/btg/ Battletech General!

>What combinations are even possible?

Literally any of them? It's all in how you set it up. Although ever since Muninn posted his take on it ages ago I've been conviced that the FS and FWL should have been the original team-up. I also enjoy the Dracs and Taurian combo and their tsundere hijinks

>try to play other factions
>/btg/ starts going on about the purple bird
>go back to playing Marik

Why does it keep sucking me back in? FM:FWL seems like the gift that keeps on giving.

I just discovered the fan TRO 3063 too. /btg/'a opinion of it?

FedLeague would be the other big one, though DracLeague is a not-too-close second
Hell, even FWL+periphery woud be enough to beat up the CapCon without having to pull anything from the lyran front

Isis is best waifu

>tfw no Isis/Omi

Is that the LYRANS STRONK one or the HA HA TIME FOR JUMPTANKS one? Or were those the same thing?

>tfw katherine never tried to one-up victor's thing with omi by seducing isis

>Literally any of them? It's all in how you set it up

The more I think about it, the more I want an IS version of Diplomacy to play. Nothing but cold, hard realpolitik and betrayals.

I started working on one a while ago, but it's on one of about a thousand back burners.

but what if you're an introtech grognard?

I actually thought it was kinda "Drac tanks stronk" because they got a bunch. Everyone else got mostly support vehicles and stuff.

Is the Cheetah an interceptor or just a reconnaissance bird?

If the latter, what interceptors does a Marik force have access to?

If you're the Quad guy from the last thread, putting one behind partial cover only blocks the legs. The torsos can still be seen, and shot at/used to shoot.

>no super tech

Among their many, many best-at hats the Suns' schtick was super tech, including FTL communications and building the first new WarShips.

>Is the Cheetah an interceptor or just a reconnaissance bird?

Both.

>If the latter, what interceptors does a Marik force have access to?

MUL. But since so many ASFs are 6/9, anything that moves at least that fast should qualify, and that includes the Stingray.

>If you're the Quad guy from the last thread, putting one behind partial cover only blocks the legs. The torsos can still be seen, and shot at/used to shoot.
But they super easily hull down for full cover from a L1 hill, which may have been his point all along. Also I seem to remember that they can do stuff while hull down, but that might be the rum talking.

What's a MUL?

Master Unit List.

Not quadguy, was just trying to figure out if they had enough benefits to outweigh the areas they are lacking in. I know they can sidestep and they have reduction to PSRs. Just trying to figure out what roles they would make sense playing in.

Is it a book or is it on the main forum?

They do well in city fights thanks to the -2 on PSRs, and putting them in partial cover makes them a pain to deal with since all arm and leg shots will hit the cover instead of the 'Mech.

I think they're better as lighter, faster 'Mechs where the loss of crits doesn't hurt them as badly than as heavier ones where heat can become a real issue since there's not enough space to mount as many DHS as you could otherwise and you can't fit ES too easily either.

masterunitlist.info/Era/FactionEraDetails?FactionId=30&EraId=256

Wow, thank you!

It is weirdly restrictive, a lot of units I would consider generic, or have seen in novels and scenario packs are verboten for a number of factions because reasons. But it's a place to start.

So it's like secondary canon?

It's been awhile.

Randall Bills is still FB friends with Toymaker. You'd think at the very least he'd drop that shit.

I have no idea what any effect has been behind the scenes.

No, it's official, but as always, it's more of a guideline than a flat out "you can't have this."

>I have no idea what any effect has been behind the scenes.
Let me sum it up for you: fucking nothing. Nothing's going to change, CGL doesn't give a shit what we or anyone else thinks and neither does Topps care what CGL does or doesn't do. Just learn to live with it.

Ehh, not really. It's more a meta-source. Some of the folks who've worked on it (MadCap, Roosterboy, AK) aren't dependable on fluff. So yes, you could treat it as a secondary source. Go with it unless you find something that contradicts it.

Be prepared for some serious side-eye if you dare to show up at a game with units outside what you "should" have though.

Honestly it's mostly stuff like the various House models that piss me off. Like sure, the Suns have more PHX-1Ds than anyone else and the FWL has more WVR-6Ms than anyone else and the BNC-3S is Steiner-only, fine. It's not like removing two MGs for extra HSes or using a Large Laser instead of an A/C should be state secrets, but according to the MUL they're flat exclusives. Which is fuckin' retarded, but hey. It's a CGL project, I don't know why I expected any different.

>Be prepared for some serious side-eye if you dare to show up at a game with units outside what you "should" have though.

I've heard that here but never encountered it in RL.

I have, multiple times.

Most recently it was for an Omni config- I was running a Firestarter F and my opponent flipped their lid over my showing up in a 3067-era game using a 'Mech the Dracs had, equipped with weapons the Dracs used, because at that time it was listed as FWL only. He actually packed up and refused to play.

The MUL has since been amended to make the FS9-OF an IS General 'Mech. Sarna still says otherwise though.

DESU it's mostly something I see effecting Drac players, pre Xin Sheng Cappies and FWL players who have selected something they could either reasonably have as salvage or which actually showed up on their side in a scenario pack or novel, and mostly against FS players. I've played in four different groups over the years but that's what I've seen ever since the first version of the MUL showed up in Combat Ops back during the day.

>He actually packed up and refused to play.

You're so full of shit it's coming out your mouth.

I wish. He's the reason I haven't played IRL in almost two years. That's the only local group going and he's a fixture. I'd rather only play the odd MegaMek game or ATB campaign than deal with players like that.

So who the hell is Battle Pope? And does it have anything to do with a story about Harrassers with SRM Infernos taking out a union by driving up its ramp?

Does he also have something to do with a peasant company taking out another drop ship due to a golden BB?

Sorry you've had to encounter that kind of weapons-grade autism. But it doesn't sound like you really missed out.
I don't get how they can be like that in a game that's had mixed forces and battle salvage as part of it since day one, but I'm not a shrink or whoever it is that handles screeching autists.

And playing with the other players without him is not an option?

Call him a faggot and slap Atleast Itsnot on the table. Or go full retard and bring a company of Mackies and call him a faggot anyway. That shit wouldn't fly at my table, and most of the stores I've played at have the same rules.

>Pencil drawn torso bomb edition

This is the closest thing I've got. I guess I never drew a proper Crud.

>and bring a company of Mackies
You are a man of excellent taste
The mackie is awesome and never should have gone extinct

He yelled at me for a good five minutes straight and for a while it looked like he was literally going to flip the table and come at me. If they'd told him to knock it off then maybe but the vibe I got was that everyone went along with his autism to avoid him sperging out at them rather than addressing the problem.

My life is full enough of fucksticks already and I game to relax in my limited free time. I like BT, but not enough to go back to a group like that.

I just don't believe that anyone cares that much about an omni config. MadCap doesn't love Xin Sheng or little girls that much, ffs.

Have a mook tank /BTG/. Becomes really annoying when you get access to special munitions.

It's not about the omni, it's about the autism

I like it. There's something charming about cheap ass tanks and vees and 'Mechs in general.

I don't believe that anyone capable of getting themselves to a game store is that autistic.

It was a group that played at another guy's house.

I've seen worse in game stores.

Shit, I've seen worse when people discussed sports teams. Doesn't mean I want to hang around with people like that.

>Just trying to figure out what roles they would make sense playing in
Problem with Quads vs. bipes is, they need more maneuverability and planning (or careful use of terrain and blocking elements) to make up for their severe firing arc restrictions. They also have severely restricted critspace for a mild increase in armor. It's basically the same tactical considerations as you get with self-propelled guns and tanks.
Quads do best with jump jets (for better positioning) with something to compensate for the jump inaccuracy (see: the Tarantula), a few very large guns (Barghest, the HGR quads) or a solid sniping array (the Gauss/LRM Goliath comes to mind). Turreted quads are great fun, but you lose even more critspace so whatever you have in there needs to HURT when it hits. The Stalking Spider II is a good example of this strategy, with its iHLL and twin Streak-fours. It's a fast, nasty little brawler that hits like a truck.

Oh, and never underestimate the utility of a Quad's mule kicking ability. I've knocked down so damned many Bugs with a swift kick to the groin because the other player set up a backstab and forgot I had a quad..

The sidestepping ability is mostly useful in cities (where enemy movement is constrained, which means the quad's restricted firing arcs are less of a problem) or to save a few MP on those stupid zig-zags that litter hex maps. Hull-down is a TacOps rule and frankly most of the time it's more bother than anyone actually gives a shit about.

They should, he hurts sales all around and worst of all loses potential new customers that try these "great price minis" and get them and they are garbage.

>So who the hell is Battle Pope? And does it have anything to do with a story about Harrassers with SRM Infernos taking out a union by driving up its ramp?

He's part of the Cincy group, and yes, in like the very first campaign we ran (circa ~2005), he somehow managed to run a hovertank up a hostile DropShip ramp and asked, "I'm demanding they surrender or I'm firing my Infernos at pretty much everything I can see inside the cargo bay. What happens?"

Do note that he actually was loaded with Infernos. IIRC he was playing a more or less suicidal former Comguard vehicle driver (insane b/c he got kicked out of C*) who'd taken ludicrous chances all through the campaign and come out of them alive.

Anyway, when he asked "what happens", there was ~30 minutes of looking through assorted rulebooks, with the answer of, "I have no goddamn idea." So Pope contacted Ben Rome and basically relayed what had happened and asked FanPro if they had any plans for creating rules to handle this situation.

And lo! A few years later, TacOps had rules for shooting at shit inside DropShips. This incident was, to my memory, the very first instance of weird shit happening in or to the Cincy group which caused rules additions, rewrites, and retcons to happen.

>Pope, if you're reading, forgive any detail errors. It's been like 12 years, man.

Note that I still have shots of some of the Anchorage drop. Shit warmed my heart. Especially that poor insane RWR fucker in the Spider.

What the FUCK is that big box-looking thing in the middle of the table?

It's a Rattler.

sarna.net/wiki/Rattler

>no artillery tokens
Have you people learned nothing from Normandy? Shell the fuck out of the beach and the surrounding mile or so.

No shit. My first thought was: show them the effects of grouping up. FASCAM and Swarm that shit. Make them pay for bunching up.

Shipfag, if you're here, this is a second vote for Hard Truck Apocalypse. Just make see to get the patch, either through Google or Steam's community pages.

>the WoB actually built Hitlers Landkreuzer Ratte, the absolute madmen

Terran Hegemony built them first, WoB just re-activated some and built a few more.

It's a pretty amusing kitbash.

I'm not with Cincy, but as someone who's run a game about half that size I'd say it's probably just to keep the turn time limits something reasonable. If I ever do another one I'm going to make it just be ToT ortillery strikes that resolve at the end of designated turns.

shit like this is why I miss rome

Le Inferno up the BUM(p)

...

...

Oh, oh man. Dat comic.

>>Got semi-guided LRMS banned

Shit, I've heard about that from my own campaign group's 3025 grognard. According to him, the story goes that for operation Bulldog, these guys just brought like maximum longbows all loaded with SGLRMs and each turn would basically just choose a clan mech and drop like 1200 fucking missiles on it. It got to the point where the event coordinators decided that they couldn't do it any more because they had shot all the semi-guided LRMS in the Inner Sphere and they needed to wait for the factories to make more.

It gets funnier and more outlandish every time I hear what we supposedly did.

We were playing WoB at GenCon 06-09. Generally speaking, every year we ended up with ~4-8 missile support units on a board with ~40 Mechs on it. Given that we're always playing the same faction, and the event runners were Bones and Chunga from 06-09, we usually ended up with the same Mechs each year, because that's what was already painted in WoB colors. So we're generally running a support force of 1-2 Longbows, a Shogun, a 1-2 of Legacy -02s, a Dragon Fire and a Devastator for direct-fire, and depending on the specific day and scenario, between 0 and 4 of the LFE-model LRM carriers.

Being WoB, we almost always had at least 2 TAG-capable units on the battlefield. What set us apart was that we went out of our way to pick one unit per turn that needed to go away, and then deliberately concentrated mass fire (~120-300 LRMs/turn) on it. We were willing to work as a group, while the people playing us were not. That was the difference. Throwing 1200 LRMs/turn would have been glorious, but it's unfortunately not true.

The part of that story that *is* true, however, is that the writers were more and more frustrated by the fact that the WoB kept winning games while being the Bad Guys (and thus were supposed to lose). The Demo Team *was* told that SG-LRMs were no longer a legal munition for the WoB to take, and that if anybody asked, the profligate use of them in previous games had "run the IS out of the ammo type". The writers also did things like "rewrite the scenario the day before explicitly to make WoB lose" (see pic for battlefield, we started with a medium company against an assault company, a company of "Davion" Purifier BA, and a lance each of dug-in Alacorns and Demolishers), which didn't work either. Eventually they just made the table leadership into Demo Agents, which in the long run didn't seem to work out for anybody involved.

>how to completely destroy your community in three simple steps

Yay, CGL.

>(see pic for battlefield, we started with a medium company against an assault company, a company of "Davion" Purifier BA, and a lance each of dug-in Alacorns and Demolishers),

Before you ask, the pic is not showing the medium company. It's showing a reinforcement group the WoB retasked from another table, plus Fisk's personal command lance (the blue/white Lyrans) which was also committed to this table from reserves. Everything from the starting medium company was wiped out...except for a Beowulf which inexplicably survived, made it into the base, lost a leg, and provided C3i targeting data so we could shoot the base for many, many turns.

Naturally, because what happened was funny and stupid in equal measure...Battle Pope was driving the Beowulf.

Watching how you guys fucked up their Fortress Dieron campaign was delicious. Even in the Turning Point, the Blakists had to lose the final battle offscreen.

>Fisk's personal command lance

Aw shit, so this was Odessa?

Indeed.

>have to go teach german longsword. back in a bit

You guys did the WoB fights with the Coalition dropship downed by an infantrymen right? And the urban fight where you dropped a building on civvies so the Coalition couldn't win?

[desire to know more intensifies]

Actually, having the Cincy guys as demo agents was a good move. They know their stuff, they have a large collection, they know how to run and balance campaigns.

The dumb move was then losing them all over bad treatment between AK bullshit and the edgy stalker shitting everything up.

Yeah, if CGL were run by competent people that could hold on to and develop one of their greatest assets instead of driving them all away over asinine bullshit...

Can someone post Shimmy's Wolverine, Griffin, and Shadow Hawk? Plus maybe the Crusader is he's done it?

For Xotl, when you're around next:
In a post on the OF, you said that rules for creating TAG infantry are on the same page as the specialized infantry types, 341 of TacOps. I checked TacOps and the errata and there's no mention of TAG infantry at all. Was that a goof or is it somewhere I'm just blind to?

If no one else does I'll post the Shad and Wolverine when I get home.

I want to get into Battleteh, I have already played the Demo ruleswith paper cutouts but I want to paint some Mechs, what should buy? I want to play a Lyran Military Unit or some Lyran associated Mercs bbefore the clan invasion if that helps (don't like the newer designs visually)

>don't like the newer designs visually
You can't be serious

I like boxy humanoids. My favorite Mech is the Commando

>Implying the Zeus isn't great

Plus he also might mean the Dark Age stuff which a lot took from the CMG toys and look pretty goofy.

Anyone got TtS: Iron Land yet?

You're relatively close on the details but you've got a few muinged. I actually have some details of that fight in notes back from that era.

Game was literally 10 years ago based on my notes. I don't remember what you were driving back then, but I had the ex Comstar lunatic, the Harassers were modified 3025 Pegasus (Ripped out the ML for a third lancher and another round of ammo, and I was running a mixed load)

The main line of battle was going reasonably well, but the flankers were way up field and were getting good luck of of 36 SRMs a turn. Somethng happened (But I cannot remember what to save my life) and the two Pegasus determined the best course of action was to Duke Boys it up a dropship ramp - during the shitload of house rules on the fly that followed it was determined that Bo passed his PSR to get up the ramp at full speed, but Luke flubbed it and ripped the fans off, and pinned the other one to the wall - and there was a very confused Orion in the bay that two little hovertanks should have been easy prey.

And the hovertanks won. Those two tanks actually had more kills than the entire 'Mech core for the first dozen missions.

And along the way, the escapades made their way up to the TacOps design team and rules were made.

Simultaneous unplanned stupid hilarity (But effective) is kind of my thing apparently.

See if you can find the introbox online or at a LGS for a reasonable price.

>Before you ask, the pic is not showing the medium company. It's showing a reinforcement group the WoB retasked from another table, plus Fisk's personal command lance (the blue/white Lyrans) which was also committed to this table from reserves. Everything from the starting medium company was wiped out...except for a Beowulf which inexplicably survived, made it into the base, lost a leg, and provided C3i targeting data so we could shoot the base for many, many turns.

You're close, but the actual story is even more...well, me.

You were busy driving the heavy elements and getting into that strange Longbow/Stalker punching match.

I didn't have any elements to spot so I was busy bring fast and annoying to let the heavy elements regroup, and was told that if a unit with a BAP could get to the base we could find out how much HP the buildings had left.

Pop masc, failed the roll, but only lost two MP.. go for it, run right next to the base and fall...next movement two lances of Sorensens Sabres shows up next to me, and outside of some potshots mostly goes by me (But now I'm down an arm, a hip, an acutator in another leg, and a gyro...I'm good here!) ...leaving me free to scan the base for the entire rest of the game...

True. Derp Age really has some hit or miss aesthetic.

Funny you say this since DA is usually less silly than the originals, including Zeus. Zeus X is amazing

Picture very related. DA Panther is ugly as hell, but the original Panther is leagues worse than it

Nah. I'm not shelling out for a product whose premise is a ridiculous pun, and is just another weird worthless world.

>DA panther better than original

That's wrong. Same thing if you said it about the Centurion, Hatchetman, Firestarter, Black Hawk or Atlas

I could give you the DA Spider. It looks more like an LAM than a spider but it's pretty cool.

>Zeus X is amazing
Zeus X is literally a regular Zeus with some silly fins on it.

And, of course, the 4th edition rendition is the best.

>That's wrong. Same thing if you said it about the Centurion, Hatchetman, Firestarter, Black Hawk or Atlas

now THAT'S wrong. I can give you Atlas and Black Hawk, but every other mech you mentioned is FUCKING UGLY. Not even an opinion here, Loose was horrible and DA simply manages to be less ugly

And the Zeus X art is better than the original Zeus art

Ridiculous. The only way I could tell that the DA Centurion wasn't a Cyclops was by reading what the base said.

>And the Zeus X art is better than the original Zeus art

The original Zeus X art is the cover of Maxtech. The Zues X mini is the regular Zues mini with a fin pack. And the original DA Zues X art is this.

>DA simply manages to be less ugly
I dare you to flip through Technology of Destruction and say that again with a straight face.