Mission #7: Sit there and try to look menacing
Next mission is a defense mission. My first defense mission. I am not sure what I should do to defend because I have a feeling that I can’t defend in any depth.
I’m going to go for salvage on this mission because I feel like there will be some mech chassis to add to my collection. Probably nothing particularly useful (stupid Las Vegas Golden Knights hickey team just eliminated the San Jose Sharks - I’m not a fan of either but having an expansion team just waltz their way through the playoffs is annoying me. Marc-Andre Flury is pretty good though).
The lance makeup for this mission will remove the lighter of the scouts in order to bring back into service my third mech, choosing weight over maneuverability. I’ve moved some of the pilots around but nothing significant. I should have reconfigured one of those mediums as a missile pod with legs.
Not a bad defensive position (“It’s over, Anakin! I have the high ground!”). I am going to move my scout off to the right and forward to see if I can squeak out some contacts before they become a threat.
Two moves out and I have a good idea what’s happening.
Those are light mechs, and closing the distance fast.
Trying to get lucky, I throw down a sensor lock on the middle mech (I want to target the guy to the far left of my position but I guess that my scout can’t see that far with their sensors. I use the LRM’s on two of my mediums but don’t do much to slow the target down.
Those little guys move up fast and I am starting to think that I might be in trouble.
They are targeting the building and I am not sure if I can allow that building to be destroyed. It had not crossed my mind that they would choose to engage the structures so fast. If I had, I would have considered giving them something else to spit their fire and fury against. That leaves me reacting about a turn behind where I should have been.
I move out the Vindicator which, incidentally, walks through a few of the buildings that we are trying to protect, nothing significant but I guess we have stock in building material companies (or our banks do) so someone is likely happy.
This starts the chain of events where I feel truely unlucky.
During my turns of missing light mechs with my shots, a second force appears on my right-rear flank. At this point I have destroyed one of the enemy scout mechs, leaving two slightly damaged scouts to keep taking cracks at that tall building.
I take another turn to try to decisively deal with my front before having to react to the second group.
But I’m not doing it right because the RNG engine is handing me a bunch of low rolls (but luckily no critical fail 1’s … yet - and honestly this DnD joke might imply that such a thing exists in Battletech but I sure hope not 
).
This leads me to one of my mistakes for this mission … firing arcs. I assume that my multi-target capable pilot (Glitch) is able to start making her way over to my right flank where she would be able to split her fire: direct fire on the right flank units with indirect LRM fire on those annoying scouts. I forget that depending on which way her mech is facing, those LRMs can do a 180 to go after what is now behind her. Here is me cursing the indirect fire arc that disappeared after I had moved! The nerve!
Meanwhile, back at the front, I have directed a second medium mech off to the right flank because additional vehicles have shown up and I do not want some little toy trucks taking down the buildings behind me. That leaves my BlackJack and Spider mechs to bully and playground stomp a pair of Locusts who have stopped doing damage but have not stopped running around and annoying me.
It takes a lot of work and a lot of stomping and head butting but they finally lie down.
Seriously, who coded the BlackJack to head butt it’s opponents. It has a nice glass pilot viewport on the front! When I want to head butt an opposing mech, I want a solid part of my mech to do the job without smashing the greenhouse on the front of that mech into sharp pinching hazards of an opposing mech!
It is a win though and although there was damage to the maintenance compound (I swear those small buildings were like that when we got there) there was also no significant damage to our forces.
I chose the Spider and Locust salvage and call it a day.
Fin.