Battle Report - Heavy Gear Blitz

Hello Folks,

I got a fill in player for this week, so Patrick can over to try out the new Heavy Gear Rules. Since the kickstarter stuff was delivered as discussed previously I felt inspired to try it out. This game is using my existing metal stuff, but no matter.

I figured out a couple of forces, since this is based on my existing collection the units are kind of optimized for the old version of Heavy Gear and not the new one, so it would be fair to say some unit choices might be slightly odd. Mainly in the new rules auto cannons are pretty much the best weapons for fighting heavy gears, when before they were not. So the special weapons now are really that, you only want them for special circumstances. Anyway here are the forces:

North:

Strike Squad: Thunder Jaguar, Arrow Jaguar, Destroyer Jaguar, Hunter Gunner
Unit Attachment: Klemm Light Tank
General Purpose Squad: Head Hunter, Hunter Gunner, Hunter Hunter

South:
Strike Squad: Razor Fang Black Mamba, Black Mamba, 2x Black Adder
Unit Attachment: Hun Light Tank
General Purpose Squad: Jager Commander, Jager, 2x Striking Jager

We played the normal scenario, so there are 4 stone heads spread out in the middle of the table and you have to capture these points to win. Of course the best way to do that is to kill bad stuff and not die.

Here is the starting point, I had the north at the bottom of the pictures, and the South is up top (confusing?). I put my GP guys in the middle, Strike around the hill and tank on the other side.

Going first in order to demonstrate things, I activated my GP squad and moved up to start destroying some Southerns. I got a lucky hit and managed to kill one right away, in the first shot I believe. This kind of dice rolling was going to be the bane of the South. They retaliated by activating their strike squad and sending some missiles indirectly over the forest. This put some damage on one hunter, and crippled another. Not much luck with the other shots. I then brought up my strike squad and got a lucky hit with the Arrow Jaguars missile and destroyed a Black Mamba! The rest of my guys just advanced up. Finally the Southern GP squad advanced up trying to get their bazookas in striking range of my tank.

Next turn the South got the first activation. The Strike squad decided to activate first to try and kill some of my guys. They advanced and took a few shots, but not much effect. This is when we started to learn that autocannons are really good, and snub cannons which the black adders have are very short ranged and not great. But one Black Adder did move left of the forest and put a hit on my tank.

I decided that the best thing to do now was activate my GP squad and try to kill some Jagers before they got to go. I was able to cripple the most dangerous one who was quite close to my tank, but that was it.

In retaliation they killed that guy who was now quite exposed.

This left my Strike Squad to go. My tank moved up to try and kill the Black Adder. But they are don't go down to easy! Still I was able to cripple it due to some poor rolling for the south. On the other side I moved up my strike guys and was able to focus down the other Black Adder with autocannon fire, and put a few hits on the sourhtern tank. Things were starting to look bad for the south.

On turn 3 I got the initiative again, so jumped straight to my Strike squad. Feelings confident now, my tank cleaned up the crippled Black Adder, and the rest of my guys finished off the tank. My commander took a couple of hits due to snap fire, but no big deal.

The South activated their GP squad next, and put a few hits on my tank. But it costed them another unit.

With only a couple of gears left the South decided to pack it in, so it was a victory or the North!

I actually found this game to be pretty fun. The mechanics are cleaned up allot so it is easier to play and more fun. It was good to get back to playing Heavy Gear since I used to play it allot 4 or 5 years ago. Bit of a learning curve with the armies thou as it turned out to be a bit imbalanced maybe, and some bad dice rolls for the South didn't help things. Still I found it to be pretty cool, will be looking to try it again sometime.

Thanks;
Mike