| Introduction
Greetings, all.
How about an exciting report of some StarCraft battle on Lost Temple? What? You're tired of those? Good! Because this isn't a BR about that kind of thing. This is a BR about MechWarrior 4: Black Knight, full of big robots running around blowing stuff into smithereens. A note on images: I run the game at 1600x1200, but since loading screenshots (and there are a LOT of screenshots in this BR) like that would be a very serious pain, I have reduced them to 800x600 (maximum) .jpgs for this BR. Some quality reduction will doubtlessly occur; also, my HUD will appear different in different shots, as I only need to reduce the full-screen shots, not the cropped ones. That said, let's get into it!
Ready to Rumble
Since I own the Inner Sphere mech pack, I have access to a few new mechs. One of these is the Hunchback, a fifty-ton medium that I greatly enjoy using. It's fast, fairly durable, and can carry a big gun.
I am an infighter at heart, not a sniper, so in my case the big gun is an LBX-20, a cannon that is very shortrange but packs a great punch, and reloads quickly.
Nothing too fancy. The lasers are medium X-pulse style, fair damage, quick reload time, fairly high heat. Heavier than normal lasers, too, but not by too much. A good secondary weapon to my cannon.
Looking for Trouble
I go searching for a game. I quickly find one that looks promising: a 30-minute round of Capture the Flag (a rarely-played gametype), on a map I am unfamiliar with (since I bought the Black Knight expansion only days ago), with the "heat on, unlimited ammo" rules on, which is not perfect but good enough. It curbs the excessive use of heavy lasers. Missile boats still exist, but they aren't so bad. I choose my mech, select my team (team 2, with the red paint scheme, opposing team 1, with the blue paint scheme), and away I go.
I take up a spot beside my flag and scan for targets. My mech doesn't really have a defined role for a fight such as this; I'm too slow to effectively capture flags myself, or chase down flag-grabbing light mechs, but at the same time I'm too lightly-armed to fight the enemy flag defenders.
I decide to go scouting. Since this is a new area for me, I head towards the most interesting map feature, which is the base directly north of my flag position. When I reach it, what do I see?
A freshly-spawned enemy Bushwhacker, with the unfortunate player name of "La poop". We exchange friendly greetings.
He is not a particularly skilled player, but that is OK because neither am I. We circle each other; he has what seems to be a pair of weak autocannons and a Thunderbolt missile, which is something to avoid. I do manage to avoid most of its shots, since its reload time is very long and it has no tracking. I succeed with more shots than he does, and soon
I gloat, but not for long: I am still standing on his spawning point, and here he comes again, looking for revenge!
One of my allies arrives in a Thor, causing La poop to self-destruct in fear. Or, more likely, he self-destructed to spawn a new, undamaged mech, since you can do that without a score penalty in Capture the Flag.
But La poop is the least of our worries at the moment; a devilishly fast Uller mech, piloted by CYT_J Dogg, has just stolen our flag, and through my zoom scope I see another foe approaching:
The grinning face of an Atlas, one hundred tons of humanoid death. ANGEL is playing flag defense, a job an Atlas is well design for. VERY well designed for, in fact...
My mech tumbles to the ground after being hit by a salvo from the weapons (he said later that he was carrying two particle projection cannons and a gauss rifle) of ANGEL. I respawn back at my base, and decide to check the score:
We're doing quite well, with a flag capture (worth 1000 points) and a kill (worth 25 points) versus the other team's record of two kills and zero captures.
After seeing how well a good flag-defending mech can work, I scan to see if we have one. No, we don't. I ask our team who is on flag defense, and receive no answer. I decide that the safest way to do something is to do it yourself, and post myself on guard duty.
They say guard duty is boring in the military. That doesn't apply in MechWarrior CTF, because I was guarding for a very short amount of time before an enemy appeared. It was CYT_J Dogg, the Uller flag-grabber, with an ally of mine in hot pursuit.
I put up a stalwart defense.
Realizing that I cannot catch the elusive Uller, I fall in with a procession heading back towards my own flag zone. It is our own COnfed Rebel, also in an Uller, carrying the enemy flag, being chased by La poop's Bushwhacker.
I drop into a mauling position directly behind La poop. He is so focused on his target that he ignores me, even after I begin tearing into his rear armor with cannon and lasers.
I am not, however, able to do damage quickly enough to prevent the death of COnfed Rebel.
But thanks to the quick action of V8i_Sigma_Siegel, the flag is still in our possession.
The flag is soon captured, but La poop follows the capturer all the way to our base. Thinking quickly, he grabs our flag and heads back towards his own area.
He is stopped by a shot from COnfed Rebel. That does not deter the enemy; things go from "under control" to "big trouble" as CYT_J Dogg makes another lightning dash into our base and steals the flag from under our noses. Yet again, I am unable to catch him, and can only watch through my zoom scope as he runs away.
I chase him closer to the enemy base than any medium mech should go.
JarheadEd is a brave pilot, but it takes more than just bravery to survive a flag run when it is guarded by a Dragon heavy mech and an Atlas assault mech.
I do something incredibly foolish. I grab the flag that JarheadEd just dropped.
I run, with something like four enemies right behind me. My other arm is soon blown off, much to my dismay. Near-misses fly past me, and shatter crystal formations. However, it's not the near-misses that bother me, it's the non-misses.
V8i_Sigma_Siegel grabs the flag from my still-stumbling-forward corpse, and runs it onward to score another capture for our team. This angers the opposition greatly. ANGEL has decided that he is bored with flag defense, and goes on the warpath. His mech thunders towards our base, sending an alpha strike of gauss and PPC rounds harmlessly into the air (not sure why - maybe one of our mechs was using jump jets).
My newly-respawned mech tears into ANGEL, who is much slower than I am and has a hard time keeping up with my circling pattern. A Cougar mech comes to my assistance, and we pound away. ANGEL, confused, unleashes a salvo that destroys CYT_J Dogg, his own teammate.
ANGEL cannot take the pounding of my weapons, and dies soon after the shot was taken.
I decide to go play escort for our flag-carrier mech. This scenario starts to resemble the one I played out earlier; my escorted mech dies, I grab the flag, I run like hell while being chased by a heavier mech.
There's a twist this time. I don't get blown away immediately, to my surprise. I make my best possible speed out of there, around the corner of a mountain range and out of the line of fire of the Dragon behind me.
I call Paco, who is driving a Nova Cat laser mech. I figure he can clear the enemies that are after me. I am correct; Paco shoots down Lightsniper, and I reach our team's flag area. SCORE!
ANGEL decides to do another flag-run in his assault mech. Like before, it doesn't go well for him, since he is just too big a target when fighting against multiple fast enemies.
A quick check of the score: with ten and a half minutes left, Team 2 is winning, 4175 to 3225. Team 2 has four flag captures and ten kills, while team 1 has three flag captures and twelve kills
ANGEL is feeling hurt by his defeat at the hands of lights and mediums.
I act stupid again, and pick a fight with RG_Spaceghost (spelled using some ALT symbols that I do not know how to copy); he's in a Dragon, ten tons heavier than my Hunchback. When Lightsniper, also in a Dragon, shows up to lend him a hand, I am utterly overwhelmed and die very, very quickly.
The flag-grabbers are still dashing across the map, retrieving flags, being chased, losing the flags, and sometimes reaching their goals.
This hunting party comes dashing towards me. Teucros, although he has made at least one kill, is not in a true combat-worthy mech and can't last under fire. Spaceghost seems poised to return his team's flag. Can he make it?
NO! COnfed Rebel steals the flag right out from under him and heads for his goal. Spaceghost and Lightsniper are still in pursuit, but they are even slower than I am. I couldn't catch J Dogg, so they don't have a prayer of catching Rebel.
But they don't need to catch him. They just need to destroy him...
That's a bit of an odd picture. It says Lightsniper made the killing shot, but the laserfire is coming from my left, while Lightsniper is in front of me. My theory is that Rebel is already in an "advanced stage" of blowing up, and the laserfire from the left had nothing to do with his death.
Teucros, wanting another shot at a flag-capture, dashes in and performs the "last-minute grab" move, just as Rebel did when Teucros himself died. By now, the other two mechs have fallen completely out of range, so Teucros runs the flag into the base and scores unbothered. Lightsniper and Spaceghost self-destruct, to put themselves back at their base. I do not like that tactic; there should be a point score loss (nothing big, -25 seems fair since that's what you get for killing an enemy mech) for self-destructing.
Wanting to accomplish something, I rush towards the enemy base, to meet an enemy Thor. This is one I have not faced before, named BraverVandenburg. He seems to be carrying a lot of missiles, but my antimissile system destroys the first salvo of each launch.
Braver is a tough enemy; it's a good thing he isn't giving me his full attention, or I'd be toast. The concept of toast re-enters my mind, however, when the next enemy appears on my screen.
It's my regular foe, Lightsniper. And while my attention has been on the fact that I'm about to die, it hasn't been on where I'm going.
The next moments are utterly predictable, if you have picked up the details of my playstyle from the earlier parts of the report. I charge, unload a full salvo into the back of ANGEL's Atlas. It does not fall, although I do take off its left arm. It turns, with an evil grin on its face
BOOM. Interestingly enough, it was Lightsniper, not ANGEL, who made the final shot.
Score check: 6275 us, 3350 them. They still lead in kills (17 vs 14), but flag captures are were the real scoring lies.
I duel SpaceGhost in a little canyon, where I keep getting stuck on the slopes.
He fears me! He turns tail and runs away! Well, he probably realized that killing me wouldn't defend his flag. The match is almost over, but I still want to get in some action. Where do I go?
For all my fear of dying, given the choice between fear and boredom I will choose fear, time after time. Teucros is doing yet another flag run (don't you think that would get boring? I guess there's a rush to dodging heavy gauss fire and trying to get away, though. I wouldn't know, because I generally can't dodge it).
Speaking of dodging, Teucros does a nice bit of it right there, turning neatly out of the way of a couple of large lasers and a heavy gauss rifle.
La poop notices me hanging around shooting at him, and turns me into giblets. This is an important lesson: mediums should never fight heavies on the heavy's terms. It leads to violent death.
Down by several flag-captures, with the clock almost run down, the enemy has nothing to lose. They launch a full invasion of our territory:
I swear, I could hardly have gotten a nicer shot if I had staged it. Don't know if Lightsniper (at least, I think it was Lightsniper, but there were two Dragons on the enemy team) missed while shooting at me, or if he was targetting someone behind me.
I meet them, full force.
This could have turned into another full-scale battle, with multiple mechs from both sides. Sadly, it instead turned into the "Match Ended" screen, as the timer ran out.
After a half-hour of fighting back and forth across the map, Team 2, which I was part of, was victorious. I failed to get a screenshot of the end scores themselves, sadly.
Closing Segment
Now, wasn't that refreshing, after reading "So-and-so expanded to his natural, while Player X expanded to HIS natural! Then So-and-so went for a zerg rush! But Player X held him off with Zealots! Then I lost connection and didn't see the rest of the map!" one hundred times?
This report written by Kylaer. Please post comments and critiques, so I'll know what to improve next time.
|
Home
Forum
Starcraft Tournaments
