From: Indy Kochte <kochte@s...>
Date: Tue, 01 Mar 2005 14:10:01 -0500
Subject: ECC 8 AAR (long? very most definitely!)
My AAR isn't going to be strewn with rib-rubbing humour, unlike
Laserlight's. Instead, just a [rather long] AAR of my side of ECC this year.
Pre-con:
The weeks leading up to the con were stressful and *filled* with prep work. I
had it worked out that I'd get everything done in time for the con, but then
got laid out flat with the flu for a week. That really put a crimp in
my schedule, and there were more than a few nights where I only got 3-4
hours sleep in the last week before the con. So, going into it, I was one
tired boyo.
Oh, one thing I want to do before this continues is to publicly thank the
various game companies who donated prize support for the various scenarios
that were played this weekend. We had some very generous donations from some
companies that had never donated before (Force XXI
for some 15mm prizes and Xtreme-Hobby for their superb Cold Navy ships).
With their donations, along with prize support from GZG, Brigade, and some of
our vendors (as well as Los, who donated some of his own stuff), we were able
to offer some very nice prizes to painting contest winners as well as winners
of a number of games.
Okay, now, back to the [exceedingly long] AAR!
[warning! I did say "exceedingly long" - you have been warned!]
Friday, Feb 25, 2005 - Start of ECC 8!
The drive up for me was uneventful. I managed to work it out so I left work
early, packed, and for the first time in 8 years of this con, managed to beat
Jon Davis to the hotel. Okay, beat him by maybe 10 minutes, but
one takes one's "victory" (so to speak ;-) where one can (I live 90
minutes from the con, Jon lives a few hours away, and half the time makes
sidetrip detours to pick Stuart up, so how does he beat me every time?). After
checking in, went around with Jon and the very helpful and friendly catering
sales manager, Lisa Dawn, to discuss the future of the con room we have been
using and what possible options for the future were available
to us. All non-game stuff, this, but as con organizer, interested in
learning. Who knows what the future holds for which room we'll be in next
year. May be in our current room, or may be in the larger ballroom....we will
see come 2006.
After that, it was time to unpack and get things ready for the games to begin.
I took a quick stroll downtown a few blocks away to grab a virtual geocache
that had been planted down there, grabbed some dinner at the local Chinese
hole-in-the-wall place (discovered after I got back to the con room that
there were no utensils; argh!), and started organizing prize distributions and
all the stuff I brought for the games I'd be running. And when the time came
for the games to begin, I had already signed up for John Lerchey's "Last 'Bot
Standing", a Dirtside II game based on Metagaming's old Rivets game. John even
had two armies of Boppers painted up for the players to use. Now, as there
were only three of us instead of four, it meant that it was going to be one vs
two. And it turned out that it would be I who stood alone to face off against
Dan Blezek and Aaron Teske (complete with his Teske
Field!).
We were given initial forces (no dive boppers or missiles were in this
particular game, btw) of four light boppers and a jack bopper, told to assign
them their targets, and begin play. Both sides began building. I opted, over
time, to start generating more boppers early, whereas Aaron and Dan were
working on the Big Boppers. At first, early in the game, I was able to push
close to their factory building, and even did a few points of scratch damage
to it. But after that the weight of the Big Boppers (and Teeny Boppers) began
to weigh heavily on my forces, and I eventually ended up in a forced retreat
(if not killed outright). The
Teske/Blezek units began the March of the Big Boppers. I did what I
could to blunt that onslaught, but they were able to eventually get to an open
range of my factory, and blasted the hell out of it. I went from 15
control points to 4. Ouch in a *bad* way. I had to lose control of 1-2
of my damaged boppers (one jack bopper was a pillbox, unable to be
reprogrammed or engage it's targets, as the latter were behind hills
and stuff). And still the Teske/Blezek Factory churned out more boppers.
I managed to finally work a couple of jack boppers down to their factory,
and from point-blank range, got in a couple very lucky shots - bringing
their factory control to *zero*! Which meant that in time I would be able to
create a Big Bopper or two, and send that against their factory to finish it
off; they had no way to repair the damage to the control console. Nigh three
hours after we started, my four boppers stood
victorious on the battlefield. Go me! :-)
The rest of the evening was spent going around to various tables to see
how things were developing/finishing, touching base with various people
at the con (I never did get to spend enough time visiting with Beth, alas,
as she always had a contigent of others around her ;-), and setting up
the terrain for my DS2.5 game Saturday morning. Finally sometime after
midnight, I crawled to my room and crashed, dead to the world. So dead that I
never heard the riots and car alarms and police and people yelling and whatnot
about 2 or 3am after the nearby bar let out. Slept right on through it
all....blissfully unaware....
Saturday, Feb 26, 2005 - Day 2
Saturday morning came too quickly, alas. Up, showered, dressed, I and Joel
Frock proceeded downstairs to the lobby to meet up with Jon Davis, his kids,
Aaron Teske, Jerry Han, and whomever else was going to join us for breakfast
at Zimmerman's. Now, usually I try to beat Jon down to the lobby, but he
manages to get less sleep than I and is usually
already waiting for a while. This time, however, beat him down. ;-)
Okay, by only a few minutes, but one takes one's "victories" where one
can get them. ;-D
After a good breakfast at Zimmerman's, back to the con room. Other people
staggered in, some having gotten less sleep than I due to the earlier-
mentioned noise events that occurred about 2 or 3am. Overheard a number of
people complain about that. But since that was the worst of it all, everyone
was willing to continue on; we have experienced FAR worse within the hotel
building itself (anyone remember the "ski" group who was partying
their heads off all night long in a recent ECC? ;-). The only other
group in the hotel was a wedding that was going on, and they were, for the
most party, pretty quiet (some people reported Sunday morning having heard
some
post-wedding celebratory activities going on in rooms next to them, but
again, not near me, and I was dead to the world that night; but that's neither
here nor there...)
My game on Saturday morning was The Return to the Gramicci Pass, a Dirtside
battle that featured some playtest rules. Said playtest rules dealt with unit
morale (different than what is in DS2), movement, and the 'firefight' concept
that Oerjan developed on the playtest list. In this game Beth Fulton was a
participant, and was able to do a direct comparison to the playtesting she and
her group had been doing down in her corner of the world (apparently they
resolve their games faster; unfortunately I never did get a chance to sit down
with Beth and compare notes on exactly how they did this, but she did say that
they used smoke a heck of a lot more). The game was set up so that each side
had to choose a 'sealed' set of orders. Forces may or may not have been
compatible with each other, objectives may or may not have been compatible,
either. This was an attempt to put some 'fog of war' aspect into the game. The
UNSC was the 'attacking' side, and their primary objective was to find out
what happened to a recon unit that had gone up into the pass and disappeared.
Their secondary objective was to take out any enemy units they found. The ESU
(defender) objective was to keep secret 4 heavy batteries of artiller that had
been sequestered in the Pass. As long as the artillery batteries did not fire,
or as long as the UNSC got no units within line of sight of
where the batteries were hiding, the batteries were kept off-table. The
UNSC had no clue about the artillery, but the ESU was nervous as hell when
some of the UNSC got close to LOS, and in the end, unleashed a barrage of arty
on the UNSC in order to pound out the invading force. This was a surprise to
the UNSC (as they had no idea about the arty), but they took it in stride
(what, Indy, placing hidden units on the board? naaaah!!!). We managed to only
get through one turn, but this was partly because we only got started about an
hour and a half after the nominal time; I was deluged early on with entries
for the painting contest, and that prevented
me from being able to get my game going on time. :-/ I tried to
multi-task,
but next year I think I'll not run a game Saturday morning so I can con-
centrate on the painting contest entries bit.
In any event, of the comments I got back from the game were that people did
like it, but it "seemed" to run slow, since we only got through one turn
(despite the carnage that was left on the table; the two forces had
lost at this point 40-60% of their units). There were also questions in
how artillery works in firefights, and some other stuff, that will be
taken eventually to the test list for a working over. ;-) The players
in the game were Beth Fulton (playtest list member, UNSC), John Lerchey (who I
have bounced numerous DS2.5 ideas off of and who worked out the OGRE rules for
DS2 that we used last year; UNSC), John Crimmins (UNSC), Noam Izenberg and his
son Zev (the former a playtest lister; both played ESU), Jon Davis' son Greg
Davis (ESU), and Dave Hornung (experienced DS2 player; ESU).
Saturday afternoon. After a brief recon foray to a Mexican burrito place
that Dan Blezek spotted the afternoon before (big-@$$ burrito, no better
or worse than a sandwich from House of Pizza - but definitely broke up
the regular routine of HoP food every year ;-), I was involved in Vince
Johnston's "Ancient Eyes Always Watching" FT game. This game featured NAC,
ESU, and Sa'Vasku. The premise was that the ESU pops in a
NAC-controlled
system, catching them somewhat unawares, and combat ensues. The Sa'Vaskue then
enter the field of battle a turn or two later. The field of battle happens to
be rather thick with asteroid fields of different sizes (small,
medium, large; running into/through any is a Bad Thing, but you *could*
blow away the larger, ship-damaging chunks with weapons fire if one
wanted to, reducing the size of the asteroid field down to a lower level, or
even zero if enough damage was applied). As the Sa'Vasku, Tom Tongue and I
were to secretly pick a side to support (we were not to let either side know
who we were supporting), destroy both flagships, and cause discord amongst the
two sides. We decided to support the NAC, who was getting seriously hammered
and unable to hammer back effectively. We popped in beside and behind the ESU
on turn 3, and spent that turn blowing away asteroid fields (clearing an area
for maneuvering) and just drifting along side the ESU. Since they didn't know
what we were doing, they left us alone and continued to pound each other. The
NAC flagship was destroyed about this time, iirc. The ESU flagship was
drifting further and further away from the field of battle. It was apparent to
us that it was trying to escape. But given how far away it was, and how slow
everyone was going, it didn't seem likely we were going to be able to stop it.
Tom thought it was going to swing around behind the NAC, but with the NAC in
sorry shape, and facing two battle squadrons that consisted of a BC, a CAH,
and support ships each, I didn't think that was likely. But who really knew
but Noam, who was playing the ESU flagship squadron.
On turn 4 the Sa'Vasku made it clear that the ESU were too strong compared to
the NAC, and it was time to widdle them down. So we proceeded to. Most of the
ESU ignored us and kept pounding on the NAC ships that remained, but
eventually they took exception to the damage that Tom's group was dishing out
and began to hit him back. But it was too little too late. By the end of this
turn, the Sa'Vasku were the most powerful thing on the board, an no one was
going to stop us. We pounded away at the ESU (I had planned on sniping a
couple of NAC ships for good measure, but the ESU blew them up before I got
the chance) for another turn and then the game ended. With Vince's victory
conditions and calculations, it turned out that of the 7 players playing (2
NAC, 3 ESU, 2 S'V), one person from each faction won. All in all it was a fun
game, but I think the S'V came in one turn too late to prevent the ESU
flagship from leaving. Vince told me later that in other games he's run of
this the NAC had won by convincing the ESU to side with them and pound the
tentacles off of the S'V. This time they didn't cooperate, and the S'V
whalloped with impunity.
After this session was over it was time for me to tally up the votes from
the minis contest. There were four categories (FT, DS2, SG-15, SG-25),
and each person could enter up to two submissions per category. The FT and
SG-25 categories are always very popular for entries, typically having
12-20 entries per. The DS2 and SG-15 categories are usually less
popular,
but do have entries. Sometimes 2-3, sometimes 10 or more. This year the
DS2 category had 4 entries, and the SG-15 category had 5. I had
submitted
two entries into the SG-15 category (a squad of GZG Ghurkas - ones I had
"complained" about several months ago as being too well-sculpted for me
to
begin to do justice to painting them - and GZG's SG-1 team), and one to
the Dirtside category (a platoon of Brigade M-84 Kochte tanks). I can
only attribute the low numbers of entries in these two fields to the fact
that I won the Dirtside category and took 3rd in the SG-15 (with my
Ghurkas,
no less!). Martin Connel had entered GZG's sci-fi Egyptians in the SG-15
category, and those were DAMNED good! Everyone agreed - so much that he
had more than 2.5x the votes of the 2nd place entry (which I am spacing
what that was). In the FT and SG-25 categories, the difference in votes
between 1st and 2nd place was 1-2 votes - there was a lot of good work
submitted to those two categories!
After I tallied up the votes, we had our standard mid-con 'meeting' with
the con goers (we are small enough to do that; you'd never see that happen at
Cold Wars, Historicon, or Origins!). At this point the prize
for furthest travelled was handed out (Beth Fulton - all the way from
Tasmania!:0), and the painting contest winners were given their certificates
and prizes.
Because in year's past as well as this year, some people paint so well that
they can win multiple places in different categories, we are looking to
implement some changes (from the feedback given us) to limit each person a
single win for each category (so one person can't win 1st and 3rd, for
example). Also, for those whose craftmanship is SO much better than others, we
may open up a new category: Master's. This will be for repeat winners, and
will give those others who enter but never win a shot at possibly making it to
the upper ranks in that category. Details will be hammered out at a
later time - we've got a year to work this out. ;-)
Saturday evening was "Weight of Command", run by Tomb and Los, with Magic and
Kr'rt as support GMs (RTOs). There were some 9 or 10 players involved. The
premise to this scenario was that we were all UN Peacekeepers, on some
backwater planet or country, that had just recently undergone very tumultuous
and destablizing events. There is a local warlord or war criminal who is still
in power in the region, and has a vested interest in further destabilization,
granting him more personal power. He has allies and followers all over,
including elements of the local police agencies (if not the entire agencies).
The UN wants him for war crimes, but must grab him in such a manner that it
looks like the national police are the apprehending force. All sounds well and
good, except...there are two boards (one for each side of the town, seperated
by a river), so there will be two seperate teams of players, plus an HQ
section in a different room, who is tasked with coordinating the activities on
the two boards. Tomb and Los would be the 'local' GMs, running things at their
respective tables. Magic and
Kr'rt would be the Radio Transmition Operator GMs, sitting in the secluded
room with the UN CO and XO (I got to be the CO, Damond the XO; Phil Pournelle
was Alpha Team leader, and Beth Fulton was Bravo Team leader). The quick and
short of it was the war criminal Mr K was coming into town, meeting with his
family during evening church services on Bravo table (he was coming in from
Alpha table). Phil's group was to perform the snatch of Mr K while Beth's
forces were to prevent sympathizers from Bravo table from interfering, by
blocking the two bridges with her corden groups. And Damo and I were sitting
in a side room coordinating all this. Hahahah. ;-)
Without going into a LOT of detail, it was a very interesting scenario. Damo
and I had to balance being able to issue orders to our field teams without
getting into micro-manage mode, and still deal with upper levels of
headquarters (various generals and things; we were but majors). Things on
Alpha table went off pretty well. Things on Bravo table, on the other hand,
kept getting worse and worse as the turns went by. Unbeknownst to our intel,
Mr K was actually coming to the church in Bravo town in order to purchase a
small nuke (~10 megaton iirc) from a group of weapons dealers. While Alpha
Team was making the snatch on Mr K, Bravo Team saw Mr K's decoy, thought it
was Mr K, and went after him. Their shooting out the tires of the decoy
vehicle caused said car to flip and explode (at which point I started getting
queries from my superiors as to 'what is going on'; these went quickly to
'what the hell is going on' when they picked up fusion weapons fire ;-).
As the car exploded, the UN Bravo forces moved in to secure Mr K
(decoy),
who turned out to have been killed in the explosion. The weapons dealers in
the church had no way to know that they had NOT been found out, and started
shooting, thinking the UN was coming after them. When the power armored mercs
appeared, that's when (as I understand it) the APCs let loose with fusion
weapons fire (and about that point my superiors were getting a little anxious
with what was going on ;-). After I explained to them about the powered
armor mercs, they gave my teams clearance to eliminate the PA troops. Of
course, my teams were already in the process of trying to do just that (so
when I sent down the official order that PA mercs were fair game, comment back
was "Little
late!").
Anyway, as the firefight grew on Bravo board, it became clear that there was
more to the area than we first knew - and we learned about radiation
spikes that eventually became understood as coming from the nuke that was
hidden in the church. I tried to get my people out of the area, but then
higher up HQ insisted that I "secure the WMD!". Dammit. Now I had to send
people into harm's way that we weren't prepared for. I sent the XO to the
scene with the
heavy-lift VTOL and all our elite power armor squads. Nominally to pick
up Mr K and bring him back, but to give any team that heavy hammer fire
support. Turned out the Bravo teams needed it, and the XO dropped two squads
of PA on the church. Chaos ensued in the escalating firefight (during which
apparently most of the locals left town, knowing about the nuke). The UN
forces were able to punch into the church, at which point the arms dealer
leader asked for amnesty in exchange for information on the nuke. I didn't
have the authority to grant amnesty, and while I COULD have lied about it, I
opted to just play it straight and told the troops on the scene to advise the
leader that amnesty was not granted, but to also tell the leader under the
strongest possible terms that it would be in the best interest to drop his
weapons and surrender (leaving the unspoken 'or else' hanging in the air).
More fighting ensued, and the weapons dealers retreated to the basement of the
church, focusing all their attention on the narrow stairwell, the only access
to the basement from above...or was it?
In the mean time, HQ had gotten word that one of the weapons dealers was
actually (or also) a high-level civilian in the national government (or
something like that; iirc it was the weapons dealer leader) and having them
injured or killed would be a Bad Thing. And so I was ordered to take PERSONAL
command of the situation. I think Beth and Aaron thought I was coming in to
steal their thunder for securing the WMD, because they carried on with the
church assault. Unbeknownst to them all I really wanted to do was to contain
the situation. They were going to get credit for retrieving
the nuke. ;-)
While Beth's UN corden force was negotiating with the weapons dealer leader,
Aaron and Beth's PA set charges around the floor of the church - the
blew
the floor, dropping in on the weapons dealers from above. Close-quarters
melee commenced, with the PA subduing most of the mercs. That was when they
noticed the object in the corner with the LED that was reading
"30....29...
.28....27...." Oops. The Bomb.
At this point things went into 'cinematic' time, as the UN forces did a
HELL of a lot of things in the remaining 25 seconds - from waving the CO
(me) off from landing due to the impending nuke explosion, torturing two
prisoners to learn who knew how to disarm the bomb, retreating from the
building to take shelter in the nearby sewer treatment plant, rescuing the
group of school children who showed up JUST at the wrong moment, etc, etc,
etc. I think maybe 40 minutes worth of activities happened in that
25 seconds. ;-) Nevertheless, the UN PA was able to dismantle the Bomb
and secure the radioactive material in a safe place for later hazmat teams to
come in and retrieve. And the scenario ended.
I didn't get much more detail covered on Alpha table, mostly because I was
focused on the events going on on Bravo table, and partly because they had
things over there under control. In the end we got Mr K out and taken to a UN
holding area, and recovered the unsuspected WMD. A pretty good win for the UN!
Post-game we all convened in the HQ room and had a debriefing,
discussing what each of us experienced and thought of the situation. Alpha
team for the most part had no clue about the WMD, but that was mostly because
Phil Pournelle did not pass that information on to his troops. Reason? They
didn't need to know. As Phil stated, in his experience, a good officer is a
good filter: tell the troops what they NEED to know, and not bother them with
information that would either hamper their abilities to function effectively
or distract them from doing their jobs. As there was nothing Alpha team could
do about the WMD, the Alpha team didn't need to know about it, and only had to
worry about their own evac plans.
All in all WoC was probably one of the best games I've played in a long, long
time. I really appreciated the amount of time, energy, and effort that Tomb,
Los, Kr'rt, and Magic put into this. It was well worth it.
Sunday, Feb 27, 2005 - Day 3
Sunday morning came entirely too quickly. I was running my 15mm Dirtside game,
"The Bigger They Are...". Premise: an unknown enemy force had broken through
the front lines and was wreaking havoc in the rear areas. Tracking the force's
movement, the defending commanders were able to cobble together
a counter-force in order to try and stop the invaders. Suspected (due to
the availability of the models) but not 100% known to the players, the
invading force was a 15mm Ogre Mk III (called a FOGRE, created by Joel Frock
at my request from last year). The defenders included units from
Brigade (an M-84 Kochte platoon), Force XXI (MBTs, light APCs, an
APC-VTOL,
a couple of Banshee gunships, and an artillery battery), DLD (Kamodo APCs,
TOC, ICVs, and HFS', as well as a platoon of Civet grav tanks and a platoon of
Bengal MBTs), and GZG (2 NAC infantry squads, a squad of Ghurkas, and three
NAC PA squads). We used the end room of the con room, which was also used as
the HQ room in "Weight of Command" the night before. And since in 15mm playing
on tables would be...inconvenient (weapons ranges were multiplied
by a factor of 3 for simplicity sake - thus a HEL could now shoot 180
inches or about 15'), we used the floor. To the slight dismay of some
participants,
but no one seemed to kill themselves or knees. :-) We opted to keep the
room a 'shoeless' room so people could actually feel if they accidently
stepped on any terrain or models. Happily, only a couple of stands of trees
were casualties from a short stumble at one point; otherwise all models
faired well by not being stepped on - however...)
The FOGRE came on the board, and the defenders moved to cut it off. Long range
fire was ineffective against the Mk III, and in reply the Mk III
wiped out the entire platoon of M-84s, and thumped a couple other
platoons with missile fire. The defending tanks kept trying, though, to get in
range
and tried to destroy things, but the levels of armor (6/7; remember,
meters thick of biphase carbide armor) on the modules proved resilient. The
FOGRE rumbled on...until it got within range of the infantry. THen one team
(the Ghurkas) fired an IAVR (in desperation; they needed a 'boom' chit to do
ANYthing to the FOGRE) at the FOGRE's main gun (which hadn't fired yet).
The IAVR pulled a '2'...and a 'boom'. Ka-blooie! The main gun was now
gone; first blood drawn on the FOGRE by a lowly infantry team (said team did
not last long, however, being creamed by AP fire a short time later). At this
point the tide began to [slowly] turn. Further weapons fire against the FOGRE
proved effective now and again, and the FOGRE began losing tread units and
secondary batteries. But not without a cost! There were many defending tanks
burning when the FOGRE drove into the heavy forrest. Many fresh and still
viable tanks piled up behind it, to shoot down the 'tunnel' created by the
FOGRE driving through the woods. The FOGRE then threw its treads into reverse
and...rammed through four tanks in one move, rammed more tanks later. It was
down to only one secondary battery, but ramming it could do with
impunity. As it had killed the Kamodo APC/ICV units earlier, the Wraith
APC-VTOL picked up a couple teams of PA to move them into position to
take on the FOGRE. The FOGRE's remaining secondary battery knocked the
APC-VTOL
from the sky, taking out the two PA teams at the same time. Bummer for the
defenders.
In the end the defenders were able to prevent the FOGRE from getting past the
halfway point on the field of battle, but had only 6 viable tanks and two
squads of infantry (one regular, one PA) left to fight with (oh, and the
artillery unit and the two Banshee gunships as well). Everything else was a
burning hulk. A costly victory, but the FOGRE was stopped.
After that, the game sessions were mostly over. I packed up, said
good-bye
to people who were departing, and then eventually departed myself for the
drive home.
Another good ECC had come to a close. Now to start thinking about what to run
next year....FMA? More Dirtside 2.5? FT? So many scenario ideas to choose from
I don't know where to begin...
Mk