Week 2The Interdiction mission didn’t pan out, heavy cloud cover hiding the movement of the AFFS defenders.
In better news, one of the Marik liaisons put in for a long-term transfer to the Brotherhood, bringing his Dervish with him. Another ultra-green rookie, he immediately joined the training command. Privately, Albus and the officers were sure he was a SAFE agent being planted with the unit to spy on their future employers, but wasn’t too troubled by it.
Speaking of training, James Gundersen improved his gunnery after two weeks of training, and several of the rookie infantry started specializing towards artillery and anti-Mech paths.
Wednesday the 15th of April, Gamma Platoon was alerted to an attempt by the AFFS to extract high value personnel in the Brotherhood’s Area of Operation. They moved in to engage, facing enemy ‘Mechs, vehicles, infantry and air support.
For my own sanity and to speed up the timeline, I won’t give the full report for battles that don’t include PCs. This allows me to do some battles for fun without having to screenshot and comment every step. 
The target was in a small civilian convoy, advancing through a tiny town in the middle of nowhere. The Orion, an ancient relic, was likely a bodyguard unit, leaving them likely to be in the M.A.S.H. truck or the APC.
When they arrived in town, the heavy vehicles of the Brotherhood rolled out of hiding, and the civilians panicked. Three of them turned off to the west, not realizing that doing so left them trapped by the thick woods that their wheeled vehicles couldn’t traverse, but the treads of the Devastator could. The Orion broke to the east, looking to bypass the town, but he instead came under the guns of the Behemoth and the SRM Carrier.
Meanwhile, their escorting Hunchback moved to engage the AFFC forces hurrying to save the civilians, focusing on a Phoenix Hawk with his large bore autocannon.
The battle was almost anti-climatic. The Devastator picked off the Brunel, M.A.S.H. truck and APC with its large bore autocannons, the civilians not even managing to get off a shot. To the east, the SRM Carrier swarmed the Orion with its missiles, before moving on and doing the same to the AFFC Blackjack and Phoenix Hawk, bagging three ‘Mech kills in the battle. The Marik Hunchback was battered from taking the brunt of the fighting but came out intact.
The Devastator claimed three vehicle kills, the Brunel Dump Truck, M.A.S.H. Truck and APC.
The SRM Carrier bagged the RetroTech Orion, the Blackjack and the Phoenix Hawk.
The unit claimed the salvage of the Phoenix Hawk – while the SRM Carrier didn’t leave much behind, it had blown the right arm off in intact condition, including a working Large Laser that would let them bring their own Phoenix Hawk up to usable standards that much quicker.
4 AFFC personnel were captured, and the two civilians in the M.A.S.H. truck were confirmed dead, including their target.
One of the AFFC personnel was the pilot of the Phoenix Hawk. She was in tears over the destruction of her family’s heirloom ‘Mech, but after some negotiation, agreed to join the unit as their new Phoenix Hawk pilot.
With her broken arm, she won’t be piloting it for a while, but the Brotherhood is growing. She came with enough XP to raise her piloting, making her a 4/5 Regular.
Analysis:This is the first time I’ve played this mission type (I don’t normally set units to Defend), and I have to say its rather hard depending on the terrain you get. The victory conditions for the player is that you have to kill all the civilian units before they can escape, but they’re set to rabbit immediately, and if you don’t get lucky with the map layout like I did, then its hard to down them all in time. Fielding a full Lance would make it a lot easier
On Friday, disaster struck. A company of the 1st Aragon Borderers stumbled on the Training Command busy with a training mission in an abandoned industrial area of a city. They moved to engage, calling in air strikes from a flight led by local ace pilot Kenny ‘Two-Shot’ Goodenough.
No, seriously, I didn’t make that name up, or his skill. The Training Command scrambled to defend itself from the sudden attack.
Mission Goal: Destroy 3 enemy units before Turn 4, 4 enemy units before turn 8, or 6 enemy units after turn 8
Defeated on: Loss of 3 allied units.
The Brotherhood’s infantry dug in on the second floor of the hardened building in the center of the town. While the Shadow Hawk and Commando moved to flank a Scimitar, their instructor in his Spider moved to deal with a Vedette, which the infantry also took aim for. Glaive and his companion in the Dervish stayed relatively still, facing the rest of the forces coming in from the west.
The AFFC pressed the attack on the west side of the small town, focusing on the skyscraper the Brotherhood Infantry was holding. Glaive moved to support them, while the Dervish moved into melee range with the AFFS Stinger.
The Brotherhood’s fortunes turned for the better. While their Dervish and the AFFS Stinger both missed their kicks, the Stinger pilot was too hasty in trying to stand and ended up crippling their ‘Mech with two engine hits and a gyro hit and knocked themselves out to boot. Meanwhile, pilot error from the Plainsman led it to crash into the woods, immobilizing it.
While their building was worse for wear, the Brotherhood Infantry had yet to take any casualties, and scored the first actual kill of the battle as their heavy support lasers knocked out the Vedette. Glaive scored another kill shortly after, crushing the side of the Saladin Assault Hover Tank at his Warhammer’s feet.
The AFFS’ aircover flew in, one of the Defenders making a pass over the Brotherhood stronghold, another striking the FWL Spider. The cluster bombs did a fair amount of damage to Glaive’s Warhammer, causing him to lose his balance and fall, further damaging his leg. The Spider was bathed in fire as three Inferno Bombs sent its heat spiking far into the red.
Fighting continued as the green defenders struggled to land shots against their far lighter opponents.
With damage mounting, the Brotherhood fought to force the FedCom attackers to back off.
The FedCom forces start falling back, most of their machines are now heavily damaged, it should only take one more push from the Brotherhood to force a victory.
That push was provided in the form of the Infantry coring out the damaged Spider from behind with their support lasers, and the Shadow Hawk destroying one of the Scimitars. With the main body of their forces combat ineffective, the reinforcements instead covered the withdrawal of the surviving vehicles.
The Warhammer took a beating from the bombing run and combat, with its left leg barely functional (only 1 structure remaining). Combat damage was otherwise light, though the Commando took some nasty falls.
Jami (Commando) took 2 hits, while Gani (Dervish) took 1, as did James (Warhammer).
The Brotherhood claimed the salvage for the Stinger, before promptly turning around and selling it to the scrappers for 1.4 million C-Bills.
3 AFFS personnel died in the fighting, and 3 more were captured, including the pilot of the Spider, who was enraged that his ‘Mech was destroyed by ‘mere ground pounders’.
Lieutenant Yi’s Heavy Infantry claimed the Spider and a Vedette as kills
James ‘Glaive’ Gundersen claimed the Saladin
Stefanova Ragozin claimed the Scimitar.
Despite its near destruction, no one was given credit for the Stinger, as its damage was entirely inflicted by pilot error.
In the wake of the battle, Stefanova’s piloting improved markedly, and a number of infantry had improved their skills or started developing Anti-Mech or Artillery skills. One of them however, put in for a change of position. Belmiro Larcher already had some experience piloting AgroMechs and had been working hard in the simulators to improve his ‘Mech gunnery. While he was green, so were half of the Brotherhood’s pilots. His transfer was approved, though now he needed to wait for a ride to become available.
Analysis:This would have been so much easier without green pilots. That said, I was gratified by how well the infantry did – they did have the advantage of digging in on a fortified building, so they had ~130 HP of armor before they would start taking damage.
One thing I didn’t anticipate is that I thought the Support Lasers had a
maximum range of 5. They instead have a range increment of 5 – meaning they hit out as far as 15 hexes away. Combined with larger regular+ gunnery, they were doing very good scattershot damage to enemies. This was deadly to the Vedette, where they inflicted immobilizing damage in two turns. The Spider got unlucky – it had taken some back shots from our own Spider a few rounds earlier and was nearly stripped of all armor from trying to brawl with a Warhammer. Running and exposing its back, it just got shot through the naked back armor and was cored.
The rest of the week...Nothing much occurred the rest of the week. Seeing how effective enemy air support had been, Albus started acquiring HE bombs for their own Aerospace fighters, and the Techs were hard at work repairing the battle damage to the training ‘Mechs. By Sunday, all that was remaining was to repair the structural damage to the Commando’s Central Torso and the Warhammer’s leg.
For the coming week, the Aerospace Fighters were tasked to ground support, while other unit assignments remained the same.
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Topic: The Iron Brotherhood - A Battletech/MekHQ Let's Play: Operation Eclipse (Read 42459 times)