FCC Squad for MERCS

Two weeks ago I bought the rulebook for MERCS – Military Economic Reconnaissance Counter Security. It’s what I do now – buy the rulebook and read it well before I buy any minis for a game. I used to drop money on both, simultaneously, when I was particularly enthusiastic about a system. But not anymore.

But I’m digging these rules, so last week I bought as many of 2 squads as I could get my hands on; and I’m happy to report – they’re all painted! Now I can learn the rules with the actual minis and cards, and I’m looking forward to the tactical choices. My FCC squad is only 4 strong now (a 5th model came without a torso), but I’m eager to play because MERCS can be played with as many or as few models as you like. Five is the standard number.

These FCC were painted with their resistance background in mind – cohesive looking without a definitive uniform look. Their pants are Vallejo Green Ochre and their tops are GW Shadow Grey. All models have been intermittently washed – something I’ve rarely done before. Usually I do a basecoat and wash right off the bat and then just detail as desired, but these soldiers have way too much modeled on them for that technique, so I generalized as much as I could and painted details for hours afterwards.

MERCS FCC Squad (4)
Points on the table: 4     Time to paint: 8hrs(!)

Relthoza Scarab Classs Heavy Cruisers
Time to paint: 3hrs     Points on the table: 160pts

Before I finished the Scarabs, I completed a 3 ship squadron of Bane Class R&D Cruisers – sometimes called “Shunt” Cruisers. I found when I was painting these, that they looked better horizontal, than they did in their intended vertical configuration. They just look so much cooler this way. I drilled holes in them with my Dremel, and after the paint is completely dry on them, I’ll fill in the original flight stand holes with putty. Again – easy to paint, and easy to detail. I love Spartan models!

Relthoza Bane Class R&D Cruisers
Time to paint: 4hrs     Points on the table: 165pts

Nice going Christopher. Dead. What the fuck am I going to read now? You selfish bastard.
Ad astra Christopher Hitchens. I’m gonna miss you.

Now I just have to reread the rules and maybe play a couple of solo games to really get the feel of the game back. They’re definitely a better set of rules than Uncharted Seas.

Will wanted his Sorylians to have a base colour of aquamarine – greenish blue – so I base coated these in GW Turquoise, then washed them with Asurman Blue. The highlight colours are the original Hawk Turquoise and Ice Blue. Bright green and yellow were painted here and there to indicate energy flow from the engines.

Shown are: 1 Swordbreaker Class Battleship, 3 Skyhammer Class Cruisers and 6 Scythe Class Frigates.
Points on the table: 495pts     Time to paint: 20hrs

These guys have really interesting skull helmets for most players, as well as ornately cast shoulder pads. I’ve emphasized the brass and bone as much as possible, and I think they look really barbaric. When painting them, I went for blocky highlights and unsubtle edges. This will make them stand out on the Blood Bowl pitch.

Cotxum Cold Ones Lizardman Team
Time to paint: 10hrs

Once again I’ve painted up more men than you can take in a typical force, but I’ve painted most of the options you can get for the Brits:
- 1 x Corporal
- 1 x Sergeant
- 1 x 2″ mortar
- 1 x Bren light machine gunner (with assistant)
- 1 x sniper
- 10 x Commandos with Enfields

A British Commando squad starts out at 365pts. You can easily upgrade them to 500pts, like my Panzergrenadiers, but you will probably always have less men. What the Brits excel at though is the “Trained with the Bayonet” skill, which allows them to reroll 1d6 when assaulting and allows them to keep their hidden status while assaulting. Cool.

The Universal Carriers are not included in the squad, although I may use them in my game tomorrow as scenery or give them very rudimentary rules.

Operation Squad British Commandos
Points on the table: 505pts     Time to paint: 4hrs

Anyway, the point is to have a good variety of troops at the 500pt level. The base Panzergrenadier squad of 11 men is 400pts, which doesn’t leave a lot of room for modifications to get to 500. Hell, a sniper is +90pts! We’ll see how many men is good on a side at once.

I chose to paint up some individual models from my Flames of War stash. Turns out I had more Panzergrenadiers than I needed, and because my other army is British/Canadian I’ve got some Commando figures for a second Operation Squad force. If I like the game I’ll consider changing scales. Right now I’ve got a fair amount of 15mm scenery and vehicles, so I’m sticking with 15mm. The half-track is eye candy only for now – teh guys who made Operation Squad haven’t got any vehicle rules as of yet, and some time has gone by since they promised there would be.

When I get the British done I’ll post a battle report and review.

Operation Squad Panzergrenadiers:
Points on the table: 505pts     Time to paint: 4hrs

Mighty Armies 2 Review

Mighty Armies 2 is published by Rebel Minis. It’s a unit based game – but the final number and kind of units in your army is completely customizable and up to you. Sound good? It is.

The Rulebook

You get the rulebook for Mighty Armies Fantasy (v.2) from mightyarmies.com as a downloadable PDF. It’s $10 USD, is 43 pages long, and has the following sections:

1 – The Lands of Zatariel – an introduction to the background and races of the rulebook’s fantasy setting. Skip it. If you’re like me, you don’t need yet another fantasy setting for a reason to pit elves vs. orcs. You’ve probably already got the models you want to use too.

2 – Before Play – a kind of clumsily assembled section. It actually contains the rules for “before play”, but also includes core “during play” rules such as initiative, moving, shooting and initiating close combat.

3 – Close Combat – yup.

4 – Magic – a list of 6 spells that can totally undermine your opponent’s strategies. Nice.

5 – Summoning – how to summon units to the field of battle if your army is so inclined.

6 – Victory – winning the game. You win the game when you eliminate half of your opponent’s units in battle, or kill his General with less AP (army points) lost than your opponent.

7 – Building an Army – 2 pages of generic unit tables and upgrades, along with their AP costs.

8 – Larger Battles – Mighty Armies is meant to be played at the 40pt level, which will get you roughly a dozen units to fight with. Larger battles are covered in this section.

9 – Expanding Mighty Armies – buy more Rebel Minis models.

10 – Mighty Missions – there are 6 missions described in Mighty Armies 2. When you fight your opponent, you will be playing against his mission, as well as his army. Because the missions are kept secret, victory points may be quite different when tallied up at the end of the game. Missions are recommended to be 6 turn games.

11 – Mighty Campaigns  – 8 pages on running a campaign!

12 – The Empires – this section is actually an extension of the Campaign section. It describes empires that you might want to play in the campaign along with their accompanying rules – perks, flaws, that sort of thing. These empires mesh nicely with Rebel Minis’ own miniature line.

That’s it! You may be thinking “Hey man – that’s a lot of sections for a 43 page book!” And you’d be right. The unfortunate thing is, not nearly enough of those pages are actually devoted to the rules of fighting. The basic movement, combat, shooting and morale rules are quite brief – and while this is the brilliance of the Mighty Armies system, it is also a source of frustration. After just 1 game, I encountered several battlefield events not covered in the rulebook. Some of these will be shown in my first Mighty Armies battle report. (Coming soon after this review. I’ve already played and photographed it).

Mighty Armies 2 Rules Summary

Players build armies to a recommended 40 AP (Army Points). For the battle I played with Zac, this got me 12 stands of Dwarfs to his 13 stands of Undead. We then set up the recommended playing table – a 2×2’ space – with 2 hills and 2 clumps of trees. Terrain is mutually decided in Mighty Armies 2, and is not strategically placed as in DBA.

Building an army based on points is easy! There’s a chart on page 15 that lists unit costs and stats for whatever you want to buy. There are really only 10 troop types listed:

• light and heavy infantry
• light and heavy cavalry
• archers and crossbowmen
• chariots
• artillery
• monstrous (anything really – could be a giant or a dragon or a sentient boulder)
• spellcaster
• army general

The cool thing about buying these units is, they can be upgraded to have one or more of many unit abilities, each costing an additional 1AP. So, if  I bought a Heavy Infantry unit (3AP), I could upgrade it to be both disciplined (+1AP) and fearless (+1AP) for a total of 5AP. It would be a kick-ass unit, but as you’ll find after playing a few battles, numbers mean a lot in this game.

Deployment starts by making a die roll – the lowest roller places his army first. You then deploy your armies within 6” of your side of the battlefield. There are some exceptions to this rule, like the SCOUTS unit upgrade, that allows players to deploy a SCOUT unit anywhere on the table, but at least 8” away from the enemy.

Players roll a die to begin play – highest player goes first. In following turns, initiative is rolled again, and the highest player will go first for that turn. The player’s turn is broken down into 4 parts:
1 – Roll for Movement Points (MP)
2 – Move your units
3 – Shoot
4 – Fight in close combat
Pretty straightforward stuff really, but for people who haven’t played DBA – maybe not!

Rolling for MP is going to determine how many units or groups of units you can move in your turn. You roll a d6 and that is your MP limit.

Units can be moved individually, or in a group of up to 6 units in size. Groups can be no more than 3 units wide and 2 units deep. The units in the rear of a group are said to be ‘supporting’.

For the cost of 1MP, a unit can move up to its speed in inches. Pretty standard hunh? Except – the unit is allowed to turn 90 before it moves, and another 90 afterwards (pivoting around the center). All movement in between these turns has to be in a straight line. In my games this has lead to strange contacts again and again, where you have enough speed to make partial contact with enemy units or groups, but because you pivot around your center, when you try to align, you actually pivot out of contact. That’s movement in a nutshell, but other reform options are allowed as well – but since they all cost 1MP, you’ll never be reforming and moving in the same turn. As you’d expect, moving through terrain other than open doubles the movement cost.

This leaves the player with an interesting conundrum – if I have 4 units (or groups of units) on the board, and I roll a 2 for MP, which units will I move? Should I change formation to receive a charge? Should I try and move into range to shoot? The choices in the movement phase will determine how much risk you’re prepared to take for the turn to come. You can set up a perfect  2:1 charge for next turn, only to be allowed to move 1 unit when the time comes. Yikes! Makes defensive players happy and aggressive players reckless. But it just might pay off.

Shooting is a straightforward affair. Ranged combat for archers and crossbows has a 5” reach. Choose a target within that far of your leading edge, and roll a die. The roll is compared to the fighting value of the target, and if it’s equal to or higher than what’s needed, the target is removed. That’s it! No saving throws, no recoils, just life or death. Shooting can be upgraded to level 2 to make killing enemies at range more lethal. Artillery is quite dangerous, and has a range of 12”.

Close combat is also straightforward, but bloody. Units that are in contact roll a d6 to get the highest score possible. The die is added to the unit’s Fighting Score (eg. 2 for light inf. and 4 for heavy inf.) and may be further modified by charging, difficult ground, flanking, etc. All units can also offer support, by being directly behind a friendly fighting unit. Infantry are really the only units good at this, everyone else is just ok.

Once you’ve added the numbers up and compared them, one of three things can happen:

Equal scores – draw – units stay locked in combat.
Higher score – drive back – lower unit is driven back. Turn the unit 180 and move it its full speed away from the attacker.
Higher score by 2x or more – lower unit is removed from the battle.

Group combats resolve a little differently – group combat totals will equal all the units in the front rank, and all their support plus a d6. A group that loses a combat loses 1 unit (of the loser’s choice) and must be driven back. If a 2x higher score is rolled, the loser will lose d6 units from the group. After a combat has been resolved, players may rearrange their battling groups.

Being victorious in the game means you remove half of your opponents’ units, or you kill his general along with a higher AP of units than you’ve lost yourself. Done!

Magic in Mighty Armies 2 is fairly powerful. While an army can only have 1 spellcaster, in the close combat phase, he can cast as many spells as he has MP, with the proviso that no unit may be attacked/affected more than once. There are 6 spells listed. Spellcasters and their accompanying unit cost 5AP, which is quite expensive considering all their other stats are quite mediocre.

There’s more too! But you can probably guess what’s what from my chapter descriptions above.

Mighty Observations – the Good, the Bad and the Clumsy

Good

A ruleset that plays a lot like DBA, without all the DBA “Destroyed if in a BUA or camp, or by elephants, knights or scythed chariots if in good going, or by Warband not in a BUA or camp, or if shot at. If not, no effect.” crap.

Unit basing. Mighty Armies 2 has a standard basing of 50 x 25mm, or whatever you want to use as long as you’re consistent in being roughly 2:1. Monstrous units and other exceptionals are 50 x 50mm. This means that I could use most of my DBA armies, Warmaster minis or whatever. Going forward though, Rebel Minis will host tournaments using 15mm scale models, and 50 x 25mm basing.

Unit customization. Players can alter units into whatever they want. If you want to play a horde of cheap units or have a specialized, rock-hard, smaller army – you can! Want 9 artillery units and 1 general?! No problem! I can’t find anywhere in the rules that says you can’t. In fact, I can’t find anywhere in the rules that says you can’t have more than 1 general!

Easy learning curve. I could teach a friend to play this game in 5 minutes and being playing inside of 10 if I have the armies already prepared. It really is that easy.

Bad

A ruleset that’s 43 pages, but doesn’t have enough combat examples to solve its own simplified resolutions. What’s up with that? It also doesn’t address partial contacts – you either have full frontal contact or you don’t. There’s no ‘closing the door’ for free in this game, although sliding into perfect alignment is permitted once full frontal contact is made.

Clumsy

A questionably designed rulebook. The “cover” is nice – great colour, lots of menace… But the interior pages are 2 columns surrounded by keylines. Really, designer Ed Wedig? – if that is your real name. I’ve got to ask what program you used to lay this book out in, because it looks like you did it in Word – a complete design failure. This would be ok back in say, 1988, but today it’s kinda amateurish. And it’s a PDF, so why aren’t all my pages in colour? There are black and white photos throughout the rulebook, (most of them kind of murky and not Photoshopped for clarity), but why are they black and white? If I want to print them out I can choose colour or black and white if I want, but not if I don’t have the option!! Good lord.

Some contradictions that could have been cleared up with better proof reading. For instance, on page 18 in the LARGER BATTLES section, while trying to clarify multiple division MPs, it says to complete the close combat of all divisions before moving on with shooting all divisions. But shooting comes before close combat!

Summary

The bottom line is, I like Mighty Armies Fantasy 2. It’s an easy to learn, easy to play miniature ruleset that rewards good army composition, prudent maneuvering and planning. It stands on its own quite well, or can be a gateway game for other mass combat systems. For experienced miniature gamers, Mighty Armies Fantasy 2 is just asking to be house-ruled to suit their personal preferences. It’s a well thought out, if not well illustrated, fun set of rules. And hey – it’s just $10. Give it a go.
- Battlemind

My 2-player starter came with two (almost full) GUARD and Destroyer armies, 9 buildings, a fully updated rulebook, and of course all the dice and maps needed to play. I’m impressed. After setting up the map with all the buildings, monsters and units needed to play the game, you have a really aesthetically impressive game with enough complexity and options to keep you involved for many many months. And like other miniature games, if you get a little bored, changing armies will force you to reinvent your strategy, as they all play slightly differently, and its a brand new game again.

As a long time miniature gamer, here’s what I like about Monsterpocalypse:
1 – Fantastic aesthetics with pre-painted miniatures (well painted)
2 – Rules are complex enough to keep me interested for quite a while
3 – Lots of variety in monsters and units will keep you varying strategies to see what’s best
4 – Other gamers (miniature or Clix or board gamers) are also happy to try it out. Every time I play this at my FLGS it gets attention and people talking. New players are already buying in after only 2 weeks.
5 – Low price point. Relatively. The starter in Canada is about $60 after taxes. You can’t beat that for prepainted goodness.
6 – TeamCovenant.com is THE website to visit for people interested in the game. These guys – Steve and Zach  – love the game so much, they’ll make you optimized army packs, have done tutorial videos and have a really intelligent forum on the go, discussing the game. Watch the 8 part tutorials on their YouTube channel to get a really good feel for how the game plays before you spend your money. Look for “The Definitive Monsterpocalypse Tutorial” parts 1-8.

I love this game. It checks all the boxes for a good, strategic time, playing with friends. Watch the videos I’ve linked to above. Buy a starter. See if you don’t fall in love with this game. Seriously.

Piecing an army together in Heavy Gear isn’t a starightforward affair – it’s kind of convoluted actually. Especially if your army is from a subsequent source book like my Colonial Expedition Force here. I’ll rant about it another time perhaps, but suffice it to say that this is a legal CEF army at PL:3, with the heavy squad being the mandatory Specialist sqd., and the 2 hovertanks being an Auxiliary combat group.

I chose and bought these models before I’d fully understood the army selection process for Heavy Gear. I knew that CEF used tanks as core, so I bought the two HT-68s. But as it turned out, CEF light tanks are core, not the heavies. I bought the Heavy Frame Squad because I wanted gears in my force, without realizing that they were a Specialist combat group. Now I had to play at least a Priority Level 3 army to put these 2 squads on the table on their own.

Now let’s add up the points on these bad boys:
Heavy Hovertank Squad: 480 pts (with no other upgrades)
Heavy Frame Squad: 255 pts (incl. the minimum mission packs they must buy)
Total points on the table: 735 pts      Time to paint all models: 12 hrs (6 for the tanks, 6 for the Gears)