Formation Building Example #2

Formation Building Example #2

Hey Game Fans, we’re back with an example of how to put a formation together using the Combat Manuals for Alpha Strike.  If you’re interested in the explanation for how this is going to work, feel free to check out our article on the process, which you can find here.  I’ll take you through the step by step process to get you an idea of how this works.

Today we’re going to take a look at a mercenary formation that should be a lot more adaptable to any situation than the craziness we put together last week.  We’re going to put together a Mercenary Company hailing from the Grave Walkers.  The Grave Walkers are a Mercenary Combat Command that contains two subcommands, The First Grave Walkers, and The Second Grave Walkers.  The Grave Walkers have a unique pilot listed in their force brief, and we’re going to build this formation around that pilot and their mech.  

Process 1:  Getting Started with the Grave Walkers

Step 1:  Choose a Point Value

This particular formation is intended to be used at 450 points.  This is a good point value to build a company that feature a variety of weight classes.  The specific company we’re building is from the 1st Grave Walkers, and features 1 lance with Assault weight machines, and 2 lances that feature lighter options.

Step 2:  Choose an Era

This lance is built using the Late Succession Wars (Renaissance) Era

Step 3: Choose a Faction

This is a Mercenary Formation.

Step 4: Choose a Combat Command

The Combat Command i’ve chosen for this formation is the 1st Grave Walkers.  The 1st Grave Walkers have a regular experience rating and several Special Command Abilities to choose from.  The Second Battalion of the First Grave Walkers is entirely energy weapon based in their armament, so i am going to have to do some digging to find the right fit.  

Interlude: Formation Organization

Now at this point in the text is a multiple page discussion about the standard organizational scheme used by the combat manual you have in front of you.  Take some time and look through it, because if you decide you want to expand your forces as you get deeper into the game, having a coherent battalion is a lot easier if you look at its components.  This particular section ends with a discussion of how to put together a Company, along with the typical lances that are the building blocks of companies.  

Process 2: Build Formations (1st operation)

Now that you’ve got the basics figured out for what you want to put together, it’s time to actually go through the steps and put together each one of your formations.  Now we’re going to plan how to put together a company, which requires 3 lance sized formations.  Let’s go through some steps to get you started, and cover a few distinct oddities.

Step 1: Choose Formation Type (Assault Lance #1)

There are a lot of choices for putting together the first lance of this formation, as either a fire lance or an assault lance would work.  We’ve thought about this one pretty hard, and have decided to go with an Assault Lance, primarily because the units that are available with the ENE special ability and Assault weight aren’t prevalent enough for us to be able to fill out the entire lance with Snipers that aren’t 4 Awesomes.  

Step 2: Choose Units for the Formation

I am going to include the special mechwarrior listed for this command, Captain Lenore Staley.  She comes with her own Awesome (8Q)

1. Captain Staley (Awesome 8Q)
2. Banshee (BNC-3M)
3. Charger (CGR-1A1)
4. Awesome (8Q)

Step 3:  Select Skill and adjust PV

These folks are all regular skill rating, and other than the Captain, they are regular members of the company.  They cost 143 points, and 2 faction points since i have two copies of the same Model (the Awesome 8Q)

Step 4:  Assign Special Pilot Abilities

No one in this lance is assigned a Special Pilot Ability.

Process 2: Build Formations (2nd operation)

Step 1: Choose Formation Type (Cavalry Lance Lance #1)

The Cavalry Lance is a rapid response unit that moves quickly across the battlefield and puts holes in bad guys.  This lance fills in the expected role of one of the other lances listed in the description of the specific company we’re working on.  

Step 2: Choose Units for the Formation

This formation runs fast heavies and mediums, so we’ve got our work sort of cut out for us with this formation.  We’re trying to  keep the ENE restriction and only running units with this special ability, but we aren’t going to make it.  

1. Ostroc (OSR-3C)
2. Ostsol (OTL-4D)
3. Grasshopper (GHR-5H)
4. Guillotine (GTL-4L)

Step 3:  Select Skill and adjust PV

This cavalry lance uses regular pilots and has a PV of 135

Step 4:  Assign Special Pilot Abilities

No one in this lance is assigned a Special Pilot Ability.

Process 2: Build Formations (3rd operation)

Now that you’ve got the basics figured out for what you want to put together, it’s time to actually go through the steps and put together each one of your formations.  Now we’re going to plan how to put together a company, which requires 3 lance sized formations.  Let’s go through some steps to get you started, and cover a few distinct oddities.

Step 1: Choose Formation Type (Battle Lance)

The Battle Lance incorporates a wider variety of mech types, and this gives us a lot of room to figure out what our unit probably needs.  We’re going with some decently quick heavy units but they aren’t fast enough to qualify for a Striker Lance.  Again, we’re going to try to keep with the Heavy mechs with the ENE special rule.

Step 2: Choose Units for the Formation

I have selected four heavy mechs for this lance of the company.  My current list looks like:

1. Black Knight (BL-7-KNT)
2. Black Knight (BL-7-KNT-L)
3. Black Knight (BL-7-KNT)
4. Black Knight (BL-7-KNT-L)

Step 3:  Select Skill and adjust PV

This unit at Regular skill rating has a Point Value of 134, and costs 4 Faction Points for the multiple copies of Black Knights.  

Step 4:  Assign Special Pilot Abilities

No one in this lance is assigned a Special Pilot Ability.

Process 2: Build Formations (Bonus operation)

We only spent 412 of our 450 points, which is just enough to squeeze in a surprise.  We’re adding an Air Lance (subcontracted from another mercenary command, probably the Hell’s Black Aces) to our Assault Lance.  Since these are sub contracted mercenaries, they don’t benefit from any of the SCA choices or special abilities granted by the Assault Lance.  This let’s us add a couple of Aerospace Fighters to give us some speedy scouts and maybe ordnance carriers on good days.  

Step 1: Choose Formation Type (Air Lance)

The Air Lance consists of two aerospace fighters that are attached to a ground lance.  We are going to add this Air Lance to the Assault Lance.  

Step 2: Choose Units for the Formation

We only have 38 points to spend, so we’re going to have to get some lightweight units for this.  We opt for a pair of Cheetahs.

5. Cheetah (F-10)
6. Cheetag (F-10)

Step 3:  Select Skill and adjust PV

This unit at Regular skill rating has a Point Value of 36, and costs 2 Faction Points for the pair of Cheetahs.

Step 4:  Assign Special Pilot Abilities

No one in this lance is assigned a Special Pilot Ability.

NOTES:

The Company is the basic administrative unit of forces built for Alpha Strike, and depending on its make up can include aerospace assets, infantry, vehicles and/or battlemechs.  There are several important concepts to keep track of at the company level when you’re putting your forces together.  

1. Faction Points:  Faction Points are managed at the company level, and a standard sized company has 12 Faction points to purchase out of faction mechs or special lance formations.  You can’t share faction points between your companies, and they should be tracked on the formation Worksheet from page 125.
2. Rare Units:  Some units are uncommon within a given faction’s availability.  This means that while they don’t cost FPs to purchase, they are limited to One per company.  These units are marked with an * in the Availability List.
3. Multiple versions of the same variant:  Most military forces lack a large enough logistical support network to field lances and companies of the exact same mech.  There are exceptions to this rule, but anytime a Force builder puts two copies of the same variant into their list, it costs them 1 Faction Point per copy.  Example:  Tim puts two copies of the BLR-1G into his list, each of which costs him a Faction Point.  Had he selected the BLR-1G and the BLR-1S, he wouldn’t have had to pay the extra Faction Points because they are two different variants  
4. Story Availability List:  Some mechs have an interesting story as to how they made it to the battlefield.  What this means in play is that by expending a lot of FPs, a player can access a host of wider options for picking up a specific mech.  For 6 FPs, the player can access any of the following Availability Lists: Davion, Kurita, Liao, Marik, Steiner, Mercenary, Wolf’s Dragoons, and Star League cache: Star League.  For 7 FPs, they can access Star League: Star League Royal, and if during the Clan Invasion, Clan Jade Falcon, Clan Ghost Bear, Clan Wolf, Clan Smoke Jaguar, Clan Nova Cat.
5. Unique Characters:  Each Combat Manual has a selection of unique characters that can be added to a formation.  They have fixed skill ratings, special abilities, and a unit assigned to them.  Each Force can only have one Unique character.  
6. Sub Commands:  In cases where Players want to add additional forces that don’t feature on the primary Combat Command’s Roster, (For example, adding a lance of combat vehicles to an All battlemech force), they can assign a sub command made up of the desired units from another of the larger Combat Command’s sub commands.  Units pulled from another sub command are considered to be a part of their own company (though they can be as small a formation as a lance), and draw their Special Command Abilities and other supplemental rules from their specific Sub Command.
7. Supplemental Formations: Some players may wish to add units that don’t show up anywhere in their Combat Command’s available forces.  Doing so is as easy as combining the desired units into formation sized chunks and assigning them to the larger force.  These forces do not generate Faction Points, and come from either the General or Kurita Availability Lists.

Process 3: Assigning Special Command Abilities

Special Command Abilities are basically force level special abilities that any given combat command are capable of acquiring.  These represent specific training styles, methods of organization, or just odd quirks of how things worked out for that particular Combat Command.  For players selecting a force that doesn’t belong to a listed Combat Command, you can still acquire Special Command Abilities, but they are randomly determined as detailed below.

Step 1: Determine a Force’s Experience Rating

13 units are at skill rating 4, with 1 unit at Skill Rating 3.  This gives an experience rating of 3.9 (rounded up to 4).  

Step 2: Determine the Number of Special Command Abilities

As a Regular unit, the 1st Grave Walkers receives two Special Command Abilities.  

Step 3:  Assign Special Command Abilities

The Grave Walkers have four special command ability choices, and we opt for the Force the Initiative and Off Map Movement SCAs.   

Conclusions

So at 450 points, we’ve assembled a much more generic force than the Sun Zhang cadre we built last week.  Built around heavy and assault class machines, the Grave Walkers have a variety of special abilities and options to tinker with.  We’ll put together a couple more things like this in the coming weeks so you can look at some different formation options.  

Since this formation includes a unique pilot, we’re not going to be able to put this together for you using the Alpha Strike Army builder.  If you want to put this together, you can use the Army Builder and calculate the points yourself.  

That’s the first of many potential outbreaks of Formation construction.  As we get access to more combat manuals we’ll put together a bunch more of these.  Next week we’ll build a formation that uses the standard lances, and see if we can’t find some other creative things to do.  

Game On, Game Fans