Hello again! Lynn here, one of your BattleTech tournament correspondents! I’m thrilled to have company now in this particular content-creation niche, even if it inevitably frames me as the Goofus to Liberty and Perigrin’s Gallants. You are not about to read a story about carefully fine-tuned lists, optimized for the tournament packet and honed through many practice reps. No, the road I took to my most recent local tournament, Summer Fever II, was far more… haphazard.
First, an overview: Summer Fever II was a 30ish-person (two out of the 32 tickets didn’t sell, and one drop meant that, as at WarZone, we had a “ringer” to round us out to an even number) Classic BattleTech tournament held at Level-Up Games in Duluth, GA. Forces were locked to a single Inner Sphere / Periphery / Pirate / Mercenary MUL roster for the Late Succession Wars – Renaissance time period. 6500 BV, 2-6 units, ‘Mechs and CVs only. Vehicles were capped at two total (no on-board artillery, mortars, or aerospace), and mechs were limited to the MRC-normative max of two of the same chassis, no duplicate variants. A shift in MRC guidelines for the 2025 season meant that players could take a single Unique unit as long as it wasn’t from Solaris and didn’t feature Experimental tech. Alternate ammo was era-limited to only Infernos, Art IV-capable missiles, and NARC-compatible missiles. Players could also bring up to 30 BSP in battlefield support off the “Strikes” table (so artillery, airstrikes, and air cover), using the costs from Mercenaries rather than the BMM.
While the TO for this tournament was the same as for WarZone Atlanta, he changed things up significantly with regard to optional rules and deployment. Forced Withdrawal was no longer in effect, ditto level changes while in reverse and Careful Stand. Floating Crits, Expanded Damage Modifiers (escalating penalties to the PSR to remain standing if damage received in one round hits 40+), One-Armed Prone Fire, Enhanced Flamers, Front-Loaded Initiative, and simplified target declaration (declare targets, not specific weapons to be fired) were all still in play. To compensate for the slower speed and shorter range of IntroTech ‘Mechs and get us into the violence quicker, we could deploy our units up to six hexes in from our short edge of the Battlemat rather than walking on from the edge as we did at WarZone. Frustratingly, though, the TO didn’t actually 100% lock in how big this deployment zone would be until tournament start, which sucked for practicing. Scenarios were once again revealed only ~30 minutes before the start of each round, further limiting the effectiveness of practice. In one last change, rounds were 20% shorter than at the WarZone tournament, cutting back from two-and-a-half hours to two hours. I’ll have more to say about that later.
As you might recall from the signoff to my last tournament report, Renaissance is my least favorite to play out of the common eras; it’s a time of extreme haves and have-nots. While ComStar leads the “haves” column as it does throughout the Succession Wars, Davion has a very solid base of recovered LosTech (some of it shared with the Lyrans through the Federated Commonwealth, like the DVS-2), Kurita has a few fun toys from Operation Rosebud, and, since players could bring a Unique ‘Mech to this tournament, the Bounty Hunter single-handedly nudged the Mercs MUL towards “haves” as well. The have-nots? Pretty much anyone else. While there is some LosTech available more broadly, like the gauss-armed Cyclops CP-11-A on Inner Sphere General, those examples tend to have… questionable implementation. (For example, said Cyclops is only carrying 57% armor for its chassis).
I swore last time that I was going to try to make Marik work regardless, and I swear to you, reader, I tried. I did try. My first draft tournament list featured a Goliath 3M, Viper VP-5, Trebuchet 5S, Hermes II “Mercury,” and Pegasus (Missile). There’s things I liked about that list – a gauss rifle is always welcome, and the two SRM units felt good (Inferno spam is particularly useful in an era where single heat sinks are still commonplace) – but on the whole it felt like I was paying a little too much BV for what I was getting, especially with the Goliath. My eyes started straying towards greener pastures… and then when I decided not to run the Bounty Hunter, my eyes strayed further, back towards the white pastures of ComStar.
I’d been down that force-construction road before… my very first tournament, back when I could still count the games of Classic I’d played on one hand without using all the fingers, was also limited to the Renaissance era, and when I asked for advice on the Goonhammer Discord, Perigrin gave me the advice they always do when that era of play comes up: Play ComStar, take the Royal Black Knight, make people suffer your Large Pulse Lasers. At the time I tried a ComStar list anchored by a Royal Black Knight, got outplayed by a more veteran player with a list full of IntroTech shitbuckets (the terrible moon map did not help at ALL), and ended up swapping off to an IntroTech Marik list and placing a respectable fourth out of twelve, losing only to the overall tournament winner. My current point of view is much more nuanced and experience-informed than “I lost to an IntroTech list with a ComStar list once while I was still a noob, therefore simpler is better,” but I’m gonna be real with y’all: I still don’t enjoy playing around a Black Knight’s heat curve. I know it’s an efficient zombie, and I love the look of the ‘Mech, but I just don’t generally love the way it feels.
My hunt for treasure on the ComStar MUL other than the BL-6b-KNT led me to the somewhat ridiculous technique of sorting every ‘Mech they have by tech base (anything with double heat sinks would show up as “Standard,” rather than “Introductory,” tech), then opening every single Standard ‘Mech up in Flechs to scrutinize its sheet.
That, my friends, is how I discovered that the Inner Sphere built its own Gargoyle. The Spartan N2 is something of a victim of having been built under old rules, with FAR more ammo for its Streak SRM-2s and its AMS than it would ever want under current rules for that equipment, and it runs just a hair hot (would that those two extra tons of ammo were two more heat sinks!), but it’s a lovably affordable 5/8 slab of armor like its spiritual cousin… and it comes with two fists, to boot!
While I was in that stage of list planning, parsing through the less-well-known ‘Mechs available to ComStar, the amazingly talented Porble reached out to me with a compelling offer: He would paint a force for me to borrow for my next tournament in exchange for being featured in this writeup. His only request was that I try to feature ‘Mechs and/or vehicles which exist in CGL plastic but haven’t received full Goonhammer write-ups yet, so that the painting effort towards my list could double as prep for future ‘Mech Overview articles.
I can appreciate a challenge, I find listbuilding constraints interesting, and I was certainly thrilled to be offered the chance to make heart-eyes at Porble’s impeccable paint jobs in person, so I quickly said yes. Aiming towards the goal of using novel-to-Goonhammer CGL plastics prevented me from going with some very solid ‘Mechs with no modern minis, like the Shootist, and discouraged some of the more obvious picks from ComStar’s stable, like the aforementioned Black Knight, the Highlander, or the Mercury. Committing to ComStar did also bring its own sacrifices… their vehicle availability is significantly restricted until they gain access to Inner Sphere General in the Clan Invasion Era, denying me access to many of the vees I would’ve liked to use, like the Pegasus (Missile) I ran in my draft Marik list.
The self-imposed list-building challenges I accepted were soon joined by a host of other speedbumps: I befriended a new player (yay!) who prefers to play Alpha Strike (whoops!), drawing a significant portion of my BattleTech table time away from tournament prep. I also got distracted doing some prep for a different tournament, only to realize I didn’t actually have the funds to attend it. I went through busy periods at work, I went through a period of illness, and I had to get a list to Porble fairly early to leave time for both painting and shipping in advance of the tourney… All of this added up to me only getting my prospective list to table once prior to locking in my unit selection!
I committed to the following:
The aforementioned Spartan N2, giving me the ability to push a big mech with guns that can’t be ignored into people’s faces at alarming speed…
The basic Crockett stepped in as my long-range threat, narrowly getting the nod over the Emperor 6A. I knew I wanted to pack at least one LB 10-X into the list, since it’s the only weapon permitted under tournament rules that can make flak attacks to discourage VTOLs. The Emperor could double down on that capability, and would bring more pulse lasers to the list, but I ultimately decided that the little bit of extra range on the Crockett’s ER Large Lasers, along with its ability to throw out Inferno SRMs in self-defense, tipped the odds in its favor. As a ranged attacker it’s less threatening than a gauss boat, but also draws less attention and counter fire than a gauss boat would.
Going with two assault mechs at 6500 put a cost crunch on the rest of my list, particularly since I planned to upskill my non-Pulse mechs where possible. Enter the weenie swarm…
The Mongoose 66 stepped in as an alternate to the Mercury, trading MASC for armor and a small laser for a third medium laser. It’s more expensive, but I rationalized that the armor coverage would help protect it against air strikes while it played objectives, and the slight increase in range and damage could help in the backstabber role.
I dipped into IntroTech for a basic Javelin 10N as my primary Inferno SRM control piece after ruling out ComStar’s selection of SRM hovertanks. Its armor is bad, its speed is only okay, and it is dreadfully vulnerable to Infernos itself with single heat sinks and a volatile payload, but it’s still less likely to be immobilized and better able to deal with rough terrain than a hovertank, and opponents sometimes underestimate it.
As the last (significant) piece I ultimately tapped a Firefly 4C, despite the FFL having been covered by Goonhammer already with the rest of the Mercenaries box set. The Art-IV LRM-5, AMS, and Jump 4 are unimpressive, but the three MPLs are very nice to have, and it’s got enough armor to act as a sort of budget Medium, while its low speed keeps BV cost down.
I had already submitted those five to Porble as my roster, but as I played around with skill allocation (my first draft drastically overinvested in the Crockett by taking it to 3/4, and dropping it to 5 Piloting opened up more space to work with) I joked with him that I could take my force up to a full Level II, but only if the sixth member was the cheapest vehicle with a listed BV on the ComStar MUL, an unarmed flatbed truck.
Then the motherfucker (complimentary) showed me that he already had a resin kei truck painted white and basically dared me to do it, and then I realized I actually had enough space to really meme it up and put a 2/0 pilot in the driver’s seat, so there we were, embracing joke characters and Initiative Sinks.
The list I locked in featured the Crockett and Javelin at 3/5, the Spartan and Mongoose at 4/4, the Firefly at 4/5, and that 2/0 madlad in the truck, for a total of 6493 BV.
I did finally get in some good testing against a very strong opponent (the winner of the first two Classic tournaments I participated in), but only after I had completely locked in my list. That practice showed that while the list *mostly* performed as intended, the comedy truck was indeed a total waste of space (initiative sinking is reduced in value by front-loaded initiative); my tactics with the trio of lights put too much weight on the assumption that my opponent would prioritize shooting the Distraction Spartan, leaving them too vulnerable to removal; and I also felt the durability I gave up by picking ‘Mechs with XL engines. That said, the Inferno SRMs definitely looked to be worth their weight in C-Bills in this environment, and the consistency of the six MPLs on 5/8/X bodies looked promising. I looked forward to the tournament – and my commitment to document either my success or my failure for all the Internet to see – with equal parts excitement and trepidation.
A Miami-Vice-themed tournament logo and a couple of other 80s references in the Player Packet suggested a bit of a theme, but it wasn’t until I arrived that I realized how much 80s kitsch I was in for. Swag, trophies, certificates, even the missions themselves were all stuffed with pop-culture references. Starting with…
Round One: Operation Back In Time
This was an escort mission with loose Back-to-the-Future theming and hover-Delorean objective vehicles. The rules for this one were more elaborate than they needed to be. The goal was simple enough: Get your Delorean as far as you can across the map while hindering the opponent’s. The implementation, however, got weird. Each player’s Delorean was an unarmed, indestructible 1-ton 5/8 hover vehicle with a skill 4 pilot. It had to obey regular hover movement rules, including sideslipping, but since it couldn’t actually be damaged it would “bounce off” of woods hexes and level changes greater than one. Further, while indestructible, it could still be shot at. If 10 or more damage was dealt to it in a single round it would be pushed back four hexes along the most efficient route towards the player’s deployment edge. To help you prevent this from happening, friendly ‘Mechs standing in a hex adjacent to the Delorean could block enemy LoS to the objective vehicle.
Primary scoring was based on where your Delorean was at the end of the game: 25 points if it was at the halfway point of the map, 50 points if it reached the 3/4ths mark, and a full 75 if it made it off the map entirely. As in all of these missions, the Secondary Objective score for killing/crippling enemy units was worth up to 50 points, 5 points for each full 10% of the opponent’s BV you destroyed (with crippled units counting for half their BV). The winner of the game got an extra 25 point bonus, for a theoretical maximum score of 150.
My opponent for this round was a quiet, agreeable guy playing a simple IntroTech Kuritan list. From the shade of his hair and the metal of his models, I assume he’s a long-time player, but he wasn’t familiar with hover vehicle rules; I’m grateful that he trusted me to help him figure out what moves were possible and what sideslip rolls were necessary.
I was a lot better about taking battlefield photos this tournament, but the art of “actually making solid notes on (or taking pics of) my opponent’s list” still eludes me. Best as I can recall I was facing a 4G Hunchback, stock Panther, stock Dervish, Mongoose 68 (the Large Laser one), and Charger 1A9 (the first DCMS jumping model, introduced to me by the player as “like the one Jeremiah Rose piloted, but without all the fancy stuff”).
In Round Two a lucky double-tap from the Crockett to the the head of the Hunchback just failed to go internal (I landed one of the ERLLs and one LBX pellet), but the Hunchie’s driver failed the second consciousness check and took a nap, putting the scariest gun on my opponent’s side of the field out of commission. In the same round I also managed to score both an engine and a gyro crit on the enemy Mongoose after finagling the Spartan into its rear arc – both crits scored by the SSRMs, which somehow managed to hit while the pulse lasers missed. This crippled the Mongoose for purposes of secondary objective scoring and also effectively limited it to a move-blocking role (since the heat gain from the engine crit made its large laser fire unsustainable and the gyro crit threatened to turn any kick into an existential threat), but I kept firing higher-BV guns at it on subsequent rounds trying to finish it off and never succeeded, which is honestly a win for the Mongoose.
It wasn’t all roses for me in Round Two, either; my Spartan took a headshot from the Panther’s PPC – it only scored a Life Support crit, but I was forced to think harder about subsequent moves with the Spartan since I knew a single SRM in the wrong place could end it at any time.
I honestly don’t think I played particularly well in the middle stretch of this game. I struggled to advance my Delorean past a choke-point on the map, failing to get my mechs positioned where they could tank for it, and while the Hunchback’s nap, the other enemy mechs’ anemic weaponry, and my opponent’s fondness for jumping meant that he wasn’t doing much to threaten me, I wasn’t able to land any significant damage in return, either. I ultimately did win this round, but it was a low-scoring, luck-driven win: I was able to shoot his Delorean to send him back to the mid-point of the map, his Hunchback (whose pilot had woken from his nap) missed my Delorean to leave it at the middle line (in the very same hex the enemy hover-car was pushed back into by my fire, in fact), and my Mongoose, alpha-striking the Hunchback’s rear arc, managed to crit the AC/20 ammo bomb. We tied on primary objective, with the Hunchback’s fiery demise edging me up on kill scoring, earning me an humble 60-30 win.
Despite the victory, I wasn’t pleased with my speed of play or with my target discipline in this game, and I once again completely forgot my BSP. I thought my opponent had forgotten BSP as well, but as it turned out he simply chose not to engage with that system at all. I’ve noticed that older players tend to be dismissive of it, and my local community’s overall enthusiasm for BSP strikes seems to be waning; I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this TO’s next tournament drops them entirely. (Since I originally wrote this, the TO has released the packet for this year’s Toys for Tots tournament… BSP strikes are still in, but have been re-flavored as gifts from “Robot Santa.” Go figure.)
Mid-tournament lunch was once again a peanut butter sandwich from my backpack. During a previous tournament at this game store, I left on the hour-long lunch break and drove somewhere else for food, but good ol’ Atlanta Metro traffic shenanigans almost prevented me from getting back to the venue on time, despite the short distance traveled. I’ve sworn to never risk that again.
Staying at Level-Up throughout the break gave me time to contemplate future BattleTech purchases and make heart-eyes at pretty Gundam kits, a little overly-optimistic ember of me pre-planning how to spend my winnings should I take home a prize and its accompanying gift card. Unfortunately, staying throughout the break also gave me time to gradually realize that the tournament was about to get significantly more challenging. Not because of my competitors, not because of the upcoming Round Two scenario, not because of the terrain.
Reader, I don’t know who rolled a critical hit on the FLGS’s heat sinks, but as the day wore on everyone in the building got a taste of what it feels like to be in the cockpit of a BattleMech. It got hot. Humid. Hotter and more humid than you’re imagining, if you live anywhere outside the Deep South. Hot. Steamy. Filled with sweaty nerds (extra-filled; there was an MtG: Final Fantasy prerelease event going on at the same time as the later rounds of our tournament). It was not pleasant. Regardless, it was time for…
Round Two: Operation Spare Parts
I want to start by saying that my opponent in this round, Brent, was one of the most genial, pleasant people I’ve ever had the fortune to play in a game of BattleTech, a skilled gamer and a real gentleman. He also brought the toughest list I played against at this tournament, which promised a nice challenge.
I needed to lead with that because it’s approximately the last pleasant thing I’m going to say about this round.
The pop-culture-reference pitch for this scenario was that each player was trying to aid a damaged T-800 by acquiring spare parts from their opponent. This was implemented as one of the least-balanced wargaming scenarios I’ve ever seen. Let me give a rundown of how this worked:
On every odd numbered turn (1, 3, 5, and so on) a supply drop would come down, scattering from a starting point of hex 1609. The problem? The supply drops scattered a distance of 2d6 hexes from that point, and with only one coming down every other turn, there wasn’t really enough rolling to smooth out probability curves.
The supply drops weren’t the only source of salvage, however; in fact, they were the least-valuable source of points. You could also score points by picking up limb markers (dropped wherever a mech lost a limb) or wrecked mech tokens (dropped wherever a unit – including vehicles – was destroyed). In order to pick up parts you needed to walk or run (no jumping!) a unit into a hex containing one of the various relevant markers and refrain from attacking in either the weapon phase or the physical phase that round. You could only pick up one marker per unit per round, regardless of how many markers might be present in the same hex. Crippled units couldn’t pick up spare parts, but MIGHT hang on to any spare parts they were already carrying by making a PSR at the end of the round in which they became crippled. Any parts dropped after being picked up would be destroyed, and players could not retrieve any salvage from their own units. Primary points were scored exclusively based on how many spare part tokens were held by your surviving units at the end of the game, 10 per supply drop, 15 per limb, 30 per wreck, to the Primary maximum of 75.
In theory there are some interesting tensions at play here, with the need for tankiness (to not-die yourself) and the need for firepower (to cripple/destroy your opponents) warring with the need for speed (to get into position to pick up supplies/salvage) and desire for lightly-armed units (to avoid giving up too much firepower when some of your guys stop to pick up supplies). The implementation felt rough, though. The map did my mood no favors, either. It was the Lunar Battlemat (no!), but with 3D-printed hills added in place of the craters to add some playable cover and LoS-breaking (yes!), but said hills were a bit prone to shifting on top of the neoprene, weren’t sized exactly right to fit properly onto a CGL mat, and had absolutely no markings on their surface to delineate hexes, forcing us to just extrapolate where the hexes should be on their plateau segments (what in the Monkey’s Paw?). Plus, even with hills the map still lacked any trees, which is itself game-warping.
My opponent brought a very solid ComStar list: The Royal Black Knight, Thug 11E with Infernos, Guillotine, the same Mongoose I brought, and a basic Stinger. The Thug 11E is a mech I would’ve brought myself if I hadn’t been trying to avoid chassis already reviewed by Goonhammer; it’s so solid, and an excellent Inferno platform since it’s never going to overheat itself. I’d faced the Royal Knight in testing and actually felt pretty good about facing it, but the Thug scared me.
They say a poor craftswoman gamer blames her tools dice, and I certainly made mistakes in this game that were not dice-driven, but I’ve seldom been dice-screwed as hard as I was in this round. The first-round and third-round supply drops went deep in my opponent’s territory (quickly retrieved by his Mongoose, which I failed to pin down throughout the whole game), and I amplified my misfortune by chasing hard after them, while he held back cagily and let me close the distance. I chastised myself for this aggression at the time, but in retrospect there wasn’t too much else I could do – I didn’t have concentrated enough long-range damage or open enough firing lines to guarantee attrition of his force if I hung back, and while it would’ve been a low-scoring win if I simply let him win on supply drops, it still would’ve been a win. What I can confidently say was a mistake was that I held my Crockett back in a sniper spot throughout the entire game. I felt cowardly without any trees to cover its advance, but this game very much needed another armored body on the frontline and needed the Crockett’s SRMs to be in play.
Of course, better tactics wouldn’t have changed my shit dice – beyond the supply drops going the wrong direction, I also couldn’t seem to hit anything this game, missing an improbable number of shots, seemingly regardless of how low the to-hit numbers were. The same did not hold for my opponent: He shot the arm off my Javelin on a dicey shot in round three (dropping one of those all-important limb tokens) and landed a ridiculous sequence of crits on my Spartan in round four, first TACing the left lower-leg and hip and then breaching the right-leg armor for another two crits, hitting the foot and upper leg. My attempt to salvage some value out of the Javelin by Inferno-SRMing the Black Knight failed: It became a crater worth 30 points of Primary in exchange for landing a grand total of four missiles on target, only mildly inconveniencing the Knight.
I tried for a bit of a Hail Mary by hunting the Stinger with the Firefly and failed, though the Stinger itself failed its own attempt to hunt my poor, innocent Flatbed Truck. The fifth-round supply drop finally fell in my territory, at least, and the Firefly picked it up to keep me from scoring zero on Primary. More crucially, as it turned out, I also managed to finagle my Mongoose into position to Push the Thug off the wreckage marker the Javelin dropped. This would, ultimately, be the point swing that kept my opponent out of the second-place spot in the tournament, dropping him to third.
The game ended on that push as a 10-70 loss for me. Incidentally, BSP did get used in this round, but accomplished absolutely nothing, as our respective air covers neutralized our respective strikes/bombings. My opponent did forget his second light attack (a light strike) which might’ve slipped past my remaining Heavy Air Cover, but I doubt it would’ve swung the result given my mechs’ armor levels at close of game.
This was a difficult game to post-mortem. I definitely made mistakes, most clearly with the positioning of my Javelin (too aggressive) and my Crockett (not aggressive enough), but I do feel like the design of the mission was fundamentally flawed. If the supply drops had simply come down reliably in the middle of the board, or even if they’d only scattered 1d6 rather than 2d6, there would’ve been stronger incentive for both players to move up to the middle, and better odds of either player grabbing any particular drop. The separate limb / wreckage tokens also had the potential to create perverse incentives: the kind of instant-kills that are normally very beneficial in BattleTech, like headshots and ammo explosions, would create less potential for point-scoring than a gradual Monty-Python’s-Black-Knight attrition kill. Overall this game just felt… bad. But again, it’s hard to parse out the “my dice suck, this is miserable,” “this store is way, way too hot, this is miserable,” “this map is hard to play on, this is miserable,” and “this mission feels unbalanced, this is miserable” miseries and know where to fairly lay blame. All I can say is, once again, my opponent was absolutely lovely and never the cause of any of my distress.
By the way, this mission was, uniquely, given a date: June 10, 3052. This was meant to subtly imply that the T-800 we aided went on to assassinate Hanse Davion, but nobody got the joke until the TO told us later.
Everyone who wished to participate in the paint voting laid their minis out for a “Force Parade” between the second and third rounds; we could each vote anonymously for our first, second, and third place picks, with the results tallied to determine the painting victors. I had hopes of bringing home a victory-by-proxy for Porble, but while his paint jobs drew a lot of attention and praise throughout the tournament, there seemed to be a bit of resentment over me entering an outsider’s models, and my local BattleTech painting meta has entered its display board era in earnest – probably around a third of the entries had some form of display board, and all three of the eventual victors boasted elaborate displays.
After I’d finished snapping pics of all the entries and had submitted my votes, I realized the water I’d brought was running very low (what with the whole “the venue was extraordinarily hot” situation). I picked up a Sprite, but I ended up killing the bottle about a third of the way into Round Three, and I finished my water soon after. Eesh.
Round Three: Operation Too Much Headroom
This scenario tasked us with uh, uploading Max Headroom’s AI to a sequence of data centers. This was another scenario heavily influenced by randomness, with a win-more clause tacked on to boot, but I felt like the basic setup was still fairer than the Spare Parts mission. An illustration will help me explain why. This was the objective setup:
The objective markers were numbered 1-6. At the start of each round the winner of Initiative would roll 1d6 and the corresponding objective would become “active” and remain active for the rest of the game. Once the fifth objective came online, the sixth would be removed. (Repeat numbers were to be rerolled so each of the first five rounds would reliably add one objective to the active list.) You scored 15 primary points (again to the max of 75) each time you controlled the most active objectives at the end of any given turn; objectives had to be completely uncontested in order for a player to assert control, though airborne VTOLs, jumping mechs, and any mech that fell prone involuntarily wouldn’t count towards objective control. The win-more aspect came in through the “Candygram” rule – whoever scored Primary in a round would additionally be gifted a Light Air Strike to be used in the subsequent round.
I’ll be honest with you, I may only feel neutral-ish on this mission because I wasn’t really affected by its more questionable elements; all three (yes, all three, I’ll get to that in a moment) of the objectives that came online during my game were along the centerline, no candygrams got delivered, and my experience this round was much more influenced by other factors… namely my opponent, my opponent’s oddball list, and the oppressive heat. Still, at least I can say that the die had only a 33% chance of tilting the odds heavily in a single player’s favor rather than the 66% chance of the previous mission’s supply drops drifting towards a player’s deployment edge (rather than along the centerline), which is… improvement.
I played this game on the intimidating-looking River Delta Battlemat from the Savannah collection. I’m pleasantly surprised to report that it wasn’t nearly as bad as I feared under these circumstances: The advance deployment zones let us both dodge the worst of the non-depth-zero water, and while the mat completely lacks elevation changes aside from the water itself, the plentiful trees still offer opportunities to break LoS.
My opponent for this round was playing another ComStar list, but he’d decided to get weird with it. The Mercury with MASC for objective-grabbing wasn’t a surprise, and he was running the same Firefly I was, but I was more surprised to see a stock Sentinel desperately trying to pretend that a single Ultra AC/5 can be a primary weapon, the Royal Shadow Hawk as his LBX caddy, the Royal Demon Tank as his heavy, and, rounding out his Level II, the Kanga.
If you don’t know what the Kanga is, it’s a Star League hovertank with an unremarkable set of forward-fixed guns in classic Shadow Hawk “one of everything” style. Its one claim to fame, the one thing that distinguishes it from being a disappointing turretless Drillson variant, is that it jumps. Yes, jump jets. On a vehicle. At “Standard” rules level, according to MUL.
I knew I was in for an interesting game when my opponent, in giving me the quick overview of his list, handed me the Kanga’s sheet and challenged me to “find the jump jets.” He went on to claim that since jump jets aren’t explicitly on the vehicle crit charts, while the Kanga could suffer a “vehicle is immobile” critical result, it could continue to jump until it was completely destroyed. The only other interpretation, as he saw it, would be to rules-lawyer the Kanga into being unable to jump at all, since, he claimed, the core rules for jumping specifically refer to ‘Mechs and Battle Armor and never mention vehicles. (This is a half truth, incidentally; while there are several call-outs for ‘Mech-specific interactions with jumping in Total Warfare, and no specific mention of jumping vehicles, the basic movement mode rules refer generically to “jump-capable units.”) I agreed that the Kanga should at least be able to achieve its basic function and he said something along the lines of “Yeah, I didn’t figure you’d be a dick.” While I can’t say I’m happy about it, the Kanga being immune to immobilization via motive crits apparently IS the official ruling.
I don’t enjoy being this blunt, but this player should have reviewed a number of vehicle rules more closely prior to fielding a list with two vehicles in it. Keep in mind that this is round three. At this point in the evening my opponent had already spent four hours across two games playing these vehicles. However…
When I first damaged one of his vehicles I asked him if I’d scored any potential motive crits, and he responded with the Alpha Strike version of motives: one automatic potential motive crit whenever the vehicle is successfully attacked. I had to remind him that there are † marks on the vehicle crit chart to indicate where motive crits occur, and had to try to retroactively piece back together what location rolls I’d made after I’d already cleared my dice.
He quickly moved the Demon into light woods. I said “Wait, isn’t it wheeled?” He readily agreed. “Only tracked vehicles can enter woods, though?” He told me that wheeled vehicles could enter light woods at an additional MP cost and were only barred from heavy; that only hovercraft couldn’t enter any woods at all. I was dubious, but didn’t press him. Reader, I was right.
I used Inferno SRMs against the Demon to fish for crits (eventually getting a “Crew Stunned” in exchange); he was completely caught off guard by this and I had to find the Inferno SRM rules in Total Warfare and show them to him before he accepted that this is how they interact with vehicles.
I’m pretty certain he fired the Demon’s medium pulse lasers at a ‘Mech in its front arc; they’re mounted Right and Left and the Royal Demon does not have Sponson Turrets, so they can’t fire forward.
Most egregiously, when I scored a non-Inferno Critical Hit on the Demon he demanded that I roll to confirm the critical as you would against a ‘Mech, stubbornly insisting that all criticals must go through a confirmation roll. The basis of his argument? When fielding Blakist forces in a narrative game at his home store he once landed a punch and used the Retractable Blade’s optional special rule to inflict a through-armor crit and the people at the store there made him roll to confirm it, thus, on that precedent, all critical hits require confirmation rolls. He argued on this basis not only with me, but with both the TO and the co-TO. Even after the co-TO explained repeatedly that the “no critical hit” result on 2-5 on the vehicle crit charts is the vehicular equivalent of failing to confirm a crit against a ‘Mech, my opponent acknowledged the actual rules only grudgingly.
A couple of these points, like the Inferno SRM interaction or even vehicles’ counterintuitive firing arcs, are a bit niche and I don’t necessarily begrudge my opponent for being ignorant of them, though I wish he’d been more open to correction. There is, however, no excuse for not understanding even the basic framework of how critical hits and motive crits work against vehicles in Classic BattleTech while you’re in the last round of a tournament in which you made the choice to bring two vehicles.
In any case, due to a combination of these rules kerfuffles, the oppressive heat, both of us having brought lists with LBX autocannons and a lot of SRMs and neither of us having the crit location chart fully memorized, and my opponent being even slower at CombatMath than I am, we finished just three rounds in this game.
Neither of us was quite able to reach the active objective on round one, and at the end of round two both were contested, blanking primary scoring, but I felt confident that I could win primary on round three. I made an aggressive move with my Javelin, moving away from the middle objective, #3, in order to get into the Firefly’s rear arc. I’d already blown through the Firefly’s left torso rear armor in the previous round and I believe it only had two points of structure remaining; even if it wasn’t that low, any hit to the left torso internal structure would’ve had a chance to pop the ammo and kill the ‘Mech. The Firefly had stood still on the objective while my Javelin ran, so my to-hit number was five. I felt certain I could kill the thing. Buuuut I managed to miss one of the SRM-6s, and the other launcher hit all limbs. The Firefly survived.
On one of the other two active objectives, #2, my Spartan and Mongoose knocked down his Mercury while the Mongoose successfully secured the point. On the third active objective, #4, my Firefly opened up on the Kanga in its vulnerable side arc at point blank range… and missed with all three Medium Pulse lasers on fives. We agreed that that point remained contested, while #2 was mine and #3 was his, and we scored the game as a zero-zero draw: No primary achieved by either of us in any round, his crippled Mercury wasn’t high enough BV to give me any secondary points on its own, and the “immobilized” Kanga didn’t count as crippled under the rules of the tournament.
However, did you spot the problem I didn’t notice until I was putting together this write-up?
My opponent and I both forgot that units couldn’t contest objectives in this scenario in a turn in which they jumped.
Since the Kanga jumped to objective #4 in round three, it should not have counted as contesting that objective, I should’ve held objectives #2 and #4 to his objective #3, and I should’ve actually won that game.
I don’t believe this oversight was made maliciously; it was extremely hot, none of us were playing at our best, “you can’t hold this objective if you jump” is a fairly unusual scenario rule, and I myself forgot and signed off on the 0-0 result. I chalk the result up almost entirely due to our issues with speed of play and rules comprehension; I don’t think it’s a boast to say that I was in position to win more decisively if the game had worn on longer, especially with the Demon’s crew stunned going into Round 4. It stings, though, realizing that I accidentally handed away a victory.
Results:
Having gone 1-1-1 in three low-scoring games, I landed at 14th out of the field of 30(ish), the worst result I’ve ever posted in a Classic BattleTech tournament by a large margin, both in terms of absolute placement and in proportion to the size of the field.
The (metaphorical) podium was filled by Brian B. placing first with a ComStar list (more on this list later), Rocco B. coming second with Free Rasalhague Republic, and my second-round opponent, Brent A., in third.
The top painting honors went to Joshua Hysong’s Legion of Vega, absolutely buoyed by his impressive display base:
Rocco B. managed a solid sweep of second place, taking the silver painting trophy as well as the silver in the tournament standings. Ironically, he also came in second in the paint voting at WarZone, and he plays the Rasalhague “2nd Freemen.” The man has a lucky number, what can I say?
Third-place painting victor Will Bundy did not fear the question “What is this, a crossover episode?”, choosing to display his ‘Mechs deploying from a Warhammer drop pod, complete with, uh, a Shakespeare quote attributed to Alpharius.
The certificates for this tournament included the obligatory wooden spoon (“Cue the Rocky Training Montage”) and sportsmanship award (“Heart of a MechWarrior”), along with the TO’s standard acknowledgements of the player who prioritized primary scoring the most relative to their kill score (“You’re The Best”) and the player who prioritized kills most relative to their primary scoring (“Predator”). Less ubiquitous awards were given for the most heat-efficient list (“Cool Runnings”), the least heat-efficient list (“Cruel Summer”), the fluffiest list (“Fluff Level: Kirby,” given in this case to a player who fielded a list sourced exclusively from one manufacturer… but not GM, Liberty’s niche there is safe), and a special recognition to the “ComStar Quadruplets,” four ComStar lists which were precisely the same, down to exact configurations and skill allocations.
In the moment, as awards were given, the “Quadruplets” were recognized for breaking the laws of probability, and everyone seemed shocked that they had replicated each others’ lists, but it came to light soon after the tournament that the four of them actually coordinated to perform an experiment on the impact of player skill on Classic BattleTech list performance. I’ll have more to say about their list and this whole situation in the next section.
In the grand tradition of the one other tournament report I’ve written, I’d also like to shout out a couple of my personal favorite paint scheme themings!
This over-strength lance from Kevin C. evoked the Titans from Zeta Gundam!
In Davion County, GA, the beaches are patrolled by BattleMechs, backed up by their light-bar-equipped Leopard dropship!
And Ryan Nock’s Kuritan force drew impressive inspiration from specific pieces of Legend of the Five Rings art!
Of course, this tournament’s true paint winner of my heart was the one and only Porble. I am still touched by the trust he showed in letting me push his awesome pieces of art around like mere game pieces!
Final Thoughts
For a three-round, one-day tournament run out of a FLGS, Summer Fever II was a remarkably large and competitive (by BattleTech standards) event, with multiple MRC tournament circuit regulars traveling in from out of state. The last Renaissance-era tournament I played in, run out of a different game store with a smaller and more local crowd, actually drew no ComStar players. In this tournament, by contrast, 11 out of the 30 of us were spreading the Peace of Blake. In the aftermath, the TO first threatened to ban ComStar from future Renaissance-era tournaments and then quickly walked that back by saying he was joking. Regardless, he fortunately isn’t wedded to that era; the next tournament on his docket, his annual Toys for Tots charity tournament, is going back to the Civil War, and he offered Jihad and Early/Late Republic as the other options in the poll which decided that era of play for it.
There were nine Royal Black Knights across the 11 ComStar lists; my Round 3 opponent and I were the only ComStar players who didn’t bring that mech. The FFL-4C came in a solid second place in terms of # brought; part of that’s likely the ubiquity of the Mercenaries box, but the larger factor is that it’s one of the mechs the ComStar Quadruplets chose to bring.
About the Quadruplets, their shared list was the Royal Black Knight, BattleMaster 1G (carrying Infernos), the aforementioned Firefly, Hermes 1S, and Ostsol 4D, with everything at 4/4 except the Hermes at 4/5. They said that they diced to determine the faction of the shared list they would bring and landed on ComStar by happenstance. They ended up placing 1st, 11th, 13th, and 23rd, which they took to prove their point about player skill, pairings, etc. mattering in Classic. I think the experiment is an interesting idea, but they absolutely should’ve informed the TOs that their shared list was pre-planned in advance; I am a little peeved that they got an extra reward (as the certificates did come with gift cards) in recognition of a “coincidence” that wasn’t a coincidence in any regard.
Only four Unique ‘Mechs were brought across all the lists, to my knowledge: one SuburbanMech 100, one “Butterbee” Catapult, and two of the hatchet-wielding pirate “Reinesblatt” Banshees (in the hands of the tournaments’ only two pirate players). No one actually went Bounty Hunter, despite multiple people I spoke to saying that they didn’t bring the BH because they expected that there’d be too many of them. As for the pirate Banshees, I’m told one of them got only one chance to actually swing its hatchet across the whole of the tournament, and then the hatchet got taken out by a critical hit before the physical phase; they definitely didn’t impress.
I did not enjoy the missions this time around. I am grateful that the TO let us keep the little 3D-printed doodads from each mission (and to my Round 3 opponent for letting me keep the full set of six objective markers from that mission, since he has a filament printer and I don’t), but it felt like more effort was put into cutesy theming than into balanced play, and all the mission rules were more elaborate than they really needed to be.
Rounds were two hours for this tournament, down from two-and-a-half at WarZone. This seems to have been universally recognized as a mistake, and the TO’s Toys for Tots tournament will be back at 2.5. While I remain committed to improving my speed of play, there’s only so much one player can do unilaterally to speed up BattleTech games. This is a game which really demands both players be focused and on top of their rules if it’s going to move swiftly, but the culture around the game is such that lackadaisical play is broadly tolerated. The additional time at the next event should at least help make sure that games have results that are actually results, unlike the silliness that was my Round 3 game.
This isn’t the place to really get fully into a discourse over maps in BattleTech, but I still need to make a few observations. First off, the six-hexes-in-from-the-short-edge deployment zones did actually feel pretty good, at least with Succession Wars mechs, which brings me to a place where I must grudgingly admit that walk-on-from-long-edge players may have a point; there’s only a three hex difference in the distance between player start positions from the Summer Fever II drop zones (twenty hexes apart) and the distance between the long edges (seventeen hexes), with the long-edge option allowing objectives to be scattered further apart if your missions are built for that.
There are definitely maps in use in my local tournament meta which shouldn’t be. There seems to be a strong perception locally that maps with 3D terrain > neoprene mats > paper maps. While in terms of visual spectacle 3D terrain does take the cake, and in terms of physical ease of use neoprene is definitely best, this apparent bias leads to the use of maps that are really, really not suited to tournament play. I don’t recall seeing any of the Tukayyid maps in tournament play, at least, but I’ve seen everything else. I have played a tournament game, short edge to short edge, on this Battlemat. The result of that game was effectively determined by the roll to choose home edge. I’ve played on the other side, too; while it was less obviously biased towards one player, it was miserable in a whole host of other ways. With recent releases, Savannah and City maps are now starting to proliferate, bringing with them their own asymmetric challenges (the city maps at Summer Fever had a block of reminder text about skidding placed next to them, for instance). 3D elements applied carelessly, as in my Round 2 game at this tournament, can also introduce their own problems. And the MRC has inflicted its own new flavor of madness on the scene; while I never played on one, their third-party neoprenes were at this tournament, complete with lava rules posted beside them. I will admit that I didn’t ever read through that map’s rules in full (I blame the heat), but I did skim closely enough to see a header for “breaking the magma crust.” Yikes.
There’s a flavor of thought in the MRC that embraces the idea of map-as-antagonist (the two “semi-competitive” MRC tournaments at NashCon, both Classic and Alpha Strike, recommend that players be familiar with the planetary condition rules coming in). I personally feel like map-as-antagonist play, while potentially interesting in its own right, should not be a feature of competitive events. If you want to do an organized play day / narrative event / what have you on a map pockmarked by lava or raining acid or whatever, sure, count me in! But when there’s actual prizes at stake? Grasslands C is fine by me, thank you very much.
As for my own list and play at this tournament, I am honestly disappointed in both. Even with the listbuilding constraints I set for myself, I almost certainly could’ve wrangled a better list together, and been more comfortable playing it, with just a little more testing and practice. What I ran was just a little too fragile for my play style, and I needed a better psychological threat to influence my opponent’s movements; the Distraction Spartan just didn’t quite do the trick there. Something like that Thug 11E, or even a cheapo single-heat-sink Succession Wars special like the Charger 1A5, would’ve done a better job of shaping the battlefield. And again, if I’m going to stay weirdly competitive about BattleTech, I need, need to keep drilling myself on the hit location table, tighten up my grasp on CombatMath, and improve my speed of play.
I’m not certain where I’ll go next from here. I’ve grown a little disillusioned with some aspects of my local BT meta, and I’ve been investigating tournaments further afield, but funds are tight for me this year (I’m getting married this fall!), so travel expenses seem prohibitive. I’ve also got a friend doing her level best to drag me into playing Warmachine, of all games, and I think she’s actually winning me over.
Regardless, I hope you’ve enjoyed my rambling on again, and with any luck I’ll find something to submit to The Hammers That Be sometime in the months ahead. Cheers!
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