With our individual match-ups ending quickly, we decided to be more social and play with everyone at the same extended table. We left the two main floor maps as is and created 8 starter armies: two UCM teamed with two Resistance against two Shaltari with one Scourge and one PHR. A “Humans vs Alien” mega-battle.
We used the starter armies from the original edition but still played under the new rules and new unit stats. The goal here was more for fun and to “kill stuff” than actually be competitive. To move things along, each “team” would activate one battlegroup at the same time. If there was a question of timing, the team members could figure out how best to activate.
The scenario was simple: two large buildings in the center would act as control points. The team with the most points garrisoned inside would earn a victory point. If there was a tie at the end of the game, it would go down to kill points.
Team Alien won the initiative and forced Team Human to go first.
Sorry for the bad shot but it was the only one I had. Team Human set up multiple AA zones near the open side of the table’s building, then sent all the closed sides’ Resistance troops into the other. Team Alien sent in it’s Braves into both buildings (each Shaltari team committing all troops to each building). The Shaltari attacked the occupying Resistance and did minimal casualties.
This is what Team Human was hoping for and we then committed all our resources to the other building, overwhelming the four units of Braves holding sway in the building. We knew that “occupier’s advantage” would weaken our attempt but even with rerolls, we knew we’d have ninety dice going against essentially 12 soldiers. I wasn’t really doing the math but I liked the odds. Dumb me.
Ninety dice went in, three dice came out. We did them in each factions turn so UCM One threw its thirty dice, needing 6s to hit. Then, due to Occupier’s Advantage, had to reroll the successes. UCM One came up with zero 6s in the reroll. UCM Two did the same. Thirty dice in, zero out. Finally my Resistance came in and threw thirty dice. I got seven successes initially and rerolled, getting three 6s that finally stuck, wiping out one base of Braves out of four.
414 points of infantry vs 140 points of Braves and they wiped one stand out. The humans were in serious trouble. I saw what happened when a building tried to destroy them earlier but apparently didn’t heed the loss as well as I should have. The math actually holds up to our results.
The Braves have the highest armor of any stock infantry and require a natural 6 to damage them. Under normal circumstances, that would roughly mean 15 successes out of ninety dice. Take those and force them to reroll and need 6s again and we actually did better than average (2.5 successes on average). I felt like the fools that play the lottery for anything but fun.
With all our troops committed, we realized that the rest of everyone’s units didn’t matter. We would be left with a pretty uninteresting game of chucking lots of dice until one side lost. That didn’t sound appealing so…
Let’s Try That Again…
Ok. Reset. This time, same armies but this time we’d pull out a scenario more fitting to what we wanted to do. Enter the Battle Royale. This scenario just goes to kill points. To give infantry something to do, if they are in garrisons, they double their weapon range.
The battle was on yet again. This battle was pretty chaotic since we had a lot of simultaneous activations going on. I stuck to my end of the board and tried to keep it under control.
Again, a bunch of Braves took up position on a building and shot down at my forces. Luckily, they did little damage, hitting only one of my Gun Wagons.
I would spend the rest of the turn pouring every shot I could into them, including all my Resistance Fighters launching RPGs into the side. It ended up taking out about six figures (two bases worth) but split across the squads.
UCM One and Two occupied the middle and did some good work taking down two PHR anti-tank walkers.
UCM Two quickly became bogged down by the other group of Braves and started losing soldiers quickly.
UCM One was unopposed and started laying down rocket fire on enemy armor units.
The Braves didn’t like the far Resistance group owning their side of the map so they pulled out from the fight with UCM Two. This freed up several anti-air units to spray the building face and take out a squad of UCM’s fighters.
Our initial victories started to fade under superior tech and tactics. UCM One started losing all their armor units and two squads of PHR Immortals came in on my Resistance fighters. Their initial attack wasn’t terrible but then Team Alien won initiative (as they would for the rest of the game) and that tore up my squads pretty bad. My retaliation was weak as Immortals seemed almost as tough as the Shaltari Braves.
The exchange ended in round three with the Immortals killing my Resistance to the man with very little done in return.
Scourge Infantry with the Braves I could never kill eventually stormed the remaining UCM bastion and eventually wiped them out. Scourge turned their plasma rifles down onto everything in sight and started cleaning up the remaining enemy armor.
The war essentially lost by the end of round four but our troops soldiered on. The anti-armor of Team Human was in tatters so completely that enemy armor skimmed easily down the streets without any fear of reprisal.
Eventually a lone UCM Rapier stood against the onslaught and took 14 straight attacks, weathering them all.
By rounds five and six, most of the remaining forces were either mopping up easy prey or fleeing the field. The game concluded at the end of round six with multiple players having little less than a single battle group to activate.
Just to conclude the game fully, we calculated kill points just to see what the damage was. Some on Team Human were optimistic the real score belied the failure Team Human had at holding this wrecked patch of earth.
Team Human kill points: 906
Team Alien kill points: 1590
Team Alien wins! To point out the fact that UCM One and Two lost more points than all of Team Human killed in the game shows where the main thrust of the enemy was and just how badly their match up was.