/btg/ BattleTech General

Something for Halloween, an Urbie that wants to be like the Scarecrow or the Sunder Samual. Just more useful.

Lose the rear mounted MGs to add an array to the forward mounted ones. Should be funny.

Specifically on the LA so it can flip.

I've come to appreciate light and fast medium mechs. They're great for controlling the battlefield and giving your heavier mechs more room to maneuver or pin the enemy, and if opposing light mechs try to fight for the flanks or territory you can just send in a Phoenix hawk to tell them to fuck off.

I like the idea of lights in-universe more than I like actually using them on table. The idea of the Locust wolfpack seeking and destroying anything they can catch on the fringes of a larger battle where the heavier mechs wreck stuff is pretty cool and I like it. Realistically though, I almost never play in games large enough to do the lightpack and having just one light mech isn't very enjoyable since it can't practically contribute to most fights unless extremely optimized somehow.

If I played in more company+ sized games, I'd have a much more positive opinion of light mechs. Since I mostly play at lance scale, I'm really not a huge fan (even though my merc force right now actually includes a Wolfhound which hasn't been very good).

P-hawk is the mech that most consistently delivers for me.

>If I played in more company+ sized games,

Man, even at company-sized games, they're barely worth it. You can swing functional double-lance wolfpacks of lights in battalion-scale games (whether BT or Alpha Strike), but it's just a hard concept to make work on the table in general. What makes it even harder is that for maximum effectiveness, a wolfpack has to hit individual targets (difficult at best when the game rewards MechBrick tactics) AND wants to hit targets that are already damaged in some way (so you have to hold your wolfpack back till closer to the end of the game, which takes both discipline of thought and a game which can go more than 8-10 turns).

Wolfpacking low-end MEDIUMS absolutely can work in company-scale games, but lights carry little enough firepower and have a hard enough time hitting (they can't stay stationary for a turn to get good to-hit numbers the way a medium Mech can) that the concept just doesn't work against a competent opponent in anything approaching normal BattleTech play.

>feels bad, man

Yeah, it's more that lights can *start* being ok in company sized games. They aren't really worth it still, but they're as close as you can get really until you hit battalion sized games and frankly, no one has time or space to play those. If I owned a house with a full basement and a 9 foot by 4 foot table I could set up on for a week, then I'd have battalion sized games constantly. Until that day, my light mechs will just have to be sad.

I used to do pretty well with 3ML Locust wolfpacks when I played with people who balanced by tonnage, so there's that

The BV system really overprices lights, which I suspect is the big problem with the things, because taking three bugs is always going to be worse than the two mediums you'd get for the same BV

How do all light regiments like the Davion Light Guard or 2nd Oriente Hussars do it then?

What happens in lore isn't same as what happens on the table top.

Try playing a running ground war with rules for realtime repairs and manufacturing on a map that not only covers a tenth of a continental landmass and is using doubleblind rules. It'll take two years to resolve a month of ingame time, but light wolfpacks, especially fast laserboats, are a fucking nightmare to dig out of their camps and the one bunker they got halfway excavated before air support started razing the forests.

ya the problem with light mechs is that they're great strategically being able to redeploy faster and cheaper and are more efficient at supporting infantry than a heavy mech, but 9/10 battles are just small scale mech vs mech engagments.

The paintjob on that mech is pretty fucking dope.

Fast lighter units can be nice... but its invariably better to just make those speedy mediums than actual lights.

So what do you guys think is really the minimum tonnage to include a mech?

35, exclusively so I can include the Panther, which is a mech that's done really good work for me in the past.

Mechs that have also done okay for me at 35 tons include the Wolfhound, Jenner, Venom, Firestarter and Raven. Not to mention some decent clan designs.

Its really where mechs start to get at least decent.

Yeah, 35 tons seems to be the decent place to be. Lots of decent designs at 35 tons. Lower and you get dodgy stuff though. I'd probably call minimum effective tonnage on mechs 35 tons and be happy with it.

Honestly the only time I've found lights to be worth it is when both sides are deploying them. We used to games where most of the light RATs were bugs. Let me tell you. In the land of bug mechs, the one armed commando is king.

25, with a handful of 30 ton exceptions

It takes ClanTech or other advanced tech to make things good below 35.

It's fun being a fast medium mech in a lance of locusts. It's like I'm their daddy who protects them from the big mean wolfhounds.

And even then, the Wulfen, Kit Fox and Cougar kinda demonstrate that even with clantech, many of your best entries in the light category are going to be 35t

...Wulfen is 30?

Is it? I could have sworn it was 35. Guess I was wrong then.

Anyone here have experience using the Puma Assault Tank?

I just got some Puma Tanks as a bonus with some other BT vehicles. At first I didn't know what they would be good at but look it over more it seem like it is meant to bring one of its LRM 'broadsides' to bear on a target along with its turret PPC.

I'm still not convinced it will be very good armor seems a bit light for its tonnage and BV. When I get a chance I'll try it out.

Question. Do PPC Capacitors count as weapon tonnage when one determines the size of TarComp needed, or are they separate?

they should be separate.

Side mounted weapons like that are always complete garbage because of how critical hits work on tanks. On the other hand, ass weapons like on the Von Luckner are excellent.

Not really good, despite being a mainstay of the SLDF. If the LRMs were in sponsons they might, I stress might, be a decent tank. As it is, you're better off modding the shit out of it and putting the LRMs on the front or something.

That's about what I thought, not worth exposing your side for that extra fire power.

Well the actual model looks like it has two LRM5s pointing forward rather than the side missiles. I'll see if my usual opponents will be okay with a modded load out.

>Not really good, despite being a mainstay of the SLDF.
Threadly reminder that the SLDF did a lot of really stupid shit, despite being the best military anyone in-universe has ever seen.

Is there a particular reason why I can't load most types of bombs onto an ASF in MekHQ? I only have the option for HE, Cluster, LGB, and Rockets.

A lot of that was pure SLDF quantity. Even piece of shit machines when deployed in triplicate with Warship orbital support will always carry the day.

It's related to game year and chassis weight.

Yeah but almost a third of both of the assault RATs are Pumas. The other third are Rhinos, and the rest are an assortment. It's like procurement was possessed by dead F-35 supporters

>It's like procurement was possessed by dead F-35 supporters
I mean, they basically were. Look at the retarded shit the SLDF supported, both in mechs and vees. Fucks sake, didn't they kickstart the Jackrabbit? And they started the Vulcan as an infantry pacification platform. The Vulcan. Pacifying infantry. With an AC/2. The SLDF was full of retards, what does that say about the Houses that they mercilessly crushed?

>Fucks sake, didn't they kickstart the Jackrabbit?
"We built it wrong, as a joke. And produced it in the hundreds. Dolla dolla bill y'all."

>And they started the Vulcan as an infantry pacification platform.
I guess they were going for fully automatic AC2 fire as a hope for the best option.

>The SLDF was full of retards, what does that say about the Houses that they mercilessly crushed?
None of them have amounted to anything, so...

Vulcan is a premier militia terror machine. AC for killing tanks and air, and MG/Flamer for the scrubs. It's a fantastic machine.

Now something like the shitty bins on the Bombardier when you already have the Archer...

>"We built it wrong, as a joke. And produced it in the hundreds. Dolla dolla bill y'all."
I want you to know, I laughed so hard reading this that I pulled something in my side.

>the Bombardier
Oh Jesus H. Christ, I forgot about the Bombardier. That mech is just terrible, doubly so since the Archer exists. Like, what was the point of that mech? Does it even get a canon explanation for why it exists?

>Does it even get a canon explanation for why it exists?

OOC explanation is they wanted to make an entry for the original BD Archer sculpt that became the Bombardier. Kinda like how the Battleaxe and stuff got entries in TRO3075.

3080, so everything should be available. It's not that the dropdowns are showing 0, they're purely greyed out.

I meant the IC explanation for why it exists, when Archers are both better and canonically the most prevalent mech in existence. Cool to know the OOC reason though.

Then your tech level is too low or your bird is too small.

Tech level is set to allow unofficial. This is on a Huscarl, so it can mount at least one of anything.

>I want you to know, I laughed so hard reading this that I pulled something in my side.
I do what I can.

>Like, what was the point of that mech? Does it even get a canon explanation for why it exists?
Yes, according to TRO:2750, its launchers were specially designed to fire Thunder and Swarm rounds, rather than the simpler racks of the Archer. I probably should have given it fast reload, but oh well.

Speaking of this, the Megamek LAM bomb loads stay at 0. Is this a bug and ASF mode carry them like old times or is that just for the ones with internal bays? I haven't been able to get the standard SW models to load up even when deploying in ASF mode.

The old TRO2750 fluff says it's designed to be a linebreaker in large battles. Form the tanks up by lance into diamond formation and drive into the enemy line. Each lance picks a target on its left and throws 80 LRMs at it. Pick a target on the right and throw 80 LRMs at that. Shoot medium lasers and SRMs at anything that gets in front, and pick your favorite target in any direction and throw 4 PPCs at it.

It doesn't really make a lot of sense, but it probably sounded cool to whoever wrote it. And like others have pointed out, any regiment the SLDF couldn't beat with technology, they just threw a division at.

Well I have two that will need to be backed up by other tanks (mostly Rommel/Paton/Axle) or mechs.

Hell the royal version is used by the clans so I might even put them in a vehicle star with Mars and Epona or whatever.

Or they might just collect dust.

I want to missile bote. What are some good mechs and builds?

Bane / Kraken 3 for 120 LRMs. As much as that is though, one Hellstar will give it a run for it's money.

Someone also posted an Archer loaded with Clan tech with 40 Streak SRMs. Don't know where it is.

The Hellstar is actually better, since the direct groups are more powerful than the shotgun damage of the LRMs. The LRMs might do more over all damage, but the Hellstar is going to be more precise, which matters a lot.

I just came up with a unpleasant lineup... On one side, one Hellstar. On the other, an entire company of IS mechs as they would've been during the original Clan Invasion (ie, 3025 tech final destination).
The question is, how many mechs would the Hellstar remove per round, and would it actually suffer significant damage before finishing?

Numerical advantage would overcome the Hellstar. It only has so much armor and the company would eventually overwhelm it. It'd probably get between 1 and 3 mechs before it was taken down.

>spot and target an enemy mech in MWO but he doesn't see me
>10 seconds later the mech gets overwhelmed by hundreds of missiles and I get tens of thousands of C-Bills.
recon is fun.

It depends on a few factors. What mechs exactly, and what terrain?

This is one of the reasons almost all my 'Mechs are Lights. Scouting actually matters, and you get to see instant returns, unlike in something like WoT where you get paltry rewards and your team usually ignores your spotting efforts because they're too busy shooting at a T-34 behind a building.

>an entire company of IS mechs as they would've been during the original Clan Invasion (ie, 3025 tech final destination).

Rolling on Xotl's 3039 tables, using default regional Weight Distribution

>Kurita Company (5L; 2M; 4H; 1A)
265: WSP-1A Wasp
308: LCT-1V Locust
521: JVN-10N Javelin
339: LCT-1V Locust
719: PNT-9R Panther
125: CDA-2A Cicada
25 ->387: WTH-1 Whitworth (Davion Salvage)
463: OTL-4D Ostsol
563: WHM-6R Warhammer
46 - >481: CRD-3R Crusader (Steiner Salvage)
722: TDR-5S Thunderbolt
672: STK-3F Stalker

>Steiner Company (2L; 4M; 4H; 2A)
320: WSP-1A Wasp
485: LCT-1S Locust
298: WTH-1 Whitworth
946: GRF-1N Griffin
693: HBK-4P Hunchback
199: HCT-3F Hatchetman
87: RFL-3N Rifleman
141: RFL-3N Rifleman
858: ARC-2R Archer
651: MAD-3R Marauder
298: ZEU-6S Zeus
939: HGN-733 Highlander

Assuming they're on some salt flats, the hellstar can just keep moonwalking and take these guys out one by one. There just isn't the long range power to keep it down. and the light mechs wont last 3 hits.

>Assuming they're on some salt flats,

That assumption is bullshit and everybody knows it. Nobody plays on salt flats.

Turn 1: I stay stationary, they stay stationary except for a Locust that starts moving towards me but ends movement out of LOS. In the Princess's defense, I do have a nice little redoubt giving me partial cover and some fairly open terrain between our deployment positions.

Turn 2-3: A solitary Locust tries a banzai charge, and then slows to a walk. I walk forward slightly into a patch of trees on the top of the hill to give myself a better shot (avoiding heavy woods). The Locust’s tactic of charging straight ahead almost works, because the RNG on Megamek is utter bullshit. See pic.

Turn 4: It wasn’t utter bullshit twice in a row. Scratch one Locust. The heavy stuff is still loitering, while the OPFOR Wasp and Javelin are starting a pincer movement to my north and south, respectively.

Turn 5: The pincer movement is obvious now, though they haven’t actually fully flanked me. They’re being supported by the 2nd Locust who’s running straight up the middle. The Javelin to the south is by far the more dangerous target, so I focus on that and remove a leg and both arms. In return I take a half-dozen scattered SRMs from the Locust and one from the Wasp.

Turn 6: The Wasp can actually jump behind me from its current position, so I move off the hill away from it and turn, putting my back to the board edge again. This is when the heavy stuff on the far side of the board FINALLY starts advancing. The Locust and Wasp decide discretion is the better part of valor and don’t try and rush me, staying out of LOS. See pic. There is one less Javelin at the end of the turn.

Turn 7: The Wasp jumps forward to try and boot my cockpit, so I move up onto the ridge myself (exposing myself to desultory long-range fire from the lance of heavies in range), but that lets me shoot the Locust and kick the Wasp (since these fuckers aren’t obeying zell for some reason). Locust is cored out and I take a bit of damage from the Wasp. It misses the kick and I kick its leg and all but 1 point of RT off.

Turn 8: The fucking Wasp stands back up on an 11, and I’ve got a Warhammer and a Stalker getting closer, so I move off the ridge to block the heavies’ LOS. Then the Wasp puts both SRMs and the ML into my CT, and all three hits generate TACs. Luckily none confirm. Then the Panther, who’s starting to close in along with the Cicada, hits the CT with its PPC, which also generates a TAC, which fails to confirm. That’s getting rather annoying and my CT is starting to look thinner than I’d like. I split fire, blowing the Wasp off the face of the earth, but missing the Cicada completely.

Turn 9: Fair simple; a back up into the woods behind me blocks my LOS to everybody but the Cicada. It sucks, and I basically tear off its right arm and right torso and most of its CT, but I can’t put 2 shots into the same location this game to save my own life so it lives. Fucker out to get renamed to a Cockroach.

Turn 10: I play the LOS game with woods again, and only the Panther is exposed. It’s so happy to get a LOS to me that it loses its head.

Turn 11: Now’s when shit gets real. The trio of heavies (Stalker, WHM, Ost) take up a nice little firing position on and around a wooded hill about 7 hexes away from the area I’ve been lurking in. I can either choose to run north behind the ridge and hope that the partial cover is going to eat some of the damage, or I can charge in under the minimum ranges of the Stalker and Whitworth and be in a position to fuck some shit up getting even closer the next round; 3 of those 4 Mechs have minimum range issues (I know I’m reaching using that description on the Stalker, but work with me here). You don’t get a Bloodname by being a pussy, kids. Charge it is. Bright side, charging puts me in a position where the trees on the hill work to my advantage against the Stalker.

Weapons-fire wise, basically everything misses my Hellstar except a single, 3-point LRM cluster that TACs my engine. Great. Oh, and I miss with 3 out of 4 PPCs against the Whitworth, needing 5s.

Turn 12: OK, so they’re going to sit their asses on that hill for the foreseeable future (I was hoping they’d move more aggressively against me so I could isolate one), but I can work with this. All of them but the WHM are in a position to lose LOS of me if I’m prone at the foot of the hill, and I can still prop and fire at the WHM. It’s a risk next turn if I fuck up the standing roll, but again, see above re: Bloodnames and pussies.

…so of course the WHM hits with every short range weapon, and I miss with all but one of my shots on 7s, which at least strips a leg.

Turn 13: Bot wins init, so I stand up and move to some cover. I tear both legs off the Warhammer, which falls and crits its MG ammo. However, the Stalker hits me with 2 SRMs. Both of which crit, both of which hit the engine. So combined with the LRM TAC from a few turns ago, that’s 3, and my Hellstar shuts down.

Final tally: 6 kills (Wasp, x2 Locust, Javelin, Panther, Warhammer) and 1 cripple (Cicada was fleeting off-board). I feel reasonably certain that had those TACs *not* been bullshit, I likely could have killed the Whitworth and the Ostsol before being brought down via accumulated damage. Regardless, the Crusader and T-bolt never made it into combat, and had I managed to also somehow kill the Stalker (mostly likely kicking it to death), they would have made short work of whatever was left of my Mech.

>four TACs

>7 TACs

Dear fuck, the RNG you.

What's the best way to play MegaMek online these days? Do people still play that one 3025 campaign?

If I'm reading Sarna right, the Locust is pretty much used by everyone and not a specific house, right?

All the Unseen are in wide service.

The Bugs and Archer are especially common.

I've been playing this this here lately:
minimek.sourceforge.net/RogueMek/

Fun little 5 minute battlemech arena that you can play in the browser.

I guess you could still get some use with the LRMs by hiding behind cover and using IDF, but that's still just making the best of a bad situation, especially since you're getting no use out of the LRM on the other side.

I am a simple man.

I don't know that much about battletech lore. Did the dark age ever get some sort of closure? Did they find out what caused the break down and did they manage to rebuild the communication systems?

That's one way to keep cool I guess.

Found out what caused the Blackout. Did not find out who or how to fix it. They kinda just started ignoring the difficulties of 1/20 the HPG network working after awhile. All these giant organized campaigns don't seem to have any problems coordinating despite everyone having to pony express and black box.

Fuck yeah.

All the smaller mechs ganged up on the 2 assault mechs and eventually killed them. The last guy alive was a pretty damaged Hatchetman. I managed to kick him over and destroy one of his legs then ran circles around him. He hit me once and destroyed half my weapons, but then he somehow killed himself with falling damage.

the nova cats to the shipyard, cause they're like, its better than yours, damn right, its better than yours, we could trial for it, but we'd have to charge.

Lewd!

And cute.

So is this the end of Inktober?

>the smell of sweaty pussy all over her cockpit seat

What will her tech say?

>I uh, need some time to recalibrate the uh... Look I just need to not be bothered while I do it, okay?

So what are the benefits of running a heat-neutral build besides the no heat build-up as long as shit dosn't go wrong? personally, I always run my mechs hot as I feel that if your heat-neutral then you are sacrificing firepower and maybe tonnage for heat sinks, but as a heat-generating mech you could either fire all one round and then some next round to prevent too much heat. critical hits to engines and heat sinks will also build heat, so a heat-neutral would no longer be heat-neutral after a critical. For example, If your heat neutral, whats adding 1 more machine gun or Gauss cannon gonna do? 1-2 heat isn't enough to shut your mech down, and it's only after a few turns of sustained firing that you have to start making rolls, but by that point wouldn't the extra firepower have helped fuck the enemy up and destroy them? no bully genuinely curious.

As somebody who loves riding the heat curve, the weakness is when you get plastered with infernos. It can cripple your movement and targeting just long enough to get fucked.

Otherwise heat neutral is for pussies. Bracket fire and heat curves 4lyfe.

What is the general opinion on the upcoming battletech turn based vidya?

cautiously optimistic.

Those regiments are lightweight as regiments go, but they aren't 100% light 'Mechs.

Same, HBS has delivered satisfying products that have improved with each game, so I have high hopes for it. That being said if goes south it wouldn't be the first of Weisman's fuck ups.

They were back in the day. DLG doesn't get mediums until the 4th War.

I miss old silly same size units honestly. The death of Barber's Marauder II's was really the end of that kind of thing.

This. It's a feeling I have much experience with as a Marik player.

What were the fast mediums of the 4th war?

Do we even know how it's going to play? is it going to be a 1 to 1 conversion of TT or will it be more "video gamey"?