=============== OGRE/GEV list, May 12th (Last: May 11th) =============== ===== Death of a Fencer From: Chris Camfield From: grendel@cdsnet.net (Nocturnal Proletarian) ------------------------------ From: Chris Camfield Subject: Death of a Fencer. To: hcobb@IO.COM (Henry J. Cobb) Unless there was a change in the Ogre Minis rules, the Fencer has *four* secondary battery guns. It's the Mark IV that has two. If I'm wrong on this, all the following is wasted, but oh well... So after the Fencer takes out 4 light GEVs with missiles, the remaining 16 attack and destroy a secondary battery (expected hits 8/6), and the overrun begins: Ogre defensive fire: 4 missiles (aside: can the missile racks be reloaded by this time?) and 3 secondary batteries and 1 ram reduce the number of LGEVs to 8. LGEVs fire: they can get 2 1-1s and a 1-2 on secondaries. Hopefully get a hit. (Expected hits 5/6) The Fencer has 2 secondaries left. Ogre fires: 2 more LGEVs die, leaving 6. LGEVs fire: Again, 2 1-1s on secondaries, hopefully they get another hit. (Expected hits 4/6) Ogre fires: 1 more LGEV dies, leaving 5. LGEVs fire: Hopefully they nail the last secondary. (With a 1-1 and a 1-2, expected hits 3/6.) Now the LGEVs get two more fire rounds, and maybe get 1 missile rack, leaving 3. (Expected hits 4/6) If the LGEV's call for an overrun before the Ogre gets to move, it does get to ram another unit, neh? That'd leave 4, and they still need to eliminate the missile racks. Say they kill a second in their fire phases. If the Ogre chooses *not to move*, logically it can wait until the LGEV move, call for an overrun, and probably eliminate another 3 units with missiles and ramming. That leaves 1 LGEV. Comment 1: The LGEVs do still seem to be doing extremely heavy damage. How would 20 GEVs take the Fencer apart? They're still a smaller force. Or, what if there were another 20 LGEVs waiting in the wings? Comment 2: The Fencer and Mark IV are meant to be raiders. If they never face more targets than they have missile racks, they can annihilate their opposition with ease. Comment 3: Terrain matters an awful lot. The 20 LGEVs need a fair bit of space to avoid spillover fire, if they are all within 12" of the Ogre when it fires its missiles (so they can close on it and attack), but not within range of its secondaries. The Fencer could also try to hide from them in the forest. :) Comment 4: I think it's a bad rules change, if the Ogre Minis rules allow either player to call for an overrun at any time when units are close enough, even if the moving player didn't move INTO the overrun range. Comment 5: In original G.E.V., you couldn't leave more than 5 units in a hex after an overrun, so 10 LGEVs would have to split up after they carried out an overrun, or be reduced to 5 units! Comment 6: After the overrun by the LGEVs, if the Fencer pulls out, it can bombard the close formation(s) of LGEVs with missiles and disable most of them. This example IS leaving me a little confused about the missile rack reload rules, though. One shot per turn, or no shots until one full turn has passed? Christopher Camfield - ccamfiel@uwaterloo.ca - 1996 BMath Joint CS/C&O "Do you need a new invention? Are you in the right dimension?" (The Jazz Butcher) ----- [I have the Miniature right in front of me and I count exactly two big guns in that turret, (which does not bear in a 60 degree arc to the rear), these guns are bigger than the main battery on the American tanks, but then again, they're made in France. -HJC] ----- To: hcobb@IO.COM From: grendel@cdsnet.net (Nocturnal Proletarian) Subject: Death of a Fencer Nice trick, but I've been on the receiving end of this before. My friend Cambo overran a Mark V with an obscene amount of LGEVs, (this was about six years ago in a game of BODYBLOW, I was defending) and when the dust settled (which took about six months), he had but a handful of LGEVs' & I had the biggest farm tractor this side of PapCat. I can only hope to encounter cybertanks that just rumble up into range of massive concentrations of my troops. What about spill-over fire? If the LGEVs are spread out enough to minimize this, then all might not be able get in a fire phase before the overrun. Typically, when faced with this situation, the cyber sideslips to the left or right and then bags the suckers, er, I mean, units closest to it, minimizing the amount of retaliation it will have to under go. The other solution is to give the Fencer 4 secondary batteries as it had in the OGRE book & Space Gamer when it was first published. ----- [Be honest with me, could even the upgunned sucker deal with it's "cost" in LGEVs? A suggestion: Cruise Missile Crawlers are excellent anti-Ogre weapons, take six against a Mark-V, the very first one has a 8% chance of wasting the beast (from 15 hexes out) and the third through 6th ones have a 23% chance (after the Ogre's SAMs run out ;-), giving a less than 30% chance that the OGRE will run over the CP. (Main & Secondary battery intercepts will risk stripping the guns much quicker than the threads will go when the missile "falls down, goes boom!") Another suggestion: do not pick up BOLOS, Book three, turn to the Technical Notes and compare them to pages 9 through 11 of Ogre Minis. Hint: Mk Is through VI match very well indeed. (Guess which of these are "standard combat Bolos", which have VLS missile systems, whats the difference in firepower from say the Mk I through Mk III, etc) Fortunately it's all copyright 4029. In lots of other ways Laumer's schedule is even longer than Jackson's, with the first self-directed Bolo showing up in 2796! My prediction is that a tank designed not to have space for any human occupants, largely autonomous, will be deployed by humans either by 2015 or never. (I suspect that we will survive at least that long, and the autonomous robotic combat vehicle will be no bigger than a M1A1. (It won't be a "real" tank, because it'll have an autoloader. ;-)) -HJC]