When Ghost Bears Maul

So this past Friday I managed to get back up to the Outpost for another game of classic Battletech with Cheef. I was fielding most of a star of my Clan Ghost Bear while he had some Draconis Combine troops. With the points cap I had 4 mechs to his 4 mechs with my fifth star member being stuck back at the dropship on guard duty. I fielded a Kingfisher (C variant), a Nova Cat (A variant), a Bearcub 2, and a Pirahna. He was fielding a Rifleman, a Dragon, a Cyclops, and a Hunchback.

This was definitely more of a balanced game than our previous outing as my dice were more normal in their rolls while his rolls actually were willing to score some hits this time. Seeing as that set of dice rolls normally when he's been playing with Frankie in Alpha Strike, I am starting to think they only work well when Frankie is there to use them. I tried to keep my deployment to one side of the map, especially since he started looping his Dragon the long way around the central city section we were fighting in. I ended up with the Pirahna looping behind the Dragon and spending several turns wearing it down while my other forces dealt with his other units.

The Bear Cub was the first to die but between its up close SRM and medium laser fire combined with the Nova Cat's ER Large Lasers, and the heavy fire from the Kingfisher, the Cyclops took a lot of damage and was in a rough way fairly early. In exchange for heavy damage to my Kingfisher, the Cyclops and Hunchback were both killed off on the same turn though some of this was I was lucky on a lot of my shots landing repeatedly in the same location.

In the late game my Kingfisher was getting close to dying from cockpit damage as the LBX AC-5s on the Rifleman kept landing at least one point of damage on the cockpit each time it shot. Indeed, the Kingfisher was down to just one point of armor on the cockpit at the end of the game. At this point I had the Pirahna use its speed to disengage from the Dragon and loop back around to harass the Rifleman with the Kingfisher while the Nova Cat dealt with the Dragon.

At this point the pilot of the Rifleman seems to be from the former Rasalhague region of the Draconis Combine because he was turning his mech into a walking sauna. It actually got to the point that the mech shutdown due to overheating which was a first for both of us in a game. Due to the number of heatsinks it was going to be 2 turns minimum before he could restart the Rifleman which was when Cheef called it a game. I'd have been able to finish off the Rifleman between the Kingfisher and the Pirahna while the Nova Cat held off the Dragon or teamed up the Kingfisher and Nova Cat to deal with the Dragon while the Pirahna kicked and machine gunned the downed Rifleman. So all in all it was a good outing for the clans and it was nice to finally get them back on the table after a long long time for them. It was a fun game as always and I'm looking forward to the next one.