Gruntz after-action report and first thoughts

quozl

I played my first game of Gruntz 15mm last week.
Here are the forces we played with, you stat up your own units using whatever 15mm models you want.



The sides were both 131 points and I wanted a big variety of unit types involved.

The UNSC force had 1 light commander with sniper rifle, 2 light grav APCs, 3 basic gruntz squads, 1 spec sniper team, 1 spec missile team, and 1 each of a SAW and missile squad attachments.

The opposing Crusty force had 1 medium commander with plasma, 1 walking APC, 1 Medium mecha, 2 gruntz squads with plasma and active camo, 1 gruntz squad with jet-packs, power armour and shoot 5, 2 sniper squad attachments, and 1 plasma squad attachment.

The idea was that the Crusties would be harder hitting, more resilient but slightly shorter range and slower due to 1 walking APC/1 jetpack unit, versus two Grav APCs.

I picked the 'What's mine is mine' scenario, as it looked simple but more interesting than a simple stand-up fight. There are three objectives that start neutral and you gain points for each turn that you hold them plus bonus points if you convert one that belongs to your opponent.

I let my opponent choose forces and he went for the Crusties.

I won the roll for initiative and we placed objectives.

The only non basic rule that I choose to use was alternating activations as I f'ing hate I go, You go (IGOUGO). So much that I wrote a guest blog post about it on w-ired (http://w-ired.org/blog/2012/03/28/i-go-you-go-no-go/), so if my club-mates see me playing a IGOUGO, there'll be much slagging, which is best avoided!

While this all played out in alternating activations I'm going to list each players actions seperately as it's too hard to remember exact unit activation order.

Turn 1:
I zoom a grav APC forward to objective 3 (right hand most one) and place the APC so that it will provide cover to anybody at the objective.
Grunt unit pops out, and spends 1 action to start converting the objective. I'm not sure if I'm allowed spend the two actions over two turns converting it, but it doesn't affect any results as it still takes to the 2nd turn to convert either way.

2nd APC zooms forward to objective 2 (middle one), positions to provide cover.
Grunt unit pops out and starts working on the objective.

My plan is to seize the objectives and use the APCs as ablative shields for the gruntz, and just try to hold out long enough that I have too big a VP lead to assail.

3rd unit of grunts trundle forward towards objective 3, as more of my opponents forces are on this side, including his APC with grunt unit, and jet-packing power armour. So most of his highly mobile objective capturing stuff.

Commander and specialists move forwards into cover. Specialists have nice clear lines of fire to all three objectives and the paths to them. However I don't realise quite how woeful my shooting is in double range bracket, fortunately neither does my opponent and is terrified of them.

Opponent:
Walks his stuff forward slowly making for objective 3 on RHS with APC grunts/jetpacks, and objective 1 on LHS with walking gruntz.
My opponent was a bit shocked by the speed of my grav apc/grunts dumping units on two of the objectives. The grav APCs could move 18" a turn, or 24" once a game due to their perk.

He didn't want to leave cover and as neither of us knew how effective or otherwise shooting is in this game, he was nervous of coming out of cover even in my double range bracket. Turns out he was vastly over-estimating how scary my shooting is!

Turn 2:
I claim objectives 2 and 3.
RHS APC remains as ablative shield/cover.

Seeing as my opponent is hanging back, I decide to get greedy and try and steal the 3rd objective too!
APC on the middle objective moves a couple of inches towards the gruntz unit that isn't minding an objective. This gets that unit within 4" of the APC and they walk over and board it.

Specialists shift forward slightly and go prone, covering approachs to objectives. But at double range of course.

Opponent:
Still scared of my shooting. Inches forward in cover (where his guys are defence 14 thanks to active camo). Takes some long range shots at my APCs, does nothing due to the -2 to shooting thanks to moving fast (as he shoots at them before I reposition them slow move this turn).

Turn 3:
As I have more units than my opponent I trade off my less important stuff so that I can do the key stuff at the end of the turn when my opponent is finished.
Final actions of the turn are to zoom APC over to 1st objective - currently unclaimed. He blows the living cr@p out of it with a combined attack and a sniper SA attack from his lurking cowardly prawns squad. Leaving my APC with 4 boxes of health left. I disembark the gruntz squad as the final action of the turn, putting 2 in base to base with the objective and making sure that a 4" AOE placed on the grav tank wouldn't clip them - what can I say, I wasn't confident about the grav tank surviving much longer. It's a disposable asset

Turn 4:
I claim 1st objective - now hold all three.
He nukes the APC with his gruntz squad. It explodes but my guys are out of range. Crew killed instantly. Heroes to the UNSC /sadface

He hits my other APC with his big gruntz squad on the RHS. combined attack from 6 guys, plus seperate plasma SA and sniper SA hits. The grav vehicle continues to float serenely in the air, with all its critical systems gone and 5 IIRC boxes of damage left. It's doing its job as an ablative shield.

His jetpack squad walk out of the forest with the aid of a push move from their commander. Some long range shooting at somebody or something I don't recall doesn't do much.

He snipes at my commander with his APC, needing box-cars to hit. Misses but encourages me hide the commander better!

My specialist snipers and missile launcher fail to hit anything at double range, even with the sniper having let-rip.

Turn 5:
He kills my remaining APC.
My middle grunt squad move up and shoot the Power Armour squad - I figure I own that objective and might as well try and hurt his ability to attack other objectives. My pathetic shooting, hitting on 8s or 11s and needing 9s to kill if I hit, does nothing. My SAW gunner and missila SA also bounce/miss. I realise that I was daft but didn't want to just sit there all day

My sniper manages to hit once, but needing a 7 to kill the PA guy fails it. This was entirely due to a random passing friend shouting 'fail it' at me while rolling the damage!
Missile specialist continues to suck. Badly. I am failing epically with these guys. I should have gotten within single range band but then I'd have had no cover. Still, they're doing nothing where they are. Their only reasonable targets are the PA in the open (def 12) as the basic grunts with active camo in a forest need box-cars (13 actually!) to be hit at double range. Not a chance.

His power armour guys gun down my 8 man middle grunt squad. They condition brown themselves and run away - or at least the two survivors do!

My RHS grunt squad, holding objective 3, hide behind the building, ready to pop out if my opponents grunts come out of cover to try to claim the objective. Remaining within 6" of the objective they also mean it can't be captured without dealing with them.

My opponent refuses to walk out into the open to be gunned down on my turn, but I think he had to here, as he won't get objective points staying where he is. Especially as I'd need 8s to hit and the 7s to kill, so I doubt I'd have done much to him anyway! We're both used to playing Infinity and in Infinity if they can see you, odds are that you're dead, so this is some change for us.

His Mecha tank - 36 points of awesomeness - moves up and tries to shoot my specialist missile launcher. He fails to hit thanks to my def 15 in cover.

Turn 6:
Not much happens. He kills a few of my gruntz in the RHS squad but can't claim objectives. I manage to kill a member of his power armour squad with my sniper. Finally! There is much rejoicing

Victory to me due to points for holding the objectives. Moral victory to my opponent for killing loads of my stuff, to almost none of his


Thoughts:
My opponent's force is harder hitting and more resilient, especially in cover, so I think he needed to barrel up the field and give me the beating that I so richly deserved. However we both over-estimated the killiness of units, probably because we're coming to this from Infinity. He had cover to get really near to the objectives and still be def 14 with his basic gruntz, or just barrel forward with his power armour guys at 12" a turn and as long as he kept out of LOS of my specialists he'd be fine. Even they struggled to do much to them!

My evil plan of using the APCs as ablative shields worked well. Especially the turn after they fast moved, they're pretty resilient with the -2 to shooting. Once that was gone, they didn't last long but they sucked up some shooting which could have gove to denying me objectives and they provided cover nicely. I treated them as only +1 cover for my gruntz, is that right?

I may try and tweak the stats a bit to make things a bit more killy!
I would be worried about reducing human guard to 11 and leaving crusties at 12, or giving either side a +1 shoot advantage. The bell curve means that the difference between hitting on a 7 or an 8 is big! I don't want one side to be hitting on 7s and the other on 8s as I worry that the point difference in the units isn't big enough for this big an advantage. However, this is only my first game, and clearly it's been played a lot by others, so I am only speculating here.

Grav APCs rock. 18" versus 12" for walking is a big deal.

I enjoyed the game but have the vague feeling that I'm not quite doing it right. I felt like this when I first started playing Infinity, and I was right, we were messing up terrain amounts/type which completely breaks that game. Once we got that right, it became fantastic. I've the feeling I need to tweak stuff here too and that it can be significantly more fun.

My opponent did not like how ineffective shooting was at range, and TBH neither did I. I understand that Robin wanted a close range game, but long range shooting seemed to us almost slightly annoyingly ineffective. Maybe we need to just bump up shoots and perhaps reduce guard - perhaps considering the versatility of Gruntz, the onus is on us to stat the sides to produce the game that we want.

If we were coming to this from 40K then the shooting would probably be fairly similar to 40K levels of killi-ness, I think. Possibly higher even.

quozl

Heya lads,

I played my third game of Gruntz yesterday, with yet another lad from my gaming club - Paul.

A bigger game again as I get more and more stuff painted

Paul had 2 grav tanks, 2 grav APCs, 4 squads of gruntz + 1 missile squad attachment, a sniper weapons team and a missile launcher weapons team. Plus his commander.
I had 2 walking APCs, 1 walking quadriped medium mecha, 2 walking bipedal light mecha, 3 squads of gruntz + 1 squad of power armour gruntz, 3 plasma squad attachments, 2 sniper squad attachments.

We each had 34 models. So that's starting to get into small 40K army scale territory, I think.

It was another fun game. Paul had the speed and mobility with his stupid grav tanks - coincidentally choosing a monastery on a giant hill terrain piece that was a PITH to get up without flyers!
I had the slower moving, shorter range but harder hitting and slightly more resilient Prawns!

3 Objectives to be captured. You capture an objective by spending a gruntz units full activation in base to base with it, without an enemy model within 6" of the objective.

Being filthy tourney players, no objective was captured until half way through turn 5 of 6! As I plonked my jet-packing heavy armour gruntz in cover near the monastery objective (nobody else could get up there in time!) to deny it to Paul's grav moving force, and he dumped a grav tank and a grav APC to sit on the objective near to my deployment zone, so that I couldn't capture it until working my way (slowly) through a fairly tough tank and a fairly wussy (but lucky!) APC.


Middle objective we both had squads nearby and vehicles sitting on it, and getting blown up around it, but nobody could actually take it.

Half way through turn 5 with all his basic gruntz squads gone, and most of his vehicles blown away, I finally managed to take one objective, sealing victory as with no gruntz squads left, Paul couldn't take it back. Very enjoyable. It took 2 hours to play and we were fielding 238 points each, which I think is getting to a fairly large game.

I totally intended to take photos - especially as everything fielded is now fully painted - but forgot as it was an absolute nail-biter the whole way through, apart from turn 1 which was fun but only the manoeuvring for position when we would engage on turn 2.

Greg

Here's the forces we used - remember that you stat up your own units and armies. So this is just how I wanted my two forces to be, and we had multiples of some of these units



I need to take new photos of the stuff that is now fully painted but isn't in the card photos.