KickStarter BATTLETECH - turn-based mech combat from Harebrained Schemes

[Elex]

https://store.steampowered.com/app/853140/Adeptus_Titanicus_Dominus/ ty god emperor.

 

[Mark Richard]

Some early thoughts...

The difficulty is quite challenging. My 3 medium mechs and 1 light mech went up against 3 mediums and 4 lights in a 2 star seek & destroy mission and barely made it out alive. At times I considered ejecting, but couldn't shake the angry image of that officer from Wing Commander chewing me out for abandoning expensive hardware.

Maybe I could get the verdict of a Battletech expert on the writing - is it out of place? Something about it just doesn't gel. My employer is like a sanitised Daenerys Targaryen, and the dialogue options involve sitting atop my high horse and condemning our enemy for the monster he is. So much for my cynical hard as nails mercenary character whose only concern is getting paid. Spoiler for the second main story mission (third if you count the tutorial):

Spoiler

we basically liberated Auschwitz

As for the bugs, yeah, Battletech is a poorly optimised trash fire. By far the worst I've played this year. It could be the poster boy for the industry's fix it later attitude in the digital age of gaming. I really wish I had chosen Frostpunk instead and picked up Battletech a few months from now.

 

[Cael]

Maybe I could get the verdict of a Battletech expert on the writing - is it out of place? Something about it just doesn't gel. My employer is like a sanitised Daenerys Targaryen, and the dialogue options involve sitting atop my high horse and condemning our enemy for the monster he is. So much for my cynical hard as nails mercenary character whose only concern is getting paid. Spoiler for the second main story mission (third if you count the tutorial):

Spoiler

we basically liberated Auschwitz

BTech writing runs the gamut, just like any series with a multitude of writers. Star Wars EU, Forgotten Realms, Eberron, etc.

For example, the dialogue of MechCommander 2 is pretty bad, but MechCommander 1 is not bad. MechWarrior 4 Mercs isn't too bad either (Duncan Fisher wins hands down), and MechWarrior 4 itself is OK except for the dopey idiot playing your character, who sounds like he just woke up.

For books, "Wolves on the Border" is pretty good, so is "Flashpoint", "By Blood Betrayed" and the Warrior Trilogy. "Prince of Havoc" is atrocious, which is funny because it has the same writer as the Warrior Trilogy.

That said, I never expected the writing of HBS' game to be any good for a variety of reasons but mostly to do with the fact that there is no good piece of writing that cannot be destroyed, betrayed and plain ruined by sjw preaching.

 

[DeepOcean]

Some early thoughts...

The difficulty is quite challenging. My 3 medium mechs and 1 light mech went up against 3 mediums and 4 lights in a 2 star seek & destroy mission and barely made it out alive. At times I considered ejecting, but couldn't shake the angry image of that officer from Wing Commander chewing me out for abandoning expensive hardware.

Maybe I could get the verdict of a Battletech expert on the writing - is it out of place? Something about it just doesn't gel. My employer is like a sanitised Daenerys Targaryen, and the dialogue options involve sitting atop my high horse and condemning our enemy for the monster he is. So much for my cynical hard as nails mercenary character whose only concern is getting paid. Spoiler for the second main story mission (third if you count the tutorial):

Spoiler

we basically liberated Auschwitz

As for the bugs, yeah, Battletech is a poorly optimised trash fire. By far the worst I've played this year. It could be the poster boy for the industry's fix it later attitude in the digital age of gaming. I really wish I had chosen Frostpunk instead and picked up Battletech a few months from now.

The problem is that their characters lack edge and lack strong conflicts. Writers with personal problems of accepting personal failings many times will project themselves on the story by creating sanitized characters without flaws that are idealized versions of themselves, Mary sues. Political correctness is an effect of low tolerance to frustration and conflict, people with low tolerance towards frustration and conflict will try to avoid writing stories with frustration and strong conflict. SJW types don't look to me the kind of people that are willing to tolerate writing complicated conflicted characters that aren't perfect morally good.

 

[Shadowfang]

Playing a little longer. The graphics are okay, maps look good, specially the more mountainous ones that allow for more strategical maneuvering.
I have a little issue with the paint-schemes of the mechs over distances. They all look silver. This didn't happend with mech commander, you could tell factions apart through colour, but here, if you are not zoomed in, all mechs look the same.
Whats the point of painting my mechs purple and yellow or all red if i can't tell them apart?

Edit:

Spoiler

Oh and the ICEBOX is supposed to be Auschwitz? How original

 

[moleman]

Is there a way to make the fonts bigger? These popup-texts are hard to read when you have low vision.
I haven't found any font-size/ui-scaling options.

But hey ... at least we got three pronouns.

 

[fantadomat]

Maybe I could get the verdict of a Battletech expert on the writing - is it out of place? Something about it just doesn't gel. My employer is like a sanitised Daenerys Targaryen, and the dialogue options involve sitting atop my high horse and condemning our enemy for the monster he is. So much for my cynical hard as nails mercenary character whose only concern is getting paid. Spoiler for the second main story mission (third if you count the tutorial):

Spoiler

we basically liberated Auschwitz

BTech writing runs the gamut, just like any series with a multitude of writers. Star Wars EU, Forgotten Realms, Eberron, etc.

For example, the dialogue of MechCommander 2 is pretty bad, but MechCommander 1 is not bad. MechWarrior 4 Mercs isn't too bad either (Duncan Fisher wins hands down), and MechWarrior 4 itself is OK except for the dopey idiot playing your character, who sounds like he just woke up.

For books, "Wolves on the Border" is pretty good, so is "Flashpoint", "By Blood Betrayed" and the Warrior Trilogy. "Prince of Havoc" is atrocious, which is funny because it has the same writer as the Warrior Trilogy.

That said, I never expected the writing of HBS' game to be any good for a variety of reasons but mostly to do with the fact that there is no good piece of writing that cannot be destroyed, betrayed and plain ruined by sjw preaching.

Dragonfall have great writing,Hong Kong have good writing. I never expected it to degrade to that pile of shit.

 

[Bocian]

Hong Kong have good writing

Give me an example of "good" writing in this game. For most part, it's OK-ish - descriptions of the locations, mission briefings etc. can get rather creative - but the companions and NPC's in general have non-existent level of quality.

 

[fantadomat]

Hong Kong have good writing

Give me an example of "good" writing in this game. For most part, it's OK-ish - descriptions of the locations, mission briefings etc. can get rather creative - but the companions and NPC's in general have non-existent level of quality.

I disagree with you,companions and some npc felt pretty good and real. A rat girl with interesting shaman story and cool side mission,a psychopathic Russian genius-Zuckerberg fan,a ghoul samurai debating humanity,a dwarf codex addict,chinese mob granny and lets not forget JiveBot joining the codex. Anything BBS was great fun to read . Also i enjoyed the main story,but i am sucker for supernatural stories.

 

[Blaine]

Uh-oh! I've seen Country_Gravy playing BATTLETECH on Steam all week, and now he's in this thread downrating my posts! I was afraid something like this might happen.

Help! I NEED AN ADULT! MY RATING RATIO, SOMEONE HELP ME!

 

[fantadomat]

Uh-oh! I've seen Country_Gravy playing BATTLETECH on Steam all week, and now he's in this thread downrating my posts! I was afraid something like this might happen.

Help! I NEED AN ADULT! MY RATING RATIO, SOMEONE HELP ME!

I am coming mate,just wait a month .

 

[Latro]

Hong Kong have good writing

Give me an example of "good" writing in this game. For most part, it's OK-ish - descriptions of the locations, mission briefings etc. can get rather creative - but the companions and NPC's in general have non-existent level of quality.

I disagree with you,companions and some npc felt pretty good and real. A rat girl with interesting shaman story and cool side mission,a psychopathic Russian genius-Zuckerberg fan,a ghoul samurai debating humanity,a dwarf codex addict,chinese mob granny and lets not forget JiveBot joining the codex. Anything BBS was great fun to read . Also i enjoyed the main story,but i am sucker for supernatural stories.

outside of rat-girl and the black dwarf, I actually didn't mind hong kong much

 

[Cael]

SJW types don't look to me the kind of people that are willing to tolerate writing complicated conflicted characters that aren't perfect morally good.

Their version of "perfectly morally good" is often at odds with what is truly Good. Which makes me believe that Miss Goody-Two-Shoes there is advocating "mass murder" and "prolonged conflict" with a side order of "burn everything" because the other side is simply not human.

 

[gestalt11]

Some early thoughts...

The difficulty is quite challenging. My 3 medium mechs and 1 light mech went up against 3 mediums and 4 lights in a 2 star seek & destroy mission and barely made it out alive. At times I considered ejecting, but couldn't shake the angry image of that officer from Wing Commander chewing me out for abandoning expensive hardware.

Maybe I could get the verdict of a Battletech expert on the writing - is it out of place? Something about it just doesn't gel. My employer is like a sanitised Daenerys Targaryen, and the dialogue options involve sitting atop my high horse and condemning our enemy for the monster he is. So much for my cynical hard as nails mercenary character whose only concern is getting paid. Spoiler for the second main story mission (third if you count the tutorial):

Spoiler

we basically liberated Auschwitz

As for the bugs, yeah, Battletech is a poorly optimised trash fire. By far the worst I've played this year. It could be the poster boy for the industry's fix it later attitude in the digital age of gaming. I really wish I had chosen Frostpunk instead and picked up Battletech a few months from now.

The problem is that their characters lack edge and lack strong conflicts. Writers with personal problems of accepting personal failings many times will project themselves on the story by creating sanitized characters without flaws that are idealized versions of themselves, Mary sues. Political correctness is an effect of low tolerance to frustration and conflict, people with low tolerance towards frustration and conflict will try to avoid writing stories with frustration and strong conflict. SJW types don't look to me the kind of people that are willing to tolerate writing complicated conflicted characters that aren't perfect morally good.

Basically. SJWism is basically an artistic lobotomy. The writing itself is mmmmmm 3rd tier? Its at least somewhat decently in the general theme of BT's cutthroat power struggles. But its overall pretty poor, like 3rd-4th tier writing you might get in some long running franchise novel like some of the poorer star wars/star trek novels or something.

Its considerably worse than any of the shadowrun games, including Dead Man's switch. I backed Deadman's switch and while I understand some people wanted various things I feel the story was fine. Its kind of odd because there are tongue in cheek dialog responses that sort of acknowledge it, like you can call the main villainess out on how she talks like a cartoon villainess. Its like that thing where hipsters try to be ironic. But them it just kind of keep going, like that was just some meta in joke or something. Its kind of off.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

this is incredibly disappointing after the shadowrun games


don't know what I expected after it asked me what my character's pronoun is

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

I've started modding game files. It's possible to customize the portraits of your starting mechwarriors (Behemoth, Dekker, Glitch, and Medusa) by simply editing the portrait files that exist for these characters, with as many options as you have for your own character. However, there are another 300(!) portrait files that are listed only by number, without any identifying information. The character creation screen at the start of the game has 80 presets, 40 male and 40 female, but it seems these aren't the first 80 portrait files or otherwise easily identifiable.

I also tried changing the biographical information for the starting mechwarriors by editing their files in the pilot folder, but this didn't have any effect; perhaps the game is saving this information after the start of a campaign.

 

[Infinitron]

I've started modding game files. It's possible to customize the portraits of your starting mechwarriors (Behemoth, Dekker, Glitch, and Medusa) by simply editing the portrait files that exist for these characters, with as many options as you have for your own character. However, there are another 300(!) portrait files that are listed only by number, without any identifying information. The character creation screen at the start of the game has 80 presets, 40 male and 40 female, but it seems these aren't the first 80 portrait files or otherwise easily identifiable.

I also tried changing the biographical information for the starting mechwarriors by editing their files in the pilot folder, but this didn't have any effect; perhaps the game is saving this information after the start of a campaign.

Where are these additional portrait files located?

 

[Belegarsson]

Look like they're in \BATTLETECH\BattleTech_Data\StreamingAssets\data\portraits. .json files.

 

[Jimmious]

Any mech build advice in here? Even after quite some time in the game I can't seem to find the perfect balance between firepower, armor and mobility for my mechs.
Also whoever said that the game is easy or that the combat is simplistic, did not play the game more than 10 hours or the first big "main story" mission

Spoiler

(Argo retrieval)

If you go only for full damage not considering aiming specific parts, distances, heat, evasion, cover, LOS you'll get your ass blasted easily.

Still considering it a great game after 25 fucking hours which is insane due to my current time constraints. It's literally the only thing I do in my free , personal, time

 

[Cael]

If you go only for full damage not considering aiming specific parts, distances, heat, evasion, cover, LOS you'll get your ass blasted easily.

Welcome to every tactical squad game... ever. Hate to break it to you, but things like LOS, cover and, you know, TACTICS, have been part of games of this genre since at least D.R.A.G.O.N. Force.

 

[Jimmious]

If you go only for full damage not considering aiming specific parts, distances, heat, evasion, cover, LOS you'll get your ass blasted easily.

Welcome to every tactical squad game... ever. Hate to break it to you, but things like LOS, cover and, you know, TACTICS, have been part of games of this genre since at least D.R.A.G.O.N. Force.

I was referring to completely misleading criticism I read previously in here.

 

[Cael]

If you go only for full damage not considering aiming specific parts, distances, heat, evasion, cover, LOS you'll get your ass blasted easily.

Welcome to every tactical squad game... ever. Hate to break it to you, but things like LOS, cover and, you know, TACTICS, have been part of games of this genre since at least D.R.A.G.O.N. Force.

I was referring to completely misleading criticism I read previously in here.

You mean the fact that the game is a memory hog, melts GPUs and still has the loading speed of a stunned snail?

I... don't see it.

 

[Jimmious]

If you go only for full damage not considering aiming specific parts, distances, heat, evasion, cover, LOS you'll get your ass blasted easily.

Welcome to every tactical squad game... ever. Hate to break it to you, but things like LOS, cover and, you know, TACTICS, have been part of games of this genre since at least D.R.A.G.O.N. Force.

I was referring to completely misleading criticism I read previously in here.

You mean the fact that the game is a memory hog, melts GPUs and still has the loading speed of a stunned snail?

I... don't see it.

No I meant for example the "review" of DeepOcean who said that combat boils down to damage only which is completely false.

Also loading speeds are fine for me but yes it fucking burns the PC up.

 

[Cael]

No I meant for example the "review" of DeepOcean who said that combat boils down to damage only which is completely false.

Also loading speeds are fine for me but yes it fucking burns the PC up.

That is because you are fucking HBS shill:

(spoilering bits to lower wall of text)

Spoiler

The good:

You gonna explode mechs on all kinds of places and that is fun, ice planets, desert planets, moons, I wouldn't say the graphics are top notch but it is very cool to look to your mechs on the surface of a moon and all kinds of planets.
The managing merc game while simplistic, is entertaining enough to keep you going as .
I'm not a Battle tech fan, didn't know the setting but the game did enough to make me interested on it.

The bad:

Spoiler

1 - Boy, they really failed into explaining the mechanics, the major culprit being the Ui, man, the Ui in this game isn't a show stopper but when you take the terrible performance of the game and the fact that you need to do needlessly clicking and going into superfluous menus over and over again, this has a grinding effect on your enjoyment as refitting you mechs, choosing contracts, buying weapons is way more complicated and time wasting than it should be.

Usually I don't care about Uis but there are really important information that is completely obscure and the Ui really overwhelm you with alot of useless noise that just wastes your time. You get used to it when you eventually learn it but it is an annoyance that didn't needed to be.

2 - Moving four mechs feels cumbersome right now, especially because many missions require you to walk alot and there are alot of animations that take too fucking long, after watching the jumpjet animation 100 times, it gets annoying that takes five seconds to move a mech and shoot to fire a weapon every single time, having a heavy mech on a lance will slow down even more.

3 - Jesus, the tutorial missions take forever and while you are at that, you have a very restricted options of mechs, it takes to long to get to the good stuff.

4 - There aren't that many variables affecting the combat, sometimes you have a feeling that what matters is just raw damage, beyond some very basic tactics like luring enemies over a direction for shots on the exposed backs, sensor locks and long range sniping, using the terrain for cover, you will get all you need to know right on the tutorial missions and then it is just using bigger guns to do the same things. This wouldn't be that much of a problem on a RPG but on a tactics game, this make things increasingly repetitive.

Spoiler

5 - The story is cliche as hell, not that Battletech is high literature or anything but I find really sad to see the really awesome intro about much more interesting Battletech stories to just be stuck saving some bland backwards empowered princess ass. The game tries to give you a motivation and by trying to give you a motivation, I mean making the good empower bland kamehameha princess good and the bad guys, BAD guys, THE END. I don't care much about this on a tactics game but it was one of the things that annoyed me.

6 - I would love to say the pronoun thing is harmless and just enjoy the game, trying to pretend the political issue isn't a problem like some are doing but I know how this sort of activism works and the "them" stuff is just the start, sjw activists really despise people with different political views and they will push and push until those sorts of things are on all fucking games, they have zero respect for conservatives, and I would be forced to witness this sort of stuff even more and more radical on the future. The fact that the pronoun removal mode was banned on Nexus is really worrisome.

I don't hate transexuals but when I play a game I want to be lost on a fantasy and not to be used as forced audience into identity politics that is only convenient to a tiny real world minority. Your political issues don't interest me and I completely lose the suspension of disbelief when I see this stuff. Instead of making me more sympathetic, this makes me doubly pissed off because someone is trying to shove their politics on my face and I really can't believe on the fantasy of the setting because I'm constantly reminded of this shithole we live on after every clumsy attempt of minority pandering.

Verdict:
5 Mehs of 10

I would lie if I said blowing up robots on the space isn't fun but there are MUCH better designed tactical games out there, this game made me feel XCOM was actually a hardcore tactics game and my enthusiasm was slowly eroded by a series of issues. Probably it is better to wait for a TON of patches, the directors edition and "the mods will save it", some sort of long war version of this game.

Bold mine.

You know what? HE SAID EXACTLY THE SAME THING YOU DID.

 

[Jimmious]

Dude is your purpose in life to be negative about BattleTech or something? I didn't even come to talk to you in here. Gtfo
Also I don't give a shit about HBS.

I wanted to hear about builds not your whining while you never even played the game