MERCS Tournament Prep

Tuesday night board game night at Icons turned into "MERCS tournament preparation" this week as Thomas, Josh and I got some games in before the tournament at Games & Stuff I'm running this Sunday.

I played two games of my CCC against Josh's USCR.  Here's some highlights and pics.

Overall: Not enough terrain on either map.  I need to put more terrain than I think I should when playing MERCS.  That's the form of the game.  I think I should also use more full cover walls.  I quickly built a small two floor building using my TerraClips.  I think this was a little too much.

Board setup for game one.

My Incinerator moved up and got hit my all three shots from the Behemoth. Damn.

TOO MUCH OPEN AREA. I set up the board so its all my fault.

I managed to get my "speedy" Medic to the balcony, but running ahead of the pack ended up being a fatal flaw. Lesson learned.

One of the things I love most about MERCS is simultaneous actions. We had an unusual situation with a four-way simultaneous action. It ended up not doing too much because of which of my models it was, but it was still weird.

My Heavy "set" and the Incinerator had broken armor, so she "repaired".

Other half of the simultaneous.

I was the Ice Grenade's bitch this night.  The USCR Leader has Ice Grenades which can anchor models for three turns.  The problem is the Leader can target an area of the board.  Well the Leader (the guy all by himself just above the building in the next picture) targeted the balcony and froze my medic in place... with his back facing the stairs.  Ballsacks.

My Demo (just below the door) was able to toss a grenade into the room and deal a Blood each to the two USCR on the lower level. Score.  My Heavy (to the right of the Demo)? He ain't doing shit. He was useless.

USCR up the ladder, about to get ass-rapey.

He's in 100% of my back-arc and I can't turn around for two more rounds.

My Demo broke the USCR's armor and was dealing Blood, but my Medic had broken armor and was a dead man.

Everybody was getting shot in the back.

Outside the building, my Leader went on Suppression to stop this A-hole from doing anything and my Heavy had him in an Overwatch arc just in case. I ended up Suppressing him for the rest of the game.

Medic down, the USCR I grenaded through the door comes back for revenge.

This was the end of turn five (of a six turn game) and at this point I surrendered in favor of getting another game in.  My Demo was going to take at least one Blood. So the "final" score was 7-4 with Josh winning the most Blood.

I did three main things wrong.

1. Running my Medic up ahead to get elevation early got him killed. Sending a man ahead alone into a hot-zone is dangerous. Duh.
2. WTH was my Heavy doing this game?!  Nothing. That's what. 
3. Incinerator. I killed you. I'm sorry.  Don't run models without long range weapons up in nothing but half cover.

Game Two!

I did much better.  I moved the brick walls and added a full cover wall.  Here is the setup at the end of round one. 

Speedy Medic in a good position this time.

My Incinerator was able to get up to the wall just in time for the USCR Medic to come running around the corner. I torched his ass.

*BWOOOSH*

The Demo took some fire getting into position, but he was getting his Heroic bonus so he was shooting well.

Medic shooting in through the door.

I continued torching the USCR on the right, which apart from doing Blood was forcing Suppression checks compounded by my Heavy (on Suppression) which was locking him down.

Medic's armor broken. USCR Booster moving in on the Demo (left side of the building).

The Booster got behind my Demo!  I was able to execute a Move & Shoot so I turned and fired.  Heroic (as well as Short Range) made the penalties easier, but my double 4's doomed me!

NO!!!

The USCR launched another damned Ice Genade at my Medic, freezing both the Medic and my Leader in the doorway.  My Leader couldn't move and didn't have LOS on anybody. I realized far to late that I could have used his action to try and repair the Medic's broken armor, but in the end that wouldn't have mattered.

My Demo got a shot off on the Booster, bringing him to two Blood.  The Booster then shot at me, killing the Demo but triggering Overwatch from my Heavy, which took him down.

Now we're there...

... and now we're dead.

The whole time I was frozen in the doorway I was able to keep shooting at the USCR Leader that put me there.  I broke his armor so he couldn't get up the stairs (or anywhere else for that matter).

Frozen models can still fire. Much to the USCR Leader's regret.

Once the Ice Grenade wore off it was turn six.  My Leader moved to face the Behemoth and I did an action that I think is one of the most clever ones I've ever made playing MERCS.

My Leader went on Suppression.

Its the last turn. If the Behemoth opened up at my Leader he could deal a ton of Blood.  If I Suppressed him successfully he wouldn't be able to shoot. If I failed it would still raise the FN.

Well the Behemoth passed his Courage check but only landed one hit on my Leader so the game went to me! Yay me!

End game state.

These two games illustrate why I love MERCS.  In the first I made some dumb shit tactical decisions and paid for them through the whole game.  In the second game I used smarter tactics and came out ahead.  It doesn't so much matter what faction you play as long as you bring sound tactical decisions that exploit that faction's abilities and that unit's synergy.

End of lesson.

If anyone can find a weirder alcohol commercial I'd love to see it.

Seriously. This is bizarre.

I'm Clearly Not Smart Enough to Understand Business

On Monday I wrote about how awesome Dredd 3D is and how I don't understand by what criteria it was being judged to have "bombed".  Yesterday I heard something equally baffling on the news about the iPhone 5.

I'm not going to talk about how I feel about Apple products, because its honestly irrelevant.  The product could be a toaster, as this is about sales projections and reporting, not the iPhone 5 as a product itself.

So the iPhone 5 sold 5 million units in 3 days.  That's insane.  That's a shit ton of phones.  More importantly, that was basically the entire stock that Apple had for the initial release.  So the iPhone 5 is "all but sold out".  Okay.  There are basically no more left.  Maybe 100k or something.

So then I hear--in the same breath--that the 5 million unit sales were below the projected sales for the initial offering and as a result Apple's stock price dropped a percent or so.  (here and here)

Wait, WTF?!

Look, you have a fixed number of the things to sell going into the release, and 5 million is a huge number.  Now stay with me here because this is important.  You can't expect to sell more of a thing than you have.  How much more?  Well the projections were between 8 to 10 million units.  Yes, they were projecting Apple would sell 3 to 5 million more units then they had on hand.  In three days.

Here's what I imagine happened in every sales projection meeting leading up to the sale:

"I think Apple will sell 10 million iPhone 5s in the initial offering."

"They only have 5 million of them."

*Coy smile while reclining in office chair* "I know."

*Stunned stare* "You're brilliant!!! I'm going to throw money at you because you are handsome and smart!!!!"

I've learned from this that sales projectionists (that's what I'm calling them now) basically don't know how to count, nor do their bosses.

My opinions of Dredd 3D (no spoilers)

I've been hyping Dredd 3D for weeks now. If you still follow me on Twitter you're probably sick of seeing retweets from @2000AD and @lionsgatemovies promoting the film.  I've been reading 2000AD/Judge Dredd comics for about three years now and he has been my favorite comic book character for almost that long.  So a lot of my friends are wondering what I thought of the movie.

Not surprisingly, I loved it.  I saw it in 3D (RealD3D if it matters) and I do truly believe that it adds a lot to the film.  I'd like to see it in the theatre again if I have time, and I can't wait to own it on DVD and watch it after (and whilst having) a couple of beers.  It was a bit different than I'd expected, but that actually made the movie better.  I thought it would be non-stop high octane action.  It has loads of action, but its not over-the-top.  In fact, its grounded in the real in a very hard way.  Everything looks and feels real, which is key to making the Judges logical.  Mega-City One has to be a shit hole out of control and it feels like it is. Its a place you'd never want to live.  The film also brilliantly captured 2000AD's dark humor, which I wasn't expecting.

But I didn't write a whole blog post to give a review of the movie.  I'd like to talk about some math.

When Dredd 3D opened in the UK a few weeks ago it took #1 at the UK box office with $1.65 million  (apparently the UK box office is pretty small).  So basically the film has to make lots of money on the foreign market (USA being foreign) to recoup its $45M budget.  So what did it do this weekend in the USA?

$6.3 million, placing 6th this weekend.

Of course, there are lots of review sites reporting the numbers saying things like "Dredd is Dead" and "Dredd Bombs".  I'm not sure it has bombed.  Did I hope it would make shit tons of money opening weekend?  Of course.  But look at this shot from Rotten Tomatoes.

Currently, Dredd 3D is rated "Fresh" with a review aggregate score of 77%, so 3 of 4 people liked it.  Compare with the #5 spot for the weekend which is yet another Resident Evil movie that is generally agreed to be shitty but made just a bit more money.  What I find really interesting is that Dredd 3D, although having a low enough opening to be declared "Dead" made nearly half what the number one and two spots made individually.  I don't understand by what criteria Dredd "Bombed".  Lets say it took the #1 spot by making a little more than twice as much. Would it have still "Bombed"?  It wouldn't have made back its budget.  I suspect Dredd will pick up some momentum as word of mouth spreads.  Will it make $50M in the USA (the amount rumored to be need to prompt a sequel)?  I hope so, but I don't know.

Either way, its a badass movie that 2000AD fans can be proud of.

Pointless pictures of MERCS

I meant to blog about the two MERCS gaming sessions I had last week, but I got really busy and didn't have a chance.  But I do have a bunch of cool pictures of the minis mid-game, so I figured I'd post them anyway.

Game summary is as such: I got my ass handed to me in every game.  It was honestly pretty frustrating. I don't remember all the details (otherwise I'd blog about the games rather than just post pics) but I recall making a lot of really bad calls.  Thats the thing about MERCS that is awesome: its a tactics based game. Make a bad call and you can be screwed.

But I also have Good News! I played at Icons this Tuesday (two days ago) and won my first game in a long time!  I basically brought my A-game, got elevation and laid down a good combo of overlapping Suppression and Overwatch.  I even got my Demo by himself up field to throw two grenades.  I took some advice from Brian (one of the creators of MERCS) that focused fire is a solid tactic and it worked out well for me.  It was a six turn "most blood at the end" game.  I killed three models and only lost one. I think I did have some blood on my remaining guys at the end but the score worked out to a clear win for me.  Yay me!  Of course, I forgot to take any pictures! Doh!

Anyway, the two game sessions where I sucked last week:

The first set was at Icons and was a "first to kill three" vs Josh's USCR.  He pwnd me. That's alright. I'm pretty sure I pwnd him in our most recent game. ;)

I'm pretty sure this was one of the few guys I was able to kill. Not 100% on that recollection though.

Whenever I hit somebody with the Incinerator I put the card in front of the model. Otherwise I forget the +2 courage check against their next acton.

The next game was Wednesday night at my place vs Thomas's Waza.  I needed some terrain so I borrowed some from Xavier's plentiful toy boxes.  It worked alright. It was too open though.

A bit frustrated with my lack of variable terrain I finally got the Buildings of Malifaux TerraClips that I'd been drooling over for months.  There goes that item off my xmas list...

I could not be happier with it! Its beautiful and amazing and it will be super fun to play on. It is incredibly variable and lets you make a building the size of a closet as easily as a multi-floor complex! I did a quick test build to see what I could come up with fast and snapped some pics of the end product.

This is like 1/3 of whats in the box! I have it stored in a comic short box with two small plastic totes inside it and four plastic zip top bags! All this terrain for like $70!  INSANE!!!

I made a two floor tavern type of thing with a 2nd floor balcony above the front door and a back side door. Again, this used a small fraction of the pieces that came with my one set, but would be a nice piece as part of a larger MERCS board.

My MERCS CCC Medic for scale. 

Roof removed. Malifaux Silurid also for scale.

Wide staircase in the back of the building. The foot of the stairs is near the back door.

"I've got 1/2 cover, elevation and clear LOS on your gigantic son!"

Bottom floor.

 What I love about these is that if there's action happening on both levels you can just lift one off and play it in some other area! The multiple floors fit together and lift apart so nicely.

You can see the 2nd floor in the back left of the pic. Its still entirely intact.

I can't wait to play a game of MERCS in an "office building" type of setup, and a game of Malifaux on one of the "indoor" locations!