Stargrunt AAR – City Fight

Jonathan and I played SG again last Thursday. For this game we had two platoons fighting over a downed recon drone in a dense urban landscape; lots of bombed out buildings and rubble. For added madness, we came up with a system for underground movement utilizing the sewers!

For minis, I was using my Pig Iron Heavy Infantry and EM4 powered armor. Jonathan was using Rackham’s AT-43 Red Blok troops. I have to say both forces looked fantastic on the table!

I must apologize for the poor quality of the pictures. Next time I’ll use a stand or something to mount the camera on.

Jonathan’s UDSS troops (space socialists!) contested control of a recon drone with my Ramstar mercenaries. The UDSS forces were trying to decode and transmit the data in the drone and my objective was to simply recover the drone.

Manning the barricades

Jonathan’s troops set up fairly close to the objective, then I was allowed to deploy a recon squad hidden. After that, the rest of my unit dropped on the opposite end of the board.

The first turn, both of us moved forward. The UDSS troops advanced toward the downed recon drone and set up a defensive perimeter. I got the bulk of my platoon on line and began advancing down the left side of the table with my infantry, while a squad of power armor troops went up the center and the APC moved around to the right.

My recon squad revealed itself on the floor directly above Jonathan’s HQ squad and pinned them down, only to come under heavy grenade launcher fire from his heavy power armor troops in return!

UDSS HQ squad about to get jumped!

Ambush sprung! So happy to see you!

Street fighting men

My troops going down the left chased a UDSS squad out of one of the buildings. Once I’d invested my troops in the forward buildings, Jonathan sent a squad through the sewers that came up behind my troops in the building they’d just left! This resulted in a furious shootout at close range, after which I turned my troops around and attempted to close assault. I blew my movement rolls and was only able to get right up on the enemy. Literally there was only a wall between us!

Chasing them out! That white poker chip is the sewer more enemy troops popped out of!

What followed was both squads using their activations (and extra HQ activations) to fire at each other right through the windows! In the end, the UDSS troops took some hits and wound up retreating back into the sewers.

Point blank shootout!

Jonathan got his tech squad over to the drone, picked it up, got into cover and went to work. Realizing I was getting bogged down on the left, I tried to press forward in the center and on the right. My PA troopers blazed up an enemy squad in a forward position, eventually close assaulting them and causing a lot of casualties. But the advance was not as fast as I would have liked.

UDSS squad seizes the objective

Power armor assault

With his tech troops working on the drone, I had to try and slow them down, so I drove the APC forward and right up on them! The result was an insane exchange of fire between his PA troops and RPG armed troops. Rockets bounced off the thick front armor of my APC, but I wound up with maximum Suppression markers, making the vehicle a sitting duck. Eventually, one of the rockets got through and disabled the APC.

APC coming up the flank

Rolling onto the objective

The UDSS cracked the code on the drone and although their first attempt at sending the data was stymied by ECW jamming, they would have eventually gotten the roll they needed. We had to stop the game there because of the time.

UDSS tech squad under the gun

It was a fun game and well played by Jonathan. His troops were Green but had High motivation (meaning they didn’t need to roll for 1st Suppression). That helped but he maneuvered them well. My advance on the left was checked by the well-timed emergence of one of his squads behind me (through the sewers) delaying me there.

The firefights and close assaults among the troops fighting in the ruins on the left were totally insane! I haven’t played a game of SG yet that had troops going at it at such close ranges! The back and forth there was a lot of fun!

My biggest mistake, which surely cost me any chance I had of winning, was not putting my PA troops into the APC and driving them forward to the objective. Although I could drive it over there and cause trouble, without troops to pick up the drone, there was no way I could win.

So, by my count, the UDSS is up two victories (the successful kidnapping of the Kryton Corp heiress, and this battle). Ramstar’s got one.