/btg/ BattleTech General

When it comes to factions, I am grong af. I don't like any of the shit like TDF, Marians etc. Give me my 5 houses and 4 major clans.

I really like WarShips and LAMs for fluff reasons but have never actually used either on the table

3rd and 4th Succession Wars are the most retarded eras and every stupid aspect of the game is a result of writers having to comply with the original stupid decisions

I like the post-Jihad Taurian Concordat mech selection. They might not make many unique chassis (just the Brahma and the ancient Toro) but they do built variants of old classics. Many of those manage to be weird and/or interesting without completely breaking the original 'theme' of the mech. Thunderbolt 9T, Warhammer 10T and 11T, Ostroc 5C, Griffin 4N, Rifleman 9T etc.

I quite like Light Gauss, and wish their were more mechs that paired LGauss with regular PPCs. I also like Light PPCs and I compare them to ERLLs rather than ERMLs.

I unironically disbelieve the 'Capellan fiat' memes, and think that until 3145 the Capellans actually look pretty pitiful as they slowly claw back what they lost to Hanse. The influx of technology that came post-Invasion was much smaller than many anons seem to think (check out FM: Updates for proof) and was largely due to their contact with WoB.

I think that calling the Lyrans 'Space Germany', the Capellans 'Space China' and the FedSuns 'Space Britain' is far more misleading than it is useful. And stop using fucking Charl for the FWL.

I think the Ice Hellions got what they deserved and it was entirely in keeping with their boneheaded mindset. All this 'muh genius Raina Montose wuz retconned' is simply not backed up by the books, all I can see is that she wasn't completely outright insane like Asa Taney.

>HG looks to have gotten froggy again and tried to fuck with the franchise.

What's actually going on, though? Is there a link or a press release? I was looking on the OF and I didn't see anything (not like the mods would let a thread about that stay up, though). Where can I read more details on this?

>Where can I read more details on this?
Nowhere. There is no press release. Not a peep.

There's nothing but rumors, some of which seem to have spawned from these anonymous threads.

>and think that until 3145 the Capellans actually look pretty pitiful

>Forces in 3132
>RotS:10 regiments total, about 3 worth of mechs
>Davions:25 regiments of mechs
>Kurita: 31 regiments of mechs
>FWL states: less than 5 regiments of mechs apiece

>Capellans:44 regiments of mechs

When you got more military than every other state in the Sphere as a rump state then you got serious authorial wanktitude going on. It's not a meme.

Like the thread said, it's all rumors and inferring. CGL was releasing teasers and hints for the Unseen left and right last year, but so far we've gone (until 2SW came out) with nothing for 7 months Unseen wise, while the BMM initially had a Rifleman cover, but now has a Mad Cat.

>I like the post-Jihad Taurian Concordat mech selection. They might not make many unique chassis (just the Brahma and the ancient Toro) but they do built variants of old classics. Many of those manage to be weird and/or interesting without completely breaking the original 'theme' of the mech. Thunderbolt 9T, Warhammer 10T and 11T, Ostroc 5C, Griffin 4N, Rifleman 9T etc.
Absolutely same here
I really wish that the TC got (even retconned) SW/50s era mechs that lead into the weird-but-fun theme they developed in 3085

Not to mention the canopian commonality has like another 30 fucking regiments (which is more than every other periphery state put together, for that matter)

>I unironically disbelieve the 'Capellan fiat' memes, and think that until 3145 the Capellans actually look pretty pitiful
That's the point. They were the also ran of the Inner Sphere. Not big enough to win, but too big to swallow. Would you consider North Korea invading the US and taking large swathes of territory to be a believable prospect, or a bullshit one? Because that's the closest real world comparison we have.

Color test for a homebrew FedSun/FedCom division. Trying to evoke a sort of "Colonial French" feel.
I think I'm leaning towards the middle one.

Am I blind, or does the latest MekHQ zip from github not actually have...MekHQ in it?

I'd go with something along the lines of the old Crusher Joe scheme since Crushers are Davions anyhow but Joe's color scheme has never been used.

>canopians have a larger force than the Suns and are almost as large as the Dracs
>after the Drac invasion they will be larger than both

What the literal fuck?

>canopians being beefed up again irrationally

Is anyone surprised? This shit was going on in FM:P years ago. They magicked in half a dozen regiments even though Canopian industry couldn't do it and no one was selling to them enough for that.

they've actually got like 20-ish, but those regiments also have magic experience levels and all that good shit

as for why, the eternal kit strikes again

Leave the Magistracy alone.

Slightly more reasonable but that'll still be more than the Suns post-Palmyra and the Dracs have probably ground themselves down to about that level by now too.

>got serious authorial wanktitude going on

That's just the Capellan just desserts by virtue of having been unfairly held back for so long by racist FASA authors. They deserve to be on the oppressing end of the oppressed-oppression spectrum finally. Maybe we can talk again in 20 years after they've had a fair go.

Or we could talk about it now. Literally 17 years after Xin Sheng material started and the Cappies became a powerhouse.

0/10 try being somebody who actually argued that the magistracy wasn't powerful enough instead of a person who kept arguing with tptb that the MOC was being unfairly inflated.

kit has an avatar; try that one.

hey DW

They whole time that cgl was wanking over the wob doesn't count. That's wasted page time that could have been spent on the Capellans regaining ancestral worlds.

While I chuckled, it's sad that there are some actual faggots that think like this. Not just about Caps but other stuff in real life.

17 years after their crazy DA power boost. Xin Sheng started with Double Blind back in '95 or '96.

DW types like an old person, not somebody texting. He doesn't even have a mobile phone.

Well, I mainly went with 2000 since that's when FM: CC came out and things kicked into Xin Sheng overdrive, but yeah, you could definitely argue for earlier.

Either way the Cappies have been top-tier for longer than they sucked now so seeing people seriously argue otherwise is a bit o_O for me. If they were arguing the Dracs and FWL got shat on or ignored, sure though.

I don't agree that the Cappies deserve a damn thing just because they were the designated bitches of the setting, but this is also a good point. It's no fun at all for a faction to finally get some level of fun and interesting designs and characters, only to get BTFOd by another faction that gets an even bigger author fit stick. The time that the Jihad was going definitely shouldn't count towards the Cappies "not shit" time.

You know, the terrible thing is that the XINSHENG MAGIC FAST RAP DOMINANCE has been the dominant thing for longer than the FedCom was actually the big bosses of the setting

>The time that the Jihad was going definitely shouldn't count towards the Cappies "not shit" time.

It sure should because they were raping their way across the Dark Age concurrently. By Temptations and By War came out in like 2003.

I think everyone is talking about the Capellans being good in real Battletech though. Not Dark Age.

The novels are all real battletech.

I'm a Clan Wolf-in-Exile fan.

I would really like to intern or volunteer for Catalyst Game Labs. I'd really like to be a part of the gaming community.

From what I've heard Catalyst got a cease and desist from SOMEBODY. And poof mechs disappeared. Seems pretty obvious what happened.

It seems really weird to me that Macross and Battletech are competing for headspace/ namespace. They don't seem like the same market.

Is battletech big in Japan or something?

lol, there is no such thing as "real" battletech.

At least.. not yet...

You're trolling, right?

Someday I have no doubt that giant robots will clobber themselves for our amusement, that much is assured.

As to whether they will be to battlemechs scale, that I'm not so sure..

>I'll never have to answer for this, so why not?

I'm an actual, honest to God transsexual, and I play that Steiners and Magistracy solely because they're run almost exclusively by women. I hate Dracs and their fans because their faction is sexist.

I think Fanpro and CGL have been the best things to happen to the franchise, because for all that they've gone bad over the last year, they're still better than FASA.

I think the wob and their incessant warcrimes we're the worst thing to happen to the game, because of all the realism autists who use that as ammo for their argument that everything in the Battletech universe should be solved with warcrimes.

I think the mods and admins on the of are well intentioned and are genuinely trying their best to grow the game and community, and we should be a lot more supportive of them.

Never seen a game of battletech in japan.

you know, when I hear stuff like that, i just kind hear "pony-pony-pony-pony." Its like, I'm not your dada sweetheart.

i remember when b8 was good

Apparently they got the Shadow Hawk 7M just before the Jihad, and with the New Dallas core they began building the royal Marauder, Warhammer and Thud.

B8 has never been good.

Neither was Battletech.

Well Mecha is like, 'silly' i guess. Battletech is more for young adults. I think what people in Japan get upset about is that Battletech doesn't have an anti-war message.

Japan had, and I think, still has, a very strong pacifist movement. They do not want to revisit the horrors of war and always want to keep clear in their memory that war is tragic, though sometimes necessary.

I think they know more than anybody that war has fundamentally changed, it would be hard convincing them to fight for their independence from foreign sovereignty when they know first hand that war is no longer as simple as killing the enemy soldiers, civilians become inextricably involved in the macabre mathmatics of war.

You could say killing so many civilians with the atomic bomb was an act of terrorism, it dealt a blow to the peoples morale, it created a scar, a wound, that has never been healed.

>I think the wob and their incessant warcrimes we're the worst thing to happen to the game, because of all the realism autists who use that as ammo for their argument that everything in the Battletech universe should be solved with warcrimes
I know you're a shitposter, but I unironically agree with most of this point

It may have saved lives, but it destroyed part of their spirit. It pacified them in a way that we have a hard time understanding.

Now that the world is tame and there are no more dragons to fight or windmills to chase, America is left to suffer the consequences for the havoc it has wrecked.

>You could say killing so many civilians with the atomic bomb was an act of terrorism,
No it wasn't, the nips deserved it.
>t. burgerchink

its like flipping a safety.
when in rome, do as the romans do.

>I think the mods and admins on the of are well intentioned and are genuinely trying their best to grow the game and community, and we should be a lot more supportive of them.

This is a true point.

Also, I actually believe the tranny claim. I know two MtFs who play BT personally, and I've seen at least one other playing at original, so they're definitely out there. Of course, they're all 50-year old tranny's who transitioned too late to be anything but a horror show, like the military history Jew from the History Channel who got surgery last year.

You might say the Japanese spirit, like the British spirit, has been tamed. Now America has spread across her shores it is our turn to be tamed.

It will not be an easy process. America is used to being the hero in its own saga.

>I've seen at least one other playing at original,

At Origins.

Fuck autocorrect.

>Now America has spread across her shores it is our turn to be tamed.

No. We'll kill ourselves first, or kill ourselves and everyone else if it's an outside force who tries to tame the US.

>He believes he is being respectful, but is actually being a shithead.
>And how would he know if you didn't tell him? >He is trying to honor and respect your traditions.
>Yeah, but hes such a butthole!

that is the dream, yes.

Most empires settle in a far more graceful form of decline, one which does not so much resemble a viking funeral.

How fucking obnoxious would it be to cast a redneck imbecile as a kung-fu master who takes a world weary troubled asian youth under his wing?

No, I don't mean Grand Tourino, shutup

One would think it would be in everyone else's best interest to keep the US from collapsing, if for no other reason than the "everyone else" clause in "kill ourselves and/or everyone else".

Instead, people are rooting for it while hoping they get lucky and the burgers only kill themselves.

>redneck imbecile as a kung-fu master

That's cultural appropriation user.

yes, but cast it in the opposite direction its a frat flick. Maybe the redneck has achieved inner peace? Maybe the redneck has no great shakes as a kung fu master, but his philosophy on life is different and hopeful?

Your traditions are going to be appropriated eventually due to cultural drift, accelerated by mass media, isn't it better to keep it true to its roots? who cares who the players are, is the philosophy tied to one place, one ethnicity?

If you want a deep character drama, you can have an easterner whose adopted and accepted his new western roots. You need some Chinese guy to say, "I'm from the Bronx. Thats where I've lived my whole life. I don't beleive in kung-fu, magic faries or any of that shit. Where I'm from, its a struggle just to stay alive." Maybe for him, western values work.

Do it with a better company. I say this as a fan of the game. Love the game, but lament what lap it's in right now. CGL apologists, fire away. No amount of REEEE can dispel the truth that the IP is being grossly mishandled, and the fans are suffering for it.

And yes, /btg/ could do better. This group of literal dysfunctional autists could do better than CGL handling the IP.

Of course, thats basically just saying you gotta play ball, and you've been hearing that shit forever. You want to get an americans attention you gotta lean on their toes a little bit. Respect their short attention spans. No lesson is too small or too simple.

The only reason the Capellans have that many regiments in 3132 is because they weren't playing nice with the RoTS, while the other states mostly were. It's not that the Capellans were given magic things out of nowhere, it's that they wanted and expected war while the other states were much more aquiescent. There's nothing wankitude about it. You may dearly like to frame it that way, but any objective and unbiased look at it says otherwise.

Funnily enough, at that point in time they were still not much bigger than they were post-4SSW either. It's not until they butt up against Prefecture X and have taken New Syrtis that they start to look good... and they're still not doing quite as well as Hanse did, though it's close.

But cheer up, user. Hints in XTRO: Republic III and TRO:3150 suggest reversals for the Capellans on both their Republic and FedSuns fronts. Read em closely.

That's an unrealistic comparison. The US doesn't share a direct border with North Korea, the US has a massive military and technological advantage over North Korea, and the US hasn't recently suffered a devastating military defeat that wiped out multiple major combat units along with their head of state.

There is no workable real world comparison, and trying to force one doesn't do us any favours. A shaky analogy is basically no better than a straw man.

They have some Royal variants like the Royal T-Bolt and Marauder, which are nice slow-and-steady back up to those mobile homegrown variants. I'm actually a little surprised they didn't go for some crazy Marauder build, they had two factories for them IIRC, but I guess they reasoned they needed a slugger in their Heavy ranks.

Well, that's like, your opinion man.

>Either way the Cappies have been top-tier for longer than they sucked

Nope.

Go read FM:Updates. Look at their upgraded tech ratios compared to the FedSuns.

Then go read FM: 3085. Look at how pummelled they were by the RoTS.

Then look at the maps, starting with the 4th SW. Look how long it takes them to claw back anything. Look how much they backslide when the RoTS kicks their asses.

None of your memes can be backed by facts.

>b-b-b-b-b-but they beat tiny St Ives! And some independent Chaos March nations! With the help of two Periphery states!

Yeah. So badass.

>This is a true point.

Not really. I can recall a laundry list of public fuckups they've spearheaded. I'm sure they *believe* this themselves but the truth is that the mods are the reason the BT forum is so hostile to outsiders and that it's got such a tiny pool of regular posters.

Gran Torino is hilarious. My father rented a copy because he thought it was going to be Clint Eastwood BTFOing the "slants" and by the end of it he was like "... oh."

>Maybe for him, western values work.

then too, many values are universal, or at least shared. We consider many of the same things taboo, we consider many of the same things to be virtues.

Best attitude to have, I salute you.

>There's nothing wankitude about it.

A lot of things like this have less to do with individual situations and more to do with being part of a pattern. We were coming off over half a decade of JUST AS PRANNED from the Cappies when it turned out they were the only ones smart enough to go "lolnope" when asked to downsize, and even the much more militaristic states were going along with it.

Then go look at who ended the FCCW and Jihad in the best state and who is top dog in the DA.

I'd say Capellans are about due. Their forces are positioned well at the start of the era, they are probably doing what I used to do when I ran our online campaign and trying to lose old units through attrition so they can get them replaced with new ones.

Knigga, the Caps had over 12 regiments hidden away. That's almost a +50% force boost. And they should have been grinding down their spare forces in the continuous wars they were in since the end of the Jihad such as the Capellan Crusades and the Victoria war. And then AFTER all that, they pulled an additional 7 mech regiments out of their ass while at full scale war with both the Republic and the Fedsuns.

Compare that to Anson Marik being super proud he managed to scrape a battalion together unnoticed.

The author fiat was not grinding them down during the wars and also having a military industrial complex capable of pre-Jihad manufacturing numbers when everyone else was getting their factories wiped and half busted.

>while the other states mostly were.
Mariks weren't and they got jack shit. Kurita played nice diplomatically but totally ignored the MRP. Only the Suns really went all in.

I think maybe they lost the culture war during the Jihad. Nobody wanted to trade RotS for Cappie rule because back then they represented Camelot.

Now with the wall coming down some people are thinking they would be safer with the Cappies.

Casis Belli is a big part of integration during and after the war efforts. If you've got more reason to feel hostile towards your host country than you do with the invaders you might indeed welcome them with open arms.

>and even the much more militaristic states were going along with it.
Honestly the lyrans just throwing their army in the trash when they had three giant gangs of mongoloid retard murderers who conspicuously didn't disarm AND were attacking them literally all the time on their borders is really one of the biggest bits of DA high impact idiocy

Honestly the best thing that could happen to Battletech right now would be if CGL lost the license. It's painful to watch them let the franchise rot.

>Now with the wall coming down some people are thinking they would be safer with the Cappies.

That's Prefecture X only. All the other nine prefectures got all eaten up. The Capellans were all out of old Capellan worlds minus Caleb's Davion Protectorate in Prefecture IV by late 3135. Then they took that in 3145. Wall doesn't come down until 3150.

And quite frankly everyone jumped ship to stronger parties as soon as Levin put up the wall in the first place. If you read Fortess Republic, you see all the people on half a dozen major worlds freak out as the Republic garrisons just pull up stakes and leave while Levin announces that everyone outside the core are acceptable losses.

The Davions took the Swordsworn Territory. The Senator Alliance latched onto Marik. The worlds of Prefecture III went Kurita or Ghost Bear. So on and so forth.

And just who do you think would take it? Paizo? Wizards of the Coast? PALLADIUM? No one exists who can do it justice and cares, even a little, except CGL. At least I genuinely believe they want the game to be good, even if they're incompetent fucks who can't run a company to save their lives.

Fuck you. Second Succession War was back to form to me. Get them rolling on ilClan and a new box and we're back in business.

wait, so is that what the little letters mean?
D for davion, K for Kurita ect?

I don't know where to buy hardcopy TRO's. If I knew some place other than Amazon I would buy them right now.

Well, technically, CGL's store sells them, but realistically they take your money then laugh at you and never ship anything, so I'd advise against that.

Generally

R (Regular/Star League Regular Army)
N (Normal/Standard)
G (General)
B (Base model)
b (Royal Star League)
C(Capellan, Command or clan gear refit)
*C(C3 refit)
T (Taurian)
M (Marik)
D (Davion)
K (Kurita)
S (Steiner)
W (Word of Blake)

But there are a lot of exceptions, ho boy are there exceptions.

You also forgot one common one:
X (experimental)

Best bang for your buck is to grab old lots of them at auction as they pop up on ebay. Amazon/ebay new should be saved for the newest stuff like TRO 3075+.

Also, avoid the garbage that is TRO 3039 or TRO 3025 Revised (Original 3025 is fine)

Too bad the CGl doesn't have the money to really put a fight vs HG, because this time the damn designs are new ones and yet Battletech is getting dicked by HG AGAIN.

Nice catch. Also might as well do some of the omnis.

Z (Society)
H (Heavy Lasers)
U (Underwater/extreme environment)
R (IS omni clantech refits)

Last time this came up in the great 25 Years of Art and Fiction debacle of 2008, it was said if it gets to be a legal fight, it's the Topps lawyers that take the ball.

So might just be that CGL is buying a little time while the boys upstairs are weighing their options and HG might get wrecked like Hasbro wrecked them a few years back.

I know the one you get from their homepage has MekHQ in it as I just played a game with it yesterday.

You know, it really hurt to never have won a damn game. thats not how you build a general. You'll end up with someone who is good as an underdog but poor in a fight.