/btg/ - Battletech General

Daily reminder that there are no Steiner superheavies yet.

youtube.com/watch?v=StZcUAPRRac
Don't mind me, just deploying my lances.

I wonder how large an XL engine you'd put in a Atlas to get it to run in time with Erika. youtube.com/watch?v=fc-DgRO1SrQ

They can't find big enough legs to put on a

>those tiny-ass landing gears

They could always make it a Quad. Steiner likes to use those every so often

Boxhead music coming right up.

youtube.com/watch?v=0YOFdcogIg8
youtube.com/watch?v=7PUHbRqJ8hE
youtube.com/watch?v=vdq5LAMHuig

Once we're past the Dark Age I'd honestly expect every faction to have Superheavies. We'll talk again in 2030 when we know.

Man, there need to be more Zoids-like quads.

I don't know, but it's worth trying.

Friends don't let friends pilot Quads.

>Commandos don't exist
>Stilletos don't exist
>Razorbacks don't exist
>Talons don't exist
>Night Hawks don't exist
>Griffins don't exist
>Blitzkriegs don't exist
>Nightskies don't exist
>'Lightning Companies' don't exist

ITT: fake Lyrans. Somebody call Loki.

A Quad would fit that Leopard pretty well, you could always make the legs on the Vanir walk for you.

INFORMATION IS AMMUNITION BUMP

Why does this tank look so good? I want to get into DA just so I can field a regiment of these.

Is there a cooler brigade than the Regulan Hussars? No.

Someone ask for the best 'Mech in the game?

All the brigades of most IS powers lost their luster in the Jihad, or died off. Everyone went so retarded, or were watered down, that the unique identities they had seem gone.

i56.tinypic.com/2egbibs.gif

This really needs a version that says CERPPCs on everything.

(Not on my own computer so I can't upload normally.)

Someone say something to the /btg/ro people about this. I need my WALLOWSTEEL Lyran companies to get bigger.

>Decided after the success of the Leopard (apart from the crash) I'd field aerospace units as support since I hadn't figured out if megamek supports artillery
>blow a few million on an Eagle and Slayer
>first mission of new contract is a recon raid
>read the fine print
>"Attacker is considered to have control of the battlefield if he destroys more than 50% of the enemy forces"
>Stand up fight this is
>Large map so the air units have room to turn
>Unit chart shows up two extra units on my side
>Allied Firestarter
>Another fucking Leopard!
>Lance+1 of mechs become the mop up crew as my Eagle, Slayer and Ally's Leopard perform ridiculously powerful a2g strikes on enemy mechs

Now this is podracing. Already tearing the Eagle apart so I can fit a ton of pulse lasers and double heatsinks to it.

pandora.com/station/play/2865911679624309807

I ain't no Lyran, but I've got a company or two of the Donnie Guards. And a few Royals, because goddamn that scheme is sexy.

I always thought it was kind of a lackluster scheme.

I've been using the Donegal Province Militia scheme for my company's base scheme, then the squad leaders' and assault mechs get a random alliance Jaeger scheme to get the Flying Circus look going.

Eerily enough my first attempt at this company had the Kommandant piloting a Barghest in blue and white of the Skye Jaegers, and when looking for an example I found this.

>I'd love to get enough people together to get a 4" patch for the MoC logo instead of the Lyran fist, but the only sane estimate I could get had a minimum order of 70pcs, and I don't think there's 70 MoC *players*.
As a taurian fan, I feel your pain exactly, but with the added problem that even IF there were 70 of us for a group buy, some of those people would be medron pryde and associates, and fuck dealing with them

>Lyrans seemed the "least bad" option of the five
Not trying to start shit but they're really more middle of the road if you're speaking morally. They did kick off the Succession Wars, after all (like Germany with the World Wars, I guess)

Lyrians are when you need not one, neither two, but THREE government-funded terrorist organizations killing your own citizens!

It always struck me as borderline disturbing when characters identified as Lyran patriots unironically referred to certain Lyran government groups as "state terrorism" and then went on to proudly serve said government.

Reminder that Davions are all mary sues

"Behold, here is my mouth. Find me a cock to place in it or I shall find one myself"

Still better than the US.

Local Police.
State Police.
Federal Police.
CIA
NSA
FEMA
DEA
BATF
Immigration&Customs
US Army
US Air Force
US Marines
US Navy
US Coast Guard

I'd rather have three government-funded organizations which kill (Lyran) citizens than fourteen government-funded organizations which kill (US) citizens.

How's that?

>cucked by the Dracs in the war of '39
>consistently beaten during Clan Invasion
>cucked by Liao-Marik invasion
>government went retarded and handed over control to a rebel head of state
>had a massive civil war
>tried to invade Dracs again and once more got cucked
>cucked out of the Pleiades by peripherats
>literally tricked into losing Tikonov
>(((Davion))) who enabled the civil war put back in power anyway
>cucked hard by robes during toaster wars
>capital besieged for years and mountain collapsed
>March lords do whatever they want
>literally only saved because robes have nothing more than token forces (that still tied the AFFS up for years)
>move into the Republic era and retard (((Davion))) agrees to disarm for literally no reason
>muh LCTs, what could go wrong lol?
>being cucked by Dracs, Liaos, and Ravens currently

Davions are underdogs.

>Lyrans seemed the "least bad" option of the five, anyway, and ...I tend to play Imperial Germans in my WW1 navals and in Leviathans, so they're the least objectionable of the 2 real, 2 NPC, and 1 pointless Successor States.

Plus you have a thing for blonde Nordic women.

Making a lance for a provincial League force and my assault options are a Banshee and a Cyclops. Which, if at all, would be more Marik-y?

>Even marrying a Sandoval couldn't stop Yvonne being Yvonne

I mean, sure, it was the pussy "The Dracs surely won't murder us all in our sleep" Sandoval, but come on.

Banshee, but not by much

Depends on if they're nearer to the Lyran or Cappie border.

Neither, honestly.

Cyclops is OOP until 3058 so only old SL relics would make them up. Maybe a force from Oriente would have a couple.

Banshee would be salvage from the Steiners, like you might see in a force from the Border Protectorate or the Silver Hawks.

Does anyone else like to crank up the crazy? Just won a battle as the Star League vs Taurans. My mechs were murdered by conventional scuba infantry and a weaponised floating-oil-rig, but gave me enough time for my Condors to sink the damn thing.
How far down the experimental rules rabbit hole are you willing to go?

>My mechs were murdered by conventional scuba infantry and a weaponised floating-oil-rig
>weaponised floating-oil-rig
>weaponised oil-rig
>oil-rig
And you didn't post us the sheet, you faggot bastard.

Might just go with the Cyclops then since they're on the Cappie border. Lance also has a Grasshopper and Cicada.
To round it out would you recommend a Quickdraw or Catapult?

Would have if it were mine! Honest!

This reminds me of the time I fought in a city that was built around a little bay. I didn't realize one of these big boys inhabited the bay until it took the head off my commander's atlas at 28 hexes.

I wound up landing my two karnovs in a park and dropping my cruddy LRM infantry off there. Had them work their way through a maze of buildings, hetzers, SRM carriers and burning rubble until they climbed into a skyscraper within range of that big boat.

Two rounds later, they had sunk it, with barely any damage to the armor. Breach checks are fucking brutal.

Quickdraw. The Mariks make it. Bad enough you already have two mechs that haven't been made for hundreds of years in there. The quartermaster would have a seizure if the only thing he could get parts for was the Cicada.

Sorry m8, didn't mention it but it's after the Cyclops, Grasshopper and Catapult have been put back into production.

Catapults are pretty rare, but the quickdraw is pretty shitty. Why not include something like an Archer or warhammer or griffin or Trebuchet instead?

>put back into production.
Doesn't particularly make them any more sensible than the Banshee though because of where they are made and who they are made for.

>Cyclops
>Made by Rumplehog for C* on the total opposite side of the sphere

>Grasshopper
>Made by Steiner, Kurita, and Davion

>Catapult
>Made by Samurai Space Arabs

>C* toys via WoB
>Kurita stuff not available to Mariks when its their biggest era of commerce
Certainly no less sensible.

>Kuritans exporting C3's or C4's in any big number
>WoB transporting stolen Grumium crap 10+ jumps and just handing it over to Marik
Come on now. They could barely be arsed to refit Vikings for their own units.

Point still stands. Not interested in debating the commonality of stuff labeled "Inner Sphere General" in the MUL.

>Why does this tank look so good? I want to get into DA just so I can field a regiment of these.
the mwda tanks all looked really good. plus they completely dominated the game for half its lifetime.

a big part of what made mwda unlike battletech is that you originally couldn't move and attack in the same turn. this made the game really defensive: advancing means you give your opponent the first shot, and taking damage decreases your own damage. (it also made melee really important, because charges were the only way to move and attack in one turn, and trying to escape melee could fail and waste that unit's turn.)

the first expansion, fire for effect, added transports. meet this stupid motherfucker, the maxim transport. (pic related.) transports were supposedly for carrying infantry, but transports like the maxim with capacity for three infantry units could instead carry a vehicle. supposedly this was to represent towing artillery pieces (which were also introduced in ffe). instead, people used it to haul assault tanks like the di schmitt, m1 marksman, and behemoth ii, all of which were as hard-hitting, tough, and long-ranged as any assault mech at triple their point cost. you'd start with the assault tank in the maxim, push the maxim forward and drop the tank, then fire with the tank in the same turn.

tankdrop stayed effective for years. that, plus other additions like artillery and move-and-shoot vtols, meant that mechs were marginal outside of specific strategies like infiltration (you could set up to shoot your enemies before they even got a turn) or cheap melee berserkers (all of the industrial mechs).

tankdrop eventually got removed years later in age of destruction, the sixth or seventh set. the same set also gave mechs the ability to move and shoot in one turn, which ended the dominance of vtols and artillery as well.

One isn't a big number, and the Cyclops is also listed as available to mercs and the 2nd Star League which definitely places it in the realm of a provincial pick up.

That literally means "Everybody has a few of these somewhere." Not "Everybody has lots of them." Not to mention a lot of those have general ratings just because of the fighting in the Chaos March and the Jihad that really spread salvage around in a weird way. And salvage has nothing to do with parts availability.

>Not "Everybody has lots of them."
Literally no one has made this claim.

>That literally means "Everybody has a few of these somewhere."

Sounds like it fits the bill then. Was that your point?

Arguing the sensibility of that extremely unlikely combination of stuff sure implies that. When you have a bunch of far flung machines that aren't manufactured in a given state that your army is a part of as the majority of the unit, either somebody clumped them all together as problem children or it's just badly thought out. Since someone loses all the flavor of making the force as a given army unit in the first place, I lean toward the latter.

All of them are designs common and available to all the Successor states even when not in production. Nothing unlikely there when the fluff lays it out like that. Lean where you'd like, though the "problem children" remark sounds apt for his lance.

>Arguing the sensibility of that extremely unlikely combination of stuff sure implies that.
Holy shit just fuck off dude.

>extremely unlikely combination of stuff

Literally anyone could roll this on a FWL RAT.

Available, yes. Common, no. That's the issue. It's not like this is some new idea either. You can justify any wierd mech just about anywhere. It's when you start aggregating them that it gets strange.

Like this old gem. You could have all the red units from 4th War, Invasion, Bulldog, Serpent, whatever. But all of them together and it's like why even call it Fedcom anymore.

Just sounds like you're arguing an argument no one has made then.

Get the fuck outta here, back to the official forums with you

>any wierd mech
>literally on the faction in question's RATs

Ok, you had us going but now I think everyone is on to you.

RATs are abstractions and have nothing to do with the fluff-accurate state of a given faction's unit availability. TPTB have said this on multiple occasions.

RATs mean literally nothing.

Whatever helps you sleep.

>RATs are abstractions and have nothing to do with the fluff-accurate state of a given faction's unit availability. TPTB have said this on multiple occasions.

>Important Note: these tables make absolutely no attempt at balance! The goal was fidelity to the in-universe background material, not creating balanced forces for use in pickup games.

The only ones that are geared for availability are Xotl's. And even there in 3050, the chance of rolling an FWL Catapult is like 1/500, maybe 1/250 if you factor in the Liao Salvage table. Some of the others aren't much better.

None of it factors post-3058 though.

>availability
Frequency, not availability. Combined with the actual TROs and the MUL disagreeing with you on availability, I think you've long since reached the point where you need to just stop posting.

He's right though. They've stated RAT's always lean toward new toys and stuff vs accuracy. That's why some of the original Pentagon ones looked so off.

No, he's misrepresenting the argument to invent a reason he can be right about general mechs being in a lance together.

>The only ones that are geared for availability are Xotl's.

I will grant that Xotl's are the shining exception to the rule. They're excellent. I meant the published RATs in the books.

No, I'm saying that arguing that RATs shouldn't be cited at all in a discussion about Mech availability. That's different.

They're not really common mechs though. The likelihood of them being all together is pretty low. You'd be ten times more likely to have say a marauder or a warhammer instead of a grasshopper. Three times as likely to have a victor instead of a cyclops and so on.

Glad I'm not the only one. How do those tires not pop?

Scratch the victor, was looking at the fedsuns table on that one for some reason. About ten times more likely to have a stalker or awesome though.

Metamaterials

As opposed to the Dracs and the Cappies where it's the openly acknowledged state policy to murder citizens, the Davions who will fight to the death for your freedom to starve to death in the outback, or the League who aren't organized enough to murder anyone or to stop any else from murdering you.

Let's face it you're choices are murder or starvation.

Lance user here, going with Quickdraw and Cicada as domestic production, Grasshopper as hand-me-down, and Cyclops as battle salvage on the Capellan frontier.

I think we can all agree that works plausibly and fluffily.

Banshee, and make it a 3Q for maximum Marik.

>Two rounds later, they had sunk it, with barely any damage to the armor. Breach checks are fucking brutal.

Wait, will a single breach check auto-kill a multi-hex ship?

CGL's current stance is that RATs don't represent the actual distribution of 'Mechs for a given faction.

However, the old FMs and the first printing of Total Warfare literally say that the RATs are intended to represent the spread of 'Mechs at various availability levels during the appropriate era.

So, yeah.

Eh, I wouldn't worry about the Cyclops any way as long as you're not spamming salvage from the other side of the Sphere or whatever. They're supposed to be thinly but fairly evenly spread; no-one has many, but everyone has some. Just put it in as the Company or Battalion-level command ride and nobody should bat an eye.

I think you only roll those for submerged units too.

Always hated tankdrop. A very simple addition to the rules could have fixed it too. Units being transported may not take an action except to unload from the transport. Bam, done.

It's funny, because we've gotten far more serious about RATs in the past five years and so they're more accurate than ever, but part of that seriousness is realizing how many ways they can go wrong, and how bad the old ones were in this regard. So the worst ones wind up having the most gung-ho "these are totally accurate" statements, and the new accurate ones are all "whoa, don't try and figure anything out with these."

They only sink when suffering breaches on at least half their length of hexes. But a breach still "destroys" everything in that hex of the unit.

All naval vessels only breach on a 12 from attacks above the water line, but infantry do inflict lots of little hits, great for hitting those high odds.

Hey Xotl, you probably get asked this a lot, but are you gonna do RATs for any post-CI eras?

I do, but no worries. I am very slowly working on a set of 3057 tables. After that I plan to maintain the release (fix bugs, add new quirks, incorporate new sources, probably re-do the vehicle tables), but not add any more eras, because I just don't have the time anymore and I'd rather give it a definite cut-off than lead people on forever.

OK, cool.
Also, you said 57, does that mean that a bunch of the TRO 58 mechs won't be on it?

Yeah. It's set for Guerrero/Bulldog, so a few make it IIRC, but that's all.

the problem was that tankdrop was the counter to artillery, which would have been even more dominant otherwise. in retrospect it was obviously bad for the game, but without it mwda was structured to make any move order ever a bad idea.

>All naval vessels only breach on a 12 from attacks above the water line, but infantry do inflict lots of little hits, great for hitting those high odds.

I have a gigantic problem with an Iowa-class BB or it's Battletech equivalent being sunk by repeated small-arms (rifle infantry) fire.

(Xotl, feel free to use this one whenever you feel necessary. Especially on the OF.)

You should have a similar problem with them being able to destroy tanks, 'Mechs, and other large vehicles they fire upon, but it can fucking happen.