Hover APCs = Winning?

o/

One of the gripes we've had here of late with Classic Battletech is the vehicle hit chart. Wanting the game to be focused on 'giant stompy robots' (as the saying generally goes), mechs have only two locations that offer possible crits (at least until you punch thru their armor). Whereas with tanks, fully half of their locations offer possible crits (even with full armor). Heavy Gear, which also is based on the 'giant stompy robot' concept, just makes tanks terribly expensive cause they realize that from an engineering standpoint, tanks are MUCH more survivable than a Gear is. In Battletech, its just the opposite. Why an untouched 20 ton Locust is less likely to suffer a crit on the first hit (assuming its wafer thin armor doesn't just evaporate) than say, a 100 ton Demolisher II, is simply mind boggling.

As such, we've moved away from 'uber' tanks, and are instead looking towards fielding just the cheap and crummy ones. The two Oros that I have for the clans will be the heaviest MBTs in my inventory. Although the AC-2 carrier is comparable in weight to an Oro, it really is just garbage (though amusing) and thus is correspondingly cheap in points. Meanwhile my Maxim, while really just an AFV, seems to be my preferred inner sphere 'MBT' due to its versatility (even though it can be kinda pricey points wise), and for added fun, the Clans can use it too.

A size comparison to the Maxim

Taking this attitude to the extreme, I picked up 8 generic hovertanks from an old board game on ebay. I intend to use them as the machine gun fire support variant (that's the part where you're supposed to laugh) of the 10-ton hover APC (they never made a model for the APCs because they suck). With the full lance weighing in at a mere 456 points, they're quite the bargain. The crit chart is irrelevant as a hit from anything more powerful than a medium laser will kill them outright (except on the rear armor, where a medium laser will kill them on its own).

Individually, they have a total damage potential of just 6 points in 3 2-point groupings, however they have to get REALLY close to even get into range. To do so, they clock in at 10-15 hexes per turn (about all that they have going for them aside from being cheap), meaning they're not going to be too easy to hit. If they're ignored, the whole lance has the potential to put a 24 point shotgun blast of machine gun fire onto a target. That'll even get an assault mech's attention really fast!

I also have, 4 more hover APCs that I'm trying to figure out how to mount an LRM5 on (kinda hard as they're so small), and a pair of Scorpion light tanks to fill out the ranks of the dirt cheap fire support. I still need 1 more tracked tank to fill out my piss poor fire support lance. Honestly, I am tempted to put an old style Demolisher in there for that purpose, but whenever I ponder that, the hit chart issue stops me from doing so. So perhaps I'll add in another AC2  carrier or an equally worthless (but still amusing) laser carrier (no link on that one as I assume they're just not worth the effort, lol).