Well, I finished building my All Quiet on the Martian Front land ironclad model a few months ago, but I had yet to try it out in battle. So yesterday the USLI Albuquerque took to the field and emerged victorious not once but twice.
For the first game we just decided to pit the Albuquerque alone against an equal point value of Martians and see what would happen. 750 points buys three Assault Tripods and a Scout Tripod. Truth to tell, the Martians seemed a little outclassed before the first die was rolled. The land ironclad, bristling with guns, looked like a real monster.
But as every veteran gamer can tell you, there's an unwritten rule that the first time you use some shiny new unit which you have lavished so much time and effort on to assemble and paint—it gets blown away in short order. It just always seems to happen that way.
And so it seemed would be the case this time. We set up the forces at opposite ends of the long side of the table, giving the Albuquerque an advantage due to the long range of its 12" and 7" guns. (I built my model with the 7" replaced by a Tesla Gun to match the USLI Albuquerque in my novel "The Great Martian War: Counterattack!" but for this game we just said it was the standard 7" gun.) The humans won the initiative and the land ironclad rumbled forward. Its mighty 12" gun took aimed and fired—and missed.
The Martians then advanced at their maximum speed, but were still well out of range. The humans won the initiative again. With the forces closing on each other, the 7" was now in range, too. Both guns fired, blasts of flame and smoke billowing outward, their concussions shaking the air… and both missed. Drat!
The Martians now advanced into range of their heavy heat rays. Hitting the lumbering prey-creature war machine was easy (needing only a 3 on a D10) but the ironclad's heavy armor was hard to pierce, even for a heavy heat ray. But one shot did penetrate the armor and the roll on the damage table was a 10—a critical hit. The Albuquerque could only survive 5 such hits, and now its armor was weaker, too. It seemed like maybe the beast wasn't so fearsome after all.
But the next turn saw the Albuquerque move into range of its 5" and 4" guns and a veritable storm of fire erupted from it. Damage was scored on several tripod, but at last the 12" gun scored a hit. With 7+ power, it had a very good chance of penetrating the Martian armor and it did. And then with the super-heavy gun rule, the human player rolls TWO D10 and adds them together on the damage table. This means a VERY good chance of a kill and so it proved. One of the tripods exploded. That was more like it!
But now the Martians saw a potential weakness in the land ironclad. It was very slow and unmaneuverable. If they were to take cover behind the woods, they could use their ability to move, shoot, and move again to stay out of sight and yet continue to fire at the prey-creatures. The Albuquerque would have little hope of getting a clear shot.
Both sides saw this at the same time. The human player realized, that in this case all he could do would be to retreat as far from the woods as he could in hopes of forcing the Martians to move too far from their cover to retreat back again.
But luck was with the plucky humans. The Martians were not quite in position to carry out their new plan. One tripod had moved just a little too far beyond the woods and could on quite get back to cover with its second move. The humans would get one more shot.
And it was a great one! The 12" scored a direct hit on an assault tripod which exploded. Both of the other tripods, despite being behind cover, were within 6" and took 3 Power 2 hits. One of them blew up, too! The sole surviving tripod had no choice but to flee. Victory for the Albuquerque!
This game, as we'd expected, had not taken very long, so we set up for another one. We doubled the size of the Martian force and added about 700 points of additional human forces. A platoon of MKII steam Tanks, a platoon of MKIIIs, a MKIV and a heavy field battery. Once we were deployed, we started again.
Once again, the human long range fire with the 12" gun and now the heavy field battery, wasn't terribly effective, although one tripod was destroyed. By turn 3 everyone was in range, blasting away. The Martians adopted a strategy of taking on the supporting human forces and leaving the land ironclad to last. I think this was a smart thing to do and very quickly, they rushed forward and soon all the other human units except for the field battery had been destroyed or routed.
The Martians had lost a tripod to the 12" gun and several other tripods had sustained a number of armor hits. But it looked as though soon the Albuquerque would be alone, facing seven tripods.
But then, in an amazing turn where every gun the land ironclad possessed was able to blast away in every direction. Two tripods were destroyed and three others sustained heavy damage ALL of them taking the critical which damaged their steering. And as a bonus, the heavy field battery killed another one before being destroyed itself. So, The land ironclad was all alone, but the Martians had lost four tripods., Just one more and they would have to break off. They needed to score some serious damage and quickly.
The Martians did their best, but only scored a single armor hit on Albuquerque. The land ironclad fired back in its own turn. Surely it could finish off at least one of the damaged tripods! But then the 12" gun missed. The 7" missed, the 5-inchers and the 4-inchers, all missed or bounced off the Martian armor. Albuquerque was down to its last two machine guns when they scored a pair of hits on a damaged tripod. It had taken four armor hits, but the Power +1 machine guns still needed to roll 6s to penetrate the armor. A pair of 9s! Two penetrations! And then on the damage table another 9! The Martian collapsed in ruin and the rest fled.
Victory for the USLI Albuquerque!
The land ironclads do seem a bit underpriced. For 750 points you get a heck of a lot of firepower and tremendous resistance to damage. Still, I don't think the ironclads are unstoppable. On a table more crowded with terrain the Martians might be able to take advantage of their higher movement rates to neutralize some of the ironclad's power.
But the land ironclads are a blast to play!
has been watching some documentaries lately set in the Western Desert, and was inspired to create this...
