KickStarter BATTLETECH - turn-based mech combat from Harebrained Schemes

[Cael]

And playing this game? Seriously?

I know unity is shit.But,first time i have ever seen 10+gb mods and recommendation for 32 gb's of ram for a smooth game experience.

I am always willing to give any franchises i like(and i like battletetch) a hour/two testing.
To my "surprise" the game performance and the game part are not good.
But,the game does seem to have a "decent" modding community. Unfortunately,,multiple GB mods and worse performance do not sound tempting.
Meh,i am going back to titans of steel/mech commander.

It is not even Battletech, any more than it is Macross. It is a shit game with lousy mechanics and big stompy robots and its own lore.

It's funny how Harebrained Schemes flubbed this. I mean the Shadowrun Returns reboots were decent games, but somehow the magic wasn't there with this one. Parts of it are fun and ok, but it doesn't gel into enough of a holistic immersive experience. You can sense that it could be great game if some more attention and effort were put into it, but it's not really there.

That is what happens when woketards get hold of any franchise and force their stupid modern day IRL politics into a setting that had different politics and outlook.

 

[underground nymph]

Battletech is a solid game. I enjoyed the campaign quite a lot. It has very good music also. I also never had any problems with a performance. Its only flaw is that it’s too small. It could have become a much better game if it had more customizations options for both mechs and pilots, more tactics options, more maps, more of everything actually.

 

[Cael]

Playing Wasteland 2, and here is the thing.

Both HBS game and Wasteland are Unity games.
Both have the equivalent of a "world" map. Both have set random maps.
Wasteland has more weapon types, weapons and inventory items. The junk items list alone is huge.
Wasteland has far larger maps and more of them.
Wasteland is a larger game.
Wasteland is a real RPG with quests and an actual story.
Wasteland has a real dialog system.

Wasteland doesn't have in-your-face wokeshit crap. Wasteland doesn't have hatred for white people. Wasteland does NOT burn computers nor take 20 years to load a game!

Fuck those incompetent shits at HBS with a shattered glass dildo. Fuck 'em!

 

[hivemind]

meds

 

[Sykar]

And playing this game? Seriously?

I know unity is shit.But,first time i have ever seen 10+gb mods and recommendation for 32 gb's of ram for a smooth game experience.

I am always willing to give any franchises i like(and i like battletetch) a hour/two testing.
To my "surprise" the game performance and the game part are not good.
But,the game does seem to have a "decent" modding community. Unfortunately,,multiple GB mods and worse performance do not sound tempting.
Meh,i am going back to titans of steel/mech commander.

It is not even Battletech, any more than it is Macross. It is a shit game with lousy mechanics and big stompy robots and its own lore.

It's funny how Harebrained Schemes flubbed this. I mean the Shadowrun Returns reboots were decent games, but somehow the magic wasn't there with this one. Parts of it are fun and ok, but it doesn't gel into enough of a holistic immersive experience. You can sense that it could be great game if some more attention and effort were put into it, but it's not really there.

Decent games? Eh they were pretty average NuXCom fare though at least they had a decent atmosphere and conveyed the general idea of hired criminals vs corrupt organizations with supernatural elements well enough. But as for Shadowrun games? Poor, very little of the actual rule system was used, especially magic is a shitshow as is itemization. Genesis and SNES versions were better adaptations of the P&P game than these.

 

[Cael]

And playing this game? Seriously?

I know unity is shit.But,first time i have ever seen 10+gb mods and recommendation for 32 gb's of ram for a smooth game experience.

I am always willing to give any franchises i like(and i like battletetch) a hour/two testing.
To my "surprise" the game performance and the game part are not good.
But,the game does seem to have a "decent" modding community. Unfortunately,,multiple GB mods and worse performance do not sound tempting.
Meh,i am going back to titans of steel/mech commander.

It is not even Battletech, any more than it is Macross. It is a shit game with lousy mechanics and big stompy robots and its own lore.

It's funny how Harebrained Schemes flubbed this. I mean the Shadowrun Returns reboots were decent games, but somehow the magic wasn't there with this one. Parts of it are fun and ok, but it doesn't gel into enough of a holistic immersive experience. You can sense that it could be great game if some more attention and effort were put into it, but it's not really there.

Decent games? Eh they were pretty average NuXCom fare though at least they had a decent atmosphere and conveyed the general idea of hired criminals vs corrupt organizations with supernatural elements well enough. But as for Shadowrun games? Poor, very little of the actual rule system was used, especially magic is a shitshow as is itemization. Genesis and SNES versions were better adaptations of the P&P game than these.

I remember the Genesis one. Good times.

 

[Cael]

Every now and then, I like to start up a game to remind myself why I can't stand it. Today was this game's turn. I played the first forced mission against the mining company and quit straight after. Dang, it was slow as shit, and I don't mean the loading times.

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

Yeah, I remember abandoning the game too.
I remember it being very slow and it being a very long game.
I might come back to it, but there's a bunch of other stuff I'd rather play first. It doesn't help that the fucker is like 33gigs, because apparently modern games are primadonnas that want to be only game on your hard disk.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Battletech's drive space is a minor issue compared to the terrible strain on GPUs that occurs despite the relatively simple graphics which, combined with the turn-based nature of combat, should not be demanding. Not to mention the crippling bugs, such as the one that causes the game to become ever slower as the number of saves increases, or the one that results in a jump between systems never arriving with the only recourse to load a save from a point before starting that trip.

 

[Stoned Ape]

I quite enjoyed the PvP aspect of the game for a couple of years after release. The Inner Sphere Wars fan-run campaign had a few good seasons, and the tournament play was particularly enjoyable (as long as you only entered the ones which banned custom mechs). HBS didn't really support PvP though, which was a shame as there was an enjoyable core experience.

 

[GreyViper]

Im a big fan of RogueTech, but agree memory requirement is absurd and no fault of moders, the game isn't optimized well. XCoM2 had a similar issue with mods while none with XCOM EW. The problem being there arent many good alternatives and since HBS has not added any new content, mods is all we have.

 

[SomeGuyWithAnOpinion]

Playing Wasteland 2, and here is the thing.

Both HBS game and Wasteland are Unity games.
Both have the equivalent of a "world" map. Both have set random maps.
Wasteland has more weapon types, weapons and inventory items. The junk items list alone is huge.
Wasteland has far larger maps and more of them.
Wasteland is a larger game.
Wasteland is a real RPG with quests and an actual story.
Wasteland has a real dialog system.

Wasteland doesn't have in-your-face wokeshit crap. Wasteland doesn't have hatred for white people. Wasteland does NOT burn computers nor take 20 years to load a game!

Fuck those incompetent shits at HBS with a shattered glass dildo. Fuck 'em!

Is Wasteland 2 actually any good?

Also, if I get it, should I play original or directors cut and why?

Also I work with Unity every day (it's my day job) and it has plenty of built in systems for content optimization. The biggest performance bottleneck for Unity is usually rendering performance, since it doesn't have the best geometry culling system. It seems in this game, everything renders fine, but their content pipeline is obviously set up horribly, and they are terribly incompetent. They are probably doing something really dumb, like unpacking the entire contents of the game into memory at runtime, bloating your memory footprint. This is not a Unity problem and has everything to do with shitty incompetent devs.

"Shitty Unity" is the "Shitty Gamebryo" of 2022. Gamebryo is a fine engine, and most of the games made with it have ended up fine. Bethesda have just always been incompetent hacks, and Bethesda fans high on copium have blamed the engine rather than the shitty company and it just sort of stuck.

 

[Jason Liang]

They are probably doing something really dumb,

Yes. All the maps in the game is actually 1 large map.

 

[SomeGuyWithAnOpinion]

Yes. All the maps in the game is actually 1 large map.

That'll do it

 

[Cael]

Playing Wasteland 2, and here is the thing.

Both HBS game and Wasteland are Unity games.
Both have the equivalent of a "world" map. Both have set random maps.
Wasteland has more weapon types, weapons and inventory items. The junk items list alone is huge.
Wasteland has far larger maps and more of them.
Wasteland is a larger game.
Wasteland is a real RPG with quests and an actual story.
Wasteland has a real dialog system.

Wasteland doesn't have in-your-face wokeshit crap. Wasteland doesn't have hatred for white people. Wasteland does NOT burn computers nor take 20 years to load a game!

Fuck those incompetent shits at HBS with a shattered glass dildo. Fuck 'em!

Is Wasteland 2 actually any good?

Also, if I get it, should I play original or directors cut and why?

Also I work with Unity every day (it's my day job) and it has plenty of built in systems for content optimization. The biggest performance bottleneck for Unity is usually rendering performance, since it doesn't have the best geometry culling system. It seems in this game, everything renders fine, but their content pipeline is obviously set up horribly, and they are terribly incompetent. They are probably doing something really dumb, like unpacking the entire contents of the game into memory at runtime, bloating your memory footprint. This is not a Unity problem and has everything to do with shitty incompetent devs.

"Shitty Unity" is the "Shitty Gamebryo" of 2022. Gamebryo is a fine engine, and most of the games made with it have ended up fine. Bethesda have just always been incompetent hacks, and Bethesda fans high on copium have blamed the engine rather than the shitty company and it just sort of stuck.

Play Director's Cut. From what I understand, it got rid of most of the bugs, and rebalanced the NPCs, which were far more horrible in the original.

 

[SomeGuyWithAnOpinion]

Play Director's Cut. From what I understand, it got rid of most of the bugs, and rebalanced the NPCs, which were far more horrible in the original.

Yeah. I have also heard it adds things like bonuses for getting skills to certain levels? Sounds based but I'm not sure about it.

I will play Directors Cut.

 

[Jason Liang]

Finally found the last part to complete my Nightstar yesterday, on Stewart in Marikspace!

Now I'm going to figure out the best guns to slap on my pride and joy!

 

[underground nymph]

I quite enjoyed the PvP aspect of the game for a couple of years after release. The Inner Sphere Wars fan-run campaign had a few good seasons, and the tournament play was particularly enjoyable (as long as you only entered the ones which banned custom mechs). HBS didn't really support PvP though, which was a shame as there was an enjoyable core experience.

That’s actually interesting. Where can I find more info about this?

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

2-3 large lasers or 2 ppcs, rest mediums and machineguns. heatsinks. heatsinks everywhere.

 

[Stoned Ape]

I quite enjoyed the PvP aspect of the game for a couple of years after release. The Inner Sphere Wars fan-run campaign had a few good seasons, and the tournament play was particularly enjoyable (as long as you only entered the ones which banned custom mechs). HBS didn't really support PvP though, which was a shame as there was an enjoyable core experience.

That’s actually interesting. Where can I find more info about this?

I'm pretty sure it's all died due to lack of any support or interest by HBS.

Here's the only surviving post I can find about ISW:

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...are-online-fan-made-planetary-league.1073327/

But I'm pretty sure their website was taken down years ago, none of the links on there about them to work.

It was pretty good, players formed teams representing all of the great houses, the minor states, and mercenary units. After that, the strategic layer had each planet running an economy which you could develop, buy dropships/jumpships and mechs to form garrisons and attack forces, then fight out tactical battles in the HBS game.

Pretty much the same thing for fan tournaments, there were loads for the first couple of years (mostly organised over on the HBS forums)

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/forums/battletech-multi-player.1011/

but there's nothing going on there and hasn't been since about 2018.

It's a shame, really. It was far and away the most interesting thing about the game, the AI was never as fun to play against as real people.

 

[Stoned Ape]

I quite enjoyed the PvP aspect of the game for a couple of years after release. The Inner Sphere Wars fan-run campaign had a few good seasons, and the tournament play was particularly enjoyable (as long as you only entered the ones which banned custom mechs). HBS didn't really support PvP though, which was a shame as there was an enjoyable core experience.

That’s actually interesting. Where can I find more info about this?

Here's some gameplay of Inner Sphere Wars PvP:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTYDsBHyEEU

One of the cool things about it was that using non-meta lances was actually beneficial as those mechs that were less popular became cheaper to buy and field, so the game balanced itself out pretty well.

Anaro was very good at the game and I was lucky enough to play against him a few times at tournaments. He has some tourney footage and other ISW games up on his channel, too

 

[Average Manatee]

I quite enjoyed the PvP aspect of the game for a couple of years after release. The Inner Sphere Wars fan-run campaign had a few good seasons, and the tournament play was particularly enjoyable (as long as you only entered the ones which banned custom mechs). HBS didn't really support PvP though, which was a shame as there was an enjoyable core experience.

That’s actually interesting. Where can I find more info about this?

Here's some gameplay of Inner Sphere Wars PvP:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTYDsBHyEEU

One of the cool things about it was that using non-meta lances was actually beneficial as those mechs that were less popular became cheaper to buy and field, so the game balanced itself out pretty well.

Anaro was very good at the game and I was lucky enough to play against him a few times at tournaments. He has some tourney footage and other ISW games up on his channel, too

The concept is interesting but actually spending almost two and a half hours on a single 4v4 battle sounds awful. Doesn't surprise me that PvP died off, I don't see it being an enjoyable spectator thing that would lure people to the game. For once I can't blame HBS for the game's issues, it'd have to have actual support from CGL as a tie-in for those playing the tabletop game. Otherwise PvP definitely wouldn't be a moneymaker for HBS on their own.

 

[Parsimonious cook]

I quite enjoyed the PvP aspect of the game for a couple of years after release. The Inner Sphere Wars fan-run campaign had a few good seasons, and the tournament play was particularly enjoyable (as long as you only entered the ones which banned custom mechs). HBS didn't really support PvP though, which was a shame as there was an enjoyable core experience.

That’s actually interesting. Where can I find more info about this?

Here's some gameplay of Inner Sphere Wars PvP:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTYDsBHyEEU

One of the cool things about it was that using non-meta lances was actually beneficial as those mechs that were less popular became cheaper to buy and field, so the game balanced itself out pretty well.

Anaro was very good at the game and I was lucky enough to play against him a few times at tournaments. He has some tourney footage and other ISW games up on his channel, too

The concept is interesting but actually spending almost two and a half hours on a single 4v4 battle sounds awful. Doesn't surprise me that PvP died off, I don't see it being an enjoyable spectator thing that would lure people to the game. For once I can't blame HBS for the game's issues, it'd have to have actual support from CGL as a tie-in for those playing the tabletop game. Otherwise PvP definitely wouldn't be a moneymaker for HBS on their own.

I played the MP for a while on release and the matches usually lasted about 30 minutes or so - dont judge what the "normal" MP gameplay is like from some "high level pro" videos like the one that was linked to. Normal people just closed in on each other in a few turns and duked it out. MP indeed was fun, but what killed it IMO was that people mostly made locked games that were agreed on somewhere on discord or w/e, so it became increasingly hard to just jump into a random game - so most people eventually stopped to bother trying.

 

[Stoned Ape]

I'd say the main reason for MP collapsing was that there was no skill ladder and so even I would smash most players in drop-in games, which must have been pretty frustrating for them.

If there had been a skill ladder (or even an icon representing a player's win rate or something) in the MP selector, then it would have been easier to find people to play around your level and organizing games in other places wouldn't have been needed.

High level play was pretty rewarding. Anaro's game was all about manipulating the turn order and only letting his opponent target what he wanted them to, he was extremely cautious but very difficult to beat (I think he beat me 4 times to 2 overall, but I enjoyed all my matches against him).

There were also extremely aggressive top players who were pretty successful as well. I even managed to win a couple of tournaments and I tended to favor playing a more open game than he did.

I think this is the only recording I managed to do for a final, but I'm not a good streamer/narrator so I don't think the quality is very good, and if memory serves my mic stops working at some point.

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/309678187

 

[Jason Liang]

I think this is the only recording I managed to do for a final, but I'm not a good streamer/narrator so I don't think the quality is very good, and if memory serves my mic stops working at some point.

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/309678187

All you needed was a 1 legged Jenner!