Anyone else excited for Battletech?

[Drasius]

mechs i can visualize in my head:
Catapult
Atlas
Urbanmech
Timber Wolf
Vulture
Bushwacker
Hunchback
Jaegermech

Most of the rest blur into 'humanoid with guns for arms'.

When you're such a grognard that you've spent so many hours pouring over the MUL's and TRO's, read every bit of fluff that they put out for years on end while playing some forme of mech related game (be it TT or PC) for the last ~2 decades and it's surprisingly easy to have a mental picture of the majority of the 'mechs they've made over the years. I just wish I had as easy a time remembering all my uni lectures back in the day!

[Erloas]

I was out of practice on a number of things, so I had to brush up on some points as we went.

How well I know a lot of the sculpts depends on if I've painted them or not. I've spent quite a bit of time on Camospecs.com too, and most of the 'Mechs I've picked up have been because I liked how they looked and knew I could make them work. Although there are quite a few that still sort of blend together for me because they don't usually have a highly distinctive feature. But there are a *lot* of 'Mechs and it would be pretty hard to know them all.


So MWO, they're having a sale right now on 'Mechs with quite a few ballistic slots and I'm trying to figure out which assault 'Mech to pick up (as I already have all the other weight classes, though if I purchase some more bays I might look at another medium or heavy). Not really feeling the King Crab, as there are a lot of them around and it is a bit slow for my liking. The cyclops I just don't think has the armour I want in an assault. Mauler is too slow and most of the variants have an XL engine, which just seems like too much of a vulnerability on a slow assault.
So that leaves me with the Victor 9B, the Battlemaster 1D, and the Banshee 3E. The Banshee can't have any weapons in the arm though and that is pretty limiting, but it is the biggest and can get pretty tanky with some reallocation. The Victor has jump jets... but I can't see a lot of use for those on an assault 'Mech, it is a bit light on armour too, but it has the most versatile hard-point layout.. And the Battlemaster just... is, not sure what to say about it. Just can't really decide.

[Aotrs Commander]

So, having painted my Argus, I looked at the model, and looked at the stats and looked at the model and went "okay lads, you got me. Where's the Medium lasers?" Turns out the early sculpt doesn't HAVE the medium lasers - nor a visible rotary AC and the second gun looks way too big to be an MG. So I did a new version... And for about the first time ever, I found myself thinking about using an AC/2 or AC/5, now I've revised the damage. (In the end, I went with 5 damage for AC/2, 2 heat/8 damage for AC/5 and 11 damage for AC/10; I also pushed the rotary AC damage up slightly (to 3 and 6 respectively) to keep them competative without making them too good.)

(The default AGS-4D Argus uses a rotary AC/5, MG in the arm and two torso mounted MGs. The new apocraphal AGS-3D used an ER PPC and Light AC/5, Artemis IV with the LRM and an extra heat sink. This is an "early model" which was abandoned by Davion, it used an early prototype light AC. (The Light AC was introduced fully six years after the Argus was introduced, but prototyped in the 3050s according to BattleTechWiki, so there is a plusible bit of bullcrap for that!)

[Erloas]

So the balance mechanisms used in MWO are pretty interesting, it is an interesting system but one that wouldn't really work outside of a computer game. The big advantage of ACs is that the slug is all of the damage at once, the slug either hits or it doesn't hit. With a laser though you have to hold them on a target for the full duration to get the full damage. With a LL that is something like 3 seconds, so if you can't stand that long, or either of you are moving it is very easy to miss on some of that damage. It also spreads the damage over all the sections it hits, so while you can focus on a section it is very common to cover several. Also without turns the rate of fire for the various weapons works better, so AC2s are not only decent, they end up being used quite a bit. Same with MGs. While they might only be a few points per shot you're putting out quite a few shots while the larger weapons are still reloading. They make for really good crit seekers.
The SSRMs are a bit underwhelming though, they work best against small fast targets that are too hard to track for slower 'Mechs but the lock time is fairly long so it is easy to miss a shot because they get out of LOS before the lock is established. Probably worth some sensors/TCs to speed up lock time if you plan on running them a lot.

[Corsair14]

Question for anyone who plays Alpha Strike. A pursuit lance gains the Blood Stalker ability if the requirements are met. Do I select the opposing mech after deployment or before and do I have to declare to my opponent who it is? Seems to me an easy way to lose since the lance hits everything else at -1 and the opponent can just keep the mech hidden behind a terrain and a wall of other mechs while your lightish mechs get pummeled at a negative.

[Aotrs Commander]

Guys, guys, guys...

Do you think I've got enough BattleMechs?

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I don't think I've got enough BattleMechs.

[Drasius]

Guys, guys, guys...

Do you think I've got enough BattleMechs?

Spoiler

Show

I don't think I've got enough BattleMechs.

Nice mixed regiment there. Needs more vehicles and ground pounders for a proper RCT, but that's still a rather impressive collection. The board is pretty decent too, though the hexes seem a touch oversized. Awesome work mate.

[Aotrs Commander]

Nice mixed regiment there. Needs more vehicles and ground pounders for a proper RCT, but that's still a rather impressive collection. The board is pretty decent too, though the hexes seem a touch oversized. Awesome work mate.

It's not a hex map, it's Kallista's Hexon terrain. (Okay the base pieces are special commission.) The point of Hexon is it enables you to build decent battlefields. (That, beleive or not was me not really trying.)

Some better examples of what you can do with it are from some of the games do at conventions (Manouvre Group at 144th, rather than BattleTech)

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Though a more typical evening game (when Dad is not playing 25mm and we can't pinch his base boards!) would look something more like this:

Hexon is, granted, not great for BT on the basis that BattleMechs are so darned tall, relative to the hex size (it works great for 144!) - you're in reality playing something closer to 25/28/30/35mm with BT and you could make an arguement that you would be better play with the 25mm fold-falt cardboard hills. However, I'm pretty sure those heavy BT models wouldn't stand on the surface! But that's why we have lots of buildings and forest! (And, if I remember in future for the evening games, the cliffs, which would make things a bit better, too!) That aside, it's still so much better than traitional wargaming's That One Hill, it's not funny.

So we don't actually use it as a hex map. (We are currently using 15m = one inch, while we heretically fiddle with pasting BattleTech combat onto Maneouvre Group.)

Actually, it was interesting the way the actual game went (with only eight of those 145 mechs plus vehicles).

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MG's system of observation.reaction etc means that what you get very much put me in mind of X-Com (I am technically literally playing X-Com 2 right now) with overwatch. MG doesn't actually need an overwatch, since you automatically get a reaction if an enemy moves into sight. Now, because we, while allowing reactions (i.e. the ability to shoot in reaction to an enemy, eg. the aforementiond) are not allowing a weapon to be shot more than once per round, basically (like regular BT), what it means is you egt a lot of maneouvering to set-up and then to get the first shot in without provoking a reaction... And then when the reactions start going and a reacted mech can't shoot, the others can start to move in and so on. Makes for a very much more tactically dynamic game (which is what I play tabletop for), while still fundementally being the shooting and damage of BT.



(I normally don't take so many pictures, but I vey specifically wanted to take pictures of some of the homebrew Mechs we'd got (the sharp-eyed may notice them in the morass) so that I'd have some better ones for the record sheet pictures, but on a battlefield ish sort of background, not just on my painting tray! Getting everything out was just a good excuse to show off toeveryone (including my mate, of whom this was, like, his second game, his only prior experience being Mechie 3 and 4 on the PC.)