Great story :) Yeah, Lost Expedition looks so good, and the cute art belies the fact that it’s a damn hard game. I really struggled to get it my first few times through. Hopefully it has clicked now.
I had a look at the Judge Dredd variant artwork and it does look pretty bad. Maybe it grows on you after a while. I did like the idea of the Slough of St Louis though.
Good session with Thunderbolt-Apache Leader today.
Cards, clockwise from top left are: Mission & Year (draw enemy battalions until their value equals 33 or more, what map tiles to use, make the enemy pop up (hidden units) odds a teeny bit lower), Modifiers (I have 25 Special Operation points with which to buy planes), and then the two battalions I’d like to prioritise as they give me maluses until they are dealt with:
I’m restricted to pre-1984 by the mission, so I have a pretty basic fleet (no Apaches, no unmanned drones etc):
Enemy battalions are laid out as follows, and are likely to advance at the end of each day, with consequences to your mission modifiers (pilot stress, SO points deducted, how many weapons you can carry etc):
Alpha team are go. A big part of the game is selecting your weapon loadout from a decently wide array of missiles and bombs. I made a mistake here as the battalion I was targetting was in a zone which should have removed two weapon loadout points from each plane.
The map tiles have ridges, which block line of sight and force you to take stress checks when crossing them, or force you out of cover to higher altitude where ground forces can shoot at you with impunity. The tactical game is bascially threading your way through the map and weighing the odds for dropping the most appropriate bombs for the situation:
Exiting the map having made a complete cock-up of the situation. I only got the battalion down to half strength before running out of ammo, which meant I had to go back with a different team later to finish the job. I made a really egregious error in that I forgot that using the A10’s autocannon was an option - a really good one! I guess I’d better stay away from the A10 Warthog thread until I sort myself out:
I need to work on my alluring-counter photography, but these bad boys were a mainstay - get an A10 pilot with +2 to Strike and you only need to drop one of them, then roll 4+ on a d10 to hit each enemy in the hex (in turn), rather than pew-pewing away at them all individually:
I got through 2.5 days worth of missions out of 4. The setup time bleeds into weapon selection, so it seems to take a while before you get to the point where you’re actually launching the attack, but that’s all part of the game. Enjoying it so far.
Question for the group - in a ‘campaign’ game like this, do you prefer to stick with it as your main game until the campaign runs out of steam, or do you mix and match games freely? I might be playing this for a while.