Massacre in the Wasteland

This weekend I took some time to play a battle using USE ME Post-Apocalyptic. In this scenario, the humans must defend their base from mutants and robots. There are four humans: Kandi - elan 4, move 6, side arms, improvised grenade. Vince - elan 4, move 4, heavy weapon, armoured. Jenna - elan 3, move 6, side arms, close combat specialist. Mack - elan 3, move 6, standard rifle.

The mutants are all elan 3, move 6, and have submachine guns. The mutant leader (the big one, with a pickaxe) has psionic abilities. The robots are all elan 4, move 4, have side arms, are armoured and have the close combat specialist ability.

This is the board setup, about 3'x2'. The humans start on the right and the mutants and robots start on the left. I controlled the humans and rolled a neutral behavior for the enemies (with the USE ME solo rules.) I grouped the figures into three squads (humans, mutants and robots.)

In the first turns, both forces moved to the ruins, with the enemies keeping in cover to reach optimal firing range. At this point the mutants fired against Mack but missed.

Vince and Mack took down one mutant, while the robots closed in to fire or melee. I thought it would be a good idea to move in range of both groups and attack both at once -- Kandi and Jenna firing at the robots, which were closer, and the guys attacking the mutants, taking advantage of Vince's heavy weapon.

This turned out to be a very bad move. While Vince did manage to take down the mutant leader (who didn't ever use his psi powers due to limited range) the girls didn't cause a scratch on the robots, who in turn charged into melee. Not long after that, I had two characters down and one struck.

The robots finished their job as they activated first (higher elan rating) and ended the game. Close combat is brutal as the attacker just makes a damage roll (no to-hit test) and only if the target survives, he may counter attack. Having the robots use the armoured and close combat specialist abilities made them even more dangerous.

Total playing time was around 15-20 minutes, including taking notes and pictures. As expected, USE ME Post Apocalyptic runs real fast and units also die real fast -- pretty much like in USE ME Sci Fi.