Almond Brown, on 18 November 2013 - 09:36 AM, said:
Just a curious question. How many enemy Mechs were left alive after most of those gripping "goal" based TT games? Really?
The end goal of any campaign that isn't a covert op (those are fun too) is to destroy enough of the attacking/defending force to force them to surrender. However, not all missions and battles are meant to be a decisive victory. Our group typically finds that the best campaigns are those where we're out gunned and out manned (surprise attacks, unexpected reinforcements, inaccurate information, etc). To achieve the ultimate goal while minimizing our losses (battlemechs are hard to come by in the succession war era we prefer to play in) we tend to undermine our enemies through inflicting damage in guerrilla strikes, supply raids, information acquisition, etc.
If we have a choice between risking losing a mech but destroying an opponent or two during a smash and grab or delaying them long enough to complete the mission without taking any serious damage but not destroying an enemy we'll take the latter path because once they start running out of ammo their mechs have tons of dead weight and we can easily win the final decisive battle or even force a surrender of more or less functional mechs to add to our army. Granted our campaigns tend to be big picture focused (like I wish this game was) with a heavy emphasis on supply lines, mech replacement delays/availability, cost concerns, drop ship cargo capacity forcing us to take less than ideally weighted mechs (3x 4/6 50 ton mechs instead of 2x 4/6 75 ton mechs), unit availability, etc.
Edited by Narcissistic Martyr, 18 November 2013 - 11:56 AM.