The Mechbay

Ep 90: Old Bay and Crab Whiskey

• MechWarrior Josh, Denham, & Steve

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The Mechbay recaps another tournament, this time Steve's victory in the Battle of the Bay Alpha Strike Battletech Tournament!

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Josh:

What's going on, MechWords? I'm your host, Josh. I've got my co-host, Steve, with me today. Hello. And Steve is a brand new refugee from the Chain Lane Isles with a thirst, a mighty thirst for Necrotia.

Steve:

I've always enjoyed the scene of watching a chair turn into a thousand snakes.

Josh:

Who hasn't, Steve? Who hasn't? And we are the MechWare Podcast, your only source for all things casual to competitive tabletop battle tech. And today's episode is sponsored by MechWare Hilux and MechWare Nate Palmer. We promise to hose out your cockpits before you get in them and after you're done with them.

Steve:

It's awfully nice of you.

Josh:

It is. Let's get right into that news, Steve. You know I love it. News. Yeah. We've got third Star League box. It's out. It is in stores. Allegedly. Well, it's on the Catalyst game store.

Steve:

Yes, I think that they're doing that where they release it on the Game Labs store first and they'll hang on to it for a couple weeks for exclusivity and then they'll let the general masses kind of release them and get access to them because I went to take a look for one. It came out middle of June, I think is the official release date on the, on the website. So I went down to my local shop, RIW games in Livonia. And I was like, Hey, I want to see if they have this thing. I'll go on father's day and I'll give my wife a break. So I took the, took the little one with me and we get there and I'm looking for this box. And I, it wasn't out. It was only on the catalyst game store website. But while we're there, he's asking me, he goes, Hey dad, can I get some robots so I can play with you? And I was like, my heart just melted. I said, absolutely, bud. You pick whatever you want. And we came home with like two different boxes. He picked up the Assault and Cavalry Lance with the Demolisher Tank and the Pegasus and the Condor. And then he picked one with Max and he picked the Clan Command Star. So he got the Dire Wolf. That's the one he pointed that he wanted to. But when we were priming them later that day, he pulled out the Summoner and he goes, Dad, look, it's your favorite mech. It was adorable. I loved it. That was a great Father's Day gift.

Josh:

This is when I do the joke of like, oh, I thought he was going to have taste when he grew up, but nope, the apple is rotting right next to the tree. Rude. Rude.

Steve:

But no, it was a very nice Father's Day. But that's neither here nor there. The news is the third Star League box should be out now.

Josh:

Yes. And you know what's in that?

Steve:

Good old Kentaro. Okay. The Kentaro is a swag master. The original art has him just like strolling down the street and out of care in the world. He looks so cool.

Josh:

I know. We've probably devoted at least 30 whole minutes out of the entire lifetime of this podcast talking about the Kentaro's old sculpt, new sculpt. Now it's finally here in plastic. So run. Don't walk to grab your new Kentaro.

Steve:

Do

Josh:

it. Yes. All right. Let's get some. hobby progress steve guess who actually got some hobby progress done this is it me it's no it's me it's me

Steve:

you got something painted impossible

Josh:

yeah i've gotten wait for it six things painted 90 of the way painted they're waiting on basing so they're not like totally done done but they're pretty good i've already applied free hands They're done. They're done. What'd you paint? So in my infinite wisdom, as some of you Patreon supporters may know, I decided to outsource my tournament list building for next month because it's the closest, cheapest, most casual tournament that I go to all year. I'm like, I'm going to have fun with this. And I decided instead of stressing over all of like, What units I'll take? What will be balanced? What will be optimized? I was like, nope. You guys tell me what you want me to see. Or you tell me what you want to see, but I'm running it. So I threw up a poll on Patreon and the first poll went poorly. Not because of anything I did, but because... Blame the patrons. That's real smart. They're not going to give us money, Josh, if you keep blaming them for stuff.

Unknown:

Yeah.

Josh:

If you ask someone, what would you like to see me run? You'll receive a thousand answers. And unfortunately this is faction locked. So I had to like restart the poll and like, all right, we're going to all drive this ship together. So I had all the patrons narrow it down, like intersphere clan, and they chose intersphere. Then in the inner sphere, I was like, which faction of inner sphere do they want? And somehow they chose pirates because you know what? If you're living on the fringes, you still count for tax purposes as an inner sphere roid, I guess.

Steve:

I mean, that sounds like our patrons.

Josh:

Yeah. Yeah. And then of course I had to make them choose mechs. So they've chosen their mechs.

Steve:

What'd you end up with?

Josh:

Do we want to talk about this episode or next episode after I've played them?

Steve:

Whatever you like.

Josh:

Give the people at home a sneak peek, Josh. There you go. Sneak peek it. We've got a Phoenix Hawk 2C10.

Steve:

Nice.

Josh:

That is the wreck guide one with the hatchet because, you know, somehow pirates get that. We've got a grasshopper.

Steve:

I do like the Grasshopper. It's a nice mech.

Josh:

It's the Intratech one. Not the one with the LRM5. It's the one with an extra medium laser and a PVC. So I think that's the 5H. Don't quote me, folks. But yeah, it's a classic pirate mech. It's got two hands. It's got some booty. Nice. A brigand because, well, it's the only mech designed and made by pirates. For pirates. And it's called a brigand. It's fitting. And it's called a brigand. And the odd boy is a raider, which is 50% industrial mech, 50% battle mech. 100% brutal. The jury's still out on that one, Steve. Well, it's called a raider. It's got to be brutal, right? Yeah, yeah. You look up that art for that and you tell me if it is or not. No. Yeah. And then we've got two units of battle armor. One of them is intersphere standard magnetic. My personal favorite. I've probably ran them at every event now. And then some gorilla exoskeleton power armor. Wild, wild, wild indeed. And by the time this episode is out, you may start to see pictures floating around, but I will be running these on July 12th in a three round classic event. Blake helped me because I know they won't.

Unknown:

Okay.

Steve:

Pirates start from an under-advantaged location, right? They really don't have a great MUL with what's available to them, so you're kind of using what you got and see if you can make it work.

Josh:

I think I had 130 options. That was the entire mall, like 130 units to pick from. Some of those, just nope, not taking that if you paid me. But the patrons did pay me, and I'm having to take it.

Steve:

Good, good. They should make you do uncomfortable things.

Josh:

Yes, you'll get to hear all the exploits of the patrons piloting these next time.

Unknown:

Cool.

Steve:

Cool.

Josh:

So yes, I did actually go to Fortress and buy the Raider, the plastic InterSphere battle armor because I did not have those. And I did get some Harasser battle armor because there was a chance I was going to take those instead because they have two rocket launcher ones and a heavy recoilless rifle repeating like cycle gun. And I was like, okay, those are cool. I don't know if I'll want those, but I'm taking, I'm buying them. So we got those shipped. Yeah. Bobby got those shipped out of me. He was like, have fun with the Josh.

Steve:

You're the only person who ever wanted these. Yeah. Well, that's fun. That's fun.

Josh:

Yeah. So I'm getting those painted. I'm trying out some new stuff, but like I said, I'll talk more about that next time. Cool. What'd you get done, Steve?

Steve:

Uh, actually quite a bit. Uh, I finished painting, uh, an ice ferret. and a crossbow for the tournament for Maryland. I also had to paint a J51 crab shack because that was the unit that every or the J27 crab shack. It's an ordinance transport is what it is stat wise. But for Maryland, everybody got one in their list. So they gave the 3D file out. So I printed it and painted it up. And on the one side of it, they had the Maryland flag embossed on the side and trying to paint this tiny Maryland flag. If you've never seen the Maryland flag, it's hideous frankly i'm sorry maryland people it's it's kind of gross you've got black and yellow check on one side and like red and white crosses on the other and then they're mirrored it's it's far too busy for my taste

Josh:

hey they wish they were the virginia flag which it's the only flag with a boob on it so it automatically wins i mean i guess I guess. I think I've told you that that was one of my original Battletech goals, is to paint 50 mechs and each of them be in the theme of that state's flag. That's pretty cool. Then I realized I don't like Missouri, so we were never going to get all 50 anyways. Wow. Wow. I'll be cold and in the ground before I recognize Missouri.

Steve:

You're not from Kansas, Josh. But no, I did get some things painted and that was fun. Pretty pleased with how they turned out given the time frame that I painted them in. I also managed to finish a couple of demolishers and condors in my BSP paint scheme as well. So those are just, I'm slowly working my way through. I've still got about 12 to 14 BSPs on my desk that are 80% done. I just need to sit down with the brush and get a move and get them off the desk. But

Josh:

I understand. I have a hard time painting PSPs because they're just not as they're not the main characters. I want to paint main characters. So good on you for giving the sidekicks some love. I got to.

Steve:

I

Josh:

got

Steve:

to

Josh:

try

Steve:

because if they're not sitting on my desk getting in the way of my keyboard, I'll ignore them for too long. So it's just one of those things to get them done.

Unknown:

Yeah.

Steve:

But I also had a birthday. Oh, happy birthday, Steve. Thank you. Buying is also hobby progress. And I think gifts are part of that buying, even though I didn't buy them.

Josh:

You know, I don't actually recognize gifts as hobby progress. Wow. Shopping right now, right? Okay,

Steve:

never mind. Section of the podcast over. I guess we're done. Moving on. But... I was very fortunate. I got, uh, the neoprene gas grasslands maps. So now I have grasslands, a, B, C, and D. And I also managed to get the clan buster black night, which is pretty cool. Uh, looking at it, it's got a lot more pieces than I anticipated. It's the, it's the, uh, the premium one. Yeah. I'm like, there are a lot of extra legs in this. I was not prepared for a project like that. So

Josh:

1.8 black nights with that.

Steve:

I, I guess, man, um, Looking forward to it. I just got to figure out what pose I want. I've heard there's an issue with the shoulders. You got to carve them down so they look right.

Josh:

I have not gotten the new one. The two black premium ones I had were the original run from Creative Juggernaut. Since they've redone it, I know the molds have gone through a couple of

Steve:

revisions. It was like the shoulder has this weird bulb thing. Welcome to the club, Steve. I guess. I was totally unexpected. I was complaining about base coating and everything else and how it'd be so much faster with an airbrush. I was starting to do research and she just beat me to the punch and she got me a nice one and I'm pretty excited about it. I

Josh:

was actually talking to another Battletech player and was like, I think I said, oh, I haven't painted with a brush before. I haven't painted in so long. They're like, oh, but you airbrush. I was like, yeah, but airbrush really isn't. Then I stopped and was kind of like, no, it's 2025. Airbrushing is painting. If anything, I spend more time prepping than painting with an airbrush. It doesn't get you all the way there. You still got to do a lot of the work.

Steve:

We'll find out. I'm hoping for priming in poor weather will be great. Base coat should go a lot faster. I've got a couple... fun projects in mind that would use fading. So that should be significantly easier with an airbrush too. So we'll see how it goes next time. An adventures in airbrushing with Steve. Follow me as I destroy my airbrush in about five seconds flat. I mean, you got to learn some way and breaking it's the easiest. That's true. That's true. But that just about sums up my hobby progress. Um, yeah, a lot of new stuff to, put together, put away, a lot of new maps to play on. Pretty excited.

Josh:

Oh, I'm glad. All right. Do you want to get in some games played, Steve? Probably should. Probably should. All righty. Do you want to start with a Mega Mech game? Technically, it's a Mercenaries game, but I'm not counting it for, like, Tales from the Hyrule because it was just fun, dumb tomfoolery in the periphery, I should say.

Steve:

I've discovered that using... the construction rules for a force for like a Merc game, but then just playing casual with it is great. It really is the new standard. So 3000 points, two units, a couple of BSPs go have fun. No stress.

Josh:

Yeah. Because we were on mega Mac, they still haven't added BSPs. I don't know if they ever will. I feel like it'd be more fun if they did, but I understand like why use supercomputer to simulate, you know, a dice roll of destroyed or not. But yeah, Anyway, who knows? But anyways, this was me versus Bob from the Mech Bay Podcast Discord server. And me and Bob rolled up a force. I had a Vandal and a Minchin. Okay. And this is what I say. I completely forgot what Bob had because it was like a month ago because someone kicked me off the podcast for a month for mental health reasons. You lost your key. But I also remember that Magnum Danger came in to spectate, but then had the controls to the server that we were playing on. Why

Steve:

did

Josh:

you do that? Look, you let Magnum Danger into the control room, bad things are going to happen. What he did was he turned on maximum temperature and weather. So we were fighting in a heat wave in a windstorm.

Steve:

Oh, no.

Josh:

I want to say Bob had a Victor and some other little thing. And my mention just tried to chase the little thing that was jumping around. And the Vandal and the Victor are going at it in the water. There's one lake that's like somewhat cooling us off. I don't think the vandal has any heat sinks in its, in its leg. So no effect, but it's like thematically, he's like, it's getting the pool. He's trying. Yeah. And we're only using the ballistic weapons. Cause you fire a single laser, you risk a shutdown. Like that's how hot it is. Oh, geez. And he destroys my building. He runs this little annoying thing, runs away, mentions worthless at catching them. And the vandal, uh, shoots the rack jams goes in for some punches his victor you know shoots his golf rifle takes the vandals head clean off and it says vandal destroyed no pilot damage i was like wait what and i was like oh my gosh that's right torso mounted cockpit hey yeah so I was technically destroyed for mercenaries purposes because it's like you're crippled and you can't fight. And it's like, that's okay. I'm still alive. That's the important thing. Live

Steve:

to fight another day. Yeah.

Josh:

Yeah. It was a fun, great game. It was one of those scenarios where I forgot that playing with weather can be fun if you just don't care.

Steve:

How was that? I mean, wind is kind of...

Josh:

Neither was... knew that it was on until we started doing things and it's like why are my missiles like plus three to hit oh gosh wait shooting a laser it's like double heat oh no yeah there were a lot of punches a lot of kicks and a lot of ballistic but that was it

Steve:

yeah don't don't let magnum have any sort of control

Josh:

i try not to

Steve:

uh he means well most of the time

Josh:

But then I got a in-person game real quick against Noah, and I took proto-mechs. I think I took some Raven Alliance, so like War Crow, Protos, Carrion Crow. I think there was one other thing. Don't really care what it was. He took some clan mercenaries. He wanted to try out some Cthulhane battle armor. So he's got those, a tank, a mad cat. Pretty standard stuff. And it was fun because I would I rolled and we got a flank so like my mechs come on in the protomex flank and I was like sweet protomex yeah right it's cool and then that's when I had to like reread the rules for how to protomex work because as we all know they're so easy and no one's ever slowed down it's like I think he even made like the joke me was like please be patient I have protomex afterwards like yeah yeah yeah it's You did that to yourself, Josh. I did do. I mean, I had... So, game was great. I did lots of shots. He killed my protomix, and it felt so good because a lot of people ignore them because that's how you do well against them. It's like, you don't care. But I don't know if I'm doing them right. And when I looked at the rules, it says, each time an attack forces a player to mark off a critical hitbox, the pilot automatically takes a pilot hit. I was like, that makes sense. They're integrated into the suit, kind of. They take an arm hit. They're like, this is a brain shock. It's like an ammo hit for a normal mech. But the next, I want to say two sentences down, when a location is destroyed, all boxes are crossed off. So does that mean if I lose a leg cleanly that I take all the critical hits that a leg crit could do? Probably. I mean, it doesn't sound... not correct but it also doesn't sound correct in itself because like there's a lot more things that can like crit you like you lose an arm you got three pilot hits almost

Steve:

yeah you're probably bleeding out i mean you lose your leg you're you're probably bleeding out your pilot's probably cooked but they're in the torso they're all safe well kind of maybe but in that one book that we read with the, the, the story about them. It's like their brain thinks that their limb is gone and they scream about it. And there are other star mates scream too, because they feel the same stuff. So I don't know. Protopic pilots are strange. They probably suffer from like, double PTSD. They suffer a lot.

Josh:

They suffer a lot. Yeah. I'll have to do more testing. If anyone knows the right answer, please send in to the mechbaypodcast at gmail.com because I thought I knew Protomex and then someone actually started shooting my Protomex and then I realized I don't know Protomex.

Steve:

The solution is just don't take Protomex.

Josh:

Never, never can do. Never can do. All right, Steve, you got a few games in. Give me some of them.

Steve:

I did. So I got, this was kind of fun You know Paul. You played Paul in a couple tournaments.

Josh:

We talk about Paul every other episode, Steve. Come on. I know.

Steve:

He shows up all the time. But no, Paul's a great guy. And he hosted a beach bash of 2025 this last weekend. This was kind of a huge... This was like a 12-player game. We had six people on a side. He set up a huge six-by-four map. Maybe an eight-by-four map is what it was. And it was a very long table. Every player... was permitted to bring 300 PV for AlphaStrike. And you could only deploy a maximum of 160 PV on the field. So you would kind of roll in your units as others died, but you could never go above 160. And there were 100 poker chips scattered across the table. And your goal was to go pick up these objectives and carry them back to your deployment zone. And each sized unit could carry... number of objectives equal to its size right so an atlas could carry four objectives if you could get to a stack with four objectives on it right and we used card initiative and it was uh basically it was davians versus drax and i brought some mercenaries because i don't have any i don't have either of those factions painted so i just brought my generic mercenaries and we played for like six and a half hours and we got through eight turns and when all was said and done both sides were within 25 points of one another. And the Drax ended up winning by one objective score or one unit kill because kills and scoring were kind of rolled together. But it was a great game and all the families got together and had fun too. So it was a really nice, wholesome afternoon of blowing up mechs. And Paul, thank you for putting that on. It was a lot of fun.

Josh:

That sounds like a great time. A... not taking itself serious kind of level of fun.

Steve:

Oh, yeah. And the thing is, we had all sorts of fun rules about carrying objectives and everything else. And one of the rules was if you rolled a natural 12, right, for a three-armer crit on a unit that was carrying boxes or cargo, they would drop all of the cargo because they just got, you know, rocked by whatever. So it was the last turn and I had my Condor hover tank scoot around a building so it could get line of sight on an Atlas that was loaded with four objectives and I did this little pew pew. I hit 112. It dropped four cargo crates, which was, it ended up worth, it was worth, I think, 25 points with where it was standing because objectives were scored based on how far away you were from your deployment zone is how much they were worth. Right? So ended up, I caused this thing to drop four objectives and we still lost by, we still lost by 25 points. But that was, that was a huge thing where it was like, holy smokes, we might be able to pull it out. And then something got blown up. But, That swung it over, but that's okay. But it was a lot of fun regardless, so.

Josh:

I'm glad. That's the most important part about Battletech.

Steve:

Just having a good time. You had some other games you got in?

Josh:

Yeah. Speaking of, you know how I just said the most important thing about Battletech is to have fun?

Steve:

You did say that, Josh. I

Josh:

heard you. I did. Let's rewind the tape three seconds. Okay. Yeah, I played Steve. I've never played Steve before. Not you, Steve, but local Steve. And this was just someone asking, hey, does anyone want to play a pickup game on Tuesday? I was like, sure, I'll play you. And they were like, cool. He just said, BV casual. Sounds great. I rock up. I've got my, you know, fed sons, a few rotary fives, not too many. not too many. I think I had no target.

Steve:

How many is not too many, Josh? Because you have a problem with racks. Like I didn't, it's like, look, you said, Hey, I didn't bring too many racks. Just like I didn't buy too many blind boxes. So how many is too many? Two. I think I had two, two for four units. Okay. That's like 50% racks. That's like, I guess better than it could have been, but

Josh:

sometimes it's multiple. It's that amount of racks on one unit per unit.

Steve:

you have a problem josh

Josh:

uh yeah hey hey i just put the stupid parks and wrecks me first you gotta roll the dice to see how many dice you roll and that's what the game's all about baby but anyway so i rock up and steve's like hey cool i got a casual list steve has a spider with vsps a Venom with pulse lasers, a Uzeal 8S with four pulse lasers, a Chimera with, I want to say, not as many pulse lasers, but TSM and a sword, and a Penetrator, which has jump and lots of pulse lasers. And I'm like, bro, bro, this ain't no casual pickup game. This is... I don't want to walk out of here with kneecaps.

Steve:

I think he... may have thought he was going to a disco party.

Josh:

Yeah, no, it's like I literally had to look and was like, bro, you realize like two of these are the most optimized jump to pulse damage ratio mechs ever. It's like, yeah, I know they're good because I went on the Goonhammer and they say they're, you know, I was like, this is as close as we get to net listening as possible. But then like I realized he's a newer player. He got whooped a couple of times. So now he's like mentally in the space of, I need to take good stuff to do good.

Steve:

And it's like, I think that's a natural progression for any newer player. Right. I was there at one point. I know other people locally to me that are getting into classic that are doing similar things. Right. They like to play that hit and fade style. So they bring a bunch of jump pulse and then they wonder why everyone throws dice across the table and gets up and leaves. Right. So yeah,

Josh:

Now I did force them to play a mission, took one of the Mech Bay winter missions. It was the, uh, airdrops, like each player places two objectives and then we roll, but they scatter. So they're not exactly where you place them, which is always like, Oh, you're going roughly where it was, but ballpark it right now. It's not in the heavy woods where you want it kind of thing. Yep. So did that. And I was like, yeah, so we're going to play a mission. Uh, and by the end of it, I had only killed, I want to say, the Uzeal. Like I had put a PBC through its head, crit the sensors, and then a couple more shots took out his gyro. So it's not technically like destroy, but it's combat ineffective to the maximum. It's not doing

Steve:

anything anymore, right?

Josh:

Yeah. And his Chimera had gotten eaten alive by battle armor. My favorite. Go little infiltrator magnetics. Do my bidding. Swarm. Swarm and leg kick for days. But yeah, so I had By the end of it, I did win, I want to say like eight to six, like in the, whoever had objectives per turn. So like me having been up that much. And then when we called it time, there was no way he could win. He could just tie me at the best. And I was like, I'll take that. I'll take that for your stupid jump, pull spam casual list.

Steve:

No, but it sounds like you've, We're fine against it. And now he's just going to realize that he needs more jump pulse because he lost again, right? So clearly it wasn't enough. I mean, you're just reinforcing the problem here, Josh.

Josh:

Yeah, it was just like the, hey, I can still win, but I'm not going to have a good time playing against you. I'm just going to play the mission and kind of like literally feed pieces into the grinder while I sit on objectives. And I'm like, you can do that. It's just not fun. In a tournament, that's perfectly fine. I'm just there to win the mission. But in a casual thing, it's like, if I can't hit you, if literally every time you're jumping TMM4 into woods, bro, we could have just sat in the parking lot and threw dice at each other and see what landed.

Steve:

Yeah. Yeah. That's a bummer. It was. I mean, the only way to counter this stuff is to talk with players and explain... some of the problems that this causes at the table and, you know, just try to be positive about it. And hopefully people move away from that or at least get a better understanding as to why it's so frustrating to play against. And then they make conscious decisions about other people's game experiences next time they come to the shop. So that's really the only thing you could do.

Josh:

Yeah. The newer player hasn't been exposed to the social construct of like, we understand some things in battle tech are just a little bit better, like a little under costed. You don't need to like, Not double, not quadruple, six-tuple dip them.

Steve:

And it's always a balancing act to find out how much is too much. And sometimes you only learn by doing, so he'll figure it out.

Josh:

In the same vein, I then played Joseph, another returning player, and Joseph had asked for a no-BV, bring-whatever-you-want game. This was on a weekend, and I was like, sure, okay. He was like, hey, bring two custom mechs. I was like, okay, we're getting a little crazy here, but I'll take the Greyhound. I won't take two. I'll take one. I then show up, and he's got two 100-ton Clan Assault Customs with, I want to say, 12 or 13 medium pulse lasers between them. Are you

Steve:

sure you're at a game shop and not a dance club?

Josh:

Yeah, I then realized this was a returning player who had never, like, played outside of his gaming group which i don't want to say metastasized like a cancer like where one person was a a-hole player and that means everyone has to respond to the a-hole so what they expect you to take is the a-hole list like they don't know like i literally rocked up like okay bring whatever okay cool i'll bring a a greyhound a templar a hammer hands and oh i don't know an enforcer That

Steve:

enforcer shows up all the time, Josh.

Josh:

I hate it. You hate it. It wasn't even that variant, I don't think. No, it was. It was. Of course it was. Once I saw that he was taking it, I was like, but then he also was like, oh, we're going to roll up a random pile. I was like, bro, who hurt you, Joseph? Who hurt you? And by the end, I did kind of get out like, okay, you did play a bunch of a-holes. And I was like, hey, we don't do that here. Like, we aren't looking to like, break each other's ankles and call that Battletech. He had grown up in the... We don't balance by BV. We just balance by number of units because that's how many we're playing with. We're playing company on company where each day of gaming is one turn of the game where we don't care about the balance. I was like, okay... that's an option it's not what we do here like you gotta let me know in advance like that's what we're doing you can't say if you say take anything i'm gonna take the most vanilla basic stuff i'm like okay that's fun again this is

Steve:

a another example of people discovering local metas right yeah you you come into somewhere you're like hey this is how we always play it's like oh we can do that, but we got to clarify and explain before people start showing up with, uh, you know, if I show up with a cicada and a Wolverine and you show up with two turquinas, we were going to have a bad time.

Josh:

Exactly. So I forced him to play a mission. I think this one was the heaviest Mac in the middle line, like essentially, uh, hold the line. He completely forgot that we were playing a mission. I was like, see, that's what happens. You forgot you were playing the mission and you're just chasing my Thunderbolt to the edge in your own deployment zone. Whoops. Whoopsies.

Steve:

Well, again, Joseph will figure it out. He'll come back and hopefully have a little bit more fun list.

Josh:

All right. You got some more games?

Steve:

I have a tale from the hiring hall. If we want to move into that.

Josh:

No, let's do the I did get one AlphaStrike game in. It'll be quick. Let's see if I can do 30 seconds. Maybe a rough... Not an introductory, but like a... Let's see what you can do in AlphaStrike. Show them. Play Thiel. And Thiel took some Merrick Mercenaries. And that was fun to fight because, oh my gosh, I just took my Southern Assault list. But I took off the C3 component of it. No Ajax, no C3. Well,

Steve:

that's nice of you.

Josh:

I know. I asked. I was like, how competitive do you want? He was like, somewhere in the middle. I was like, no C3, no Ajax. I can do that. Yep. I think it was the cross the center line and make sure your opponent doesn't cross the center. Classic. Great. lets you know how mobile and killy and defensive your force is and i think the most fun thing i had in that game was he took his v tall and tried to get behind my v tall and i had my maxim hover tank run up behind it shoot rolls hits hits it on 11 i was like okay okay go maxim it's your birthday um Hits, rolls the 12 for the motive. And it's like, oh, oh, yes, girl, slay. VTOL crashes, explodes. I was like, all right. Maxim runs around, shoots his SRM. Yeah, his SRM carrier drops off. Hawbrook battle armor. They destroy that. And I was like, Maxim, are you slow down? So I've never had a transport hovercraft be like my low key MVP.

Steve:

It's always fun when that stuff happens. You get one pilot who just will not be stopped and just goes ham.

Josh:

It was great. It was really great. So I had fun. Like I said, it's always fun to do just a casual off strike game and do a mission and see what happens. Yeah.

Steve:

Sounds like a good time.

Josh:

All right. Give me that tails from the hiring hall, Steve.

Steve:

Sure. So I played Jason from my local shop and he brought Jason's expendables and this was his first, uh, This was his first Hinterlands game. So I just brought a regular op for, right? I didn't bring crabs. I didn't bring, you know, uh, wicked hogs. I just threw it out into the discord. I said, Hey, I need 3000 points and guys, someone give me some recommendations. And it was recommended that I take the Wolfhound five and the Argus 4D, which was just about 3000, which was great. So our first game was a meeting engagement and this had all all of the command complications. We both rolled terribly. No, no,

Josh:

no.

Steve:

We didn't forget them this time. They were just really bad.

Josh:

That's what I was going to say. I was like, no, no, you didn't. Yeah, we

Steve:

did. Mine were not great. I had a plus one to shooting all missile and direct energy attacks. So

Josh:

Those need to have like a refund. Like, okay, it's terrible. Get another tank

Steve:

as a consolation prize or something. Well, Jason got the worst of it because he got all of his assets do half damage.

Josh:

I didn't even know that's an option. What?

Steve:

Yeah. All of his tanks did half damage. And it's like, well, that's a much less threatening list because he ended up taking like a manticore. and two galleons. So now, like, okay, I can just kind of ignore those because they're not going to do any real damage to me. Why would you do that? We just rolled on the table. I'm talking to the author. Why would you put that in? Because it's different and exciting. I don't know. Look, they're complications. They're supposed to be tough. They're supposed to make it different. They did. More like a comorbidity. Comorbidity? That's the word.

Josh:

That's the word.

Steve:

Yeah. No, it was fine. It was different. And honestly, it... It made the game a lot harder, but I mean, I was shooting on garbage anyway because my missile and direct energy attacks were all bumped up. But it doesn't matter because on turn one, my Argus has a rack. I line up a nice shot and I

Josh:

roll a two. Oh, someone doesn't believe in the rotary autocannon gods.

Steve:

I liked it. It was fun. I've used, I've used racks a couple of times now and, uh, they're neat when they go off, but my Argus just decided to take a nap in the cockpit, I guess. Cause he just, he totally whiffed. And at the end of the day, the meeting engagement was fine. Uh, the wolf, I felt kind of bad because I'm gonna take this wolf hound and this, you know, Argus and it's going to be okay. We're just going to kind of fool around a little bit. He's got a bushwhacker and a Centurion, you know, It was a pretty even matchup, except on turn two, my Wolfhound shot a light PPC straight into the torso of his Bushwhacker and got an ammo explosion. Feels good and bad. It was a throw him a crit. I'm like, aha, I've got you now. And then it hit his ammo and then he blew up. And I'm like, that wasn't supposed to happen. I'm sorry. This is your first game. I'm trying to be nice. Yeah, that's like, I'm not trying to be a jerk. I can't help it. So that kind of ended that game because with the ammo explosion, the mech was cooked and we all walked off. And I said, look, it was like 930. I'm like, we can get another game in. Like, let's just do another quickie and we'll get through your whole contract. He was like, okay, sure. So we rolled on the mission table and mission two was a pursuit mission. So he was chasing down my Wolfhound and my Argus trying to stop them from getting across the map. And the real pain with the pursuit mission, we've talked about it before, is that it's really easy for the fleeing party to go unless they have two assaults. You know, it's like just across the map. It's not a hard task. Not really.

Josh:

We had to mix it up. We, we considered like, okay, skidding rules are on. We're playing on a city map. We got to make this more difficult than it would be normally.

Steve:

Yeah. In the past we've done, you have to go out and back across the map. You know what I mean? You got to like pull it. You turn it the other end of the map and walk all the way back to make it go twice. So you actually have to walk past his guys a couple of times.

Unknown:

Um,

Steve:

And this one, again, it took maybe three turns at most because the Wolfhound was fast enough. He could get most of the way across. The Argus just torso twisted, drove three rack shots into the bushwhacker, and it fell over because it failed the PSR. So whoops. And that was it. And then the guys got off, and that was kind of the end of the mission. But Jason was a great sport, and he had a lot of fun. At least he told me a lot of fun. He might've been kind and just lied to me, but he said he had a fun time. So that's all you can say. That's it. I mean, this was fun. Thank you. We'll see if he comes back, but, uh, no, it, it was good to get some, some mercenaries games. And even if you're just kind of trying to show people the ropes, but I'd never run an Argus before. So it was pretty cool. I really enjoyed it. And I will probably run that Wombo combo again,

Josh:

even with a rotary auto cannon.

Steve:

I like rotaries. They're neat. I just don't take nine of them.

Josh:

Look, look, look. You got to fully commit to the bit.

Steve:

No, you don't have to. Didn't you just give me guff two episodes ago for fully committing into one gimmick in your list?

Josh:

Look, if you think that's going to stop now, you are quite wrong.

Steve:

I know. I'm just making sure that the pot is calling the kettle black. That's all.

Josh:

The kettle has been black. All right. Let's move on to some upcoming events. It looks like you've got one here. Midwest Mech Mayhem at game night in St. Louis, Missouri. Was that a callback from my Missouri joke? Or is that just meant to be?

Steve:

It must have been meant to be because we got that email a little while ago. That's happening July 11th to the 13th. And that is $20 admission for adults with $10 for those 12 and under. The fee is for the entire event. And they've got classic Solaris battles, a weekend-long grinder, mini Mercenaries League. Alpha Strike narrative games and an Urbi Derby. So if you are anywhere near St. Louis, check it out. And that's coming out in, looks like two weeks from now. So, hey, it's a Battletech event in your area. Might be worth the checkout.

Josh:

Yeah. This one, this is a fun one because I am on Instagram. I haven't posted anything lately because I only paint like new mechs once in a blue moon. But I did find, stumble upon the Hamburg Battletech community. How do you just find it? What do you mean, just found it? I saw some pictures of the NordCon Hamburg Battletech event from, I'm guessing it's MechForce Innern. And man, it really makes you want your own jump ship to just hop there for a couple games and then hop back. No, they are doing the Deutsch Battletech Meisterkraft. August 23rd at 73079 Subin, brought to you by MechForce Germany. So if you are in the neighborhood over there, I highly recommend it because those pictures from their last event looked so good. Like, so good. I'm talking whole tables with hexes, all painted stuff. It was so good. When does the MechBay go abroad? I know, right? Which of us would be the idiot that would be abroad?

Steve:

Oh, me, for sure. I don't speak a lick of German, and I would probably find my way to a beer hall and hang out there instead of the tournament. Yeah. Yeah.

Josh:

I

Steve:

agree. That sounds fun. It does. That sounds fun.

Josh:

All right. Well, nothing else. Let's take a quick break, and then we'll get back to our main subject of I went to Maryland, and all I got was this stupid crab shirt. I didn't get a crab shirt. I want a crab shirt.

Steve:

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Josh:

All right, we are back. Back from the bay, that is. Chesapeake Bay. Chesapeake Bay, Maryland. Yeah.

Steve:

They have crab cakes. It was very good. Were the crab cakes good? The crab cakes were great. But these psychos over there, they eat them with mustard. And it was surprisingly good, actually. I tried it.

Josh:

As my brain goes through all of the crab-based culinary Instagram feed things, I'm like, no, no. That is included in the crab cakes.

Steve:

They're surprisingly good. Most of the time I've ever had them, they've had tartar sauce or some sort of cocktail sauce or whatever.

Josh:

That's to make the bad crabs better, but you're getting good crab to start. Did you... Look, we're not even going to talk about the term. We're just here to talk about Steve's trip to Maryland. Did you get a soft-shell crab... Just whole. No, I got the crab cakes. See, that's a cop out. You got to get a full soft shell crab just deep fried. Legs and all. You got to eat the whole thing. It's a sea bug from Star Wars where they just put the whole thing on the plate. Shell, head, intestines, gills, everything. It is the whole point of the soft shell crab. The shell is chuffed.

Steve:

The legs. It's the legs that get me. I know. That's it. I can't. Sometimes I have like the soft shell crab sticking out of sushi rolls. And I'm like, there's half a spider in that roll. I'm not eating half a spider. I'll take the middle slices that have the crab in it. But the legs. No,

Josh:

no. As someone who's been to Maryland exactly once, folks, you got to eat the whole soft shell crab. It's the whole point of it. I'll stick with cakes

Steve:

for now. It's the legs. It's the legs. Crab legs, man. Like, I don't mind separate crab legs. That's fine. But the whole kit and caboodle, right? They're attached to a thing. It's just spider mouth legs.

Josh:

No. So, yeah. So you traveled to Maryland to play in the Battle for the Bay Alpha Strike event, which was a three game. 300 or 375 games. PV three 51, everyone split, split in the difference. I know. Yeah.

Steve:

So it was, it was 350 points, but everyone was given one J 27 ordinance transport. And that was the crab shack. I mentioned in, in hobby progress, they gave out the STL so you could print it and paint it ahead of time. That was kind of fun, made a little bit different. And all the missions, as we get there, the crab shack played a quintessential role in earning extra points.

Unknown:

Uh,

Steve:

It was kind of fun, despite the fact that the packet looked suspiciously similar to the Motor City packet. It's okay. They asked me if they could follow.

Josh:

Legally distinct or

Steve:

suspiciously distinct? Suspiciously distinct. And they missed one section where it talks about what is the goal of this event. And it's like, we're here to spread awareness and grow the Michigan Battletech community. And I'm like, that's great. I don't know how it's going to do that in Maryland, but... It's okay. But no, it was, it was fine. They did just use it as the basis and they, they made a whole bunch of other changes too, but it was just, I got, I got to poke a little bit of fun. Yeah. So yeah, they had, we talked a lot about motor city and how it kind of ran and function. So I'll just talk about some of the differences that this one did. They obviously did painting competitive scores and sportsmanship scores, but for mission scoring, they did margin of victory, similar to how, Southern Assault does it. The more points you earn, the fewer your opponent gets, but it's all based on how much you win by. The close games, you're only going to get 12 points and your opponent's going to get 12 even if you only win by one point versus blowing somebody out by 16 or more, you're going to get 20 and they're going to get five. Margin of victory is a thing. It's not necessarily my favorite way to score, but it's okay.

Josh:

It's okay, Steve. I hate every way of scoring. You do. That's a true fact. So there's no right one and there's no technically wrong way. So that's okay.

Steve:

Yeah. So they did release a mission packet ahead of time. There were, I think, six missions on that possible mission pack. And then the day of they rolled and then those missions were kind of set up. going forward. So you, when you were doing list building, you had to kind of anticipate any of these missions, which I didn't necessarily hate. I think I still prefer blind. So I don't know. And I can't kind of, I don't want the option to try to start to play out in my head. What role, which mech is going to use for which mission. I just want to be, I want to be totally blind, but that's a personal preference. The fact that there were six and then we knew we were only going to play three kind of split the baby on that. That was fine. And it did result in a little bit of weirdness, but we can talk about that later. That's really the kind of preface to this. We can kind of get into my list if we want. Yeah.

Josh:

I mean, we've already talked about your travels. Your flight was good. The crabs were tasty. You didn't eat a real crab. It's okay. What did you take to Battle of the Bay? And did you include a Crab 27? So I didn't. Boo this man. Boo this man.

Steve:

Terrible. I brought Jade Falcons, the humblest and most honorable of all the clans. And I just kind of brought very generic units. I didn't go crazy. Yeah. I tried to get things that were relatively high in TMM with decent movement because a lot of the missions were objective based. There were, I think it was one kill mission and then the rest were all about grabbing objectives and the way that they did scoring in this, you didn't get any points for, for killing unless it was the killing mission, right? So I could kill nobody. And as long as I grabbed objectives, I'd win. So I wanted a little bit more movement, and that was just based on the missions that they made available for people to look at. So I ended up bringing a Phantom. I brought a Dragonfly or a Viper. I did bring an Ice Ferret, which is one of the ones I needed to paint. And I brought a Battle Cobra, a Stormcrow, a Nova, a Summoner, a Crossbow, a Cougar, and of course, the J-27 Crab Shack.

Josh:

Not a single metal model in there.

Unknown:

No.

Josh:

Nope.

Steve:

I built this with 90% of what I had painted and I had a crossbow and a ice ferret on my desk that were like half done. So I stuck them in the list to force me to finish painting them.

Josh:

Okay. Okay. So this wasn't like, I am forcing myself to play, like stay within Falcons, but try other things. This was just like, I got stuff. I'm just finished motor city. I don't have time to rebuild the wheel. No,

Steve:

I'm like, I, I, I tried to build it out of everything I had painted and, And I really wanted to run the crossbow because it looks like Mega Man. So I'm like, I'll run this guy. But I had to finish painting him. So I used it as a little bit of motivation to get a couple of things done. I actually also painted a Visigoth. Because, well, so BSPs were used in this tournament. And we got 10 BSP points to purchase whatever we wanted. You had to buy them prior to the game. I ended up selecting a heavy bomb. and two heavy strikes with my thought process being, if I were to take two strafing runs, strafing runs are very easily countered by hip air cover. I didn't want to take two of those and then have them both negated without being able to do anything. Air cover is incredibly effective if you can match up light to light and heavy to heavy. It just feels bad to have your bombs knocked out of the sky. So I said, I'm going to go with some of the heavier stuff. It is unlikely that people are going to take three heavy air or three heavy air covers. So I'll take a heavy bomb and two heavy strikes. And if I need to get something off the board, I will dump all of it at it and hope for the best just by attrition.

Josh:

I mean, it's, it's why it's there. What more can you say? It's like, I have the airstrike. I'm going to use the airstrike kind of thing.

Steve:

Well, it's, they're nice for high TMM units. They're nice for, because it adds an element of rock, paper, scissors to the game, right? Do I want a heavy cover? Do I want a light cover? Do I take any covers? I opted for none and I would just ride out whatever damage they brought. Thankfully, none of my opponents had airstrikes or the strafing runs because that could have been devastating if they'd had them. Now, your BSP selection is blind. So your opponent doesn't know what you have. So we got a little bit of that kind of bluffing scenario going on with BSPs. I'd say I'm using a BSP and they'd say, which one? And it's like, well, I'm using this, but you got to declare what your cover is, if you're going to use it at all. And that was kind of cool to see what they, what they

Josh:

do. I mean, that's technically, I think like an optional rule in the BSP deck, at least like, I don't think it is in like the manual, but in the deck, it's like you can play with the bluff, like portion where like, this is how you have to do it. And you declare like, I'm using an offensive error card. thing and it's like oh okay i don't know which one i'm gonna hopefully do my correct defensive so that that is a way that psps are made to be played

Steve:

yeah and i think that's how it's written in the alpha strike book i think that is written as default if i read the rules correctly there were some back and forth with the tos as to how to play them but we had some discussions with the opponents and you know that's what we ended up using so it was it was kind of fun but yeah so i i painted up a Visigoth to put on the table to visually remind me that I had BSPs to use because more often than not, I had two different opponents completely forget they had BSPs until I started using them. So having that physical reminder on the table was a huge benefit to kind of keep me cognizant of the tools I had at my disposal.

Josh:

Wait, you didn't like... I'm up. So I don't want to use my BSP. So I'll remind my opponent to use their BSP. Like I, I don't want to say I've done that, but I've definitely had the like, Oh crap, I got an asset. But if I use mine, they'll use theirs. And right now I'm up.

Steve:

No, I was never worried about that. This is one of those things where it's like, I brought them, I'm going to use them mostly because I want to see things explode. But I also wasn't frivolous about using my BSPs. So oftentimes I'd use them on turn two and, And all of a sudden people went, Oh shoot, I have those. But they only had 90 minute games and, or maybe it was, I think it was only 90 minute games and they went real fast, but the games took a long time getting the table set up and everything else. We only got three to four turns in every game. So it was, I mean, it was, I don't know why, I don't know whether the timing was off or maybe it was just, you know, I don't want to say everyone, no one played slow. I don't think anyone was like, you know, sandbagging, but

Josh:

I'd say me and you are pretty professional. If we can use the word professional alpha strike player, me and you can get a game in like a full eight turn game in, in like two hours.

Steve:

I think a lot of it just comes from experience. Do you know where you plan to move two turns down the road from now? I mean, think about good chess players. They're not thinking for the next move. They're thinking four moves down.

Josh:

I like that thought. I wish I could say that. Never done that before. I'm always shooting from the hip and going with Blake. But, you know, whatever

Steve:

works, works. Yeah. I think it's just about having intention with how you play. And, again, it wasn't a problem. I didn't mind that we didn't get very many turns in. But it just meant that, you know, having BSPs and using them in a timely fashion played a huge role in some of these missions. So, overall, I thought everything went really well. And did you have any questions about the event or anything like that?

Josh:

No, no. Let's get into game breakdown because that's my favorite part about the whole thing about the event is who'd you meet, who'd you make friends with, and how many teeth do they have left walking away from it?

Steve:

The first mission we played was Deadly Domination. And what was cool about this mission is you had two objectives on your side of the board, two on your opponent's side of the board, and one in the middle. The way they did... claiming objectives in this game was based on for each unit within the prescribed distance which is two inches the objective and they made recon probe or mech hq count as one size larger for calculating objective control only

Josh:

right i love that and that's not just because i'm a c3 player so like all my macs got mech hq

Steve:

but we're

Josh:

gonna i'm paying for it

Steve:

yeah Yeah, no, we're going to talk about that because that became a problem. Oh, no. Yeah, we'll get there. And then basically, if you have claimed the objective, you placed your flag on it, and then you could leave. So you could claim an objective, then walk away from it with no problems, right? And you could continue to earn points for it as long as the flag was there. I played, I'm going to butcher his name, but I tried really hard. I played Chris Tebow, who had a DCMS list. And he brought a Cyclops, a Catapult, an Orion, a Locust, a Komodo, a Crusader, a Panther, a Hermes, two MRM carriers, a Sprint Scout helicopter, and a Skulker wheeled scout tank. That is very DCMS, but not like

Josh:

the fancy DCMS.

Steve:

He brought a full C3 company. He had 12 units that were all C3 linked, and I hated it.

Josh:

The Skulker, the double C3 master, triple?

Steve:

It's the C3 master, and then he had the Cyclops as his central

Josh:

master. One of them has to be the master of two. Yeah, you see what

Steve:

I'm... Yeah, the Cyclops was the master for the Panther and the Skulker, and then the Skulker was the master for the MRM carriers and the vehicles. And then the Panther was for his light, like assault or his like light scout Lance. I met Chris at motor city because he came from New York. So I, I was surprised to see him there because I'm like, Oh, we're in Maryland. That's not New York. Why would Chris be here? But then it occurred to me, if the man's mad enough to drive from New York to Detroit, he's going to drive like the 10 minutes over from New York to, to Maryland. So it was nice to see Chris again. He's a, Wonderful person, very friendly to play against. And I had a ton of fun. It was a tough game because he had a ton of guys. And like I just read, if you had Mick HQ, you counted as one size larger, right? So all of his guys counted as one size larger than their written size on their card, which meant I was outnumbered because I only had nine guys, including my crab shack. And he had 12. 13, including his crab shack. And it was just not, it was not a good start. So it was really going to be tough to see if I could hold these objectives with so much, you know, so many units on his side. Uh, there were secondary, but

Josh:

good. I was just going to say, at what point did you just like start cursing slash praying to Blake? Like, come on, I can't fight the C3 DCMS game one. Like I got to work up to that. Oh, well, yeah.

Steve:

If it makes it any better, the night before started poorly and got worse. The night before we did this tournament, we went to a really bad Mexican place, drank a pitcher of margaritas, did a tequila shot, then went back to the hotel, finished a bottle of wine, half a bottle of scotch, and had gin and tonics. So I was feeling fantastic in the morning. Actually, it wasn't that bad, but I was not firing on all cylinders. I was not quite up to snuff. And to come up in the morning against a C3 company, I was like, oh boy, we made some poor choices. But it worked out okay. So turn one, I used my heavy bomb on his crab shack because the secondary objectives were if your highest PV unit dealt damage with a rear shot, If your highest PV unit never contested an objective, you got a point. If one of your units end its turn in the enemy's deployment zone, you got a point. You get two points if your Crab Shack claims the center objective, and if you never destroy an enemy on an objective the entire game, you get an additional two points. So I said, look, if I can bomb his Crab Shack, he can't score those two points, and it's something off the board, which was great. Chris made one fatal error in this game and it's that he jumped everywhere. We played on a really like rocky mission map. It was like kind of a couple of plateaus and some Hills, very cool looking map, but Chris used his Orion and his crusader to jump a lot of places and it ended up hurting him in shooting numbers because my guys were relatively fast. TMM twos, right? He just couldn't, He just couldn't shoot me.

Josh:

That's one thing you have to recognize when you're playing a C3 list. You don't have better shooting. You just have better range. You can get into your mindset like, oh, my numbers will be the same if I jump if I'm spotting something at short range. It's like, yes... But that just means you're paying for the same number. That's why I really like to take my assaults and stuff as my C3 because it's like they're TMM1. They don't care. They only get better. They can't get worse.

Steve:

I tried so hard to kill that Cyclops and I just couldn't. I couldn't chew through it. I don't think I ever killed that Cyclops and it was standing in the middle of the map. So overall, it was a very fun game. It was actually relatively close right up until the end. And what ended up happening was every turn we got three turns in. Chris contained or Chris controlled two objectives for three turns, and I ended up controlling three objectives for three turns because in turn one, I won initiative and he moved his dudes and he forgot that he could sprint. So turn one, I sprinted a lot of my guys because I wasn't planning on shooting. And I got further up the field on that first turn, which gave me just a couple of inches here and there. And everybody knows a couple extra inches is all you need sometimes. And I got to the center objective faster with my crab shack, which netted me a couple extra points. The other thing I will tell people, the other thing is interesting for this game is you have to read the mission and you have to read the packet because on the last turn, he moved his Komodo up to one objective, right? And I had an option to put my Fenris up on that other objective to try to claim it. Now, the Komodo was mostly dead, so I could have killed it very easily. But then I started reading the secondary objectives, right? With my Fenris being the most expensive unit, I would lose... those objective points, right? That would be one objective point for my highest PV unit claiming an objective, and I didn't want to do that. I would have to have killed the Komodo, which would have lost me two points for killing a unit on an objective point, right? And that would have prevented me from putting my Ice Ferret in the opponent's deployment zone, which would have cost me one because that's something I would have left on the table. So on that last turn, I faked Chris out. I made him think I was going for that objective point, And then I stopped and I did the math and I said, I would get, I would positively gain four points versus the one I would get for holding the objective. And that might change the margin of victory, but changing that margin of victory on the table would only grant me two. So I actually earned an additional two points by not going for the objective, just based on secondary objectives. So you got to keep those in mind. You got to pay attention to the packet.

Josh:

This man playing 30 feet, 30, 52 dimensional chess. It's

Steve:

just reading, right? You just got to pay attention. And yeah, so that ultimately I ended up winning that mission. 21 to 14 was a final. Really, it was only 14 points to 10 points in the objectives, but I managed to score all of the secondary objectives, which was an additional seven points, right? That was absolutely huge. So had a lot of fun with Chris. Kind of a rough game to start with the C3 company. Very intimidating. And Chris played really well. He really did. But it was just he jumped a little bit too much. And some of those numbers he needed to hit, he missed by one or two because he had jumped. And that would have been a very different game.

Josh:

Steve goes to the John Madden School of Winning Battle Tech. You got to score and keep your numbers low and make the enemies high. That's how you win. Coming from a Falcon player, if they're saying you're jumping too much, you're probably jumping way too much.

Steve:

It was fun.

Josh:

And honestly, I can understand. It's like, Oh, I have to want to be defensive. Like I want to stay alive. I don't want to get clan shot by clan stuff. It's like, no, no, you, you can, you can waste the turn or two, like drop some dudes and then

Steve:

get defensive. Well, the other problem is, I mean, I get it. He had a lot of lighter guys, right? So he didn't want to get them smoked, but at the same time, uh, I get Chris's point. A lot of these objectives were up on hills. So to get up there, he'd have to spend a ton of movement going up those different levels, right? And jumping up there is great. You just jump up and then you're up there and you score the point and then you can leave. But he jumped up, couldn't shoot. Jumped down, still couldn't shoot. And then he jumped up to protect it again and couldn't shoot. And it was like, he lost a lot of firepower that way.

Josh:

When you... I'm reminded now that he took an entire C3 company at 351 PV. And I'm like, I struggled to make one at 375 PV. And it's like, yeah, there's a reason why. Because you've got to spread out those points across all 12 units. And there's not a lot. There's no fad on that list.

Steve:

No, I mean, the Hermes only has three health. The Locust only has three health. The Panther, which is a C3 Master, only has six. I mean, his Komodo only has six. You know, there's a lot of stuff there that could very easily be focused down by, you know, the Blackhawk Nova Prime that does five at medium and can overheat for four. So, you know, there's a lot to be worried about there.

Josh:

I mean, good game. I'm glad, proud of you for winning your game one, which I think I've told you like last year at Motor City. It's like, what is the one thing I don't want to fight? It's like, I don't want to fight DCMSC3. It's like, it's a whole different game. So,

Steve:

yep.

Josh:

You did better than me, Steve. I'm proud

Steve:

of you. Honestly, it was a fun game and Chris made it, even if I hadn't won, Chris would have made it a great game. I mean, he was just such a chill dude and he was so excited to be there. And it was I like Chris a lot. He's a nice guy. Moving on to game two. Yeah. I had the distinct pleasure of playing none other than Aaron Cahal or Cubby. He brought technically Word of Blake, legally distinct Word of Blake, Shattered Division. And he brought a Word of Blake... Well, J27 Crab Shack, that's in every list. He brought the LRM Carrier, the Blizzard Hover Transport SRM variant. He brought two. I'm going to butcher this. The Serium Medium Battle Armor.

Josh:

Yeah. Yeah. Those are nasty.

Steve:

I think it's a Serium. I think that's a glottal stop is what that. There's an apostrophe in there. Yeah. It's S-E apostrophe I-R-I-M. I believe it's Serium. but I could be wrong. He brought a Marauder 9W, King Crab 005, Firestarter B, a Phoenix Hawk, a Malak Infernus, which I have never seen before, and a D.Va Communis, which I've also never seen before, and a Thunderbolt NAIS, because everybody loves that Thunderbolt NAIS. It's everywhere. We played a mission called Mobile Assets, and Josh, it's back. It's the three-point mission. Oh, no. It's the three-point mission. The bane of our existence. Don't go for three people. I can't help myself. What was cool about this mission is the three objectives were placed midway across the center line of the map, right? And if you move there and you claimed it, it would move six inches away from the deployment zone. of the person who claimed it. So it would move closer to your enemy if you claim the objective, which I absolutely loved. I thought this was great. Basically, if you run up and snag it early, it just flows closer towards your enemy. And if they've got big assault mechs, it makes it way harder for you to claim them a second turn.

Josh:

We've played stuff like this at the Triangle Classic. So I like the, you push it, but it gets harder for you to keep it kind

Steve:

of thing. It stops runaway scoring, right?

Unknown:

Yeah.

Steve:

And the thing is, if an objective is contested, then you roll a D6, and on a 1, 2, 3, it moves towards the center of the board. On a 4, 5, or 6, it moves away from the center of the board. And if it's already in the center, it remains stationary. Again, Recon, Probe, and Mech HQ gave a plus one for size. And I was once again going up against a C3 list where everything had C3 because it was Word of Blake, and it was... again

Josh:

have you considered running the c3 steve becoming

Steve:

the no you know what the worst part about my list is i have one ecm and it's on that phantom

Josh:

like hey did we go over the didn't we go over this like on four fan mails one ecm is none two is one

Steve:

okay that's true but you know i solved that problem do you know how i solved that problem josh

Josh:

but but killing the c3

Steve:

No, why would I do that? That's way too much work. If they want to be in short range, I'll just get into short range. We can all be in short range. You want to counter C3? Just bum rush them. It works great. No, Aaron had a really rough game, and it's because his dice just flat out betrayed him. Aaron missed, I think, I mean, he missed like four shots on sixes or something crazy. It happens. It does. And I felt so bad. And of course, Aaron's apologizing to me. He's like, Oh Steve, I wanted to give you a better game. And I'm like, Aaron, I am playing. You were having fun. It's okay. But he just, you know, it was rough. The big thing I think that turned this against him was the first turn. Um, I again, sprinted my crab shack to get near the objective, which was, you know, gave me a couple extra inches when he deployed, he deployed really heavy, um, my left side, his right side of the map. And when I saw him deploying that, I could put one or two fast runners on my right, his left. And I basically got over to the one objective uncontested. And I got to hold one objective for three turns, which gave me a bunch of extra objective points because he just was too slow to pinwheel over. The other thing that hurt him, this was kind of both a boon and a curse. I had to blow all three BSPs to kill his blizzard hover transport because on turn one he did not dump the battle armor out of it and i said look it's internal battle armor i am going to blow this thing up and if i do the battle armor inside dies right because it's not not

Josh:

yeah yeah it sucks but i can crush the can and the guys inside which is twice as easy as killing them separately

Steve:

well i mean so the blizzard heavy i'm sorry the blizzard hover transport is only 13 points and it has four health. So it's a TMM three unit. So it's, it's decently durable. I mean, with, with TMM three and four health, you shouldn't be able to shoot it to death unless you really dedicate a lot of damage to it. But I was more concerned about that battle armor because it is four zero zero with three health and it has heat one, a short range and stealth armor. These little monsters are pretty dangerous for 16 points. And I said, look, if I could get those off the map by dropping a couple BSPs on a hover transport, I will do that all day. So the bummer was he managed to kill. I did the bomb. The bomb missed. I shot at it. did a couple pips, and then I had to do the heavy strike to finish it off. But I ended up using all three of my BSPs because my other heavy strike just flat out missed it. So two whiffs, got a little bit of damage from some mechs, and then I finished off the last heavy strike, which was big because it got the vehicle off the map and it got one of those battle armors gone. And from there, he was just a little too slow to pinwheel and really contest the middle point. So... Uh, we ended up winning that one pretty handedly. We ended up winning 23 to 12. And again, I was able to do all the secondary objectives because my highest point unit did not claim or contest an objective. My crab shack controlled the center objective for at least one turn. I did attempt to DFA and it did not need to be successful, but I did. I

Josh:

tried. It still technically does damage if you fail.

Unknown:

Yep.

Steve:

Yep. And then you get three points if you can hold the same objective for three consecutive turns. So my Phantom just kind of ran off in the corner with the one uncontested objective, and it did its job pretty well, managed to get those points. So overall, 23 to 12, Aaron was a... I mean, he really was very nice to play, and he was really great because as an opponent gift, he managed to give me a blind box. And he said, Steve, I'm not giving you this I'm conflicted in giving you this because I know you have a problem and I don't really want to give an addict what they desire. But I brought these for my opponents and it just so happens that we got paired. So I have to give this to you. And I made fun of Aaron for that because he fed my blind box addiction, which is great. So thank you, Aaron.

Josh:

No, I'm going to put a sign on you that just says, do not blind box.

Steve:

Do not feed the Steve blind boxes. Do not do it. But. it was great. I loved it. And Aaron, if you did not hear me tell you earlier, uh, I did get the bounty hunter Timberwolf in that legendary blind box. So thank you.

Josh:

No, it sounds like fun. Yeah. Like I said, that's the one problem of non Omni mechanized battle armor, because if there is some way like VTOL battle armor, that's why they are good. Not, not, I should say battle armor that are in a VTOL because they can get where they need to go turn one and there's no way that they can die before they're deployed anything else like you have no guarantees in Alpha Strike especially Alpha Strike that anything will live to turn two and it sucks like it's very hard it's why I like magnetic battle armor because they ride on the outside of things but I mean I don't know I don't know like Sometimes you have

Steve:

to do what you have, right?

Josh:

Yeah.

Steve:

And it's tough because there were so many other tempting targets, right? That Malak was a menace. That D.Va was throwing a ton of dice. It was just, you know, I could have put him anywhere. But when he had those battle armor inside, it was just too tempting a target to not throw all my BSPs at it, trying to get it off the board. And, you know, it happens. Overall, still a really fun game. So thank you, Aaron, for playing with me. I had a lot of fun. Game three at this point, I was feeling great, right? Normally by game three, you're kind of like a little bit peaked, kind of a little bit worried. But because we've done Southern Assault so many times, I'm used to four games. So I'm like, oh, this is game three. We're still ready to rock and roll, right? I've kind of shaken off the morning sluggishness. We had lunch at a barbecue place and we were ready to get back at it for game three. So for game three, we played strategic points, which was different than mobile assets. But again, this was another three point game. mission josh two three

Josh:

point missions

Steve:

no that's illegal apparently not this one's tweak was you had one objective in the center of the map and then two other objectives that the loser of initiative gets to place 16 inches away from the center objective so basically they're they're on a string right they both have to be equidistant from the center point and they have to be opposite each other Okay. But the loser gets to place where they could be even across the board. They could be vertical. They can be diagonal. Okay. Right. As long as they're 16 inches away from the center point and opposite, you can do that, which was pretty cool. It was different. I ended up losing initiative for that deployment. So I got to place them, which was fine. I just did a standard, you know, 45 degree angle, right? Just diagonal across, but I placed them in such a way that my side of the board had a little bit more cover. Maybe you got a little bit more cover than the other exposed point, which it wasn't much. It was, it was pretty even, but you got to try to do what you can. Right?

Josh:

Yeah. I enjoy the missions where like losing the initiative, like lets you do a little bit better. Like, Oh, okay. You get to choose like this, the 1%. Advantage kind of thing.

Steve:

Right, yeah. And honestly, in this game, I needed it. I played Will B, who brought another C3 Word of Blake list. Josh.

Josh:

This was Jihad, right? It is. Yeah, the whole era, everything at the event had to be Jihad.

Steve:

I'm so tired of C3, Josh. Look, out of 40-some people... There were only six lists that had C3, and I fought half of them.

Josh:

I mean, I can't knock a C3 enthusiast. You know that.

Steve:

I'm so tired. I'm so tired.

Josh:

I'm tired, Grandpa.

Steve:

That's too darn bad. It wasn't anyone's fault. It's just luck of the draw. And Will had a brutal list. He had a Marauder 2. He had a Crab 30. Thug 13K, a Nightshade ECM VTOL. Best one they made. I didn't know that was a thing, but I didn't like it. There was a Griffin 6CS, a Black Knight 9, a Toyama. Yep. Which one? The 1C, the 554 Indirect Fire 1.

Unknown:

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Steve:

I almost killed that thing, too. It had one structure left. I just couldn't put it in the dirt.

Josh:

Blake, the shield of Blake, man. Hey, I'll tell

Steve:

you what. There were no points for killing, so I didn't care. I made it fall back and hide behind a building, and that was good enough for me. He had a Mercury 99 because they're fast and horrible. He had a Pinto attack VTOL, and despite me shooting it in the rear, it did not explode.

Josh:

Oh, the Pinto VTOL is the best of all VTOLs. It is so good.

Steve:

It's a TMM-4 with 20-inch VTOL movement, so TMM of 5. Damage profile is 2-2-0-star with 3 armor and 2 structure. This thing is a menace to society. My

Josh:

God. Do you see the art of that? That is like if they actually went to the airport, looked at what a good helicopter looks like, and were like, yeah, just make that a model. It's a

Steve:

cool looking model, but I... God, that thing chased me on the map and was doing all sorts of bad stuff to me. Then he had a pack of Asura battle armor and his J27 Ordnance Crab Shack. This was a really hard fight. I managed to kill his Mercury with a little bit of shenanigans. He hit it from... I moved one side of my map first. He ran it up and hit it behind a building. Then I moved everything else on the other side of the map so he could see the Mercury because that thing had to go.

Josh:

What is it? The Mercury has to be lucky every time, but you only have to be lucky once kind of thing or lucky. Actually, you have to be lucky four times. Mercury's got two armor, two structure.

Steve:

I have to be lucky zero times because I have BSPs, but I did end up blowing. I think I blew two BSPs to kill that thing. Cause I did a couple of damage to it and I just wanted it off the field. So it couldn't get in and mess up anything else. So we did end up killing it with a heavy strike, which was helpful, but in retaliation, Bill took a heavy bomb and blew up my crab shack. So I was then unable to acquire the extra bonus point for having my crab shack contest the center objective, which was pretty rough. Also, I think the, Game runners, the tournament organizers, were intentionally cruel with this one because do you know what one of the secondary objectives was? What was it? You get an extra point if you hold all three objectives at the end of any one round. I

Josh:

can't keep getting away with it.

Steve:

I didn't do it. I looked at that and I said, it's one point. I'm not throwing away half my list to try to get one point. You know who would have? You. Yeah. Yeah, I thought about it. There was one moment at the last turn. I'm like, I might go get it. But he moved the Toyoma back up to the point. And I'm like, I can't. I can't do it. I did successfully perform a charge attack against something in the range of an objective for an extra two points. What did you charge with? I charged with the Dragonfly against his Black Knight. I killed the Black Knight with the charge. So, yeah, the charge was... pretty great to pull off it was pretty fun to watch that dragonfly just smash into the back of the black knight oh and the rear

Josh:

and the rear

Steve:

but i had to he was trying to charge so the problem was this was in turn like three and we had no joke i think nine units in the center of the map around the center objective

Josh:

that's what happens a lot of time with that big center objective. It's just so

Steve:

juicy. They were calling it like, hey, there's like 30 minutes left. We're like, oh no, we better score our points. Hurry, get in there. And I made a move and he went to counter me. So I went to counter him and then he went to counter me again and it just turned into an absolute bloodbath. I think probably six of those mechs ended up dropping out that turn because they all died. It was a slaughter. And what ended up happening is that should have been the tie between where we each had the same weight because I had two mediums and he had one assault. He had his Marauder 2 that was still alive, but the Marauder 2 has Mech HQ. Yeah, it do. So I lost that center objective that turn, but then the next turn we managed to kill the Marauder. And we ended up taking those two again. And it really came down to secondary objective points on this one because I lost my Crab Shack. I could not hold three objectives. He couldn't either. We both did the charge attack. It was whether or not the highest point unit did or did not contest that objective. And because he put his Marauder 2 on the center, he did not get that one. And what that meant was at the very end, the score was 15 to 14. So I won by one point. It was... It was a wild game. I mean, he had his VTOLs harassing my back objective. So I had like two guys dance around this back objective trying to shoot down VTOLs. It didn't work. His Toyama and the Thug were just, I mean, they were shooting from a distance on their objective on their end of the map. And they were putting out so much firepower because it was all C3. So they're shooting short range, and I just took a beating. There was a lot of clever hill hiding, effectively. We were in a city map, so I could do a lot of like, I'm behind this building. You can't see me. I had to play a lot of those line of sight games to try to not get absolutely slaughtered. But very close game. Will was a great opponent. Had a lot of fun. And this one, I think, even though it was the last game of the day, it was probably the toughest game. If Aaron's dice hadn't betrayed him, that would have been a real rough game. And, you know, Will was, I think, the toughest game. And I don't know whether it was because his C3 worked more than the other ones did because I didn't want to bum rush him because that wasn't the objective. I had to get to the points, you know. So it was tough, but a lot of fun and managed to eke out that last win. So we scooped up three new bondsmen for Clan Jade Falcon.

Josh:

Very nice. Very nice. Yeah, that is something I recognized early on in C3. You can't brawl with it. You can, but you're paying for nothing. C3 works best when you can be in the back line and have a bunch of disposable meat shields actually doing the brawling in one spot or so. That's why I'm like, no, no. C3 is best in AlphaStrike on the slow boys that need a couple turns to get up there. You don't need TMM3 C3 guys unless they're the spotter. It's best on the TMM1 guys that can just hang back and are like, okay, yeah, I'm just playing this angle or this corner or this firing lane and moving up slowly as needed. But if you've got a brawl, yeah, you just want more damage and more

Steve:

TMM. your C3 benefit is negated by the fact that everyone's in short range. You want to have the, you know what I mean? You, you want to have your

Josh:

battle line.

Steve:

Yeah, precisely. Precisely.

Josh:

How's it feel? Because I think I was your last tournament alpha strike game before Maryland, uh, bluegrass. So you've played C3 the last four tournament list in a row.

Steve:

Yeah. Yeah, I have.

Unknown:

Um,

Steve:

It's funny because I'm not that worried about it. C3 is kind of a pain, especially when they get the extra weight for the objectives. It was a clever way to make it worth it, and that's great, and I'm thrilled.

Josh:

Now, was that in the list building packet? If you took that, then you got a bonus. Was that already known? Yes, it

Steve:

was. It was one of those things that we knew about going into it and we knew what could possibly happen, but I didn't think it was going to be a big deal. I didn't think it was going to be as prevalent as it was. And maybe that's shame on me because it is Jihad, but, uh, Oh, well,

Josh:

what did we learn? Jihad? If you're your clan, you're statistically hell's horses player. And statistically, if you're in your sphere, you're either DCMS C3 or word of like, Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep.

Steve:

I mean, I get it. I'm not upset by it either because of all the times to be playing Word of Lake, that's the jihad. Do it, right? Of all the times to play Comstar or Comstar or Jason, that's, it's really when it shines.

Josh:

No, no. You got to wait till the dark age. That's when the Word of Lake really gets

Steve:

good. Yeah. No, but it's expected and it was fine. It was good. So, overall, the games were fun. The missions were dynamic. I mean, like I mentioned a little earlier, they were all kind of the same variant of five objective three objective three objective so we didn't get a ton of variety which is where i think my list helped out a lot because i was a little bit more mobile than a lot of my opponents

Josh:

yeah but you said this was a you had six mission the whole event had six missions to choose from it just rolled that you were playing the three that were

Steve:

closest to to each other. Correct. Yeah. There were a whole bunch of other missions that could have happened, but when they rolled them, these are the ones that came up and it was like, well, I guess this is how it's going to go. So again, not the end of the world, but maybe next time a little bit of, maybe you put your thumb on the scale a little bit to make sure all three missions aren't exactly the same.

Josh:

Yeah. That's the only thing I can do. Like, I think the way I would do it is like, if you do like, okay, here's the six missions that we'll play from is like the tournament. organizer might roll one and then pick something that's completely the opposite of the first one. Like, okay, that one was the most fast moving, like most mobile, most objective focus. Like, all right, next one's going to be like the Killy with a twist one. And then, all right, what's the third one? Oh, it's that it's something else. So that's what I do with motor. Exactly. It's the only problem with the like, okay, there's only so many combinations of mission that anyone can do in a miniatures war game.

Steve:

So that's really one of my only thoughts and criticisms. If I had to go through it, it's just the missions were a little bit similar, but I think they know that already. So then after we did that, everyone packed up their stuff and kind of helped break down tables, and then we did awards. And they did very similar to Southern Assault. You get Best Overall, Sportsmanship, Commander, and Painting. Charles A. took home Best Overall. Brian D. took home Second Best Overall. And Richard J. Magnum took third best overall. Good job, Magnum. Yeah, he was hungover for most of the day. So that's the secret, folks. Just get hungover, and then you'll win at Battletech.

Josh:

I mean, okay, so there is a little thing of like, oh, you're not trying too hard. You're not in your own head. Your brain's not working on all cylinders. You're just relaxing and reacting. That's it.

Steve:

You

Josh:

play on

Steve:

instinct. Exactly. Train how you fight. For sportsmanship, we had Andrew M get first, James H get second, and Tymish H get third for sportsmanship. But I got to tell you, all these scores were within two, three points of each other. The scoring was so tight for all of these. Eugene got best painted. He has some really nice Capellan Macs out there. And Dave R... got second best painted and Charlie H got third best painted. So congratulations to all of them. Again, a lot of this painting was determined by one third of one point. That's how close these things were, right? And painting is tough. For the commander section, I managed to take first place commander or general or combatant or whatever you call it. And then Ando F came in second place commander and William B came got third, yeah, third best commander. So that last game determined, you know, quite a bit. So it was real, real, real tight. So those were the rankings and everyone did really well and everyone was really positive, really great vibe, had a ton of fun, you know? And when it came to prices, they had really good price support. I ended up getting, so Von Jankman on the Discord, right? Matt, He teased me because we were talking about on the Discord, we were talking about hot sauces for some reason or another, right? I couldn't tell you exactly why we got into it, but he's like, oh, if you show up and you win a trophy, you could earn this bottle of Old Bay hot sauce. And I'm like, I like Old Bay hot sauce. I want that Old Bay hot sauce. So I showed up and because I got best general or general meaning commander, not general as in general. overall. It's a little bit confusing. It's Best Commander. I got the bottle of Old Bay Hot Sauce, and I had to arrange it to be mailed home because you can't fly with liquids of that size. I know. I couldn't fly home with it. It used to be a country. But yeah, so the prize support was really great. I know Fortress kicked in, I think, a little bit for that, and Games and Stuff was very generous with their donations as well. So they had a really great prize spread. I managed to grab a $50 gift card to games and stuff, which was probably not the best choice because I'm not local, so I had to spend it right then and there. Oh, how terrible. How terrible. I know. They didn't have any blind boxes in the store, which is what I wanted. I just wanted to buy five blind boxes and go home. But I ended up getting two force packs with a little bit of additional kick in for me, but I thought that was fine. So I got two of the force packs. I got the one with all the two Cs in it. That's my favorite one. It's such a good one. Yeah, I love that one. And the other one I got had the Charger and the Assassin and stuff. Oh, yeah. Like the Industry Pursuit Lance, I think that's what they called it.

Josh:

I think so. That's the only one I don't have at this point. It's a good one. I need another Charger anyway, so I'm like, nah, I'll just use this. I'm like, I'll never

Steve:

use a Charger. I'll never use an Assassin. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah. So then the other thing is if you got a medal or a trophy, rather, you got to take from the second smaller prize table. And I grabbed another blind box. Oh my gosh. Stop it. Stop it. Yeah. I can't help it. It's so much fun. They also did not help because they gave out 3D printed blind boxes as well. So everyone got like a blind box with 3D printed mechs in it. And in that one, I got a Wolverine and a Delaware. So that was kind of cool. Yeah,

Josh:

boy, you're going to learn some radical heat

Steve:

thinking now. I guess I got to figure out what I'm going to do with them. But Dave, people were super generous. They had all sorts of fun stuff. Dave gave me two 3D printed mechs as well. And I'd never seen these before. So now I guess I'm painting can opens because he gave me an agro terra and he gave me a pentacelia. And those are rad. Those are super cool. Those are pretty cool. I'm ready to paint those guys up in Canopus once I get there. But overall, this was a great event. I mean, I got to see Matt and Jake and Steph again. Of course, Hammer. I got to see Jason Hansa. We had Gene there. Got to meet Danny for the first time in person despite giving me a bunch of crap on the Discord. Dave, obviously super cool. And then I got to mention Dan D, who goes by Bibbles. Dan brought... a great meme list that I absolutely loved. And because he knows how much I love crabs, when we were done, he said, hey, do you want my list? I said, I'm sorry, what? He goes, do you want to take my list home? I said, are you joking? He goes, no. So I said, well, if you're sure and it's not any harm to you, I'd love to. So he brought a king crab, a crab 30, a Crab 45, a Marauder, a Blackhawk H, a Supernova 2, and his Crab Shack. But the cool thing about this list is that he painted each of these mechs in the scheme of a real-life crab species. So the king crab was painted like a king crab, like an Alaskan king crab. The crab 45 was the Chesapeake Bay blue crab. The crab 30 was a juvenile rock crab. The supernova was a tropical coconut crab. The nova was a dungeon-esque crab. And the marauder was a lobster.

Josh:

Because it's not technically a crab. It's not a crab. Oh,

Steve:

Dan was amazing. And honestly, they're gorgeous. I'm just going to stick them in my... I'm going to stick them on my display case because they're very pretty, and it's such a fun story. So I really enjoyed that. Thank you, Dan. They made the flight home safely, and I appreciate them very much. Other people we got to bump into while we were out there, we met Dave S. again, who came to Motor City twice in a row now, and he did not have ice cream this time, which was another disappointment. It's not fair to assume that Dave is going to have ice cream. Every time. But he had it the first time I met him. And I was all excited that he might have ice cream again. And he didn't. So I'll just give him a little bit of guff on the air here. And we got to meet Wynn again. Because Wynn was my favorite opponent from Southern Assault last year. And Wynn was local to this one. So we got to see Wynn again. He was great. Got to bump into Kerry Joe from Unicorn Company Podcast. And John Hader and his son were super cool. I know his name's not John. It's his Discord handle. And I forgot his name. I'm so sorry, John. But... You told me you were John Hader on the Discord, and now that's your face. You're John. I'm sorry. And I'm sure I'm missing someone. I mean, we ran into all sorts of folks, and they were all super cool. I had a great time. I love seeing everybody. I got to room with Rich and Ben Jumper and Jason came, and we had a ton of fun. And yeah, it was great. I mean, oh, I got to tell the story. This is important. So Jake, one of the TOs, was kind enough they make a crab trapper whiskey which is a crab flavored whiskey

Josh:

didn't we talk about this whiskey on a certain after dark episode for patrons we

Steve:

did because it was i'm going to try it when i go to maryland and i went and i tried it and it was surprisingly good so it was like a nice rich whiskey and then it kind of gives away like a really salty kind of like crabby flavor which would sound super gross, but you got to try it. It's very good. So thank you for getting those. Thank you for letting me try that. Really kind of complimented the whole Maryland experience because it was crab whiskey.

Josh:

So you didn't eat the crab that's local and you drank the invasive crab. I had a crab cake. Yeah.

Steve:

I mean, I had crab while I was there.

Josh:

Yeah. It's just not the same.

Steve:

It's the legs.

Josh:

It's

Steve:

all on the legs. Anyway, no, it was a ton of fun. And then after all that, we went back to the hotel and I played a game of floor tech with Magnum because he was like, we had to play a game. So he grabbed his blind box that he took, which was a Blitzkrieg and a Mad Cat Mark IV. And I played my Agritera and Pentathelia. And we just smashed each other in like two turns. And then it was over. It was a lot of fun. It was good. It was good. What a great time. Just so much fun. And honestly, I'll tell you this truthfully. I suspect this was their first event. I would not have guessed it. It was so smooth. Everything was so well organized. And I think with the number of players in the area, I would not be shocked if they surpass Motor City in attendance next year.

Josh:

I was disappointed that I couldn't make it out this year. And... hearing your recap of just like how smooth like there was no major like event problems or anything at least that we know about but no it sounds like a great time and i really hope to go there next year because it's only two states away so it's definitely doable for me yeah it's

Steve:

a lot of fun it's very very smooth i mean they had everything timed and No issues. The scoring was easy. Really, Matt, Jake, Steph, Hammer, congratulations to all four of you. You did a phenomenal job. You should be very proud of yourselves because I've been to several tournaments and not all of them ran that smoothly. I didn't see any major issues. I didn't see any major fights. No one was shouting at anybody. Nothing got thrown that I could tell from, but a lot of fun. Thank you all very much for putting that on. I will see what the Budget looks like next year. I've been to a lot of tournaments. Josh, we did the recap and we said, hey, what do you want to do for next year? We looked ahead in the New Year's Day episode, right? What do you want to look forward to? And I'm like, I might go to like three tournaments. I think I've hosted one. I've been to three already and like coming up to Southern Assault in a couple of months. I don't know if I can do that heavy of a tournament schedule again. I don't know if I can do that again next year. We'll see.

Josh:

You get one. It's like your bucket list. Like, I want to travel the world, go to Battletech tournaments and win them all. You do it and you're like, I'm tired. I'm so tired. I

Steve:

just want to rest. I never

Josh:

wanted my own bed this much before. Oh my God.

Steve:

The mattresses are so bad. You know, look, going to sleep After you're 30, it's like a full contact sport. You're like, I don't know if I'm going to wake up. My shoulder's going to hurt. I don't know if it's going to be my hip. Maybe I'll just die. I don't know. We'll see if we wake up in the morning. Had a lot of fun. Next time, if you guys could change the weather to not be like 900 degrees, that'd be awesome.

Josh:

Working on it. We're working on

Steve:

it. It was so hot.

Josh:

Us Mid-Atlantic boys, we understand.

Steve:

Look, I'm from the frigid north, right? Yeah. I'll wear shorts in 40 degree weather, but... I was so cold. When you came to Adepticon?

Josh:

When I came to Motor City.

Steve:

That was May.

Josh:

I know. It was so cold. It

Steve:

was in the 60s. What's wrong with you? That's barbecue weather. That's like swimming and all sorts of good stuff.

Josh:

But no. Steve, thank you for going to Maryland and coming back with such a... I mean... First off, it's another trophy for you and B, another trophy for the Mech Bay, which I think was one of the things also in the New Year's resolutions.

Steve:

How many trophies can we take

Josh:

home? Yeah. But thank you most of all to the Maryland Battletech Group for putting on such a professional and fun event. It has been nothing but a pleasure to hear, read, and listen to all of the things that came out of that. Absolutely. Well, that's it for us tonight, folks. Remember, that tinfoil only keeps the C3 network out of your cockpit if you put it in the microwave first. Until next time, on The Battlefield.