Next Weekend

Next weekend is the big one, as the three way clash between General Spencer's Republican Guard face off against Colonel Whales 3rd Royal Guards, and the 4th Battalion of the Spirit of Steiner Regimental Combat Team. 

I have managed to invite a my friend Graham, who is a WW2 gamer, to come and play as General Spencer, while the players will each manage their own battlemech. Colonel Whales forces will be in defense and only react to orders from the players, assuming said orders are received and passed on by Colonel Whales HQ?

Trevor can't make it for the big battle of South Boring, so I've devised a cunning plan to account for his absence and have adjusted the battle lines accordingly. Actually makes for a fairer game, for definitions of fairer that don't include easy, or walk over, for the players.

Anyway, enough of me letting the plot out of the bag before hand, I've been busy all day painting up four town boards, and in eight hours I've gone a long way from white undercoat with a wash, to something that at least looks presentable, if not finished. 

I will be spending more time tomorrow as I'd like to flock the boards with static grass just to get them up to a basic standard that won't look to bad to me.

I've also chosen the other terrain boards for the set-up and really would like to add some tree trunk stubs into the two original open terrain boards I've chosen for the game. 

So, another job for tomorrow, and I still have to slap some paint on the infantry units for both the Republican Guards and the 3rd Royals. As luck would have it this scenario doesn't require the players infantry, which are of course all pretty much painted up and ready to go. 

However, they will be deployed at a future point. So hey ho, nose to the grind wheel.

Evil is as BattleTech Does?

Over on the Classic BattleTech Forums there has been a certain amount of banter about evil in the in game universe with particular respect to two of the developed powers that people can play. This made me think about what is evil, or what makes something evil?

One definition of evil is that it is something defined by some source or another. For instance, from deities, religion, nature and evolution, morality, or from common sense, whatever that means? Such an approach can be described as one of moral absolutism. Here if an action is wrong, then regardless of any good that might arise, it remains a wrong thing to do.

The dichotomous opposite would be that there is no such thing as evil per se. So killing someone is neither right or wrong. Obviously, the consequences will depend on whether or not the action takes place within a framework where the rules permit, or do not permit such an action, and therefore the term evil is something we create to describe the breaking of rules that have been made by mankind.

Another stance is to look at evil from the perspective of moral relativism, which leads to the position that what is evil is a subjective product of local customs, mores and prejudice. To me this seems so open minded as to be a position where one has no brain because it has fallen out.

Finally, another approach to the definition of evil is to come from the position that one has to compromise between the absolute and the relativist position to find a third way. This way posits that morality has to be flexible and one must finds ways of measuring happiness and suffering to find the common denominator of what is considered evil.

Needless to say all of these arguments are rooted in ethics and philosophy and can make for an interesting discussion in any group, depending on the definition of the word interesting?

Within the BattleTech universe background I think that one can see that all the majors powers have done things that would be considered evil from at least one of the above four perspectives. Depending on one's beliefs the individual details of the various evils will appeal, or disgust you accordingly. Therefore I am of the opinion that any Inner Sphere polity that either all are evil, or none are truly evil.

  

Mummerset 05.21.11: Aftermath

       

The session started off with a recap to bring everyone, especially me, up to speed on what happened last session. 

 

This then led into a task organisation exercise to secure the base the players had retreated into after the last battle, allowing them to consolidate the forces under their command. This involved radioing the helicopter forces and moving straggler units to either the players current location in Elizabethville, or join up with the forces that were left in Clear Water Boring barracks.

The players then got their scout choppers to swept the perimeter and as a result they discovered that the enemy had managed to retrieve the four downed mechs from the last sessions battle. 

 

I then advanced the time with daily reports updating on the riots, and general news reports that were being aired over the Mummerset Broadcasting Company (MBC). Revolution seemed to be on the cards yet it was a revolution that seemed rather calm all things considered. Police were handling the riots and the Mummerset army was just waiting in barracks, apart from the 3rd Royal Guards who had gone out to defend the palace from attack by the "pirate" forces.

Communication with the diplomatic mission was re-established and the players made their report to the Duke. 

 

The session then became one of sifting through reports and summarizing events as they occurred. This allowed me to use the Duke to move the diplomatic mission from Clear Water Boring to Elizabethville and co-opting the players as military attaches under his command. 

 

Orders also arrived by drop ship from Major Lester at Bolan with a notification that Dan's brevet promotion to captain became confirmed as a full promotion, and the other players all received brevet promotions to the rank of captain, so as to fit into their new roles of military attaches. 

 

The team also grew with the addition of brevet Captain Edmund Deville who had arrived on the drop ship that had brought their new orders with his Firestarter as reinforcements for the players team.

Summary of Events

No enemy mechs had been spotted in Clear Water Boring during the attack on Elizabethville. Civilians riots had been handled by the Royal Mummerset Mounted Police (RMMP) both in Clear Water Boring and Elizabethville. 

 

No other reports of fighting were heard, which suggested that the attack was focused on one limited objective, namely destroying the Kingdoms administrative center and the royal family.

Post Attack Developments

The players had sent out their special forces team who had reported back that the apparent revolution "didn't smell right" as a full on revolution that the initial attack on Elizabethville, but more like a military led coup d'état. The enemy "pirate" force had managed to do its vanishing act again. 

 

In the aftermath of the attack three main factions appeared.

The first was the Royalist faction led by Colonel Whales, and his 3rd Royal Guards, which had been sighted going North after the battle at the palace. Colonel Whales seemed to be the military leader of any remaining Royal loyalists, with the Right Honourable John McDevitt of the RMMP, and the Mayor of Elizabethville being his civilian counterparts.

The Northern Alliance faction appeared to be the biggest and strongest faction as it was based in Clear Water Boring the commercial heart of Mummerset. The Mayor of Clear Water Boring, Chirico Marx, announce his support on MBC for Prime Minister Rufus T. Marx's motion in Parliament to turn the Kingdom of Mummerset into the Democratic Republic of Mummerset (DROM); with Rufus T. Marx as its first President of course. 

 

I sold this very much as a progressive development to move the politics of this world forward.

The main opposition appeared to be a Southern Faction led by the Mayor of New Cromwell, Lady Charlotte Spencer, with support from the RMMP Constable of New Cromwell, the Right Honourable Sir Henry Bewley. 

 

While the players could not prove that the Southern Faction were the ring leaders behind the so called "pirates" that had attacked Elizabethville, the fact that the Lady Spencer seemed remarkably well informed of the action at Cromwell where the players had fought two enemy mechs did suggest a link.

However, a compromise between the Marx led Northern Alliance, and the Spencer led Southern Factions, led to the announcement of the "New Deal" making everyone citizens of Mummerset with rights protected by a constitution that would be drawn up with representatives from all the factions.

The Rise of the Republic

The days and weeks passed by with the MBC televising the developments of the new constitution and the rights people would have as citizens of the Republic. However, the players started to notice that while the motto "service brings citizenship," one could easily lose one citizenship if one was found guilty of a crime against the state, for example by spraying graffiti or getting into a street brawl when drunk. 

 

Otherwise life on Mummerset seemed to drift along with occasional protests at the developments in the drawing up of the Constitution being dealt with by the RMMP, which had been renamed the Republican Mounted Mummerset Police, just shortened back to Mounties. 

 

So no change there then.

Further investigations and intelligence reports from the Second Attache David Bradford, the diplomatic missions spook, indicated the Marx & Spencer coalition had eight of the 13 mayors of Mummerset in their pockets, but that four towns were sitting on the fence.

 

Meanwhile, the Mayor of Elizabethville was calling for an investigation into the assassination of the Prince Albert and General Briton.

The Marx & Spencer coalition formally invited the Marion Hegemony and Outworld Coalition to set up diplomatic missions on Mummerset, which suggested to the players that the "pirates" were aligned to one of the ruling families, probably the Southern faction under Lady Spencer and the Right Honourable Sir Henry Bewley. 

 

The local network of informers had also heard that there was an illegitimate heir to the throne, and that the Mounties had indicated that they served the citizens of Mummerset, and supported law & order above any other considerations.

Soon after the existence of the "pirates" as an onworld faction was confirmed, after leaflets for the Mummerset Freedom Party (MFP) were found, and further investigation showed that this was the political wing of the Freedom Army of Mummerset (FAOM). 

 

This political wing was made up of lesser colony founding families that felt disenfranchised by the actions of the founding fathers of Mummerset, and that FAOM basically channeled the political protest of the MFP in a more direct manner.

Rumble in the Jungle

Like all good marriages of convenience the Marx & Spencer DROM fell out. However, the MBC announced that Colonel Spencer was being promoted to General, to replace the late Sir Thomas Briton, and was being made the overall Commander-in-Chief of all Mummerset armed forces. 

 

General Spencer was then interviewed by the MBC and announced the formation of the 1st Republican Guards with its own battlemech force. With the General telling everyone that he would be leading the force himself in an Awesome assault class battlemech. General Spencer also announced that the the 1st Royal Guards would be renamed the 1st Republican Guards.

Meanwhile Colonel Whales had taken his forces to Whales Land and appeared to be in exile, but in his journey into exile had managed to liberate four of the six industrial mechs that House Steiner had brought as part of the diplomatic mission to secure the boron market. 

 

Needless to say that via unofficial channels that Colonel Whales had requested help in converting said industrial mechs for combat and training for the pilots of his battlemech force.

 

The Duke agreed that it would be in the best interest of House Steiner to provide a cadre to train Colonel Whale's forces, but that it would not be in the best interest to declare this action to the current government of Mummerset. This was basically on the understanding that the players wanted all their options open and have plausible deniability if the need arose to ditch the Royalists in favour of whoever won the upcoming war.

Inevitably, Lady Spencer then declared that the Southern Federation would support the Mummerset Freedom Party's application to be recognized under the new constitution, and in a surprise move the former 2nd Royal Guards regiment declared itself loyal to the Southern Faction of the Republic.

Meanwhile, Colonel Whales requested access to transmit a message over the House Steiner communication satellites under the banner of the World Wide Broadcasting Company WWBC. 

 

His hour long speech to the people blanketed all channels and announced that he was acting as Regent to the 18 year old daughter, of the late Prince HRH Albert Burlington, Princess Natasha Anastasia Briton-Burlington. In addition, he would be visiting South Port, East Point, New Start and South Boring (the four towns that had not declared for the the Marx & Spencer coalition) to make his case for the Republic to become a constitutional monarchy with the Princess.

By this time we had reached week 48 of the campaign, and the Republican government made it quite clear that they knew that the players had been helping the royal faction and the Duke announced that House Steiner would be leaving Mummerset. 

 

The players then did a rather good pea-under-the-cup shuffle of appearing to load up all their assets into the drop ship, while actually sending them out to rendezvous with the 3rd Royal Guards.  So they only took off with only their battlemechs loaded on their drop ship Northern Lights, which meant that they could also be prepped for a combat drop to insert them behind Republican Guard forces when the time came for action.

The plan was to deceive the Republican Guards and lure them out of Clear Water Boring where they were dug in. 

 

Colonel Whale's force was using the Fork River, a major deep water shipping lane, to move his forces to South Boring, while travelling with an airborne security force to visit the towns with Princess Natasha, thereby focusing President Rufus T. Marx's faction on the political maneuverings rather than the impending display of military force.

The game ended with the Northern Lights drop ship taking off from Mummerset, and General Spencer leading the Republican Guards out of Clear Water Boring to attack Colonel Whales's forces at South Boring. 

 

Hurrah!
  

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Medium Laser

When I started writing this blog back in the day, two odd years ago (and very odd years they have been indeed, channeling Charles Gray for a moment) I was still working through my thoughts and feelings about the combat values for weapons and usefulness of Catalyst Games battle values for use in pick up games.

For a die hard mech bunny knowing what the "real" in game effects arise from the weapon choices that one makes is a very good thing indeed. If only so that when you design a suboptimal mech design you know that it really is suboptimal, and yet meets the operational expectations you've set out. IMNSHO, too many of the mech designs in BattleTech end up suboptimal for fluff reasons that don't make much sense from a real world operational perspective, because the writer designing the mech has trouble translating the brief into a playable unit that would meet the tasks required of it (Did I just say real world perspective for a game of giant battling robots?).

As such one gets to see an uneven mix of designs, where the truly awful are fluffed away as being just like real life, with insert your example of choice, to justify something that while history shows us could exist, yet adds nothing of value to the experience of playing a game of BattleTech. YMMV.

So, I've come to the conclusion that, for me, the best way to understand the effectiveness of the weapon choices is to use the weapons test format of averaging the damage over 36 rounds of firing to come to a damage inflicted ratio. For those of you new to this blog here is the link back for you to read.
   

Crunching the numbers

Getting my Geek on

Crunchy Geeky Goodness

Nailing it Down

I've also tagged these as Number Crunch Geekiness for good measure. After all I'm talking real world perspective for a game of giant battling robots, if that is not the very definition of geekiness, I don't know what is.

Going off tangent for a moment, sort of on an affiliated blog of note, if you don't read Skiltao's Xanga  may I recommend that you at least take a look at his posts that are exploring the unliked weapons and equipment in BattleTech, see here:

10 Least Liked Pieces of BT Technology 1

10 Least Liked Pieces of BT Technology2

 
Well worth reading IMNSHO! Now back on topic, and there is one, no matter how meandering and rambling this post may seem. So my plan, when I have time, is to create an Excel spreadsheet that has all the current weapons in BattleTech that will calculate the damage over 36 results for short, medium and long range, and then I'll look at the results divided by range to create a comparison chart of weapon effectiveness.

Now running into the dark laughing and cackling madly...

  

BattleTech Community

 
An announcement of sorts and link to same:

Mech Heads UK

If you are reading this you are the BattleTech community. Paint it Pink out.

   

It's a Long Road...

It was my intention after last Saturday's game to sit down and write up what happened. My intention remains, but time is fleeting and I've lost control...

What I will say at this point is that the campaign is surprising me, especially as I'm the GM who kind of knows what is really going on, or at least is seen as the master manipulator of all that goes on. Slipping into corporate speak, this emergent property is down to the synergy from the interplay between the player and myself as the narrative of the story develops.

For instance, we have discovered during the previous sessions that the so called offworld pirates were in fact onworld forces, who then became a bunch of people who oppose the government of Mummerset, and from this place we changed the label from "pirates" to calling them the "Freedom Army of Mummerset, " the military wing of the Mummerset Freedom Party.

The name having also evolved from what had happened during the game, as all I knew as the GM was that I wanted a bunch of people causing trouble and lowering property values on Mummerset.

So, I made all that up as I went along, but it fits the plot of my story.

So what is the story? Well, I hide everything in plain sight, so the story remains the one I set out for the players. They, as representatives of their government, are going somewhere to fly the flag and support a diplomatic trade mission, which is the main McGuffin of the plot; it's all about the getting the Boron deposits.

However, as the story unfolds details get added. 

Some are mere trifles that I add to amuse myself, like the names of the characters, or places. Others are big picture stuff to do with acquiring the Boron and the lack of potable water on Mummerset. 

Everything else revolves around this, and things evolve from the different goals each faction has. 

All the Mummerset factions want technology to improve the quality of life onworld, while the House Steiner faction want the Boron (actually my players want battles, but they also want reasons for having the battles, and they want games that are fun), and it has amazed me how other stuff just falls into place from this when you add one or more other factions who have a different idea on how to achieve the goal of improving the technology base of Mummerset.

Hence the Mummerset Freedom Party, the political wing of the Freedom Army of Mummerset and their goal of removing the current government for the greater good of Mummerset. 

One of the things that came out of the previous sessions where the "pirate" attacks were described as "Strike and Fade" was the that the "pirates" had the whole sleight-of-hand, pea under the cup routine going when it came to deploying their forces. This hoisted me on my own petard, because during the last session I thought that the next battle the player team would fight would be the "pirates," but I could think of no way to arrange said fight, and my players were in that zone too.

However, I had more than one faction in opposition and this is what saved my bacon on the day, and from this the dominoes tumbled along until we reached the inevitable conclusion that a battle between President Marx's faction and the Royalist diehard Colonel Whales was on the cards. 

And thus I find myself now having to fast track the painting of the Democratic Republic of Mummerset's forces, as the Mummerset Freedom Party I was working on will not be needed next time.
   

Reviews Versus Testimonials

  

I asked myself what is the difference between both, as could think of quite a few?  First off, a testimonial is, practically by definition, a positive endorsement of something, or someone. There's nothing wrong with that, but everyone understands that it is all about singing the praises, so it has limited value, because it only tells you one side of the story. 

A review has a different function as it looks at both what is good and bad about what is being reviewed. In academic terms a review will search for other work that covers the same topic and summarise those reviews, which turn was a review that had searched for previous works that had discussed the same topic. As can be imagined this is quite a recursive process, but what saves it from becoming stodgy is the critical element that removes weaker work in favour of stronger work. So through trial and error a researcher can weight the evidence, and look at the balance of probability to hone theories to see if they fit the facts, which is the academic equivalent of the Darwinian process in action.

So what purpose would a game review serve? Does it comment on the production values, the game mechanisms, the playability, or the experiential process? I would argue that it would need to address all of these things, and probably a few more like value for money, support for the game and accessibility for the new player too. 

However, such a review would be a monumental piece of work, so what you tend to get is an edited highlights of the reviewers concerns about the game, rather than a more objective review that places the game in its historical context. 

Then there is the thorny issue of offending the games company, and a writer will offend if they are perceived as being critical and damaging sales of the game. This is mirrored in academia where the issue of who is funding the research colours how much you can trust the results of the research. It's called bias, and research reviews have to declare their biases. When was the last time you read a review in the commercial press where the reviewer declared there bias?

Ah I hear you say, what about the non-funded reviews posted on the internet for example? A good point, but more often than not they fall into testimonials that say they like the product, or a hate-fest where they say this product sucks, because it does not meet the reviewers needs. Neither are particularly useful to either the buyer, or the manufacturer of the game.

Hence my reluctance to really review games that I like, but as and when I have the time to analyse my biases, do a search of previous games in a genre, and summarise the game mechanisms, playability and experiential quality of said game, I will.

   

BattleTech Troper

BattleTech is a wargame that has not one, but two main pages on the TV Tropes site. Who'd have thought huh?

The link above deals with the general tropes of BattleTech, like duh! BTW: that is of course me using a trope.  However, more importantly, as an introduction to the world of BattleTech I really can't recommend this page enough for the casual person who wants to know what's it all about Alfie? Sorry for that shout out.

This next link is to a page on how FASA allowed the BattleTech universe to be expanded and the various tropes that have become signature items of the franchise. Be warned that clicking on either of these links will take you to pages with lots of other links on them that form a hypertext database, or Wiki as they are now called.

So what is a trope, apart from the content of a site called TV Tropes that is?

It is a figure of speech, or a metaphor if you prefer, that describes something using words whose literal meanings are different from what they say, for example "road works", which means a road that is being dug up, or repaired, but not one that is literally working. Using a metaphor allows people to explain concepts that are not easily understood using language that describes something else. Often these end up as common clichés, for instance "blue sky thinking".

Metaphors can then become metonyms, which are figures of speech that become the thing. For instance I have my wheels meaning I have a motor car. Funnily enough a trope can become ironic through meaning the opposite of what was originally intended and this trope has many flavours too. My favourite being Socratic irony, or the "Colombo gambit", where you start off by stating how one doesn't understand something and ask the other person to explain it. This then leads the inherent contradictions being spotted in what has been said.

When you have a trope that contains two words that have opposite meanings you then move into the realm of the oxymoronic, an obvious example is "living dead", and another is "military intelligence", the latter having been described as "a highly refined organisation of overwhelming generalities, based on vague assumptions, and debatable figures drawn from undisclosed activities, pursued by persons of diverse motivation, and questionable mentality, in the midst of unimaginable confusion".

Of course that is a gross exaggeration of the process behind "military intelligence" for comic effect, which therefore make it hyperbole, which funnily enough is another example of a trope. Ironic huh? Probably a bit of an understatement to describe military intelligence in this manner too, something that we Brits do with a certain amount of aplomb. I always remember an RAF chap being interviewed after a raid over Berlin who described that whole death defying ordeal as a bit of a "whizz bang". In trope terms such understatement is called a litote. A more modern example of a litote is of course the use of double negatives.

Any metaphor/trope that starts off as a counter proposition is counted as an antithesis, and you thought that it was just a part of dialectics. Well it is, but dialectics is a part of rhetoric, which uses metaphor as the basis for constructing arguments. So finally we get to the end of the different categories of tropes with the synecdoche. This is the mirror of the metonym in that the description has replaced the thing to the extent that it starts to become a cliché, though not all synecdoches are clichés.

So BattleTech is all of the above and more, which is probably why I like it in spite of the ludicrousness of the central conceit.
   

Tree Shades of Green

  

This weekend started out with a rare burger from Byron's, and afterwards treating myself to a new handbag for work from the House of Fraser, both establishments being local to me at the Westfield's shopping center, just round the corner from where I live.

Wow, living life to the limits is my motto, and this morning I even went and had my hair done at my local hairdresser.

Compared to the excitement of painting trees three shades of green the above is probably all rather dull. I've been struggling through yet another steep learning curve with my new tree project, and down to the simple fact that I can't bear to do anything "just good enough", I've been trying to produce the best trees that I can using Woodland Scenics products as a starting point.

Anyway, as I'm writing this now I've just watched Dr Who: The Doctor's Wife and afterwards I was dry brushing green on the trees. Second shade in this case. As I want the trees to have variety I've split the 32 deciduous trees I'm painting into three groups, as can be seen above. All have sea green as the base colour, but then have two other shades of green painted over the top.

The plan being to have three shades of green on every tree, but not the same three shades of green on all of them

I originally started by priming the trees by spraying them black and then  I sprayed the trunks in red primer. On top of this I then drybrushed sea green to delineate the foliage from the trunk and worked from there.Unfortunately, I made a bit of a mess of the drybrushing and overdid the amount of paint I put on, which was so not good.

So I resprayed them black and started again without painting the trunks in red primer, which was okay, but I failed to get the tonal variation I wanted and though that all the trees looked rather dull and uninteresting. So I re-drybrushed them and changed the combination of greens that I was using to add more variation to the three basic shades of green I was painting my forest.

I would like to say that this plan I had worked. It sort of did, but it doesn't account for the fact that I ended up painting each batch of trees three times, improving on the application, order and combination of shade of green. In addition, The reason for the revision was down to the order that I chose to paint the colours, and a big confounding variable was painting the tree trunks, which cause one of the repaints.

 

Hopefully you can all now see that there are three distinct shades of green in this forest down by the river side?

After taking the above pictures I spent some time drybrushing the tree trunks with pale flesh to give them a grey looking texture, which has improved upon what you can see above. Finally, I whisked some canary yellow over the upper surfaces of all the trees to make them pop a bit more.

From my observation of trees I kind of know that they are complex fractal structures that reflect light in many different directions due to the structure of the leaves, which are themselves fractal in nature.

Capturing the lacy structure of trees is extremely difficult, especially when one has to make them robust enough to be handled in a game.

So there you have it. One weekend spent slaving over a hot forest...

Being Human

 
Last night I was watching the series Being Human, the story of a vampire, werewolf and ghost sharing a house in Bristol. It is a charming and often hard hitting metaphor for life and the choices one makes when growing up. As often the case when such topics are written quotes from the Bible spring forth to hit the point home. In this case this one:

"When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things." (1st Corinthians verse 12).

I mention it because to some extent one can consider hobbies like wargaming to be the anti-thesis of Corinthians. I rather like that it is.

I can't remember if I've ever discussed why this blog is called "Paint-it-Pink". No doubt if this were a graphic novel it would have been part of my origin issue, or in a more Po-Mo presentation an inserted back story to illuminate something like the Corinthians passage above. Me being me, I will use the telling to illuminate my thought processes around gaming, and in particular running campaigns; whether that is a traditional RPG, or more tabletop figure game.

I like to make my campaigns like onions. So that cutting them open provokes a strong reaction and reveals that there are many layers to the story. Once cooked onions become sweat and delicious, and my intent to always run games that delight the the desire to play games in much the same way as a good meal not only assuages one's hunger, but satisfies one's taste buds.

So why Paint-it-Pink? Why not. Pink is a girly colour. A Pink team is description of a Red and White scout and hog team in Vietnam. I could go on. What I will say is that the periods of conflict that interest me largely feeds into the games that I play, of which BattleTech remains a favourite, despite of, or because of its ludicrous elements.

So do I take elements of World War One and use them for games of BattleTech. Yes I do. Also I take elements from the Inter-War period, for example the Russian Civil War, Spanish Civil War, the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, and of course World War Two. Though in the latter case, even though I play a large number of games over the years, it no longer holds me in its thrall, especially late war actions. This is odd, because to some extent BattleTech could be seen to be a paragon for disguising WWII scenarios, which is what appeals to me so much about the BattleTech rule setting.

However, Vietnam, remember John Wayne in Green Beret, is still the war of my childhood. Hence Paint-it-Pink, and funnily enough BattleTech and Vietnam play together well. Units that have an overwhelming advantage, US armed forces, choppers etc. versus battlemechs that stomp around owning the battlefield, but just like Vietnam no guarantee of a meaningful victory.

OTOH I still like to dabble in those areas that I steal from wholesale, because at the end of the day it is always good to go back to the source material that inspires one. As I said the very anti-thesis of growing up and giving up childish things, rather the acceptance of one's inner child and the value from having an open mind that is still able to learn new things.