KickStarter BATTLETECH - turn-based mech combat from Harebrained Schemes

[Cael]

In MW2Mercs, that was the second campaign mission. Kurita wanted you to blow up an office because it was printing seditious material or something like that. That kind of thing is pretty standard fare for the Kurita and Liao factions. T

No, I was referring to a later mission, when you have to destroy Davion bases while pretending to be a pirate, so that Davion increased military presence in the planet, letting the "honorable" Kurita use that as an excuse to make bigger demands or provoke a war.
Or how during the second mission you mention, one of the intermission texts mentions that one of the Kurita soldiers used a mech's machinegun to "silence" a protesting crowd. Hardcore. They also do not recruit military types officially due their "dishonorable nature", officially at least, so being double-crossed at some point would have been in-character.

Hmm... I don't recall that Kurita mission. But MW2M was a long time ago. I only recall the first one because it was aggravating as hell. You have to nail that stupid Jenner and then save the tank on the other side of the map in what is likely to be your starting Commando. Then you have to double back to kill some helicopters. Otherwise you fail mission objectives. In the end, I just sort of cheated by targeting the Jenner's massive head area and hope to kill it with the very first alpha strike. That is only something that veterans of the game would figure out, so newbies to the game is generally boned.

And yes, machine gunning a protesting crowd would be exactly the kind of thing the Kuritas under Takashi would do. They are that ruthless. But they are sane and pragmatic... usually (and then the 4th Succession War and the Dragoons happened...). Liaos are just batshit insane.

 

[Spark Mandriller]

No, I was referring to a later mission, when you have to destroy Davion bases while pretending to be a pirate, so that Davion increased military presence in the planet, letting the "honorable" Kurita use that as an excuse to make bigger demands or provoke a war.
Or how during the second mission you mention, one of the intermission texts mentions that one of the Kurita soldiers used a mech's machinegun to "silence" a protesting crowd. Hardcore. They also do not recruit military types officially due their "dishonorable nature", officially at least, so being double-crossed at some point would have been in-character.

Raiding military targets to get the response they want is pretty normal for the IS. It's like the FedCom mission chain where they hire you to work with an uprising on that DC planet. Advancing their goals is what's important, if some people have to die for that then that's too bad. And trying to get an advantage is pretty sensible anyway, given that they've been fighting for centuries and the FedCom already tried a major invasion of the DC a few years before the game started. Everyone knows they would have tried again if the Clans didn't show up and get everyone's attention.
Machinegunning protesters is obviously evil but it's consistent with the DC honour code. Disrespecting the DCMS=disrespecting the authority of the coordinator=treason=death penalty. And hopefully it'll be brutal enough that nobody else will get any funny ideas. It's bad, but it makes sense if you understand how their morality works. Better than Liao where they don't really have any sense of morality.

 

[Cael]

No, I was referring to a later mission, when you have to destroy Davion bases while pretending to be a pirate, so that Davion increased military presence in the planet, letting the "honorable" Kurita use that as an excuse to make bigger demands or provoke a war.
Or how during the second mission you mention, one of the intermission texts mentions that one of the Kurita soldiers used a mech's machinegun to "silence" a protesting crowd. Hardcore. They also do not recruit military types officially due their "dishonorable nature", officially at least, so being double-crossed at some point would have been in-character.

Raiding military targets to get the response they want is pretty normal for the IS. It's like the FedCom mission chain where they hire you to work with an uprising on that DC planet. Advancing their goals is what's important, if some people have to die for that then that's too bad. And trying to get an advantage is pretty sensible anyway, given that they've been fighting for centuries and the FedCom already tried a major invasion of the DC a few years before the game started. Everyone knows they would have tried again if the Clans didn't show up and get everyone's attention.
Machinegunning protesters is obviously evil but it's consistent with the DC honour code. Disrespecting the DCMS=disrespecting the authority of the coordinator=treason=death penalty. And hopefully it'll be brutal enough that nobody else will get any funny ideas. It's bad, but it makes sense if you understand how their morality works. Better than Liao where they don't really have any sense of morality.

FedSun, not FedCom.

And which major invasion were you talking about where the FedSun invaded the DC pre-3025?

 

[Spark Mandriller]

FedSun, not FedCom.

And which major invasion were you talking about where the FedSun invaded the DC pre-3025?

MW2 Mercenaries is set in the 3040s so I feel comfortable calling it the FedCom. LC and FS were working together pretty well at that point even if they didn't completely combine until later. Though if you'd prefer for me to say FedSuns then okay, sure, you are correct. Either way, FedSuns are happy to sponsor rebellions on DC worlds. It doesn't cost much and it hurts the DC, so it's the smart thing to do. And Hanse is extremely smart. Being incredibly good at leading a nation is basically his defining attribute.
I wasn't talking about invasions before 3025, I was talking about 3039. It didn't work out that time, but why wouldn't they try again? Not like the DC didn't basically deserve it either.

 

[Cael]

FedSun, not FedCom.

And which major invasion were you talking about where the FedSun invaded the DC pre-3025?

MW2 Mercenaries is set in the 3040s so I feel comfortable calling it the FedCom. LC and FS were working together pretty well at that point even if they didn't completely combine until later. Though if you'd prefer for me to say FedSuns then okay, sure, you are correct. Either way, FedSuns are happy to sponsor rebellions on DC worlds. It doesn't cost much and it hurts the DC, so it's the smart thing to do. And Hanse is extremely smart. Being incredibly good at leading a nation is basically his defining attribute.
I wasn't talking about invasions before 3025, I was talking about 3039. It didn't work out that time, but why wouldn't they try again? Not like the DC didn't basically deserve it either.

3039 was a Davion loss. Davion already knew something was up when the Kuritans started fielding weird 'mechs. He wasn't going to attack them again until he figured out what, although he had a good idea.

 

[Spark Mandriller]

3039 was a Davion loss. Davion already knew something was up when the Kuritans started fielding weird 'mechs. He wasn't going to attack them again until he figured out what, although he had a good idea.

Yeah, exactly. He was going to figure it out and then they'd attack again. DC were right to try everything they could to shore up their defences while they could. Even though it probably wouldn't have helped anyway, since the FedCom was just too strong. Which is why the writers made Kat ruin everything, I guess.

 

[Cael]

3039 was a Davion loss. Davion already knew something was up when the Kuritans started fielding weird 'mechs. He wasn't going to attack them again until he figured out what, although he had a good idea.

Yeah, exactly. He was going to figure it out and then they'd attack again. DC were right to try everything they could to shore up their defences while they could. Even though it probably wouldn't have helped anyway, since the FedCom was just too strong. Which is why the writers made Kat ruin everything, I guess.

FedCom was strong, but it was also too big. If not Katherine, some one else would have done it. Probably Nondi. The thing with the FedCom falling apart was the stupid way it was done. Katherine had nothing other than author fiat to do the kind of damage she did. It would have been more believable for Nondi to do it or a coalition of Steiner "loyalists" like what happened in the Combine (the Black Dragons). Katherine was a nobody. She wasn't even a 'mechwarrior, which automatically disqualified her to BOTH thrones.

Of course, the logic rot was right there from the beginning. Candace was the heir, for example, but she gave it up to let the entire CapCon suffer Romano's insanity? What the hell? It was total bullshit. All she had to do was to keep Justin's real identity a secret, Justin play the rogue agent still, negotiate a ceasefire and a Marshall Plan of some sort from Davion, and she'd have returned home in triumph with Davion as an ally. Instead, she ended up losing her holdings and becoming a de facto prisoner of her nephew. That is hardly the smart, cunning Candace that was portrayed in her first outing.

 

[Spark Mandriller]

This is why Crusader Clans are the best. When they do dumb shit it's in character, not out of character. Except for Wolves, but all the smart Wolves turned bandit and ran off anyway. You stick with Falcons or Jags or whoever and they'll never let you down. Just go around being dumb and hitting things all day.

 

[Shitty Kitty]

This is why Crusader Clans are the best. When they do dumb shit it's in character, not out of character. Except for Wolves, but all the smart Wolves turned bandit and ran off anyway. You stick with Falcons or Jags or whoever and they'll never let you down. Just go around being dumb and hitting things all day.

Falcons yes, the Jade Falcons are probably the smartest of the dumb asshole brigade, they're good at what they do and you fuck with someone like a Pryde at your own peril.

Smoke Jags... they're a little special, and by special I mean

Kind of pissed that CGL decided the Republic of the Sphere rolled the Jag leftovers into their special units instead of something interesting like Wolverine/Minnesota Tribe leftovers, but the Wolverines already fucked off into the Deep Periphery 300 years or so before the RotS was a twinkle in Stone's eye.

 

[TheDiceMustRoll]

Can you get Axemans in this games vanilla game

 

[Cael]

Can you get Axemans in this games vanilla game

No. Axman is a post-3050 'mech.

 

[TheDiceMustRoll]

Can you get Axemans in this games vanilla game

No. Axman is a post-3050 'mech.

It's such a cool mech God DAMN IT

 

[Cael]

Can you get Axemans in this games vanilla game

No. Axman is a post-3050 'mech.

It's such a cool mech God DAMN IT

XL engine, IIRC. And DHS. It would rape 'mechs of this era.

 

[lightbane]

It's probably in one of the "tech-advanced" mods, so the Advanced one or RogueTech.

 

[TheDiceMustRoll]

It's probably in one of the "tech-advanced" mods, so the Advanced one or RogueTech.

It is, I've got 20 hours in BT vanilla and it hasnt shown up yet so I was a little confused, as I'd seen footage of a guy just wrecking everything with an axeman

 

[Cael]

It's probably in one of the "tech-advanced" mods, so the Advanced one or RogueTech.

It is, I've got 20 hours in BT vanilla and it hasnt shown up yet so I was a little confused, as I'd seen footage of a guy just wrecking everything with an axeman

You can get a mini-Axman by getting the Hatchetman variant (the one without the AC10). It has 2 energy and 2 missile slots, so you can drop in 2 medium lasers and 2 LRM5 or something like that. It also has 4 support slots, I think, which would make it better than the stock variant at melee combat.

 

[TheDiceMustRoll]

thinking i might have to use mods. This game's bizarre insistence on doing the whole "its 4v4 mechs just kidding it's not 8-10 mechs vs you and you get to sit through 5 minute enemy turns while they all focus fire one guy" is killing the fun hard. like half the missions are just tedious and not hard.

 

[Cael]

thinking i might have to use mods. This game's bizarre insistence on doing the whole "its 4v4 mechs just kidding it's not 8-10 mechs vs you and you get to sit through 5 minute enemy turns while they all focus fire one guy" is killing the fun hard. like half the missions are just tedious and not hard.

That sounds about right.

The only tactic the losers at HBS can come up with is to give a higher weighting to glass cannons and get them to focus fire on one 'mech. Just look at your 60-ton opponents. 60-80% of them will be Quickdraws, which has a lower armour but a higher damage curve than Dragons. The computer doesn't care about losing 'mechs, so weapons at the expense of armour is grossly unbalanced in its favour, especially when it also tend to outnumber you 3-to-1, if not 7-to-1 (with 4 assault turrets thrown in).

It is like the fuckheads can't decide whether to make a tabletop experience as they promised or XCom (the original, not the remake shit).

 

[Jason Liang]

 

[Mustawd]

is this good yet?

 

[rashiakas]

With mods, it is.

 

[Roguey]

Oh hey, back in March Kiva wrote another post-mortem update https://persenche.medium.com/the-design-philosophy-of-battletech-part-4-c85be3757775

So I care deeply about worlds, and when I came aboard the Battletech project, one of my central concerns was the setting. See, Battletech’s setting is everything that annoys me about rote sci-fi world building, all in one package: worlds that are not very alien, and people that talk and act like modern people, and places that are not very well-disguised copies of real world societies and cultures and governments.

And yet that's the game you made, one where people talk and act like contemporary tumblrkin.

I had a weird idea. I mean, I had Jordan there, and we were talking pretty frequently with Randall at Catalyst. What if we made a game that didn’t just respect canon, but somehow was compatible with canon? What if we made a game that could become canonical?

The rest of the setting discussion should be understood from this starting position: I wanted to create canonical Battletech material.

In the first essay I wrote in this series, I mentioned (to the alarm of the Battletech subreddit) that I wasn’t a fan of the Battletech IP. So why did I care about canonicity? It’s actually because I wasn’t a fan that I wanted to add to the canon. In a perverse way, I wanted the challenge of constructing something that satisfied my own sense of a believable, reasonable science fiction setting within this context that I considered inimical to reasonable sci-fi.

(The truth is that, aside from the logistical contradictions and the inherent ludonarrative dissonance created by the rarity and fragility of the mechs, the setting is not unreasonable. It makes some assumptions about human nature and human governance that I think are suspect, and it makes some other assumptions about technology and the rate of human progress that I think are absurd, but it has the kind of fractally complex texture I look for in fictional histories. Since I had to go from zero to expert in about three months, I can attest to the depth and intricacy of the setting as it has grown over decades of exploration and game publication.)

Another reminder that this is what Lyin' Kevin said back in 2016:

I’ve been a fan of BattleTech since 1987, when it competed for table time among my friends with Traveller and Gamma World. I’m a historian by education, and by far my favorite thing about BattleTech is the enormously detailed future history of the setting.

I sketched out an early history where, in the wake of the Capellan withdrawal from the region documented in multiple canonical sources, the people living on the star systems left abandoned were able to contact one another and put together a rudimentary coalition government, with each system acting as an independent princedom. Over time, this coalition became more formal, and the ‘princes’ of these systems, along with a collection of other notables, became the Electors that met in the Aurigan Diet to acclaim the High Lord or High Lady, said Lord or Lady being the executive and overall administrator of the Coalition. There’s more, and if you go pick up the official sourcebook you can read my whole rambling exploration of the history of the region.

(You might ask where all this information was in the actual game. That’s an excellent question!)

Someone's upset their lore building wasn't respected.

This is really the heart of what I wanted out of building the setting: a sense that what we’d created made sense, that the people and history felt like something you could read about and say ‘I could see a future like this one.’ A future where humans, far from their native lands, would slosh around their Catholicism and their Congregationalism and their Sunni Islam into a glorious syncretic mess, a jumble of religions and cultures and traditions. Where the protagonist was a Polynesian woman, and the antagonist was a Spanish man, and they were both hereditary aristocrats of a future nobility, and they struggled over control of a distant fictional Holy Roman Empire in the shadow of far greater powers.

muh multicult

I wanted Battletech fans to say both ‘this is definitely Battletech’ and also ‘this doesn’t entirely feel like Battletech.’ And I wanted people new to the setting to say ‘this is a universe I can believe in. This is a setting that could exist.’

I honestly can’t say if I succeeded. I just re-read the House Arano book, and much of it still strikes me as quite satisfying and well-composed. But is it Battletech? Does it feel like something that fits into the larger ecosystem, or does it feel like a strange outsider? As a strange outsider myself, it’s difficult for me to say.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

[TheDiceMustRoll]

I couldn't care less, I'd rather he spent more time on making a game where I didn't have to deal with pointless and boring missions where the enemy always has reinforcements and enemies with zero sense of preservation. Why is a locust with zero pips walking straight up to the front of my Dragon to alpha strike, miss everything and then just eat a punch to the CT, dying instantly? Why has this happened, according to my notes, four times in 18 hours?

 

[Cael]

Oh hey, back in March Kiva wrote another post-mortem update https://persenche.medium.com/the-design-philosophy-of-battletech-part-4-c85be3757775

So I care deeply about worlds, and when I came aboard the Battletech project, one of my central concerns was the setting. See, Battletech’s setting is everything that annoys me about rote sci-fi world building, all in one package: worlds that are not very alien, and people that talk and act like modern people, and places that are not very well-disguised copies of real world societies and cultures and governments.

So I care deeply about worlds, and when I came aboard the Battletech project, one of my central concerns was the setting. See, Battletech’s setting is everything that annoys me about rote sci-fi world building, all in one package: worlds that are not very alien, and people that talk and act like modern people, and places that are not very well-disguised copies of real world societies and cultures and governments.

And yet that's the game you made, one where people talk and act like contemporary tumblrkin.

I had a weird idea. I mean, I had Jordan there, and we were talking pretty frequently with Randall at Catalyst. What if we made a game that didn’t just respect canon, but somehow was compatible with canon? What if we made a game that could become canonical?

The rest of the setting discussion should be understood from this starting position: I wanted to create canonical Battletech material.

In the first essay I wrote in this series, I mentioned (to the alarm of the Battletech subreddit) that I wasn’t a fan of the Battletech IP. So why did I care about canonicity? It’s actually because I wasn’t a fan that I wanted to add to the canon. In a perverse way, I wanted the challenge of constructing something that satisfied my own sense of a believable, reasonable science fiction setting within this context that I considered inimical to reasonable sci-fi.

(The truth is that, aside from the logistical contradictions and the inherent ludonarrative dissonance created by the rarity and fragility of the mechs, the setting is not unreasonable. It makes some assumptions about human nature and human governance that I think are suspect, and it makes some other assumptions about technology and the rate of human progress that I think are absurd, but it has the kind of fractally complex texture I look for in fictional histories. Since I had to go from zero to expert in about three months, I can attest to the depth and intricacy of the setting as it has grown over decades of exploration and game publication.)

Another reminder that this is what Lyin' Kevin said back in 2016:

I’ve been a fan of BattleTech since 1987, when it competed for table time among my friends with Traveller and Gamma World. I’m a historian by education, and by far my favorite thing about BattleTech is the enormously detailed future history of the setting.

I sketched out an early history where, in the wake of the Capellan withdrawal from the region documented in multiple canonical sources, the people living on the star systems left abandoned were able to contact one another and put together a rudimentary coalition government, with each system acting as an independent princedom. Over time, this coalition became more formal, and the ‘princes’ of these systems, along with a collection of other notables, became the Electors that met in the Aurigan Diet to acclaim the High Lord or High Lady, said Lord or Lady being the executive and overall administrator of the Coalition. There’s more, and if you go pick up the official sourcebook you can read my whole rambling exploration of the history of the region.

(You might ask where all this information was in the actual game. That’s an excellent question!)

Someone's upset their lore building wasn't respected.

This is really the heart of what I wanted out of building the setting: a sense that what we’d created made sense, that the people and history felt like something you could read about and say ‘I could see a future like this one.’ A future where humans, far from their native lands, would slosh around their Catholicism and their Congregationalism and their Sunni Islam into a glorious syncretic mess, a jumble of religions and cultures and traditions. Where the protagonist was a Polynesian woman, and the antagonist was a Spanish man, and they were both hereditary aristocrats of a future nobility, and they struggled over control of a distant fictional Holy Roman Empire in the shadow of far greater powers.

muh multicult

I wanted Battletech fans to say both ‘this is definitely Battletech’ and also ‘this doesn’t entirely feel like Battletech.’ And I wanted people new to the setting to say ‘this is a universe I can believe in. This is a setting that could exist.’

I honestly can’t say if I succeeded. I just re-read the House Arano book, and much of it still strikes me as quite satisfying and well-composed. But is it Battletech? Does it feel like something that fits into the larger ecosystem, or does it feel like a strange outsider? As a strange outsider myself, it’s difficult for me to say.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

So, he is a lying, sociopathic, hypocritical troll. Meh. Just another leftard cunt, in other words.

 

[Cael]

I couldn't care less, I'd rather he spent more time on making a game where I didn't have to deal with pointless and boring missions where the enemy always has reinforcements and enemies with zero sense of preservation. Why is a locust with zero pips walking straight up to the front of my Dragon to alpha strike, miss everything and then just eat a punch to the CT, dying instantly? Why has this happened, according to my notes, four times in 18 hours?

I had a Locust run up to my Anni to shoot at it with a medium laser. The return salvo of 2x SPPC++ (25x5 damage each) and 5x LB2-X+++ (8x12 damage each) literally DISINTEGRATED the Locust. There was literally nothing left. Every body part was destroyed.

Leeroy Jenkins is literally the only tactic the incompetent rotting cunts at HBS knows.