Starship Troopers - Desert Patrol.- "At close quarters"....

A little behind on posts over recent weeks, real life keeps getting in the way of game time.....

After several outings of the Martian Empire games, recent conversations have turned to more modern gaming several months ago we gave Chris Peers rules "At close quarters"... a run out they had a good feel to them, keeping figures on the table rather than seeing those freshly painted mini's back in the case after 5 mins, when they have taken 4 hours to paint.

We wanted to see if a well motivated insurgent force can take on a well armed regulars with armour support.

Time to dust off the Mobile Infantry for a stroll in the desert of some unnamed frontier planet....

Back in August last year I painted up some Denizen Miniatures K'hiff as wanted to create a new Race for the MI to take on rather than nasty bugs --- enter the Limmikin which I took from the Native American name for men who shifted into wolves, very apt given the K'hiff wolf like appearance.

The sceanario was a simple one, the MI have lost communication with the Oxygen Production Plant and a patrol of MI are sent to investigate, two 10 man squads and APC's.

 

The rules are based on troops being classified into 6 classes.

Elite, Professional, Fanatic, Regular, Militia, Rabble Each troop classifiaction has a rough organisation structure with the better quality units having less troops within each unit. e.g. Elite might be 4 SAS troopers, whilst a militia unit might be 25 figures.

In this encounter we classed the Limmikin as Professional in 4 man teams plus a single unit as a sniper, whilst the MI were Regulars, fearing an ambush the MI debus fearing a trap.

Players take it in turns moving one unit at a time, then shooting is resolved for all. But the professional class always shoot before the regulars. The nice thing about the rules is that you can place the figures on the table but they can't be seen if you are stationary or moving in sneak mode - very handy if you are the ambusher.... 

I opened up looking to pin the column in the gorge, pinning a number of the MI including the squad leader, who was unable to motivate his section to use aimed fire, in hindsight the insurgents should have had more RPG's.....

Firing is then either aimed or unaimed. Only aimed fire can inflict casualties, unaimed fire will supress an enemy forcing it to pass several dice before it can move forwards or fire.

Most weapons fire in two different modes Single shot or Auto this dectates the range and number of dice rolled. Firing is carried out using a D20 dice with modifers for your class, militia for example suffer a minus penalty.

A modified score of 18+ means the target is killed. A roll of 15-17 means the target is pinned.

Unfortunately the heavy cannon's in the APC's don't have to worry about aiming and several rounds into the sniper position silenced him.

 

Everytime your unit suffers a kill you have to pass a morale test, 2 fails and your whole unit is pinned, causing you to seek deeper cover whilst you try to recover each fighter.

Bad luck on the insurgents side, having missed with the RPG, but they did killed several of the MI foolish to be caught in the open before they were forced back as the APC's were brought to bear....

The rules had the right feel the initial ambush left the heavily armed regulars pretty worried for several turns.