Battletech (What not to do)

[Grommen]

Here my confession and tale of woooa. Let not this happen to you. Tis a bit long so you have been warned.

I've played the Tech since 1990. Recently a friend of mine and I have gotten back into the game. He too has played sense the dawn of time. Both have survived the clan invasion, fought on Tyukyadd, witnessed countless battles, and in general know better!

So after about six months of playing against each other, on a small rock over something (we don't even remember what now), suffice to say what started as a border scrimish has blossomed into a good old fashion blood feud, both sides are unwilling to fall back. Millions of credits, mecca, and warriors have gone down in this epic shoot out with no signs of slowing.

The good news is we finally got another player to join us. At the point of the story he had played 3 other games. Long story short he decided to try out tanks, we suggested the Pegasus scout hover with the TAG system. "Whats that he asks"?

"It's used for firing artillery."

"We can have artillery?"

"ya sure we'll just build you another tank with two arrow launchers on it and call it a day" <-----Mystake #1

3 hours latter it was late, so what was supposed to be me vs the new guy, and the winner fought the other experienced player turned into a fatal 3 way. And we decided to use a rather large map area (4 by 2 hex maps) <-----Mystake #2 the little bugger had range on us with those stinken Arrows

So I end up in the middle between the tank forces and my old nemesis to my right. Now I should have rushed the arrow tank and wiped out the Pegasus and ignored my buddy's mechs who would have taken a few more rounds to reach me but <-----Mystake #3) Blood feud! CHARGE ! Your gonna die this time You ((*)*^&*^^*(*(er And I send two of my three mechs his way sending a lowly Hatchet man to deal with the enemy Artillery.

Now I had me a secret weapon, the Hatchet man not only had an LBX10 but was equipped with TSM. So I announced that I shut off all my heat sinks so that I could overheat by the time I reached the artillery and my TSM's would be good and warm for that wonderful tomahawk chopping I was drooling over.

On turn #3 the Pegsis broke around the tree line and moved within my hatchet man's firing arc for his 3 Medium Pulse lasers. Well I can't let that go so I let fly! <----Mystake #4) Not only did I miss, but I forgot my heat sinks were not on. 18 on the heat scale! No problem all I need is a 6+ and I don't shut down....I rolled "5".

At this point my nemesis and I are trying like hell not to fall over laffing cause we know next round that little freeken Pegasus is gonna call in two Arrow rounds, unload his complement of weapons and only need "2" to hit. Hatchet man is DOOMED. Pilot seriously considered jumping out and running for it.

Now on to the blood feud. Back over on the eastern front both sides have decided to forgo the normal tactics of ducking and diving for a good shot and ran into a clump of trees to blast away at each other at point blank range and see what is left. The end result was a total mess with both sides taking heavy damage.

I had the forethought to bug out and go support my Doomed Hatchet man, but...

(Mystake #I've lost count now) my nemesis moves his damm Victor one hex forward and has a total of +1 to be hit for the round. I've got a modified Raven with 4 ER-Mediums and 2 Streak six's within walking range. I'm gonna need "5's" !!! FEUD ON! Ya so what I've got my stealth system activated, it's only 10 extra heat. I'll just need a "6+" or shut down.

So what I shut down, I just pillaged your damm Victor! Now all I need is a 4 so my ammo does not

BLAMM!

O now your gonna get it you made my Raven explode.

Somewhere around here the Hatchet man vanished from play due to multiple Artillery rounds slamming him. The pilot surrendered to the Pegasus crew whom it was announced were in fact French. Irionic I know.

Fast forward a few rounds and we find my remaining mech faceing off against three other mechs. A Griffin, the crippled victor, and a Commando (scrappy but infective). I know, I know, I should have headed for the door but I was killing something tonight, and that Griffin only had a +1 to hit

We both forgot that player #3's Pegasus had moved in behind us all.

You may not know this but a Stock Griffin can take 80 points of damage in one round and not die. Not only did my Catapult nail it with every thing on it's arsenal (including every LRM) but it got hit from behind by two Arrow IV rounds, a Pulse Laser and half dozen SRM's.

HE LIVED!

Lost both arms, and a torso but dam he still had a medium laser in the chest.

Then the Pegasus gives chase to the victor that my Raven crippled. That little <insert choice profane word here> gonna kill steal! Not on my watch! So I charge out with my Catapult right past the Commando and take a cheep shot at the Pegasus. Naturally I miss cause it's not my day.

However the commando didn't, and thanks to the large laser that had vacated most of my head armor on the Catapult, said catapult falls backwards, pilot dead, cockpit vaporized.

HEAD SHOT

Least the Commando's victory was short lived as the Pegasus painted him and not the back side of the Victor. Commando vanished under a hail of artillery fire.

Next round so did the Victor.

Moral of the story.

We got Nube Toobed people. Don't let this happen to you.

Bad news for the tanks. We put the feud on hold and are coming for him next week.

He is goen down.

[9mm]

Just wait till Tanks finds out about power armor; I see a bright future for Tanks.

[gbprime]

Well congratulations on roping in a new player and giving him a win to cement his enthusiasm for the game.

Next, you need to work on situational awareness... and teach the new player to cry when a hovercraft starts taking fire from SRM's and LBX cluster rounds. It's all fun and games until they start shooting back.

Hover skirt destroyed? By a 1 point hit? Yessir, leg 'em and leave 'em.

[Grommen]

O ya, I'm bringing a LBX 20, buckets of SRM's and let us not forget the incendiary rounds. Buddies got a Helo fueling up as we speak.

I just hope the truce on the blood feud holds, or right in the middle of us wailing the tar out of the tanks were gonna turn on each other again.

We can't be trusted.

[Mando Knight]

Next, you need to work on situational awareness... and teach the new player to cry when a hovercraft starts taking fire from SRM's and LBX cluster rounds. It's all fun and games until they start shooting back.

Hover skirt destroyed? By a 1 point hit? Yessir, leg 'em and leave 'em.

If you need to emphasize this, every time (preferably only once per salvo, in the case of things like HAG, LBX or missiles, unless you really want to sound like a broken record) one of his combat vees takes damage, remind him that that's why the 'Mech is the king of the battlefield.

[RandomLunatic]

"ya sure we'll just build you another tank with two arrow launchers on it and call it a day" <-----Mystake #1

If it makes you feel any better, I am sure he would have discovered the Arrow IV Demolisher on his own.

[Grommen]

Ya in a few years. Na I have to go give it to him on day one!

In all honesty tanks really do get the shaft in Battletech and ya most people don't really care. I used to care but after that beat down. Well...

I hate to crit death him though. Thinking about busting out a couple of Locust's on crack and run around him and laff as he tries to shoot them.

I have till Sunday to pick anyhow. Then he is all mine.

[tyckspoon]

I hate to crit death him though. Thinking about busting out a couple of Locust's on crack and run around him and laff as he tries to shoot them.

I have till Sunday to pick anyhow. Then he is all mine.

I wouldn't feel too bad about it- if you're grouping your forces by BV or C-bill cost he can field tanks in something like a 3-1 ratio against mechs, which makes for a decently fair fight if you're on tank-friendly mapsheets (forested hills, on the other hand, mean tanks tend to just get ambushed by mechs and get their turrets jammed pointed into a hillside.)

[Grommen]

We were going straight up tonnage, old school. Hell with this C-bills and BV. Men are men and tanks ain't.

accept his.

Really BV on a tank is that low? Kinda makes all those crit spots worth it then. Hyrm... I'll have to look into this.

[Mando Knight]

Really BV on a tank is that low?

Yeah. A Vee has to roll for motive systems damage on like 60% of the shots that are absorbed by armor. 'Mechs only get that problem if you're playing with something that doesn't have proper armor, or you do something stupid like use MASC three turns in a row with your custom Quad (one of my group's MechWarriors forgot about the MASC rules and did just that. Totally wrecked his legs). 'Mechs also don't worry about terrain as much.

[9mm]

We were going straight up tonnage, old school. Hell with this C-bills and BV. Men are men and tanks ain't.

accept his.

Really BV on a tank is that low? Kinda makes all those crit spots worth it then. Hyrm... I'll have to look into this.

BV is a far better indicator of actual combat strength than tonnage. I learned that the hard way when we let non-mechs count as half weight, and all of a sudden 2 Mars showed up.

[Grommen]

Yeah. A Vee has to roll for motive systems damage on like 60% of the shots that are absorbed by armor. 'Mechs only get that problem if you're playing with something that doesn't have proper armor, or you do something stupid like use MASC three turns in a row with your custom Quad (one of my group's MechWarriors forgot about the MASC rules and did just that. Totally wrecked his legs). 'Mechs also don't worry about terrain as much.

Here is another funny story about MASC.

Back in the day when you failed yoru MASC roll your legs locked up and you didn't move.

So we begin playing with the new set of rules and I fail a MASC roll, so we look up the new rules. "O I get a critical hit in each leg. Not so bad.."

Bad news is that I don't normally use CASE on my mechs, so I stuff ammo on the leg slots cause statistically other than the head slot, those are the least likely to get hit.

BLAM!!! up goes an untouched mech on the first round of combat cause I hit the ammo with the crit for the MASC.

I've quit using MASC now.

[John Campbell]

My experience with three-way fights in general is that typically one side gets caught in the middle and gets reamed, and then whoever took the most damage doing the reaming gets mopped up by the ultimate victor.

The last three-way I was involved in, the only damage my mechs took was five points to my C3 Master unit because it tripped crossing a river. I started out randomly behind a hill, and, though I was doing my best to get into the fight as quickly as I could (standing around watching the others beat on each other is the smart strategy, but it's not the fun strategy, and it was a one-off with no real consequences), it took me long enough to get the slow-ass 100-ton master unit up to the top of the hill that the other two players were well stuck in by the time it got a clear firing lane. And then I found a nice spot there on the ridgeline and just parked it. Meanwhile, my other mech, a 6/9 (with the TSM hot) 60-ton energy boat with the C3 slave charged in to close range and skirted around the outside of the fight at high speed, shooting (and mostly missing) with its MLs, and, more effectively, spotting for the Master, up on the ridgeline at long PPC range, and giving it 4s and 5s to hit with its PPCs and Gauss rifles.

My slave unit got shot at, but not much, because the other players generally had better targets (each other), and never actually got hit, because it was most of the time moving like a light mech. The master unit never even so much as got shot at. Ended up just gunning down the one shambling wreck - a TSM Atlas variant - that made it out of the brawl in the middle as it tried to close through the master's vastly superior weapons range.

[Grommen]

Purtty much how it had been working out John. And I was the monkey in the middle.

So this week we went brought out the big guns, teamed up and went after the new guy.....!Epic disaster! He won again cause every time he needed to roll a 10 or better to TAG a unit he did. We ended up swarming the artillery tank in the end but his protector mech for the tank turned out to be too good and my light mechs that swarmed got smoked. We also lost a griffen when it crested the hill and an Alacorn Tank put one of it's Gauss rounds though the cockpit. (General! We can't repel firepower of that maginatude!)

Good new though we accidentally trapped his hover tank in a ring of trees so he could not escape. My Phoenix Hawk suffered 4 artillery strikes, but we got the little bugger! Just so happened that one of my laser hits knocked out it's motive system (cheep kill) and it happened to be over water so is sunk. BTW the Phoenix Hawk could not take Arrow Round #5 & 6 latter on (HOW DID YOU ROLL A #@#% 10 AGAIN!)

Also finally looked up the rules for Artillery instead of relying on 20 year old memory's. I hate forgetting things and sure nuff that +4 to hit when directly firing artillery would have come in handy.

It was easter Sunday so none of us worked the next day anyway. So we called a do over. We were all still pretty torked off about A) us loosing to the new guy again, and B) tanks still suck and their is no reason why other than because the gods say it so. So we found the alternate tank rules in the Tactical Ops book, and played a straight up tonnage game.

About 3 rounds into the game four light mechs swarmed over the ridge chasing his Pegasus Hover tank (we had a good haterid of that thing now), it pillaged my Catapult nearly knocking off an arm and leg, crippling it's movement to pretty much jump jets cause it's running speed was like 3 or 4.

And then the Hover tank blows a piloting roll, slams into a grove of trees from the side, manages to roll a 3 for his damage location (motive system failure AGAIN!) and blows out the skirts yet again. New guy mad storms off table calling a full retreat of his forces.

I'm denied my sweet victory yet again!

O ya and by the way The BV for the modified Pegasus tank is like 750, and a similarly designed mech with the same stuff and 1 hex better speed (with MASC not raw power) is only 840 points. Yet the mech does not run into trees and have both legs fall off, sink in water, or die cause someone hit it with a little bit of napalm. And it can turn on a dime at over 180 KPH How is the BV system better?

Guess the moral of the story is don't bring a tank to a mech fight.

[Seatbelt]

If a Pegasus wasn't frightening you wouldn't have tried to chase it down with a lance of light mechs. How is the BV system inaccurate?

[The Glyphstone]

Sounds like he would have thoroughly kicked your butt for a third time in a row if he hadn't rolled badly on that piloting test and hit a tree. I'd call that pretty strong evidence against the "don't bring a tank to a mech fight" claim - particularly since it appears that either by tonnage or BV, you never bring a tank to a mech fight, you bring anywhere from three to a dozen tanks to a mech fight.

[Mando Knight]

O ya and by the way The BV for the modified Pegasus tank is like 750, and a similarly designed mech with the same stuff and 1 hex better speed (with MASC not raw power) is only 840 points. Yet the mech does not run into trees and have both legs fall off, sink in water, or die cause someone hit it with a little bit of napalm. And it can turn on a dime at over 180 KPH How is the BV system better?

It only has that better speed with MASC, which carries its own problems. The 90 point difference is probably due to MASC and 'Mech capabilities vs Hovertank systems.

[Grommen]

It only has that better speed with MASC, which carries its own problems. The 90 point difference is probably due to MASC and 'Mech capabilities vs Hovertank systems.

Ya that seemed to be the crux of the issue. The BV values raw speed quite a bit and to me that messed up the results. I actually don't think it's better than a mech, I was thinking it's considerably worse than a mech. The results did not pan out that way.

Their are things I do like about the BV however and I'm still considering it. I'm also willing to consider that I found an acception to the rule in the Pegasus Tank. I also tinkered with it making it faster than it was originally. I was expecting the tank to be a lot lower value than mechs similar in design. It was not.

Then again, war is hell, dems the brakes, and we were gonna get that sucker one way or the other.

[9mm]

Ya that seemed to be the crux of the issue. The BV values raw speed quite a bit and to me that messed up the results. I actually don't think it's better than a mech, I was thinking it's considerably worse than a mech. The results did not pan out that way.

Their are things I do like about the BV however and I'm still considering it. I'm also willing to consider that I found an acception to the rule in the Pegasus Tank. I also tinkered with it making it faster than it was originally. I was expecting the tank to be a lot lower value than mechs similar in design. It was not.

Then again, war is hell, dems the brakes, and we were gonna get that sucker one way or the other.

and this is the crux of the issue. Mechs > everything else is the prevailing attitude in universe, but isn't exactly true in practice. Now you are implementing some rules that make it more true with the Tac-opts realistic turning rules, but the only real advantage mechs have over conventional rules is terrain and durability. However BV just looks at the raw specs of any given unit; meaning the Pegasus is a damn fine unit that is compilable to scout mechs.