Eridani Light Horse Update

So I finally got back to putting some paint to miniatures this past week. I went with an assembly line sort of idea when breaking out the Tamiya Field Grey (which oddly enough is a really nice shade of green). I got a total of 18 light mechs and 7 medium mechs basecoated over the black primer to get them ready for the next steps.

This coming week I'm going to see about getting the bronze and red added to them and, if I make good progress, wash layer as well. I also have a dozen heavy and assault mechs, that aren't going to be in the ELH due to being old metal models or resin prints that scale just slightly different than the new Catalyst plastics that this regiment will be made of, which need a color scheme of some sort decided upon. I've gone through a lot of web pages considering different units and am starting to lean into just slapping together a small merc unit a la TBAG'ers. That's all for now and hopefully a new post next week.

Donegal Guard vs Ace Darwin's Whipits

So this past Saturday evening I made it back up to Johnson City for a game with Cheef again. This time around I was fielding a slightly reinforced lance of my 8th Donegal Guard versus his Ace Darwin's Whipits. He had me slightly outnumbered at the beginning with 7 mechs again my own 5.

We both split our forces with two of my jump capable mechs (Wolverine and Hatchman) on the tighter confined urban terrain while my Ostol, Awesome, and Hunchback took to the rolling hills on the other flank. He put his Stinger, Grasshopper, and Urbanmech on the urban side while his two Shadowhawks, Panther, and Enforcer took the other. Rob made a brief appearance and was nice enough (to me anyway) to seemingly put a light curse on Cheef's dice. Early turns of ranging shots didn't see anything happen but the first blood was in the urban era. Before the Urbie was close enough to get involved, my Hatchetman and Wolverine ignored the Grasshopper to double up on the Stinger. It was quickly rendered bereft of weaponry and proceeded to book it off the table. His Grasshopper and one other mech were the other two failed pilot checks.

My Ostol was faster than the Awesome and Hunchback and as it got out in front it quickly drew a heavy amount of fire that it weathered fairly well. As the ranges dropped more damage began mounting on both sides. Cheef became more disillusioned with his Shadowhawks as the game went on, as why they look like nice mechs, having the lightest versions basically of all weapons with an AC/5, SRM/2, and LRM/5 and a single medium laser. They consistently just couldn't put up a decent amount of damage reliably. Around this point too, Cheef learned of Murl's seeming curse when it came to piloting checks. Out of three checks over several turns and three different mechs, he rolled a combined 3 each time. One of them was on his Urbie which managed to crit itself on it's fall and took out it's own AC/10.

I ended up taking a leg off of Ace's Pink Panther and rendered him mission inoperable. A few turns later saw the Urbie destroyed, though it did score a small laser hit to the head of my Hatchetman in the scrum, and one of his Shadowhawks downed from a destroyed leg as well. It was nice to have a proper urban combat scene with a Wolverine and Hatchetman squaring off against an Urbie, Grasshopper, and a Stinger. Definitely a proper fight with the proper types of mech for it.

At this point he was trying to regroup his scattered mechs to support each other as the remaining Shadowhawk was missing some weapons and the Enforcer was starting to show some damage. It was at this point that when my Hatchetman and Wolverine shot at the Grasshopper that my dice after failing to confirm a possible critical hit on at least a dozen previous rolls suddenly got three of them on the Grasshopper for a pair of engine hits and a gyro hit. Combined with it losing most of its weapons as well, Cheef threw in the towel at this point. I somehow had all my mechs still standing though three of them were a couple good hits from going down. All in all it was a fun evening with lots of chatting and relaxing. Looking forward to the next time though it seems that once a month to get up there is going to be as good as it gets for the foreseeable future.

Into 2024

Well, we're into a new year and hopefully it's better than the last few have been. I'm going to be making a concentrated effort to start cleaning up my backlog of Battletech as I really do want to have everything caught up when the Mercs Kickstarter arrives. The first step towards that I got my desk fully cleaned off today. To assist me with keeping it that way, I took some key choices from my various collections and staged them on the desk. Hopefully this will keep me on track by not trashing the desk or letting junk pile up so at least I'll have room to work on stuff. Anyway, that's how the year is starting and we'll see how long I last on this attempted part of my journey.

I've selected a few of my favorite diecast cars, my only graded and slabbed comic book, a couple smaller Marvel figures, a few hero characters from my Lions of Harlech, some Eaglemoss Marvel characters, my Camo Specs Battletech book as I like to always have it handy, a couple mechs (the Atlas from Cheef), a few Star Wars bits, and for my GI Joe representation, this really cool Larry Hama figure that I picked up a couple years ago. As to the PC screen, retro Flash Gordon artwork for the background screen. See you all next time and enjoy your new year!