Urban Assault

I’ve been building up my collection of SciFi terrain from Battle Systems for the past couple of months, and this week we got to make use of it. It also got to make use of the urban wasteland battlemap from Deepcut Studios. The two I think went together really well in terms of colour theme.

I did add some wooded parks to the mix, mostly to give one side a region of soft cover since they had points spent on getting bonuses for that.

For this game, we used the Xenos Rampant rules, and I pulled out my 25mm Ground Zero Games figures for the Neu Swabian League and Federal Stats Europa. Neither side were painted for urban camouflage, but that was fine. A Xenos Rampant game normally suggests 24 points for armies – so we went for 60 points. This actually worked quite well, giving a good selection of units. Given how fast the Rampant rules are, the game still didn’t take too long, and was over in about 8 turns.

The game length was one issue I had, since I wanted to really do a game where we claimed territory (taking control of buildings), but that required a set number of game turns. The Rampant games can be difficult to judge turns for (you can end your turn after a single dice roll), so I ended up not going down that route. Instead we had six objective markers, and we spread them throughout the table. We needed to grab them, and take them back to our corner.

Having done this scenario, I think having a terrain conquest game over 10 turns would work. We’d want to start on opposite long edges, to make it quicker to get into combat, and maybe redistribute the buildings a bit.

For this game, we had the following forces:

Neu Swabian League

• Powered Armour (12pts) x3
• Heavy Infantry (4pts) x 4
• Jaeger Recon Infantry (4pts) x 2

Federal Stats Europa

• Powered Armour (9pts) x3
• Light Infantry (3pts) x5
• Sniper Infantry (6pts) x 3

The FSE were better at movement (though their Powered Armour was slower), whilst the NSL were better at shooting.

The FSE went first, starting from one corner, and we tried to quickly spread out along the edges. We could have stayed in the middle of the road and taken some shots at the NSL at the far corner, but then I’d be left out in the open, and the FSE light infantry have very low armour.

The NSL used similar tactics, getting off the main road and heading towards the buildings.Since the Battle Systems terrain has removable doors, we used a rule that a closed door meant you had to stop at the door to open it first. But once doors were opened, moving through the buildings was a quick way to move around whilst staying in cover.

The FSE were the first to open fire, but got no kills when they opened up on a group of NSL PA on the stairs. The PA returned fire, killing two of my sniper team, suppressing them. Using railings (which the stairs had) as hard cover gave a good defence bonus.

Between turns three and five, both sides grabbed three objective markers apiece. The FSE tried to slow down the NSL by shooting at them, but Rampant only allows movement and shooting for certain units – none of which I have. So it’s always a difficult decision about whether to get into a good position, or to open fire and be aggressive.

There was some shooting into and out of buildings, but no direct hand to hand combat. I got some units up to the roof of a couple of buildings, and used those positions to try and control the central table.

In total though, there were only four kills. Two FSE light infantry, and two NSL Powered Armour. Both sides got three objective markers back to their table corner – the NSL doing it quicker than the FSE managed.

After the NSL got their markers back, they began to pull back, so technically the FSE had control of the town, but that wasn’t one of the objectives so didn’t really count.

It turned out to be quite easy to grab the objectives without needing to get real close and personal with the enemy. The move/shoot dynamic is something I find weakest about Xenos Rampant, and we often end up with not much shooting because it’s more important to move.

In the end we considered the game a draw. Maybe we should have had an odd number of tokens, but it was going to be tricky to have a ‘fair’ place to put the odd one. They had all been placed in or on top of buildings – maybe out in the open at the cross roads would have been a good place.

It was a fun game, but would have been better with more conflict. I also think there’s still room for some more buildings.

I think I’d make the railings give soft cover in future, and allow a building to be hard cover if shooting out of a building. That would make being inside a building more advantageous than being out on the roof behind the railings.

An obvious thing for us to try is to re-run it with the Stargrunt rules. I do prefer these rules, though they are slower and more complicated.