Firestorm Planetfall AARs - Two Very Short Ones

Zig and I broke out the Firestorm Planetfall stuff for our first game of that on Saturday afternoon. We fumbled through the a couple scenarios in the Battle for Proteus Prime campaign book that came with the box set.

This also is the debut of my wintry battle mat and trees. I may give it a bit more white, but I'm happy with the result. Here I've got a big honkin' heavy tank and a support tank. The support tank's job is to feed drop coordinates to the boys upstairs. The red markers in the middle of the battlefield are the drop sites. I also had three medium tanks bobbing along off-field in reserve.

In retrospect, I should have left this guy idling on my base line, sniping. But for game 1, he zipped forward and game the infantry carrier both barrels and was one hit away from killing it!

And then this happened. Ugh. Stupid infantry.

Big 'un hit the retros and tried his luck elsewhere. Just for grins, I killed the infantry carrier. It was a spite kill more than anything.

The big Directorate tank then took aim at my Sedna and with one mighty blast sent it careening.

My cavalry showed up and sniped one of the Directorate recon vehicles capturing the objective in the center. Too little, too late.

Those medium tanks were soon overrun by the roaming pack of infantry. Game over man, game over!

OK, lesson - infantry is the queen of the battle in a phone booth. AP guys are more suited to the long game. On to the next one!

The play area was expanded to 36" x 36" and we deployed our forces. I failed to realize that the support tank was supposed to be attached to the medium tank squadron. You can see my recon skimmers which have zipped forward early to occupy the objective.

Not pictured is evidence of my decision to float them over to the EW vehicles on the right to shoot them up. Well, I got too close and those EW vehicles decided to initiate a CQB firefight. Turns out EW tanks are the bee's knees in close quarter battle and wiped my squadron. Oh well, game 2, rookie mistake. In the picture above you can see that the tank squadrons have traded shots and the Cyber Warfare tanks have obscured the advanced targeting systems of my tank squadron with pop-up ads. The Directorate infantry has occupied the objective building.

The gray hordes continued their push forwards. I had dropped two missile launchers onto the board, but I just didn't have the firepower to deal with anything. After another turn, all that was left were my missile launchers. 

Lesson - the "intercept" aspect of CQB is not to be underestimated. Especially when it comes to big silly EW vehicles which apparently are crawling with the guys from The Expendables.

We did play the shield rules wrong - we were adding up total shields for the squadrons, not just those of the vehicles that would be damaged by an attack. Noob mistake. It seemed very broken during the game 😅

I'm certainly looking forward to more of Planetfall. Its combat mechanics are a big improvement over DW's slow arithmetic-laden dice counting system. A bit more experience will sort our my stupid mistakes of Saturday's games. I have not been perusing the forums looking for tactical advice and how-to guides, so really was going in blind. It did not take long at all to determine that the Aquan Prime guys prefer a battlefield that looks like this:

Long ranges, fast movement. The pool table is where it's at...