BattleTech Tournament Report: Southern Assault V

Welcome to another tournament report, MechWarriors! Southern Assault is one of multiple BattleTech events sponsored by what’s likely BattleTech’s largest online retailer, Fortress Miniatures and Games, and the only one that takes place in their hometown of Clemmons, North Carolina. It’s historically been an Alpha Strike event, but with this year’s fifth outing, Southern Assault V, they added a one-day, three-round Classic tournament (run by Josh, Steve, and Denham from The Mechbay Podcast) on Monday, November 10th. It drew a packed field of 54 players! The East Coast contingent of the GH BT team was on-site for the tourney, with Liberty, Perigrin, and myself participating.

SAV was an 8k BV tournament with forces composed of 3-6 BattleMechs only (including up to one Unique mech), no BA or vehicles. In an interesting twist, while forces were technically tied to a specific era and faction’s MUL list, we were able to choose any era and faction. While the majority of participants chose the ilClan era (with 30 entries), most eras were represented, with only the Late Succession War (including Renaissance) and the Late Republic seeing no lists submitted. Equipment was limited to the BattleMech Manual, with a few carve-outs to allow some equipment from outside the book to be brought but rendered entirely non-functional (A- and B-Pods, plus a specific handful of mechs with shoulder turrets). No duplicate chassis were allowed (with chassis defined as per MUL listing, so, for instance, the Centurion and the Centurion Omni counted as the same mech). A handful of custom mechs from Fortress and the Mechbay Podcast were permitted (albeit limited to specific variants included in the packet). Gunnery and Piloting had to be within 1 of each other, and could not be made worse than 5.

Special munitions were capped at one ton across the whole list (and Narc-enabled LRMs/SRMs were counted as a special munition, which hurt a friend of ours), only one mech in each list was allowed to jump 7+, and Pulse weapons were capped at 40 total damage across the whole list. Each player got one Heavy Strike and two Light Strikes in Battlefield Support each game, though only one could be used per turn.

Optional rules in play included backwards level change, careful stand, one-armed prone fire, floating crits, enhanced flamers, piercing retractable blades, targeting active probes, and an odd form of front-loaded initiative wherein the player with more mechs would start off the movement phase, regardless of initiative, by moving mechs until numbers were equal.

The List

I only made the commitment to attend SAV, at Liberty’s prodding, after the initial ticket allotment sold out and the field was expanded to 60 slots. That left only about ten days between my decision and the list-submission deadline! With the tight timeframe and the field being far too large for a truly competitive three-round tournament, I decided to entertain… rather sillier lists than I would normally play. Following a borderline fugue state in which I modified a CGL Banshee into a WYSIWYG 8S variant, plus Liberty pointing out the “armored everything” Grand Titan 13M to me, I ultimately settled on a listbuilding goal of fielding nothing but TSM mechs with melee weapons. The Banshee 8S is one of a handful of Lyran mechs that was supplied to the Principality of Regulus during the Dark Age to support Regulan efforts to stop Oriente’s reunification of the Free Worlds League, and that steered me towards the idea of fielding my melee mechs as a Dark Age Free Worlds League (Regulan Fiefs) list. My “Rowdiest Regulans” ended up being…

Grand Titan T-IT-N13M (2786 BV at 4/4): A mech that’s ludicrously durable in one very specific way, the Grand Titan 13M takes a 94%-armored 100-ton frame with a standard fusion engine, a heavy-duty gyro, and no explosive crits and then armors almost every single component that isn’t weapons or heat sinks. Its melee weapon of choice, a sword, is a touch disappointing in trading away damage for accuracy you could usually get from just kicking instead, and its TSM heat management is less flexible than you’d like, but it will survive to get into melee range of anything that moves 4/6 or slower. It also brought the only ranged headcapper in my list, a Heavy PPC, though I think the poor girl only actually connected with the HPPC once across the entire tournament.

Banshee BNC-8S (2649 BV at 4/4): The mech that sent me down the TSM melee rabbit hole in the first place, I can’t describe the Banshee 8S any more colorfully than Peri already did in the Banshee Mech Overview. Its arsenal is pretty perfect for a TSM mech, except for the part where it brought an actual gun. Its LB 10-X is a nice bit of spice, with fantastic damage-for-heat and crit-seeking ability you can’t really get from an all-energy list, but it also introduces a glowing weak spot that can be hit for massive damage, with an ammo explosion killing the mech via XL engine destruction. Plus, as I learned at this tournament, cluster ammo is much less useful when a tournament field includes Ferro-Lamellor and Ballistic-Reinforced armor!

Nightsky NGS-6T (1608 BV at 4/4): An all-time classic TSM mech, the Nightsky’s pulse was a vital addition to my list, ensuring that at least one of my overheated warriors could sometimes hit the broad side of a barn. It irritates me that it has to jump 6 in order to hit its TSM heat unless it turns off sinks, though.

Scarabus SCB-9T (949 BV at 4/5): The designated victim in my list, the Scarabus is here for a short time, not a good time. The 9T is deeply silly as a TSM design, obligated to turn off heat sinks in order to build waste heat at all, but this 30-tonner moves ridiculously fast, and its hatchet can still stave in heads once it does work its way up the heat gauge.

My overheated idiots! Credit: Lynn C.

I only got in one testing game with this list before the submission deadline, and one more after the deadline, and I got tabled in both of them. Still, it seemed like a fun list to run, and not so bad that I would be embarrassed to be seen running it. I decided that would be good enough.

I made heat-flow spreadsheets for all my mechs prior to the tournament to reduce the mental load of figuring out what guns to shoot to produce which heat combinations, though my opponents, of course, did their best to ruin my efforts anyway with engine crits, heat-inflicting weapons, and heat-sink destruction!

The Event

Friends, if you ever find yourself assembling a tournament travel plan which includes driving 300 miles right after clocking out of an eight-hour retail shift, I implore you to reconsider. Doubly so if you’re going to be crashing on a couch at the end of that drive, triply so if you’ll be arriving too late to get a full night’s rest, quadruply so if one of your doctors recently upped the dosage on one of your meds and it’s making it hard for you to sleep. Alas, my journey to North Carolina didn’t get off to a particularly auspicious start. Fortunately, my shambling corpse got dragged to Waffle House in the morning, and I felt significantly more like a functional human being once I had some hashbrowns in me.

The venue was an event center attached to an independently-owned-but-Wyndham-affiliated hotel. All the activities took place in one very long room, which somehow handled the noise levels surprisingly well. Liberty had described the swag bag to me the night before as “maybe too much,” and I couldn’t fathom how right he was until they handed me mine. While, cynically, everything was a promotional item (for Death Ray Designs, Fighting Piranha Graphics, Fortress itself, etc.), they really did go all-out loading participants down with pretty cool Stuff. (Though Liberty was right to note that a fair bit of it was really more relevant to Alpha Strike players than to Classic players, and some was promo for Death Ray’s Steel Rift game, which is, uh, a competitor in the mecha tabletop space…)

The maps were a surprise; every single map for the tournament was an empty hex grid with 3D terrain placed on top, ostensibly calibrated to guarantee swift and decisive violence, which mostly meant that they had relatively sparse cover and no heavy woods. What cover was available wasn’t exactly distributed equitably, however, with some maps denser than others, and there were still some LOS-blocking pieces that were big enough to run counter to the maps’ stated goals. A friend of ours won his second-round match by bunkering his objective-holding mechs behind a level-3 plateau at the border of a map edge and shutting his opponent out from interacting with them, which is a pretty clear map design failure state. I also had a few issues with terrain slipping out of its place, mostly one particular hill in my first game.

Those nitpicks aside, the maps did look striking, and I think on the whole they played pretty well. The terrain did actually hit a decent balance between “sparse enough to help encourage violence in conjunction with mobile objectives” and “present enough to prevent long-range guns from having a totally open killing field.”

We had a little time to kill after reaching the venue, but soon it was time for…

Mission One: Push The Line

Southern Assault V allowed and encouraged calling your friends out for grudge matches in the first round, so I issued my own batchall to none other than Fronc’s Favorite Son, the two-time tournament champion, Marshal Liberty. I knew I would almost certainly get my ass kicked, but I’ve technically beaten him before via lucky head shots, and I hoped that the Banshee’s 38-damage hatchet might be able to make its own luck.

We once again came into the missions blind for this tournament, but I knew what list Liberty was bringing, and in fact had playtested into (someone else running) it (and got tabled). His beloved standard Kodiak led a mercenary crew of a Sunder OE, Men Shen OF, and Thunder Fox L8, all at 4/5, with a truly absurd number of Snub PPCs between them. I knew his basic goal: The Sunder would run out in front and soak fire until either its ammo or its XL would kill it, the Bear would rip and tear, and the Men Shen and Thunder Fox would keep up a steady stream of damage, significant enough to hurt like hell but not significant enough to necessarily pull fire away from the assaults.

The mission here was a variant on the same concept WarZone Atlanta ‘25 employed for “Operation Sumo,” but with some tweaks, most of which I liked. The mission was to push a line of four objectives, but rather than an all-or-nothing approach, each objective could move independently, with endgame scoring based on how far each was pushed from its starting point, and a bonus for each objective pushed off the opponent’s deployment edge. Mechs had to be directly on top of one of the objectives, conscious, standing, and not shut down, at the end of the heat phase in order to displace it. The objectives were displaced further the larger the controlling mech, from one hex for light mechs up to four hexes for assaults, or half that distance (rounded up) if the controlling mech was crippled.

We were playing with long edge deployment for this mission, which was fine… I’ve genuinely been shedding my short-edge bias as I’ve gotten the chance to play more games on long edge, and I presently think both deployments have their place. My actual complaint with the missions in this tournament was the kill scoring: In the name of simplicity, the secondary kill/cripple scoring was not at all linked to the BV of the enemy unit destroyed, just a flat 10 points for each mech killed (5 for crippling), to a max of 30. Killed an IntroTech Wasp? 10 points. Killed a Turkina B? 10 points. This felt bad, especially in conjunction with the free air strikes punishing light mechs.

The story of this match was pretty well set in stone from the first turn. Liberty had been able to drop one of the objective markers in an inconveniently-placed river off to the far right of the map (from my perspective), more or less taking that objective out of play, so we positioned to fight for the other three objectives, with all of our assaults staging in the center and the lighter assets squaring off against each other on my left flank. I made the mistake of moving aggressively onto the objectives, running both my Scarabus and Nightsky up onto them, and they both immediately ate Through-Armor engine crits and fell down. I was able to knock the Kodiak down with my own first-turn shooting, but it was hardly an equal exchange of fire.

How it started... Credit: Lynn C.

My big boys were able to beat the Sunder to death fairly easily, but my wounded little guys weren’t able to really inflict any significant damage on the Men Shen and Thunder Fox, and the game pretty quickly turned into Liberty’s Mediums gradually punting two objectives towards my side of the map and peppering my sole-survivor Grand Titan with their Snubbies while the Titan finished kicking the Kodiak to death. Post-Kodiak I was able to get my Titan back onto one of the central objectives to notch a little primary scoring, but somewhere in there the Titan fell over and ate an improbable double-self-hip-crit which knocked the armor off the hip and then crit the hip itself, which meant that I literally wasn’t able to catch the objective to score again on the last turn after punting it on the penultimate turn.

...and how it ended. Credit: Lynn C.

Killing a Kodiak the hard way, no headshots or TACs, felt good, and I’m glad the Grand Titan technically survived, but my only victories this round were moral ones: I was soundly outplayed, outrolled, and outscored.

In retrospect I think the right move might have been to run my Scarabus over to the waterlogged objective, either forcing Liberty’s Men Shen to go bug hunting or giving me a slow trickle of free points… he could’ve hunted it down and killed it pretty trivially, especially if it was running circles to stay on an objective it could only move one hex per turn, but forcing the Men Shen to cross the board through the assaults’ scrum might’ve let me kick the damn thing, at least. I could’ve also held the Nightsky in reserve until the big boys’ battle was joined; it probably would’ve served me better speeding up the death of Liberty’s assaults rather than ineffectually trying to bully the Thunder Fox. Regardless, dice will be dice, and I knew I was coming into this with the weaker list; I can’t be mad about the result.

I got rather… diverted after that first round. I wandered over to check out what Fortress had for sale: a mix of old oddities (including vintage BattleTech model kits and Unseen minis!), recent exclusives (including the Fox Patrol dice pucks, which strongly tempted me), clearance products (like the pre-Fanatics Army Painter line), second-hand and imperfect merchandise, and various other hobby paraphernalia, all at deeply discounted prices. I got very engaged in shopping, and only really remembered that I was on a 45 minute lunch break in the middle of a tournament when pairings started being announced. It was time for…

Mission 2: Handle With Care

I am extremely grateful for the grace my opponent showed me as I scrambled to get settled at the start of this round. The whiplash of moving from a shopping spree directly into rushing to move all my things from one table to the next left me in a highly anxious state, not helped in the least by the aforementioned medication imbalance, and I struggled to get locked in at the start of this round. My opponent was very calm, kind, and unhurried, and afforded me the time I needed to get myself back on track; I really can’t commend his sportsmanship enough in that regard.

My opponent was running the Third Star League's new Smoke Jaguars, with a Savage Wolf A at 4/4, a Hammerhead and Jackalope KA at 4/5, and a Greyhound GRY-SAV, the Mechbay Podcast’s custom mascot mech in its tournament-specific configuration, at 4/3.

To briefly describe the Greyhound in question, it’s a mixed-tech 60-tonner moving 6/9, with pretty good armor, a Clan-grade Active Probe, a Targeting Computer, and a truly bizarre mix of weapons: Plasma Rifle, two Medium Re-Engineered Lasers, two IS ERMLs, two Rocket Launcher 15s, a Retractable Blade, and a Coolant Pod which would still see it build 10+movement heat on an alpha given its basic 10 DHS (though you’d likely just drop the ERMLs and fire the rockets at that point).

Our mission was an unusual one, but one I enjoyed. At game start six objectives were placed at the center of the board. Mechs would again establish control over an objective by standing on it, conscious and un-shut-down, at the end of the heat phase, but in this mission they would pick a controlled objective up and carry it with them when they moved. These objectives were indestructible but volatile. Whenever a carrying mech moved 5+ hexes, took 20+ damage, or fell for any reason, you’d roll 2d6, and on 8+ the cargo would emit a damaging energy pulse dealing two five-point damage clusters on the mech’s front chart. In the event of a fall, the carrying mech would also lose control of the objective, flinging it into an adjacent hex in the same direction as the mech’s fall. Mechs could carry up to two of the objectives a piece, with detonation checks made independently for each of them. Mechs were strongly discouraged from jumping with the payload by incurring a PSR at a +2 difficulty to keep from falling at the end of any jump made while holding an objective.

Scoring was progressive for this objective, with players scoring 3 points for each objective under their control at the end of every turn. Kill scoring was the same flawed system as in the other missions.

I wasn’t about to run my Scarabus and Nightsky into certain death (again!) by squaring them off on the objectives against my opponent’s significantly tankier fast mechs, so I didn’t get on the scoreboard in the first turn, while his Greyhound, Savage Wolf, and Hammerhead each grabbed an objective to put half the objectives under his control.

It was in the second turn that my opponent made his fatal mistake. The Greyhound and Savage Wolf fucked off to defensive positions on his side of the board while the Hammerhead alone stepped forward to try to capture a second objective. I was able to get both the Banshee and the Nightsky into melee with the Hammerhead, and the Grand Titan was able to shoot it from close range, which was enough to put significant hurt onto even a mech as tough as a Hammerhead. By the end of the turn it was on the ground, even with its AES (helpfully tossing its objective to the Nightsky in the process). I did lose my Scarabus to the Jackalope on an ill-fated mission to backstab the Greyhound, but that was a fine trade.

Hammerhead pummeling party! Credit: Lynn C.

My opponent continued to play cagey with the Savage Wolf and Greyhound, while I moved in to secure objectives, the Jackalope moved in to backstab my Nightsky, and the Hammerhead did its best to run away. Unfortunately for the Hammerhead, we realized at the end of the movement phase, after I’d already moved onto the hex it vacated, that it shouldn’t have actually been able to move as far as it had because I’d knocked off one of its side torsos in the previous turn and it should’ve been overheating from the resultant engine hits. He probably would’ve left it in its origin hex, so it would at least be blocking me from taking an objective, if he’d realized this, but since we realized so late, he graciously rewound its movement so it had run in the same direction, but only as far as it could’ve managed at +10 heat… which meant it would again be directly adjacent to my Banshee and Nightsky. It did not survive this, and I weathered my opponent’s shooting well enough to go up to controlling four objectives. Also, crucially, I was able to land significant damage (maybe just an airstrike and Nightsky pulse, or possibly the Nightsky’s hatchet? I don’t recall for certain) on the Jackalope, enough to discourage it from getting close to me again - a great help when it was only carrying HE ATM ammo.

The great Savage Wolf chase, with distant Greyhound. Credit: Lynn C.

By this point the tide had truly turned, and my opponent couldn’t keep hanging back with his heavies. The Savage Wolf ran up to challenge me face to face, while the Greyhound still played a bit cagier, trying to flank me and continue screwing up the Banshee’s heat math with its plasma rifle. I went as hard as I could after the Wolf, but Ferro-Lam is no joke. By the end of the game I’d kicked one of its legs off, and stripped its objective in the process, but I wasn’t able to formally cripple it, and my Banshee did fall down on the last turn to lose its own objective. I won off primary objective points, with our kill points technically tied between my Scarabus and his Hammerhead.

This was the only game at SAV where I had anything close to the time issues I’ve had in my Atlanta-area tournaments (and even with that we completed at least six of the eight possible rounds we were allotted). Part of that was on me for my rough start to the round, but I will confess that my opponent didn’t have the best grasp on the rules for his mechs’ less-common equipment, either. I had to stop him from screwing himself over because he didn’t actually understand ATM range bands and was shorting himself on range for the Standards, had to remind him how much heat XXLs generate, we had a whole little merry-go-round of confusion when I questioned the range of his Greyhound’s active probe and the judge we called over didn’t know the answer off the top of his head either, and the final note our game ended on was his confusion over the Retractable Blade rules. I bear no ill will towards him - as I’ve noted, he was nothing if not kind and generous throughout all of this - but please, y’all. If you’re going to a tournament, please review the rules for the stuff you yourself are bringing to the table. That’s all I ask.

Unfortunately, my anxiety spiked again between rounds - I realized I’d misplaced an item in my hurry to relocate from my round-one table to my round-two table, and I wasn’t able to find it during the thirty-minute break between rounds. I also had to set my mechs out for paint judging again - there were so many players the judges hadn’t been able to get to everyone during the lunch break - and eat the Uncrustables I’d packed for the occasion, since I’d run out of time to actually do that during lunch. Then when pairings were shared, I was initially paired right back into my second-round opponent, had to be re-paired, briefly forgot my mechs back at my round-two table… I continued to be a hot mess.

Mission 3: Hired Escorts

Once again I need to commend my opponent, Ando, for the enormous patience he showed me. I was not only still frazzled coming into this round, I was initially thrown off balance by the communications barrier between us, as he’s a Deaf person. He was extraordinarily well prepared in terms of communication tools, but I’m afraid I wasn’t the fastest to pick up on the cues he was giving me. In particular, I struggled getting the right damage associated with his attacks when recording his hits; this shouldn’t have been a problem at all because he’d given me copies of his record sheets with his consistent dice-color-coding for every weapon included, but I was dense enough I didn’t realize that they were double-sided until after the game was over and was simply befuddled as to why he’d handed me copies of the sheets for half of his mechs. Whoops.

He’d brought an extremely Modern-Draconis-Combine list: a Hatamoto-Suna 30S, Shiro 2P, Grand Dragon 12K, and Jenner IIC, all at 4/5. While my list wasn’t too concerned about the Ballistic-Reinforced Armor on the Hatamoto-Suna and Shiro, I did keenly feel my inability to effectively throw out LBX cluster rounds from the Banshee. (Which Ando had to remind me of at least twice before I stopped trying to shoot cluster anyway.)

The mission for this round was… a bit obnoxious, honestly. We walked on from the short edges, each escorting a "Mechbay Technical," a truck which sort of followed BFS Asset rules, but with a flat 100 HP in place of the Destroy Check and with its movement houseruled to allow it to go anywhere with its 6MP (though it did pay costs for changing facing, entering woods, and a special 2MP cost to hover over water hexes). As with BFS Assets, the truck had to move before any of our other units. As with the Delorean in the first round of Summer Fever II, you could body block enemy fire by using your mechs to obstruct your enemy’s LOS. The Mechbay Technical was also armed with, basically, a single IS Medium Laser firing at Skill 5. It could not be targeted by air strikes, charges, pushes, or death from above.

The flow of this game honestly made me realize why Long Edge evangelists feel the way they do. This was the only map I played on during SAV which felt like it matched the terrain density of a standard CGL map, and with the short edge start we spent the entire first turn maneuvering out of LoS and only made incidental contact through our fastest elements in turn two. With this tournament round still capped at eight turns, that was effectively a quarter of the game spent setting up the actual fight.

When combat joined in earnest, our forces split. My truck angled towards my side of the table, while his angled towards his side. His, however, was well-screened by woods and supported directly by his Grand Dragon, with only my flimsy Scarabus in the heart of that fight (the Titan, not hot yet because I wanted its first HPPC shot to be more accurate, was too slow to reach the scrum turn 3). while my Nightsky and Banshee both failed to prevent his Shiro and Jenner IIC from getting close to my truck and also failed to screen the Hatamoto-Suna’s LoS to it. I got some damage into the Shiro and savaged the Jenner with an air strike, but I lost my objective truck entirely, and the Scarabus also died, leaving me seriously short of speed on its side of the board.

Pictures taken moments before (objective truck) disaster. Credit: Lynn C.

I proceeded to turn this bad situation worse by chasing down the Hatamoto-Suna, likely left on TMM 0 as bait, with my Banshee and Nightsky instead of turning them around to, you know, actually focus on the only primary objective vehicle still in play. I arrogantly thought that my Grand Titan would be able to solo his truck, since I was able to move it into melee, and it… almost did, but the truck survived. The next turn it could just drive right past the Grand Titan, and since I had to turn around to chase it, it was faster, and a shooting-dependent strategy just isn’t reliable with TSM mechs. I started rushing the Nightsky and Banshee back to the fight (at least able to feel comfortable turning my back on the H-S, since I’d knocked off the side of it where its gauss rifle lives), but struggled; I’d moved them too far out of position for easy recovery.

This chase scene had some Accidental Renaissance energy. Credit: Lynn C.

I finished killing his Jenner and got a little more damage on his truck and his Shiro, but he was able to turn an Initiative loss and a misplay on my part into completely blocking my Assault Mechs’ view of his truck with the Dragon and Shiro on the penultimate turn before the objective vehicle was able to move off the board. I was able to bring my Nightsky around a screening building to get LoS on the truck, but my ability to stop his truck hinged on being able to take 17 HP off of it with Range 3 shooting from a Heat 9 Nightsky 6T against a TMM 2 target: Not impossible, but not simple. Then, of course, I proceeded to miss with almost everything, including the crucial Large Pulse, and his truck moved off the board.

This was the perfect body-block that helped save my opponent's objective truck. Credit: Lynn C.

I killed the Shiro by landing my only HPPC shot of the tournament (a desperate minimum-range trigger pull on bad numbers) and touching off one of its ammo bins, but the truck was gone. In the last turn I tried to eke out the only other points I could feasibly get by running back after the badly-wounded H-S, but I was again relying on shooting to try to kill it, and that wasn’t going to work.

In terms of killing mechs, I had the edge in this match, but Ando played me (and his mechs) beautifully and completely skunked me on the primary objective. I also failed to respect his speed advantage; the Dragon and Shiro’s swiftness (and the fact that he made fights happen such that they didn’t have to turn around) allowed them to switch targets far more effectively than my mechs, letting him punish me for spreading out while not feeling the effects as much himself.

Results

The scoring for SAV’s Classic tournament was a bit... opaque. No system would’ve been perfect given the aforementioned extreme mismatch between the size of the field and the number of rounds played, and the prize support was so extraordinarily generous that the confusion had less impact than it could have, but it took a while for the overall rankings to shake out to their final form. Fortunately it also seems to have mostly impacted folks lower down the rankings (Like me! I went from "tied for 14th overall" the night of to "actually in 17th" in the final scoring), not the podium players.

The prize pool was so rich, these were the spoils of placing, uh, 14th-ish! Credit: Lynn C

Awards were given based on four different metrics: Overall placement, Generalship, Paint, and Sportsmanship. Trophies were given to the top three players in each category - sort of. No one could receive more than one of these trophies, so, for instance, if the Best General also qualified for Third in Paint and Second Overall (as it happened), their first place would take priority over their second and third placings, and those trophies would go to the next available player in the ranking for that category. There was also a player-voted trophy for, I think favorite force, as in a fan-favorite paint scheme I guess? I’ll be honest with y’all, I needed a restroom break after the tournament and I think I entirely missed both the explanation of and voting for that award.

I certainly can't quibble with top paint winner Andrew Magee's achievement, these are immaculate. Photo Credit: Lynn C

Liberty is happy declaring victory off being awarded Best Overall and going undefeated in his games (I know the "Best General" points leader had two wins and a draw), and I’m okay rolling with that, but I do think that if Southern Assault VI includes a Classic tournament on this scale (and I hope it does!), it should at least run to 5-6 rounds, look at win-loss records rather than pure points-scoring, and allocate more time for the paint judges to do their thing. We players did fill out surveys giving feedback after the tourney, so hopefully we’ll see refinement in the next outing!

Takeaways

The biggest lesson I took from this tournament was the one which probably should’ve been obvious when I first committed to a TSM melee list: Rolling most of your shots on nines really sucks. In theory I had good guns in this list, but not only was I usually eating the accuracy penalty from being at TSM heat, my mechs were also generally running to bring their hatchets/sword/boots closer to the enemy. A seven was a good shot (4 gunnery, heat, running, short range against a 0 TMM target), and much more often I was looking at 8-12. Even really good guns like my Snubbie, HPPC, and LB 10 struggled to accomplish much of anything. Intellectually I did know shooting would be a challenge, but in practice it was a bigger letdown than I expected.

My other list-related realization was a mixed verdict on the Grand Titan 13M. While its armored components definitely saved my bacon on some occasions, they were most effective against Through-Armor Crits: Without Reinforced Structure, even a 100-tonner's components don't normally survive long enough to take all that many crits before being shot off entirely. Armored shoulder and hip actuators and armored gyros are worth their weight in c-bills, though, and I'll definitely keep an eye out for mechs which mount them!

It would be easy to say that my opponents were what made my games go faster in this tournament vs. my previous tournaments with two-and-a-half-hour rounds, and they certainly were very on the ball, but I do think other factors helped as well. The TSM flow charts I had meant that I was very rarely indecisive about which guns to shoot, and I should definitely look into pre-planning gun allocation for other mechs as well, like Liberty has with his Kodiak firing patterns, or like the classic Awesome drumbeat. The lack of dithering over what guns to shoot also helped me calculate my to-hits much faster, since I wasn’t juggling numbers in my head before allocating targets to the degree I historically have. Basically, you can play faster when you have a solid game plan and second-guess it less, go figure! That’s definitely an attitude I want to carry forward into non-TSM lists.

On the whole I had an enormous amount of fun meeting Liberty and Peri, playing in a very different meta, and meeting a bunch of great players from all over (including BT author Jason Hansa, who was there to throw dice with us!), and I eagerly look forward to my next chance to play BattleTech outside the Atlanta area; most likely in the other Carolina as part of February’s “Carolina Classic” in Greenville, SC!

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Tags: tournament report | Battletech | southern assault v