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Megagame: Invasion from Mars 02
Dateline General Buck's advanced HQ on West Continent, Cydonia Operation VALKYRIE has been a major success! A successful seaborne assault by 3rd Tank Brigade has taken DEANVILLE cutting off the line of retreat of an enemy armoured division (although at a cost of 3,000 civilian casualties and ejecting an enemy infantry brigade West along the coast). A simultaneous assault by the 1st & 2nd Tank Brigades from the front line to the North has reduced the enemy Division to less than half strength and prevented its escape. Additionally an Airborne assault has taken place landing a sea marine force in both OLYMPUS and ENSEMBLE, threatening the enemy Air Logistics Base to the South of OLYMPUS. The news is greeted with delight back home, and I have been awarded a medal. I also have four more RMP and reinforcements in the…
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Megagame: Invasion from Mars 01
This is one of Megagame Makers megagames, designed by Jim Wallman and played in Anerley Town Hall in south London. The Invasion from Mars website has the game rules and the map as well as some background info on the downloads page. I played the part of General Stanley Buck, a loyal and competent commander of the Democratic Republic of Cydonia's Army Group West (AGW) (in reality about Corps strength, three two brigade armoured divisions plus air and sea components with appropriate logistics support). (details of some typical units) At the game start AGW is already committed and has captured the Eastern end of the West Continent (link to map). This gives a firm jumping off point for the next phase of the offensive and the military balance shows that AGW slightly outnumbers the New Cydonia Colony (NCC) forces. In…
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Economics of New Colonies
I often play in Jim Wallman's hard SF games set in the universe he's created. I've been thinking about how new colonies get set up and the sort of funding they need. There is a lot of infrastructure required to build a viable colony on a new system. Firstly you need to survey it to find a good spot with a reasonable confluence of resources, mining sites, farming space, fresh water, building land and a suitable area for your drop zone and spaceport. Once you've done that some cheap housing, utilities, early resource processing plants and factories for essentials have to be built. Once you get to that point you might just start exporting valuable things, although you'll still need to import lots of essentials, not to mention more people. I reckon that it is a minimum of two years…
What you missed at the January meeting of CLWG
The Chestnut Lodge Wargames Group (CLWG) January meeting (Sunday 9th January) was in Jim's office near Holborn. This one had 14 members in attendance. When I turned up there was a promotion board going on for one of the characters in our long-running Starship Marine campaign (details of the campaign and a history of the 130th Regiment). To make this more interesting for the players who were on the board ( the interviewers) there were a couple of candidates for promotion, including one marine Captain who brought a bomb in with him to prove how easy they were to defuse. A nice piece of live role-play from Jerry (who improvised the bombs immediately beforehand.) I was called upon to defuse the device which consisted of an ice-cream box with an anti-tilt device on it and a fuse inside which had…
CLWG December 1999 – Offside Report
What you missed at the Chestnut Lodge Wargames Group (CLWG) December meeting. In December we started from 12 at John Rutherford's house and played until after 9pm and chatted with the aid of several bottles of wine until almost midnight. In total we had 13 members at the meeting. It started with a fairly light-hearted game called 'Battling Druids' which was originally designed by Trevor Farrant as a participation game for wargames shows for another club that he is a member of. This involves four 100mm models of druids, four fountains, a cloud with a lighting bolt, hordes of hedges, magic spells and a whole lot of fun. A sergeant air-gunner mans his Vickers 'K' gun from the rear cockpit of a Fairey Battle. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) Next up was an RAF Aircrew RPG which I ran with the help…