Marine Corps vs Pax Arcadia 500 points Future War Commander batrep

Past friday I went back to the lovely world of 6mm sci-fi battling with the Future War Commander ruleset, a game I hadn't played since januari 2012.

My opponent was the same: Nemesis, and the goal of the game was to freshen up the rules.  It had been so long that I even doubted wether it was played with d6 or d10's... (d6's by the way).

So we both had small forces, my Marine Corps fielding an HQ (we agreed on these small points values to not bring CO's if we wanted), 4 stands of regular Marines, 2 Grav Bikes and a Rhino (Bad Dawg), of course all painted in the colours of the Emperor's Children.

Guy brought along 2 HQ's, 2 Light Tanks, a heavier tank, a Scout and 4 stands of Infantry.  Those Pax really are a heap cheaper then my Marines... and outnumbering me, but not enough to raise his breakpoint, with his being at 4 and mine at 3 as we had 9 vs 7 "combat units" in the game.

I deployed in a sink on the left side of my deployment area, with two squads of Marines inside the Rhino.  Guy split his forces in two, on the one side the light tanks with some infantry support opposing my force, on the other the heavier tank with foot support.

The table was fully drawn from our collections, houses I made ages ago for a small part, together with a lovely heap of forests and a river Nemesis made himself.

I grabbed the first turn... and with a roll of 11 on the first command check my turn was already over.  Nemesis advanced his forces for a pincer movement.

The second turn didn't went much better, as my forces moved fowards with the Rhino deploying the marines aboard... and a second roll of 11 left me out in the open...

His advancing force opened fire, and both the grav bikes where shot down, ouch.  First blood to the Pax and with both our break points at 4, this was already halfway now.

But then the battle turned as my forces suddely started activating 3 - 4 times per turn and the marines and rhino started opening fire.  Supressing fire made his flank mostly ineffective, as slowly and surely his light tanks and infantry where whittled away over two turns of firing, even with two units advancing to reinforce his line.  Suppression was leaving him helpless in the open.

The other infantry squads moved to the side to face the upcoming flank of Nemesis, even with a command blunder in which my HQ retreated 9 cm towards my own table-edge.

His scout tried to flee the battle, but was blasted apart from opportunity fire by the two marines and the rhino on that flank.

In the meantime, the infantry kept supressing the infantry, who even retreated while the tank blew apart in a ball of bolter induced fire.  Nemesis had been taking botched tests and passing, so the marines advanced on the final infantry stand.

They where gunned down in true firesquad fashion, and the battle was over.  Nemesis only had two HQ's left on the table, while I didn't lose anymore stands after the grav bikes at the beginning.

The big difference in the battle was that Nemesis only once managed to supress one squad of mine once, as he tried to interrupt a  lot but always ended being suppressed before he could react.  Those 4 dice on shooting for basic marines are a heavy advantage in those small battles it seemed, as well as the 5 save compared to the 6 he had even on his light tanks.

But the rules are freshened up now, and in two weeks we will be doing a 'serious' sized game of 1500 points...