Siege of Monopolis (part 1)

After months of (off and on) prep work, I ran Siege of Monopolis at Millenniumcon 17 on Saturday morning.

From the event description in the game program:

The peaceful City of Monopolis rises above the rubble of the Last War, a gleaming center of commerce and industry. But no peace lasts forever. Now invaders march to conquer the city while outnumbered defenders scramble to protect their home. This is a custom scenario for Ogre Designer's Edition, using the official Ogre miniatures on a large hex mat with 3-D terrain. With room for up to 8 players, you and your friends can aid in the defense of the besieged city--or help the invaders conquer it. Join the Siege of Monopolis!

 

It took me nearly 45 minutes to get the terrain set up, but it resulted in a good-looking board that got lots of compliments from passers-by.

I gave the attackers a couple of cruise missile crawlers, just to see what would happen. Since I didn't have enough of the official minis, I used a couple of old die-cast vehicles as proxies.  They're wearing the original paint scheme, with a little touch-up (I kept them tan-ish so they could be used by either my gray or my green forces).

The first cruise missile got shot down without detonating.  The attackers, however, managed to get the second nuclear payload over the northern part of the city. Here's the area just before detonation:

And here it is after--lots of city  and forest was reduced to rubble, but nearby armor units and troops withstood the atomic blast.

And of course, the attackers had plenty of  armor coming up the road, along with a Mark V Ogre.

The defenders had their own cybertank, a Mark III, but unlucky dice rolls meant that it proved pretty ineffective throughout the game.  By the way, those red markers represent minefields placed by the defenders.

On the left, you can see how the large hex mat allows a player to get plenty of miniatures into a single hex.  On the right, you can see what happens when an attack from a howitzer spills over onto every unit in the hex.

The Ogres did duke it out, but the bigger cybertank used its missiles to good effect, taking out the defender's main gun and its missiles.  Soon after, the Mark III lost all its secondaries, although it did run over a couple of armor units unfortunate enough to get in its way.

In this scenario, units could only combine their fire if their side had a functioning command post.  The city's laser tower disabled the attackers' mobile CP, and the next turn, a hidden infantry platoon emerged from the forest under the nose of an entire company of attacking battlesuits, and destroyed the crippled mobile command post.  This helped the defenders, since the attackers could no longer combine fire, but it was merely delaying the inevitable.

 Continued in part 2