/btg/ - BattleTech General

Always have been a combined arms fan.

RoR is also a good example of ICE-powered mecha and Primitive Rifle/Cannons.

mods are asleep

post purple birds

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what has been seen...

is it bad that I wish I could see the macross version in fighter mode with that paint job

Here's the greatest spymaster.

I would so play a Paradox-style grand strategy game for Battletech.

AT LAST, I AWAKE FROM MY SLUMBER...WHO CALLS ME FORTH?

gibe /btg/TRO updates or I report u

Good God, think of managing bloodlines in that.

>"Now, who could I get Victor marry? Omi Kurita? Isis Marik? Hermione Aten? Nah, I know, Kali Liao! What do you mean, 'check her traits'?"

I'm watching Marco Polo and Jia Sidao is basically Sun-Tzu Liao to me.

Since Sidao is the 'Cricket Minister', it made me think of a design challenge: a Capellan-inspired Grasshopper variant, preferably for Sun-Tzu himself to ride. Or for Death Commandos.

hay does anybody know if there are any amphibious dropships in BT canon? like say, a Leopard class fitted with a huge seaplane-style floatation hull for landing on a planet where runways aren't.

Doesn't work. Trying to use thrust when you've landed on water destroys the DropShip outright.

But you can make giant aircraft carrier submarines if you want.

Dropships in BT have the density of Styrofoam. Just take them for a dunk!

I heard somewhere, sometime, that every dropship was amphibious. Probably not true, though

every spheroid*** dropship
not that it makes more sense

Honor to the Dragon!

what mech is this? some kind of custom macross crossover or is this the real life?t

Anastasia Kerensky lands her DropShips on the ocean floor in one of the weaker Dark Age novels.

I've done this before, but I'm away from my computer. I remember it had stealth armor and ER lasers, though.

They can land on water but if they try to take off again, BOOM.

I submitted the Marik Militia as one of the color schemes in the Robotech Tactics contest. Didn't win, alas.

>what mech is this?
Stinger LAM in AirMech mode. At the time, it was actually a licensed Macross design.

Well, there's the Phobos in the second GDL novel that actually sailed across a sea. Of course it was a Union and the transfer from the black navy to the wet navy was a bit accidental, but it's the thought that counts.

>giant aircraft carrier submarines

The Argo always reminds me of the time when sideburns were magnificent and oddly shaped hulls were someone else's problem.

youtube.com/watch?v=_pwYBmduh3c

Ultra rare Phoenix Hawk LAM if I am not mistaken.

I unironicly like this. The 5w is a darn fun and dare say good mech.

no one ever implied heavy mechs are bad :^)

what's your favorite way to keep track of unit actions and firing calculations while playing tabletop?

i mostly just draw tables on graph paper but i've seen pre-printed sheets and spreadsheets on a laptop being used before.

But they do take off from the bottom of the ocean. It's literally on the front cover.

wolverine here, too

shut up and take my c-bux

I loved that game. I think its available on the PlayStation Store now

>Griffin or Wolverine? Of the stock 3025 models, which do you prefer for general field use?
Griffin. I just don't like something about the way the Blockhead looks. While it's true the Griff is focused on ranged fire, it also still has the maneuverability to put its armament at near-optimal ranges pretty much all the time. Griff does lose out in melee and it's not a Command 'Mech, but if I'm building a lance I'd rather have three Griffins and one Wolverine than the other way around, y'dig?

in AtB play, is there a reason that lances have to wait 9 turns before being deployed when coming off reserve?

Whilst technically a non-answer: I just use the configure thingy to set everyone to arrive at more sensible times, like right at the start. It's not like the bot has to wait to deploy more than a reinforced lance to begin with.

That's a damn good show.

What about Legend of the 5 Rings? Could it work as background for Kurita Districts?

thanks!

It's meant to represent your lances operating independently, but sometimes close enough to each other that once contact is made with the enemy you can get there in time to help.

The bot is also still fairly stupid, which is why they get more units than you do. Their reinforcements also have delayed deployment.

Special event Big Battles or Base Assaults with extra allied units have them deploy at the start, because they are supposed to represent larger-unit actions.

Rules say they can't. They could land at high tide but would have to wait for low (*very* low) tide so the thrusters were no longer submerged to take off.

Also, it's the Dark Age, where 'Mechs can suddenly do backflips and kick-flip of each other. A number of the authors either didn't know or didn't care about how the universe was supposed to work, and there appears to have been fuck all editorial oversight to correct that.

We call it the Derp Age for a reason.

>We call it the Derp Age for a reason.
and we say that's our favorite meme for another reason
Dark Age stronk, grogs pls go back to your retirement home

now this is a Dark Age thread

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You can cut the reinforcements' arrival time, though: every rank of Strategy the reinforcing lance commander lowers the time by one, for instance. Other factors that are taken into account are the reinforcing lance's speed (the faster the average speed of their giant robots are, the quicker they arrive) and I believe jump jets. A lance of jumpy mediums led by a Strategy 2 commander can really shift it when necessary.

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2/10

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>best art
>best TROs
>biggest unit and equipment selection available, thus providing the best gameplay
>fluff has something going on for every faction on Inner Sphere, giving every player something to play
>players can re-enact any type of battle they want, from raids to all-out planetary invasions, going from simple lance vs lance games to huge combined forces battles

>>best art
No shimmyseen, as present era of releases has, so this is subjectively false. I do like the DA TRO art in general though.

>>best TROs
Again, I disagree. It has the *most* TROs though, which is something. Most of the DA TROs seem to be focused on extremely advanced tech with a minimum of just solid functional designs )though of course some do exist).

>>biggest unit and equipment selection available, thus providing the best gameplay
Biggest selection is a yes. Best gameplay is a subjective no. Personally, I prefer the slightly slower paced Invasion/Civil War era, since I don't like the frantic speed that DA games seem to run at.

>>fluff has something going on for every faction on Inner Sphere, giving every player something to play
Are you being intentionally stupid here? Many factions are dead, crippled, or simply ignored. Pet factions run rampant and many others are simply gone. Look at how few clans remain, for example.

>>players can re-enact any type of battle they want, from raids to all-out planetary invasions, going from simple lance vs lance games to huge combined forces battles
This exists in any era, so it's bullshit as a plus for the DA.

Everything here is either subjective or so nitpicky that it may as well be irrelevant. While I respect your opinion about the Dark Age (and I don't call it the Derp Age personally), I disagree with it. Thank you for the nice art dump though, that's appreciated.

>>best art
A) No. Most of my personal favorite pieces are Jihad or earlier.
B) A good bit of the worst art in the game is in the DA. Because, chronologically, Chris Lewis stuck his muddy dick into both the Jihad and the DA at the same time. He's just flat-out bad at his job, and unlike Nelson never seemed to get better.

>>best TROs
What, you mean the giant clusterfuck of half-finished print releases and E-Cat bullshit that it took them literally years to come close to fixing? Nah. 3039 and 3085 are the best TROs available, both in terms of content diversity and in ease-of-use.

>>biggest unit and equipment selection available,
True
>>thus providing the best gameplay
False. The wide strategic array of options and high-risk equipment design choices do favor one style of gameplay, but I actually prefer the Age of War if I want "fast and loose" gameplay.

>>fluff has something going on for every faction on Inner Sphere, giving every player something to play
"You're fucked" is a substantial part of that fluff.
>in the Inner Sphere
And that's another problem with your statement.

>>players can re-enact any type of battle they want, from raids to all-out planetary invasions, going from simple lance vs lance games to huge combined forces battles
Yeah. In this and any other era.

Meanwhile, the original fluff is pointlessly nihilistic, full of shitty Game of Thrones rape/incest/murder parties, without realistic or even interesting consequence to many factions or characters. It has been repeatedly backfilled by people desperately trying to fill the holes and horseshit left behind fifteen years ago by another company. It's more interesting now, but there's still more than one steaming turd in the punch-bowl; the company is likewise refusing to just draw a curtain on it (since they can't come up with their own original shit, apparently, unless it's allied to a healthy dose of literal copy/paste from older books). Wooo, let's drop vague rumors and hints!

To expand further on why "widest unit selection" may be wrong:
A great many variants and even entire design lines went extinct in the Dark Age time-skip. The Jihad is actually likely to have a wider selection, since you literally have everything from RetroTech primitives and MODs to cutting-edge MD tech and a full selection of Homeworlds, Society, and IS Clanner tech fighting, not to mention the odd Star League and SW hold-out.
By the Dark Age time frame, the Star League, Primitives, Society, MD, and Homeworlds designs have all been removed. According to currently not-retconned fluff, all of the 3050 and earlier versions of the Unseen are extinct, as well as all LAMs.
While there are more experimental and one-off designs available, the diversity of 'Mech >production< variants available has dropped precipitously, and is at its lowest since the Succession Wars. Several factory worlds have been razed or severely damaged, and many mainstay designs are gone, forcing you to get a completely new collection to effectively play in the Dark Age.

In addition, the loss of FtL communication in the era reduces the campaign options available to players, and particularly hurts Mercenary contracting and research. While this is fine for one sort of game (again) it limits tactical and strategic options for people who want to engage in grand strategy or play a small, hardscrabble unit (say, 90% of campaign players), since they have to rely on months-old intel and jumpship circuits to get anything done.

As far as the art.. well, this is one of my favorite pieces. It tells a tight, complete story while inviting the viewer to immerse themselves in the action. In much the same way, the covers of Interstellar Players 3 and XTR: Primitives 2 have images of ruin and investigation that draw you into the piece, and again inspire gameplay in a way that simple text cannot. They also all evince a high standard of technical skill and mechanical design.

A haiku for you, honorable user:

Magical settings
Crossover with Battletech
Not even once, senpai

(cont)
Basing your opinions of Dark Age art on the work of Tony, Chris D., and Alex while ignoring Lewis and Nelson's crapsack work is like pretending that Loose, the asshat who fucked up Brush Wars, or the bottom rung of Jim Nelson's character art somehow eliminate the contributions of MJ and Geier to the SW and CI eras.

Word filtered haiku
Smile and optimism gone
Commit Sudoku

So me and my friends have just started playing Battletech and currently only have 2 of the starting boxes. What are the books we need to get, and are there any books that tell you which factions can take what?

>What are the books we need to get
Depends on what era you want to play, although TROs 3039 and 3050 are basically a must for the 'Mech selection in the intro box. You'll also likely want Solaris Skunk Werks, a free program that runs on Java and allows you to print record sheets.
Other things I'd get - More map packs ($25 each) have scenarios that introduce rules for things like rivers and buildings. They also have tiles that you can drop onto the maps to add terrain.
Current prints of Tech Manual and Total Warfare, the official rules books (can wait a few months for these though). Unfortunately they're kind of really badly-organized, but less awful after you're basically familiar with the stuff in the Intro Rules booklets and the map packs.
Downloading a copy of the 4e Master Rules is also a good idea. A few things have changed, but for basic gameplay it's really well laid-out and includes some fun advanced rules that Catalyst exiled to Tactical Operations.

The fluff books are mostly there to support campaigns and such, so you can get those as you get more into the game world. Not critical first-timer purchases.

Tactical Operations, Strategic Operations, and Campaign Operations all add options to your games, but really only matter once you've had some time to fuck around and get used to the main game.

Alpha Strike is a fast-play system designed for larger games. You NEEED the companion if you buy the hard-copy rulebook, it includes a bunch of critical errata and rules changes. Supposedly there's a boxed set somewhere in the pipeline, but right now it's looking about as close to print as the second wave of Robotech Tactics. Personally I recommend skipping it for now.

>are there any books that tell you which factions can take what?
masterunitlist.info/
That's the official site. Only covers Succession Wars -> Jihad right now though, and it's maintained by volunteers so it can be a bit of a lag between new info and it going up.

>shut up and take my c-bux

You can have my Phoenix Hawk when you pry it from my cold, dead hands, user.

Thanks for the info.

That's the spirit, the traditional method of acquiring giant robots.

I cringe every time I see this picture. It's like OMG-watermelons-and-fried chicken

I have a question where is the best place to buy additional mechs?

So I hear the Hunchback, and especially the Hunchback IIC, is retardedly shitty.

really shitty parade turnout.

is the Phoenix Hawk a decent command mech?

Not even slightly.

The Hunchie's great, and you've got them in every flavour. Want the biggest fucking gun? -4G. Want to have a light show? -4P. Missiles? -4SP and -4J.

The Hunchback IIC is intentionally a death trap. It has incredible firepower but paper thin armour, since it's intended for pilots who want to live fast, die (rather) young and leave a good-looking corpse.

It's a great bug commander, and that's one of the fluff roles for it, in fact. Three Wasps and one Pixie (the mommy bug) is both legit and fluff-compliant.

>Look at how few clans remain, for example.

I'll counter that with my thought, dating back to when the Clan Invasion was a new thing: "Why bother having all these other Clans that have no apparent reason for existing?" If it didn't come to the Inner Sphere, it failed at the basic relevance check. Which would be a good chunk of why the Wars of Reaving were a thing, cleaning out most of the dead weight. I wouldn't be surprised if the Star Adders have absorbed everything that was left on the homeworlds by the time they get around to Clan Invasion II: Electric Boogaloo.

>If we're gonna talk about real design flaws in BT, how about the fucking Hunchback 50/50 shot of 'you either fly out safely using the eject feature of you hit the ammo rack positioned right above the escape route and get crushed"

Hunchie pilots eject out the top of the head which is clear of all obstruction so... u wot m8?

>decent command mech
>6 points of head armor

Pick one and only one. In local games, PH pilots are known as "suicide jockeys".

>In local games, PH pilots are known as "suicide jockeys".
Around here, we use the term for anyone driving a mech with CT ammo or more generally any design with unCASE'd ammo and thin armor

CASE would be so much more useful on IS designs if it hadn't come out at the same time as the XL engine craze.

It's certainly very good for mercenary campaigns, though.
Completely changes how getting an ammo crit on a target feels, from "oh cock, looks like no salvage today" to being nearly as nice as a headcap

That's true, but if you're mostly a single match or single scenario player then the benefit of standard CASE tends to be much more dubious in a lot of designs.

>but if you're mostly a single match or single scenario player then the benefit of standard CASE tends to be much more dubious in a lot of designs.
That's very true

Was it ever explained who caused the HPG blackout? I thought the BT novels stopped being published in the middle of Dark Age because it was such a flop that FAFSA went bankrupt.

>FAFSA

While it was a flop I don't think it caused quite that much financial chaos user

>I submitted the Marik Militia as one of the color schemes in the Robotech Tactics contest. Didn't win, alas.
ABSOLUTE MADMAN

>I have a question where is the best place to buy additional mechs?
If you want cheap plastics, there are a couple of stores that sell the Alpha Strike lance packs at a pretty steep discount - about $4 a model. There are a bunch of add-on 'Mechs as well as reprints of some of the stuff in the starter box. That's a pretty limited selection though.

For metals, there's a guy named Aries who runs a small online shop that has almost all of the models at a discount from Iron Wind's prices. Good turnaround time, cheaper, and better shipping prices than IWM, not as good at replacing busted things. Your call there.

eBay is good for OoP stuff, but watch out for anything that looks like pic related - it's counterfeit and extremely low quality. Note the thick white paint and shitty paperclip aerials, as well as the background. This guy has been selling shitty lead recasts for a loooong time.

If you want MWO-style stuff, Warhansa is the flavor of the week. Again, pirated stuff, but pretty good quality.

If you want older models, Lords of hte Battlefield and Noble Knight both have decent selections.

GHQ does 6mm armor, which is great for repping cheap shitter tanks like the Scorpion, or APCs and infantry.

Was Dark Age a flop? Why did they think it would be popular?

it is going to be revealed soon(tm)

>Was it ever explained who caused the HPG blackout?
Yes and no. We know that the Republic, Green Ghosts, and possibly Blakists all had their fingers in the pie at some level. The Green Ghosts likely include survivors of the Reaved clans, as well as former Blakies, and ComStar was engaged in their own shenannigans. Catalyst steadfastly refuses to actually publish any goddamned answers, of course.

>I thought the BT novels stopped being published in the middle of Dark Age because it was such a flop that FAFSA went bankrupt.
Nah, not FASA, they'd already been dead for like seven years at that point. It was Wizkids folding and getting bought out by Topps, who didn't want to have to revenue-share with ROC books. And yeah, it was also a colossal flop.

the game or the novels? Game was kind of a success in its time, I don't have a clue about the novels

Pics of the extra models in the lance packs. you can see the layout here ariesgamesandminis.com/index.php/shopping/category/38-lance-packs.html

They figured that a sufficiently fresh start would bring in new blood and revitalize everything, forgetting the kind of grogs they were dealing with.

(Admittedly in hindsight a lot of Dark Age events DID turn out to be kind of stupid and their earlier plans for the factions were almost Age of Sigmar-tier goofy)

>Was it ever explained who caused the HPG blackout?
Of course not
>I thought the BT novels stopped being published in the middle of Dark Age because it was such a flop that FAFSA went bankrupt.
Not at all really. FASA folded back in '02 or around there, nothing to do with the DA. WizKids really shit the bed with the DA stuff and they eventually stopped the novels and new sets because they were losing money on the whole business, and IIRC they folded and then it was all down to CGL as the only people still doing battletech stuff

>Was Dark Age a flop?
Not at first. It came at the tail end of the Mage Knight craze (invented by the same guy who created BT), so he decided to flog an almost but not quite rebooted BT using the same system.

>Why did they think it would be popular?
He wanted to get "back to basics", with the Mad Max feel of the Succession Wars but a Darker Grittier 90's Edge (tm). Of course, it was in the 2000s at that point, but who gives a hey...

What killed it? A mix of things.
The game actually started off really popular. But Wizkids saturated the market with other titles at the same time (including rebooting Crimson Skies), and there were severe problems with booster selection. Especially in the first couple of sets. Nobody wants to spend thirty bucks and not get a single decent 'Mech. There were also problems with the aesthetics (see the bitching about Chris Lewis upthread), and the whole Reseen thing. Later sets had severe scaling and quality-control issues, and the support for the game fell off as WizKids started running out of money.

Meanwhile, there was a LOT of backlash when WizKids basically said "Old Battletech is dead, this is all you're getting", which led to some of the old FASA guys forming FanPro as a US-licensed extension of the company in Germany that was still publishing FASA-era stuff. They got the license to produce "Classic" BT in the US, and it drew off some more of the playerbase from Clix.

When Wizkids went down, there was a whole lot of bitching and wild-ass speculation about what was going on. The simple facts are Jordan was bored, his company was stretched too thin to make shitloads of money anymore, the fad for clix games was petering out, and Topps offered him an enormous amount of money for the patent on the Clix system. He took it and moved on. Frankly, I don't blame him.

Now, as to why Battletech hasn't taken back its slot as a top ten minis game.. well, that's for another day.

>Now, as to why Battletech hasn't taken back its slot as a top ten minis game.. well, that's for another day.
IT'S ANOTHER DAY NOW, FAGGOT

But seriously, memery aside, why do you feel that this is? You seem to have some knowledge of these things and I'm curious as to your perspective.

>Pet factions run rampant
honestly that's my problem with 3025-3067 fluff.
The entire game was basically "Fun with FedSuns and Friends". On the Clan side was Wolf and Jade Falcon. As bad as it seems now I don't think it was any better then. Factions that weren't related to Steiner-Davions were almost ignored