Behind the Scenes - The Battle of Red Sands City

The Battle of Red Sands city was the largest single Battletech battle I’ve ever run in my 26-odd years playing the game. It also had a number of highlights from a gameplay point of view that are definitely worth going into some detail on.

A section of the battle in progress

• The first damage in the battle came when a QLF Striker Tank skidded and bashed into a QLF Griffin, destroying almost all the armour on one leg. The Striker itself was immobilised
• The first actual casualty was a QLF Rifleman who’s AC/5 ammo was set off in the first round of combat it got into.
• The other QLF ‘Mechs didn’t do too much better. A Striker went down quickly due to losing a leg, and spent the rest of the game crawling around and shooting its Large Laser at whoever it could find.
• The Marauder II did a lot of damage with its HGR, which also served as an object lesson in the effectiveness of Ferro-Lamellor Armour. On the other hand, being surrounded and hounded by the Uziel, Scarabus and Griffin meant that it became an easy target and died fast and (thanks to aforesaid HGR) explosively.
• The Marauder II’s pilot suffered five hits during the battle, hence the “died of his injuries” line in the report. What was meant to be a “boss monster” proved to be quite ineffective
• The QLF’s Zhukov tanks were dug in and hull-down in a defensive line around the ship. This proved to be less useful then it seemed as most of the QLF assault had out-ranged them. Having VTOLs swing behind them also helped neutralise their cover
• Speaking of VTOLs, the players made good use of them to shut down the QLF’s Arrow launchers. They were rather surprised by the Medium VSPs and how effective they could be, however.
• Irony is when your AMS is destroyed by a missile that got through its attempt to intercept it.
• To counter such threats, the QLF had a pair of Pike tanks loaded with flak rounds. Not only did both prove to be quite insanely poor aims, but the few times they hit saw them only do armour damage. Shockingly fragile VTOLs were not shockingly fragile
• The QLF’s vehicles quickly became messes of motive system damage rolls, a fact not helped by the number of SRMs that were being spewed out by the VTOLs or both Irisz’s Mad Cat Mk IV and Lee’s Vulture Mk IV.
• Speaking of, Irisz (being controlled by one of the players) developed a habit of wading into the middle of enemy formations and letting fly with both her forward and rear Streak SRMs. It proved to be a great way to kill lots of vehicles fast.
• One MRM-30 is enough to make an AgroMech go from “fresh” to “exploding”
• On several occasions, QLF infantry and Irregulars’ battle armour were occupying the same building hexes
• The only casualty suffered by the Irregulars was a Scourge, shot in the head by a Zhukov’s AC/10. It was like ‘roll location… oh, he’s dead’.
• In the end, the QLF survivors included a Griffin (one leg destroyed), a Heavy Tracked APC (escaped), a Striker Tank (surrendered) and several Pikes and Zhukovs (immobilised)