My latest bunch of purchases...

Once again I found myself with money burning a hole in my pocket, so I went to Spirit Games in Burton, my Friendly Not-So-Local (20 mile drive) Gaming Store. As always the service was excellent and the staff were friendly. And as always I walked out with a bunch of stuff I don't really need.

This trip's haul:

• 1x 'Raptor' Assault Biped from Scotia Grendel. Nice AT-ST-esque walker, should go well with my GZG infantry
• 1x GZG Neu Swabian Panzergrenadiers Squad
• 1x GZG Japanese Corporate Mercenaries Squad
• 5x Copplestone Bio-Chem Troopers. Nice looking models
• 1x Bag o' Zombies. To fight the Bio-Chem Troopers. I couldn't resist 100 zombies for £7
• 1x Small Urban War Platformer set. These will end up as colony hab-blocks, I wager
• Various basing materials

Hopefully, I should get them finished over the remainder of term, pacing myself so I can keep going until Christmas. Not very likely, but a nice idea.

Stargrunt AAR (Or: Do Not Feed The Claymores)

Played my first game of SG2 in ages at the club on Saturday, against my friend Daniel. We decided to try to try the Convoy scenario from the SG rulebook, with me being the Blue side, using my ESU (I'll get round to posting some pictures eventually), and he playing the Red side, borrowing my NAC. Between us we had 3 APCs, which was just enough to transport my short platoon of ESU, but no trucks, so we changed the scenario slightly and removed the 'claim the cargo' aspect.



Daniel started by rolling abysmally for his counters, only getting two mines and one dummy counter. He did manage to get two veteran squads, though they both had abysmal leadership. For my part, I managed to get two green squads, and a regular platoon command squad with Ld 3. From the start things were not looking good for me.



Terrain was a fairly open stretch down the middle ('the road')' with fairly dense trees and rocks on either side. Whilst I went to get a drink, my opponent set up his counters. The obligatory AV mine was placed roughly halfway down the board, with one counter on top of a hill, another between that hill and a clump of trees, and several dotted about the trees, including one in a crater in the ground. For some reason, he had put all his stuff on one side of the road.



The troops in the lead APC faired well, considering they ran over a mine, with only one figure dying. The squad's first action was to reorganise and check the wounded man, and he turned out to be fine. Obviously a dud mine. The troops in the other APCs dismounted shortly before their rides got toasted by IAVRs.

Before the troops firing the IAVRs could open up on my infantry, I moved them behind the smoking wrecks of the APCS, which were large enough to block LOS. Problem was, because of the part of the road I 'd stopped on, there was no way I could get round the APCs to fire at them without leaving my troops out in the open. So I tasked one of the green squads to trek off down-table to try and set enfilade fire on the ambushers, whilst the other two held the fort. Big mistake.

Two ambushing squads came round the trashed convoy, one from each end, whilst a third went off to deal with my flanking unit. The fourth still hadn't activated and was hidden.

My platoon command unit tried to call in artillery fire on the squad going after the flanking squad, but his abysmal leadership meant I kept failing my comms rolls. Shortly after, the rather depleted command squad was close assaulted by a full-strength NAC squad and ran off, its morale dropped to Broken. This was not good.

The flanking squad had managed to advance most of the way up the table and had taken the NAC squad tasked to deal with them under fire, pinning them in a patch of wood. They tried to combat moved across the road, and managed to almost make it. They had been advancing towards a counter I assumed to be a dummy, or his concealed command squad. After dicing for the combat move, the squad ended up 4" away from the counter.

Suddenly remembering the second mine counter, I measured the distance from the counter, and was relieved to find none of the squad were within 3" of it. Then Daniel smirked and flipped the counter, revealing a CDM. As my entire squad was within 6", the effect was horrific. Of the 8 man squad, only two survived, and rifle fire from the nearby squad soon finished those two off.

With my only squad still functional pinned by fire, and my only hope of rescuing them a nasty red smear on the ground, I conceded.

Overall, a fun game. With hindsight it was fairly obvious the counter was a mine, but I thought my opponent was trying to double-bluff me and ran headlong into it. Very Russian, but not really a smart move. If my squad had managed to get stuck in and deal with the NAC squad, I still don't know if I could have salvaged the game, with only two squad to his four, with one of mine pinned down by fire. Still, it was a laugh.

Setting the Scene

After the US and Russia pulled out of Serdaristan, the small country was left with a massive debt in gold bullion to The Legionnaire's mercenary unit. With Serdar in self-imposed exile, his son, Serdar II, undertook to write off this debt and get his country back. Russia offered to bail them out, but naturally, their were strings attached, and Serdaristan soon became a Russian satellite state.

Thus, when the Eurasian Solar Union was formed, Serdaristani colonists were amongst the settlers who began staking the People's claim to the outer rim. New Sedaristan was a small backwater colony, until significant natural resources and diamond deposits were found. However, the ESU was uninterested in such capitalist prizes, and so the significant wealth was left untouched by the ESU, and found its way into the pocket of the planets ruler, Serdar XII. This piece capitalist imperialism went unnoticed by the small navy picket left in the area by the ESU, even as it funded Serdar's shiny new house, golf course, custom yacht and lavish lifestyle. The Serdaristan people were left in their People's Housing Bureau tower blocks, living on pittances. Business as usual for Serdarastani government.

Then the Third Solar War happened. New Serdarastan's position close to the NAC recently moved spatial border made it a suddenly vital strategic point. Realising a large ESU force would be on the way soon, who would undoubtedly not be too understanding about his 'expenses', Serdar panicked and defected his planet to the NAC. An ESU force was dispatched to 'protect the People from exposure to capitalistic rhetoric and imperialism' and bring Serdarastan back into the ESU fold, arriving almost simultaneously with the NAC force sent to secure this new strategic and economic asset, and after an inconclusive space battle both sides made planet fall and a long ground engagement followed.

The principle sides in the New Serdarastan conflict are the NAC and ESU ground forces, the Serdarastan Patriotic Army (TO&E to follow), a number of mercenary contingents and various militia and insurgency groups. The SPA is nominally allied with the NAC, though its main goal seems to be to secure Serdar's rule and control of the diamond mines. Apparently not learning his lesson from his namesake's mistakes, Serdar has hired several mercenary contingents to assist in the task of securing his rule in the face of the ESU onslaught. In the occupied areas, several Serdarastani insurgent movements have emerged, such as the People's Front of Serdarastan, the Serdarastan People's Front, The Popular Front of the Serdarastan People and The Serdarastan People's Front for Popular Freedom, all at odds against each other and the power blocs.

Whatever happens in Serdarastan, its no going to be pretty.

Combat Zone Review

Combat Zone came highly recommended on TMP when I asked about a sci-fi skirmish game, so for £15 I thought it was worth buying the box set. I also ordered two metal scavengers on a whim- we'll come to them later.
It arrived on Wednesday, but college kept me too busy to do anything other than examine the contents and flick through the rulebook. On Friday I finally had the time to assemble the plastics and punch out the walls, so me and my brother sat down and played a game. We played Scenario 2- Robot Rescue from the book. He won, wiping out my troopers with ease. On Saturday we played again, this time the "Starter Scenario", 5 gangers versus 4 troopers. He won again, but took heavy casualties this time.
My thoughts on the game are still fairly undecided. The basic combat mechanisms seem intuitive and solid and pretty fast playing. Roll a d6, add modifiers, 6 or more is a hit. Roll wound dice, subtract armour/cover modifiers, 7 or more is a kill. Nice and simple. Could easily be adapted to other genres such as microarmour or mecha.
Where the system falls down in my opinion is the Action Point system. I blame Space Hulk for the prevalence of Action Points in games- I don't like them. I can see their advantages, but they just seem too anal-retentive to me. I guess that's more of a personal taste complaint though.
Second problem is the inconsistent application of the morale system- you can make someone run away by stabbing at them with a knife, but not by shooting at them with a gun.
Third problem is the fact that you activate as a squad, but combat is all individual based. Thus you end up with situations where the person who wins initiative has their entire group fire at one of your group leaders, killing them in the first turn and crippling your initiative rolls for the rest of the game. Some system for groups shooting at other groups en masse would have been nice.
Lastly, its in metric. Another personal taste thing but I prefer imperial measurements for gaming- less fiddly.
Of course, all of these problems can be fixed with a little house ruling. For instance, apply the same wound-roll based morale system to shooting as to melee. The group-shooting thing isn't that much of a problem, as I bought the game to use for small games of 5-6 men a side, not the larger games the rulebook recommends. And the metric thing is easily solved with a few pencil notes in the side margins.
Overall, a system that shows promise, but needs a little tweaking. Paticular mention should go to the Combat Zone Chronicles, a fantastic resource of modelling and rules articles, which has some really cool stuff on it.

The miniatures in the box were a mixed bunch. I was quite happy with the plastic Troopers, who are well posed, with nice detailing. They look very uniform, but thats ok with the troopers because they're the faceless corporate rent-a-guns. They could have done with being more heavily armed- only two of five have assault rifles- as they're the rich ones with all the tech and gear.
The gangers, however, were quite dissapointing. The quality was mediocre, some of the poses look wrong, and they're just too uniform for the heterogenous individualistic gangers.
The robots were also pretty dissapointing. No instructions were included as to their construction, so I had no idea which arms were supposed to go with which body and the models seemed quite lacklustre in their aesthetics- nothing wrong with them, they just weren't very interesting.

The metal scavengers I ordered were a completely different story. The quality was amasing; the figures looked like a tiny sculptor had just chipped them out of granite, there was absolutely no trash and they were already primed. I've half-painted one of them, I'll post pictures when its done. Very nice models, lots of character.

Overall, a satisfactory purchase and I'll be definetly buying more of EM-4's metal figures.