Let's Play Battletech

You ladies of lubricity

That dwell in the bordello

Ha-ha ha-ha, ha-ha ha-hee

For I am that kind of fellow

 - Patrick O'Brian, Post Captain

BattleTech is almost as old as I am. Polygon did a cute little oral history of the game a few years back, which I enjoyed. I'm also fairly sure that Warhammer 40,000's Imperial Knights are stolen directly from BattleTech, and possibly a lot more; various other mech-related games also owe them a debt. Battletech is one of those things that's always been there; I've been aware of it for as long as I've known anything about wargaming, but I never got a chance to play it. Now that Catalyst Games has restarted the franchise, so to speak, and I'm getting back into smaller-scale miniature games, it was finally time to change that with their Beginner Box.

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The Beginner Box is a cute little set that's very cheap. It comes with two mechs, a fold-out hex map and a couple of leaflets, including a small set of "getting started" rules.

The biggest disappointment in all of this is the fluff. There are decades of material and backstory and whatnot to Battletech - but you'll find none of that here. There's one little foldout with a galaxy map, and barely any material at all to get a handle on anything. I don't understand how you get your hands on an intellectual property like Battletech and then make this little effort to immerse people in it.

If you want the opposite experience, there's the PC game Battletech, which does great job getting you into the fluff and everything - and then absolutely refuses to explain how anything in the actual game works, or provide any kind of manual. Is it a law of Battletech that you can have either the fluff or the rules explained to you, but never both? The game itself was all right; I wasn't really that impressed, and the hardware requirements were brutal for my poor laptop.

I have been reading up on the fluff on sarna.net, though, and one thing I'll definitely say for Battletech is that it's not often you get to play a wargame as the telephone company. So I think purely in honor of that, I have to paint at least one mech in ComStar colors. As it happens, that means white, and as I found when I got back into painting miniatures with Star Wars: Rebellion, I love painting dirty white. So I've decided to paint the Wolverine that came with the starter box as a ComStar mech.

I am delighted to note that the Wolverine has been produced by, among others, a company called Bordello Military Goods, Inc. I wonder if the people responsible for that knew what a bordello is.

The other mech in the box is a Griffin, apparently originally from an early 1980s anime, but also Soundwave. Looking into the fluff, I find that like in so many other fictional properties, there's a girls' faction. I had a House Escher gang in Necromunda, I'll have a Magistracy of Canopus, um, lance? in Battletech. Delightfully, the uniform color for the Magistracy Armed Forces is turqoise and black, which I intend to fully embrace. Here's my first shot at a color scheme.

This Griffin represents my mechwarrior mercenary company, the 11th Riedquat Rangers (Electra's Own).

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My first proper Battletech experience, however, happened at our friendly local game store, which hosted a Battletech event earlier this month. I grabbed myself a Hunchback from the mechs on offer, and ended up facing an Enforcer.

I was given a record sheet, and we started rolling a whole bunch of 2d6s. I had some success firing my giant autocannon at the Enforcer, eventually destroying its left torso completely. The Enforcer's return fire knocked my mech down, but I got up again.

The rules were actually pretty simple, certainly with an experienced player to walk me through them, and actually kinda fun. Although my superior firepower was having an impact, I wanted to have an appropriately Warhammer ending and try the mêlée rules: my Hunchback charged in.

The rest of the battle could hardly have gone more dramatically: our mechs traded blows on the roof of a building, until my Hunchback punched my opponent's mech in the face, killing his pilot!

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I very much enjoyed my first Battletech experience, and I'm going to try to play more. There's whole oceans of rules, fluff and miniatures to get into here, and the Epic player in me can't help but notice all these tanks and infantry and whatnot, all in a very familiar scale...

Why Sanna Marin and her cabinet weren't all that

Earlier this year, Finland had a very miserable election. Our prime minister, Sanna Marin of the social democrat party, had become an international celebrity, but her party lost the election, and she is stepping down as party leader. This has surprised people around the world, because she cut a very progressive and popular figure. Sadly, I'm here to tell you that she was not exactly a great prime minister.

First, there was our pandemic policy. Finland had a world-class response to Covid and we were doing a great job suppressing the virus - until we quit. In September 2021, Marin and her cabinet decided to lift practically all suppressing measures, including things like mask recommendations. Since then, thousands of people have died. I did another post on the subject, with the statistics. So when people say Marin's cabinet handled the pandemic well, I don't entirely agree. They did, until they decided to stop.

Another failure was the Sami parliament act. Finland has been reprimanded several times by the UN for our failure to implement proper representation for the Sami indigenous people, whose lands Finland continues to colonize. The Marin government was supposed to change that with a new bill on the Sami parliament. However, the cabinet allowed the agrarian party, which resists indigenous rights, to sabotage the bill, and it failed to pass. This is absolutely disgraceful.

The most colossal disappointment of the Marin cabinet, though, was their environmental policy. It was sold to us as a "climate cabinet". What they did was the total opposite.

We can start with peat. Finland produces approximately 5% of our energy by burning peat, which accounts for 10% of our greenhouse emissions, while peat extraction is immensely destructive. It's an incredibly dirty and wasteful fuel. So obviously it receives huge government subsidies and tax breaks into the hundreds of millions of euros.

In 2021, the end result of a huge budget battle with the obstructionist agrarian party was that the Marin cabinet handed 70 million euros of additional subsidies to peat production (IL). 

Later that same year, the social democrat minister for communications, Timo Harakka, called a new motorway "a climate act" in a tweet. The same minister oversees domestic flights, which have received additional subsidies of tens of millions of euros during his time in cabinet. There's so little demand for the flights, that some have flown with single passengers, or even empty (Yle).

When the invasion of Ukraine made electricity prices spike, our government rushed to subsidize households by dropping the tax on electricity. Most of the subsidies are going to well-off households that spend large amounts of energy (Yle). Similarly, when fuel prices rose, the government was there to subsidize diesel fuel (Yle).

I could go on, but I think you get the point. Marin's cabinet spent millions upon millions of extra euros subsidizing fossil fuel consumption, sometimes in the stupidest possible ways, propping up tiny, moribund industries like peat, or ridiculous boondoggles like flights with no passengers on them.

It just so happens I've taught the 1973 oil crisis quite a few times already. Finnish Wikipedia has quite a nice list of energy-saving measures the government of the time implemented, which ranged from regulating indoor temperatures to shop window lighting. The prime minister was also a social democrat, by the way: Kalevi Sorsa. Fifty years later, it did not apparently even for a moment occur to his successor that something like this could be done. Instead, as with every other crisis and policy question, Marin's answer was subsidies for fossil fuels.

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I've lived in Finland for almost 40 years, and the media persecution of Sanna Marin was like nothing I have ever seen before. The misogyny was absolutely hysterical. One of the main precepts of Finnish journalism is that no criticism of it can ever be justified, so there will be no post-mortem, as it were. All our major medias are busy reassuring each other that they did a great job. This is deeply depressing, especially since we all know full well that they're going to spend the next several years worshipping the ground the new right-wing government walks on.

We also suffer from the same disease as Britain, as explained by Professor Simon Wren-Lewis: our media doesn't understand macroeconomics at all, and believes the right's austerity fairy-tales. This was also painfully obvious in this year's election, which was dominated by all our major medias and the ministry of finance battering us into submission with their austerity agenda of billions of euros of cuts.

However, two things can be true at the same time: Marin can be the victim of concerted misogynist media persecution, and a terrible disappointment as a prime minister. Her cabinet let thousands of people die needlessly in the pandemic, cheerfully trampled over indigenous rights, and faced the escalating climate and biodiversity crisis with millions upon millions of subsidies to fossil capitalism. Yes, misogyny was a large reason why her party lost the election. But so was the fact that the policies of her cabinet were absolutely terrible.

Let's Paint Fallout: the Board Game

Several unidentified aircraft were spotted flying over the REPCONN Test Site by a local crackpot. He spoke to a toy bear near one of our microphones. "It's ghouls, I tell you. Religious ghouls in rockets, looking for a land to call their own. Don't you laugh at me! I know a spell that'll make you show your true form! A cave rat taught it to me."
- Radio New Vegas

Even though our board gaming has mostlt been on hold because of the pandemic, we did really enjoy Fantasy Flight's Fallout board game, and I got to thinking that I really should paint the miniatures. So here we go!

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Super Mutant

I've gone for the Fallout 3 super mutant look instead of the classic green, because it's so much more interesting and will, I hope, make the model stand out a bit. The skin was done in Flat Yellow, the rags in (I think) Saddle Brown, and the metal bits are Gunmetal Grey and Brass. I then gave the whole thing a wash with watered-down Black Glaze, Skin Wash and Smoke to make the dude look appropriately grimy, and I think it worked pretty nicely!

This model was fun enough to paint that I'm seriously considering getting some Mödiphius Super Mutants.

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Vault Dude

Of course the Vault guy had to be among the first models I painted as well!

His skin is Burnt Umber, and the hair is Black Grey. The vault suit is Dark Blue, with Saddle Brown, Gunmetal Grey and Copper accessories, with a little Smoke wash.

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Mister Handy

I'm skipping ahead to the New California expansion here, but Mr. Handy had such a memorable debut in our first attempt at the co-operative New California scenario as a drug-dealing murder robot that I felt I had to paint him.

Of course, a robot is also kinda easy to paint! The upper body is Natural Steel and the lower Gunmetal Gray, and the eyes are Silver; the body got a wash of Black Glaze and a little Smokey Ink, and there's some Light Green to represent the drugs, and some Scarlet for the murder.

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Ghoul

The ghoul was the MVP of our first co-op attempt and a past winner as well, so he was definitely next.

His shoes are black, the pants are London Grey and the vest is Light Grey; the shirt is Ivory. I painted the skin Tan Earth, gave it a light drybrush with Green Sky and a sort of wash with Sunny Skin Tone, followed by some watered-down Smokey Ink. I'm very happy with the result!

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So here's the first batch of Fallout characters; there'll be more.

Warhammer 40,000: Let's Play Filthy Casual - Encounter at Red Rocket

It is once again time for Warhammer 40,000! I've got my 500 points of Word Bearers and my Modiphius terrain; my opponent has 500 points of Grey Knights; we are ready to Filthy Casual.

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We set up on my 4'×4' table, with some fairly ancient Necromunda terrain as well as my newer additions.

To keep things simple, we decided to play the Only War scenario, and placed objectives accordingly. As this was the debut of my Red Rocket station, my opponent decided the game would be called Encounter at Red Rocket. We made sure to place an objective marker by the coolant pumps.

My deployment was fairly simple: I decided the Berzerkers and Dreadnought would capture the Red Rocket, while the Cultists moved up the center of the table and grabbed the objective at the container stack.

My opponent's army consisted of (below, left to right) a Terminator squad held in reserve, a Librarian, a Strike Team and an Interceptor Squad, all deployed in cover behind some buildings.

The Grey Knights got the first turn, and immediately the space wizard fuckery started. The Interceptors zoomed over to capture the objective by the word wall, and the Librarian used Gate of Infinity to teleport the Strike Squad right onto my left flank.

Obviously I couldn't let this stand; I sent my Cultists around to attack the Strike Squad, with the Berzerkers rushing over to support them, while my Dreadnought lumbered over to secure the objective at the Red Rocket.

Since the Strike Team was in range and my Cultists were encouraged by the Dark Apostle's successful prayer, it was time to charge!

The Cultists immediately start taking hevy casualties, but they take a Grey Knight with them.

Here's the situation at the end of the first battle round:

The Grey Knights Librarian is literally hiding inside the little building at top left, next to the blue dice tray. My Dreadnought is under the Red Rocket canopy; the Berzerkers are making their laborious way toward the fight.

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The Grey Knights opened the second battle round by teleporting the Terminators in to face the Dreadnought at the Red Rocket. The Librarian blasted my Dread with Vortex of Doom, doing the maximum possible seven wounds, of which my Legion trait let me save exactly none. He then hit the Dread with Fatal Precognition, meaning I risked additional mortal wounds if it did anything!

On the other side of the table, the Interceptors charged into combat with my Cultists and pretty much wiped them out - but not without taking casualties themselves!

When my turn rolled around, the Dreadnought tried to get to grips with the pesky Loyalist tormenting it - and dropped down dead!

Meanwhile, the Cultists were wiped out in the Fight phase. They accounted for one Interceptor and two Grey Knights, which I think we have to consider slightly heroic. All that remained of my army was the Berzerkers and Dark Apostle.

It was pretty obvious at this point that I had lost the game. My opponent could easily have run circles around my Berzerkers for the last three battle rounds, collecting enough victory points to win the game twice over. I said as much, and offered to concede. To his credit, my opponent wanted to fight it out, very sportingly bringing out the Interceptors to engage my Berzerkers so that I got to roll the absolute buckets of dice they generate in mêlée.

The Berzerkers made short work of the Interceptors and went on to wipe out the Strike Squad survivors as well. Meanwhile, the Grey Knights Librarian struck down my Dark Apostle.

Eventually, their numbers depleted by psykery and such, the Berzerkers were run down by the Terminators and wiped out.

And so the game ended with me being tabled. Hey, Khorne cares not whence the blood flows, and it definitely flowed.

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In retrospect, it's fairly obvious that my biggest mistake was the deployment of my Berzerkers. They should have been right there with the Cultists in one great big blob of death, or alternatively they should have stuck to the original plan and stormed the Red Rocket with the Dreadnought. I also should have been more decisive with my Dark Apostle and gotten her into mêlée with the Cultists. So yeah, my deployment was bad and I was too indecisive.

This is to take nothing away from my opponent, though: he played very well and decisively outmaneuvered me, taking excellent advantage of my bad decisions and using his mobility and psykery edge to full advantage.

I will freely admit that I was not prepared for space wizard fuckery. I expected a deluge of mortal wounds; I did not expect all the flying around. The answer for my Chaos Marines is clear: more mobility. I have already ordered some jump packs.

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On a broader note, we were left with two strong impressions. First of all, Filthy Casual is just fun, especially with smaller armies. Having said that, I'll quote my worthy opponent, who said, after the game: "There's a lot to remember." There certainly is. Even without secondary objectives or stratagems, and playing a very simple mission, datasheets and rules to hand, we still found it a struggle to remember all the particular rules and exceptions. I still feel that 40k is far too strongly designed for tournament play by people young enough to memorize huge rulesets, and even though 10th edition promises to simplify everything, well, I'll believe it when I see it.

Even so, I certainly enjoyed myself, and I'm full of ideas on what kind of army to build for the rematch!

Mission tactics at sea

For future reference, I want to record this outstanding example of mission tactics / Aufragstaktik / whatever you want to call it. I've been thinking about World War II and specifically naval warfare in it, so I'm re-reading Correlli Barnett's excellent Engage the Enemy More Closely. There's a lot to disagree with in Barnett's account, and David Edgerton has done so, at length. I still think that much of Barnett's criticism of British grand strategy in the war is fundamentally correct, and I think I'll want to return to that later.

For now, though, here's a quote from Barnett's narrative of the Second Battle of Sirte in 1942, where a Royal Navy cruiser squadron under Admiral Philip Vian drove off a considerably superior Italian force.

"His own flagship Cleopatra had been hit in the bridge early in the action, killing fifteen and temporarily knocking out her radio. But, wrote Vian in his memoirs, "The damage sustained was of no importance. The leaders of the divisions of the striking force were well aware of my intentions, and communication, for the time, was unnecessary.""

That's command for you.

Warhammer 40,000: 500 pts of 9th Edition Word Bearers

I've been threatened with a 500-point game of Warhammer 40,000, so I'd better get my army ready.

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Since my last game, the 9th edition Chaos Marine codex dropped, and changed quite a lot of things. First and foremost, it destroyed the MVP of my previous games by capping Cultists at 20 models per unit and nerfing Tide of Traitors completely. However, it gave my Word Bearers a useful legion trait as well, so win some, lose some, I guess.

I'm still bringing my old Necromunda Escher gang, even if I can only have twenty of them. I painted these Escher juves:

And added these Brother Vinni Jungle Fighters.

Finally, here's two fairly ancient Sisters of Sigmar I found to round out the unit.

That makes 14 models and the champion with autopistols and close combat weapons, because I'm hoping I can swamp some Marines in close combat again. That leaves five more, and since I can now have two grenade launchers in the squad for no cost, and I arguably have the models, why not? That leaves three autogunners.

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I wasn't that sold on my Chaos Lord last time around, so this time I'm bringing back my favorite 8th ed. HQ choice: my Dark Apostle. She now automatically comes with two Dark Disciples, and I have a Davidians Command box from Raging Heroes (which I used earlier to make an Enginseer for my machine cultists); it occurred to me that they would also make nigh-on perfect Slaanesh Dark Disciples.

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Last time, I had a Vindicator that got very little done and blew up. This time, for a little taste of Gladius, I got myself a Chaos Dreadnought.

This was a fun model to assemble, with lots of weapon options. I went for the Gladius loadout of reaper autocannon and power scourge, but magnetized everything so I can swap them out if I want. The gun arm was easy: I drilled a hole and slotted in a magnet.

The model has been done quite cleverly so that all the various weapons fit onto the shoulder joint, and with a matching hole and magnet on the weapon, it fits perfectly.

The left arm is different, with each mêlée weapon having its own shoulder, so I put a magnet on the body and another one inside the power scourge shoulder.

Here's the finished article:

The dreadnought is wearing the same dark green and silver livery as my Chaos Lord, and I kinda like it. Now that most of the weapons don't cost anything, though, I built myself a multi-melta.

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I also wanted to bring my Berzerkers, Faciebam Deum Ex Sanguine. In their debut, they were gloriously wiped out in close combat, carving their way through several characters and a conscript blob. They were also the stars of our third game, where they were nearly destroyed beating up some loyalist vehicles and Knight Armigers. I love my Berzerkers, and I've managed to paint them as well.

I will again register my disappointment that they no longer get any meaningful wargear choices. I don't like this new 40k at all.

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Here's the list:

HQ - Dark Apostle - 95 points 

Troops - Cultists Mob (20) - 100 points [195] 

Elites - Helbrute - 105 points [300] 

Elites - Berzerkers (8) - 176 pts

+ Mark of Khorne [15], Berzerker icon [5] = 196 points [496]

And here's the army.

My strategy is very simple: I'm going to run at the sniveling loyalists and beat them up.

Pandemic diary: Year 3

It's now been three years since my first pandemic diary entry on this blog. My previous one was a year ago, when I noted that our government had pretty much abandoned trying to contain the pandemic at all. The official death toll on 1.1.2022 was 1 564. As I write this, the WHO Covid dashboard has our total deaths at about 8 900. In my previous post, I said we'd need to triple our death toll from what was then about 3 000 to reach per capita numbers like Sweden. Well, we've done it.

So what happened? I'll show you. I no longer have screenshotted graphics from our government broadcaster, because they've quit publishing covid statistics. These are from Our World in Data.

The graph below shows the story of our pandemic. For the first year or so, we were very successful at suppressing the pandemic. Deaths were well below the world average, let alone the EU average. We were on par with Asia. Until something changed, and away we went.

In the fall of 2021, our government pretty much decided that we're going to stop suppressing the pandemic. The next graph is from about a week ago, and it shows the consequences of that decision.

Over the past year, covid deaths in Finland have been way higher, per capita, than in the UK or the US. We're also way above the EU average, let alone the world. We simply decided that actually, we're just going to let people die.

The one thing I associate this with, more than anything, is a cheerful media appearance by our very cinematic prime minister. On September 24, she was on the cover of one of our major afternoon papers, with the huge headline: It is time to live!

Obviously it wasn't just one interview: rather, it coincided with a general lifting of restrictions. Masks and distancing are no longer recommended, and in general, people are being encouraged to behave as if there was no pandemic at all. Below you can see the results.

It's actually really interesting to look at all the Nordic countries. First of all, this is the only real frame of reference for assessing Sweden's performance. People in English-speaking countries occasionally make very misleading arguments about Sweden, because they compare Swedish policy outcomes to their own. Surely the comparison point has to be very similar societies, with very different pandemic policies. Below is what it looks like. Frankly, if you think pandemic mortality in Sweden wasn't high, your baseline is wrong.

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So here we are. On New Year's Day 2022, 1 500 people in Finland had died of Covid. Now the number is 9 000. We were doing a world-class job of suppressing the pandemic - until we decided to quit. Almost ten thousand people died, and we're still pretending it isn't happening. Get on the subway today, and there's barely a mask in sight. We're doling out record amounts of sick pay, but even that can't sway the government into doing anything. It is time to live. Except, of course, for the 7 500 people who died after we lifted restrictions.

What's horrible about all this is that this pretence that there's no pandemic is empowering all the worst people. We now have folks who were grumbling about the restrictions claiming that they were never necessary in the first place. It's honestly kind of terrifying that hundreds of thousands of people get sick, thousands die, and there are actual people out here saying that the greatest atrocity was that they weren't allowed to go to the gym or the karaoke bar. It's certainly now easier to understand why the 1918 pandemic seems to have vanished from the historical record.

First it was hoarding pasta and toilet paper, then it was "time to live", i.e. "I don't give a shit who dies, it won't be me". The necropolitics of Covid suggest that we're in for an unbelievably grim time with the climate crisis.