drakons
2x- Rommel Tank (Gauss)
2x- Warrior Attack Helicopter H-7C
2x- Pegasus Scout Hover (Missle)

There would need to be rules put together around force creation much like the Arizona group has done with their rules. The idea here is to make things as competitive as possible and adjust to uber optimized forces. Again, this is supposed to be fun for everyone, not just the person that found a loophole.

Thoughts? Suggestions? Would this be something YOU would be interested in doing?

Thanks in advance of your input.

[Colt Ward]

Disclosure- we used BV

We had each player select a faction & some even selected specific units.  Each force had to be built using the availability of the MUL- except for infantry, just b/c there are not that many canon examples for all the flavors that exist.  All of a player's units had to fall within a certain era, again the MUL being the go to tool.  We used 5K bv to include pilot adjustments for the first round.  Out of the 8 players, only 2 integrated combined arms in that small a force- one player had 2 mechs, 2 or 3 BA and 2 vehicle while the other had 3 mechs and 2 BA.  Everyone got to play everyone else and then we expanded it to the next level- folks got to add another 5k.  So you got to see what other people were using and adjust.  Because the combined arms players beat most (all?) the mech-only forces, suddenly folks started using BA and vehicles.

With that round we had VTOLs, field gun artillery, artillery vehs, C3, smoke and mines.

[Minnow]

Colt,

Thanks for the input. I understand you guys are using BV, my players prefer Alpha Strike, hence the questions surrounding PV.

[Colt Ward]

Sure, I just do not know the rough conversion of BV to PV . . . I want to say I heard 400 to 450, but I refer that to someone who converts between the systems with more familiarity.  IMO you would plan the PV to get 2 med/heavy lances and a lance of vehicles- the point value for that 'average' size of a force should allow someone to go heavier with just two lances of mechs, go lighter and have a medium mech company, or mix it up in a lot of different ways for combined arms.  Bring your set force and play round robin which allows folks to test out what they have . . . and then after a while increase the PV so folks can 'adjust' to what they faced.