Fighting to the bitter end...

...and bitching my way to victory!

In the past, I've accused (and rightly so) Hive Angel of sometimes being a 'shitty winner' (as apparently the Imperial Guard isn't supposed to engage the Blood Angels till they're in HTH combat, but I digress...). Well, last night it was my turn  to be the one 'bitching most of the way to victory' in our game of Classic Battletech. The odds seemed long of me even surviving, much less making a Pickett's charge-like run into the teeth of 3+ missile boats (felt like I was invading the Capellan Confederation), grabbing a scout/spy, and then running all the way back off my table edge with him (in effect having to move length-wise across the map twice). Having preset mechs with crummy pilots didn't seem to help.

Despite these odds, I did actually achieve a decisive victory. I'll leave the battle report to Hive Angel as he was taking copious notes. Instead I just wanted to mention my rearguard mech, the Dervish (which, like everything I had, was still proxied with a Heavy Gear).

In the past i was always fond of the Dervish, however I ran a newer version with an Artemis fire control system which greatly improves missiles on target, something last night's mech was sorely lacking! On the rare occasions it actually hit, I'd fail on the cluster table and few missiles would actually land on target.

However hanging back to provide fire support, and then later on to allow my other mechs to achieve victory my Dervish it sacrificed itself for the cause. As you can see from the record sheet at right, despite walking away, there wasn't much left of it!  SRM ammo dropped from each arm to eliminate potential internal ammo hits! The LRM ammo hoppers ran dry in the last turn! Armor on the right leg & arm gone! The left arm & torso completely torn away!

By the end of the game it's combat effectiveness was reduced to little more than a stumbling medium laser! If you've ever played Battletech, then you can probably imagine the kind of slugfest that caused such damage! Indeed in the last round the Commando simply fell apart as its last (and only remaining) point of center torso internal structure gave way...

Many of you may be wondering where this sudden interest in such an old game has suddenly reemerged from. Well, to be honest, despite the high number of casualties in a game of 40k, its still hard to beat the bar room brawl feeling of a handful of Battlemechs slugging it out! In 40k, you hit, you wound, 90% to the time, the model just dies. In CBT, you hit, you damage, and 90% of the time after that first hit, it struggles on! (unless we're talking light mechs vs. BIG guns, then that number drops considerably) Indeed, three of Hive Angel's mechs were in just as bad, if not worse condition as my Dervish above (my Grasshopper was the only mech to fall during the course of the game).