Then, it happened. The Panther had caught up with my Catapult and kicks me in the head, boom kills my best pilot drops my brand new Catapult. No arms, no weapons and one leg the "search for the holy grail black knight" leaps with his one leg and kicks me in the head with this same leg.
This happened to me in a late priority mission in the Career. The mission parameters limited me to no mechs over 50 tons, and after a fairly fierce fight I had reduced the enemy to one armless, one-legged mech that kicked my Centurion in the cockpit, killing the pilot. I thought for a long time before deciding to accept that result and not re-run the scenario.
As I found out, some missions are not giving you full information and the surprise can be deadly. Turns out the 2 Skull mission had a couple heavy mechs that turned out to be an Atlas and a Cataphract. WTF?
The skull rating are sometimes misleading. The experience earned at the end of the mission gives you a better idea of the 'real' hazard level, though sometimes that can be way off, too. Speaking roughly, about 1 time in 6 the actual mission is a half-skull more difficult than predicted, and 1 time in 6 it's a half-skull easier. When it's more difficult it's rarely (less than 1 time in 6, or less than 1 in 36 overall) a full skull more difficult than estimated. In the thousand+ missions I've run it's only been a full skull easier than estimated maybe 2 or 3 times.
Three words: "I lost Glitch."
This is the one I always remember, too. It's been more than a year and a half now, so details have become fuzzy, but…
To tell you that story I first have to tell you this one. I ran a Training Day-type mission that my XO recommended against, saying I didn't have the firepower. I ignored him and sent my personal pilot (all 10s) in a tricked-out Marauder to escort the newbies (Urbanmech/Commando/Panther). I should've listened. It was a temperate planet with a large rectangular walled fort on the left side of the map and a large irregularly-shaped lake to the right of it, with only a narrow strip of dry ground separating them. To make a long story short, the only trainee to survive was an out-of-ammo Urbanmech. Even the Marauder (maximized for defense) got badly shot up. I'd never seen that map before and loudly expressed the desire to never see it again.
Two missions later, I saw it again.
This time I had my standard 4-6-0 heavy lance (Marauder with 3 LL/WarhammerD/Archer/Archer variant with 4 SRM6). I was back in the Marauder and Glitch was piloting the close-to-stock Archer (extra armor, no ML).
The OpFor was 8 mechs in the 60-80 ton range, all appearing near-simultaneously. As soon as they spotted Glitch, anyone who could get a line of sight to her decided she was the only target on the board. It took two turns of that to knock her off her feet… for the first time. When she stood up, she started retreating, but she was in the lake (slow moving) and kept trying to turn her least-damaged side to the enemy, so she wasn't able to extend the range (which was never lower than 12 hexes and got as high as 20). When she fell for the second time I started thinking about having her punch out, but I kept thinking I could finish off the OpFor, and when she was upright she was contributing to the fight. So, I signed her death warrant.
By the end she was in that "Holy Grail" black knight situation, with only one limb, and no armor remaining anywhere, though with both LRM-20s still firing, when she fell for the fourth time (plus the head hit that stripped off all that armor) and died. And on that round I finished off the enemy — a truly Pyrrhic victory.
And then I sat and stared at the screen for about half an hour, trying to decide whether I should hit that oh-so-tempting Restart Mission button. But, in the end I decided that 1) it would cheapen Glitch's sacrifice, and 2) I really need to learn a lesson from this, and I was much more likely to learn it if I had to finish out the Career without Glitch.
And so she remained on Argo's Wall of Honor, a memorial to my own hubris.
Apex never let me live it down.