Big Stompy Robots

[Alexander Wasberg]

I’ve been painting some big battlemechs for some games of Mech Attack and thought I’d share some pics:

The lot so far, red VS blue with 4 mechs’ each

 

Red Heavy, to the right, armed with a HMG and A twin-linked heavy laser.

 

The first red medium, with medium lasers and a set of medium missiles

 

The second red medium comes with 3 missile launchers.

 

Finally the red light, it comes armed with either dual cannons or lasers, depending on situation.

 

 

Blue heavy, with lots of missiles!

Blue’s first medium mech, armed with 2 medium lasers and missiles.

 

The second blue medium mech comes equipped with 2 medium cannons and missiles.

 

The blue light is a chicken-walker armed with 4 machineguns.

 

I’ve only had time for a single game so far, but it was promising!

 

Setup

 

First shots

 

Blue medium mech is destroyed!

 

And before long, the Blue heavy falls too, but the Red heavy isn’t far behind, with only a few armorboxes are left!

 

I’ve got the full report on the blog, and hopefully I’ll post more soon!

http://lasersandbroadswords.blogspot.com/2015/08/reinforcements-for-mech-attack-and-some.html

 

Thanks for looking!

http://lasersandbroadswords.blogspot.com My project blog

[Nathaniel Weber]

Nice mechs!

Could you give a description of the rules? I am interested in a game that’s lighter on book-keeping/box-checking than Battletech.

[Alexander Wasberg]

Thanks!

I just lost the long repy I’d written, but I’ll try and re-create it!

It’s a great game, really quick and easy to play, without being too simple IMHO. Bits blow up and mechs overheat as you attack with all your weapons at once, it’s great fun!

Mech Attack uses an alternating activation, you roll for initiative, winner chooses who starts and you take turns activating 1 mech each.

It uses a D10 for resolution, you roll against the targets TP (target profile). If you hit, you roll again to determine where the damage hit on the mechs armor grid. The grid is 10 blocks long and a certain number of rows high depending on the armor of the target, usually between 4 and 8 rows, giving most mechs between 40 and 80 armor boxes. Different weapons have different damage patterns, do a laser will penetrate several blocks in a line, while a machinegun will rolls a number of single box hits depending on the class.

If you destroy all the boxes in a row, you can cause a critical hit. This might cause damage to various systems like movement of heatsinks, blow up weapons of outright destroy the mech in question. This is the main way to destroy your opponents mechs.

Mech Attack can include vehicles and infantry units as well, it’s really simple to design your own units with the unit builder!

Each Mech has the following stats:

Armor, which describes how many boxes of armor the mech has, basically how much damage it can take.

Movement: in inches, how far you can move. There is a double move action, but that will generate extra heat. Standard move rates are between 3 and 5″.

Target Profile, or how difficult your mech is to hit. Usually a number between 3 for a heavy mech and 5 for a light one. Mechs are quite easy to hit, but then again they are 10 meter high giant robots.

Heat sinks, they let you shed some of the heat produced by the operation of the mechs systems and weapons. Most mechs can shed 4 points of heat. If you still have any exess heat at the end of your turn, you have to roll on a critical heat table.

So there’s a risk-reward between using all your weapons and risking the mech shutting down or being damaged, and playing it safe and keeping within the limits of the heatsinks capacity.

 

Each mech have 4 hardpoints, left and right arm, left and right torso. You can mount weapons and support systems in the torso, and weapons in the arms. Each weapon has a cost, a range (usually between 6-12″), a amount of heat generated and a damage pattern belonging to it.

The ranges are quite short by normal standards, but I’ve not found it to be a problem, since a sighline longer than 12″ is unlikely to occur with some terrain on the board.

There are lasers, cannons, machineguns and missiles to equip of light, medium and heavy variety, along with a handfull of support systems such as targeting aids and anti-missile defences.

 

Some guys over at the Armor Grid official forum have also posted rules for converting most BT mechs into Mech Attack, so you can easily use what you have without much fuzz. The document also has the stats for BT-specific weapons like the PPC.

 

If there’s anything else you wonder, don’t hesitate to ask!

Hope this was helpful, and sorry about the long reply!

 

 

http://lasersandbroadswords.blogspot.com My project blog

[Nathaniel Weber]

That sounds fun. Thanks for the detailed run through. Would it be accurate, then, to say the game is like a streamlined Battletech? I don’t mean that flippantly.

I have added it to my cart on Wargame Vault.

[Alexander Wasberg]

I’d say that’s a fair assessment, a quicker more streamlined battletech is a good way to describe it!

http://lasersandbroadswords.blogspot.com My project blog

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