Point Cost Land Ironclad

I introduced a number of rules limiting the Ironclad's capability and reducing the points. I justify this by a story that it was stolen by the Canadians.
For that back story:
philsmartianfront.blogspot.com/2015/07/nell.html


Ironclad Special Rules:
The Canadian-American Alliance has been strained by the Canadian acquisition, either found or stolen, depending on your point of view, of the Landship, “Nell”, otherwise known as “The Spirit of Detroit”, as the Americans have named it.

The Americans have been putting pressure on Canada to get “The Spirit of Detroit” back, as such there are numerous rules governing its use.

Low Ammunition.
The Americans have refused to provide the 12”, 7” and 5” shells for “Nell”’s guns. Britain has made shipments of ammunition of all these calibers, but it has yet to reach the Western Canada.

When each of these calibers makes a “to hit” roll that is exactly “1”, that gun is out of ammo. For the 5” guns, this applies only to the turret in question. That turret is out of ammo for the next turn, but is restocked by shifting rounds from other turrets.

A gun that is out of ammo may still be target and fire blanks, to try to fool the Martian that it is still functioning.

Low Coal
Nell needs more coal than all the rest of the 2nd Squadron combined, as such, measures have been taken to conserve coal.

Nell is deployed next to the coaling station. Nell needs to remain there until turn 4 to be fully coaled.

If a heat ray misses Nell, (I.E. A “to hit” roll of 1 or a 2) the coaling station is hit instead, exploding, causing 5 +4 hits to Nell and everyone else within 6”. Units at a range of 6.1 to 12” suffer 3 +2 hits instead.

Nell is running on one boiler out of four, it takes time to stoke up the remaining boilers. As such she moves only 1” on turn 1, 2” on turn 2 and 3” on turn 3.

If not fully coaled, roll a D10 each time Nell moves, or uses the Steam Defense. On a 1, the coal bunkers are empty, and Nell can only move 1” a turn thereafter.

Skeleton Crew.
The proper crew for the Landship is considerable and Nell hasn’t been fully crewed with trained personnel.

Due to minimal crew available for damage control, all hits on the Damage Chart 6+ are considered critical hits towards the 5 critical hits required for Nell to be considered destroyed.

If a critical gun hit is made, roll the die to determine which gun is hit. The Martians may reroll that die if they see fit. The reroll must be kept.

Cannibalizing units.
Some of the manpower to crew Nell was taken from infantry units.

Infantry and Machine Gun unit only gets one additional hidden movement counter instead of two.

The only problem with those special rules is that there are too many of them. It was hard to keep track of, and the game was distracted a lot by constantly referring to the. What did I write? Oh yeah.

It puts things in perspective with the write up that 3 of them held the line against a major force of Tripods.

Or up the LIC to 1,500 points. Another thing I do as a home rule, is the LIC is exempt from the command rules. It does not count as a unit towards the Army breakpoint, nor does it contribute to the command point total. To quote my favorite dwarf, "I still only counts as one!" So if the LIC comes out on a 2,000 point game, then the Martians only have to kill maybe 2 or 3 units to rout the army.

And seeing it's destruction might put a small damper on things.

I tend to agree, which is one of the reasons I never even attempted to get a AD one. Thats a heck of a lot of money for one model. Even with their occasional sells. And it really didn't look right on a battlefield without the corresponding Martian 'big' machine - the Overseer. I see the Dominator as kinda the counterpart to the Goliath & the Overseer as counterpart to the LIC. Or did, I suppose.