The Boreal Brawl
A 4 ‘warrior lance tournament
Welcome to Solaris VII, home of the fabled Solaris games. You’ve seen the popular Black Mountain Cup and you’ve delved into the carnage of the Solaris FFA, now experience the 4v4 lance battles of THE BOREAL BRAWL…
1.Concept
The Boreal Brawl is simple at its heart: A 4v4 single life deathmatch tournament. Money is unlimited, bases and turrets are off. While this might sound boring and standard, its complexity and strategy comes in the list building rules that will push even the strongest lances into uncomfortable situations.
For starters, each lance must be made up of only mechs, and one from each weight category: one light, medium, heavy and Assault. This means that teams can’t stack Daishi’s, Fafnir’s or even go all in on blanners and bushies. Being a mixed unit should force more cohesion out of a team, as they play to the strengths and weaknesses of each asset.
But what’s to stop a veteran team finding the most optimal lance and exploiting it? Well, every time you take a mech into combat, you can no longer use any variant of that mech until your team has exhausted all other choices in that weight category. This means if you take a Thor prime, you cant then take a Thor D until you’ve used every other heavy available to you.
Hopefully this will level the playing field, with experienced players forced into assets that they wouldn’t normally take, and adding a strategic layer of when to assign a particular mech that might ensure victory. Do we use our Daishi now to ensure victory against a key opponent or do we save it for the possible grand final? Do we really want to use the Master and Commander for ECM or can we afford to use up a raven instead, maybe denying our later tag+arrow tactic? What I hope follows is something exciting, unpredictable and fun for all teams involved!
Keeping the lance size at a traditional 4 is an attempt to get some of our casual/pub players to join up. I think you guys should find it a lot easier to gather 3 other warriors to do battle with! I actively encourage units and clans with lots of members to split into smaller teams and adopt someone from the pub games to play. Who knows, maybe you’ll get another valuable clanmate to play with!
Of course, smaller teams is also a way to limit the ‘powerlevel’ of some clans. We all know that the clans that have been together the longest play extremely well together, and limiting them to 4 players is a slight handicap to them. It might be a good opportunity for commanders to teach some of their newer members, or just for a group of clanmates to have a blast. Don’t feel confined to your clan if you’d rather play in a mixed group.
So that’s the basics of The Boreal Brawl. 4v4 mech combat at its most pure, list building strategy with a layer of planning and unpredictability that might be refreshing!
