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Setting

The scenery had a vaguely East European look we took that as a general location. Len & Steve's Hi Tech NSL forces were raiding a small town with the intention of occupying it as the spearhead of an invasion. My ESU force is less sophisticated but larger. 

The Map

The Battle

The first turn saw Len push out onto the right flank while Steve moved more cautiously across the centre of their table edge. The left flank held little of interest for them which was unfortunate because I had deployed most of my six grav tanks there. The artillery spotter was also over on that side. Len opened the combat, firing at my medium artillery battery and failed to hit a single thing. In response we decided that the guns could return fire without the need for a fire mission request. Len's grav tanks were nicely grouped and converged sheaf salvo effectively junked the platoon. Steve added to the firefight on this side with his slam tanks and after exchanges of fire with Neil's tank troop on the riverbank each side lost a tank. In the middle Neil pushed up to occupy a small wooded hill and I re-deployed my grav force as quickly as I could. Neil's militia troops took up defensive positions in the buildings on the edge of town while his recce tanks pushed up to engage Steve's force which was now swinging left. Len's despair at losing so much had been replaced by a red mist in front of his eyes, never mind the mission, it was payback time! The heavy grav tanks engaged the artillery with a bit more success leaving one wrecked. Unfortunately this left his tanks as nicely bunched as the first lot and the remaining guns savaged them mercilessly. About this time Steve stated that Len couldn't hit a cow's a*** with a banjo. Strange image but effective. Steve evened things up a bit by destroying my heavy tank hunter and on the other flank he took out one of my slam tanks. Neil pushed through the woods to engage Steve's grav tanks and was rewarded by getting through the side armour although this left him exposed to a lot of retaliation. Steve decided to push his APCs towards the town to try to achieve the mission objective. He met one of my grav tanks which took out his platoon commander and broke the morale of the unit. At this point we were running short of time (Len and Steve keep having conferences) and the attack was definitely stalled so we tried out a close assault just for fun and Neil & I broke out the vodka while Len collected up the cotton wool we use to mark smoking wrecks. Next time I'll take a smaller force so that we can get the turns finished quicker, I'm now rejigging my list to bring it down to about 5000 points. I'll also base my artillery off table where Len can't get it.

The pictures are the General's debating the finer points of deployment and strategy and Len's beutiful heavy tanks being wiped out by some artillery. They're thumbnails so remember to click the pics to see the larger version.

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