KickStarter BATTLETECH - turn-based mech combat from Harebrained Schemes

[Jimmious]

And Cloud Cobras sounds like a street gang made up of a bunch of nerds

You mean like Tunnel Snakes ?

 

[underground nymph]

How to make Battletech the game great again? I mean the original campaign was nice and all, but now we have only some questionable DLCs which add ridiculously little to the replayability. I really want to sink in again, but I can’t justify aimless mercenary life with nothing to uncover. Roguetech is cool I suppose, but does it add any new layer to the base game?

 

[GarfunkeL]

Remake the game in an engine that allows for more than 4 Mechs under player control and maps that are larger than the inside space of a matchbox without exploding. Oh and maybe that engine could also run it faster than 2 FPS and the loading times could be faster than the half-life of Uranium-238.

I am still salty that I paid real money for this garbage. Should've learned from Wasteland 2, Unity cannot into running actual games.

 

[thesheeep]

Remake the game in an engine that allows for more than 4 Mechs under player control and maps that are larger than the inside space of a matchbox without exploding. Oh and maybe that engine could also run it faster than 2 FPS and the loading times could be faster than the half-life of Uranium-238.

I am still salty that I paid real money for this garbage. Should've learned from Wasteland 2, Unity cannot into running actual games.

It definitely can. Their devs just didn't know how to use it properly.
Developers nowadays don't really need to learn anything about optimization anymore, because games made in modern engines "just work".
I mean, of course they would need to learn about optimization, but they just don't do it.

I've also often seen the mantra of "implement the feature first, think about optimization later" repeated by (not only game-) developers recently.
Poor fools never seem to realize that there is almost never time to properly clean up and rework code after a feature has long been in use. I can practically guarantee you that Battletech is full of old code, old structures and old design that would all need a rewrite - but will never get one.
With bollocks like that, I'm not surprised to see the relative surge of bad performing software released recently.

On the bright side, that only means that devs like myself, who always have performance in mind when working on something, will stick out from the crowd

 

[Swampy_Merkin]

Just take a year off of the game and forget about it. I've purposely left it alone (even while craving urban maps) since my first career play-through because I knew it would get stale.

Come back in a year, forget about the stupid story mode, run a new career with the DLC, drink some beers, and feel the freshness.

 

[underground nymph]

Just take a year off of the game and forget about it. I've purposely left it alone (even while craving urban maps) since my first career play-through because I knew it would get stale.

Come back in a year, forget about the stupid story mode, run a new career with the DLC, drink some beers, and feel the freshness.

It’s been year already. And I really like new city maps, they are cool with lot of nice details. The new stealth and stray shot mechanics are nice either. Everything is cool actually, except there’s no storyline whatsoever. I can forgive all the shortcomings of the game, if they give me some good ol battletech plot: you know planetary militia, treasures of lostech, political assasinations, Kurita dogs to shoot, etс.

 

[Nathaniel3W]

The chief engineer wears a hijab but shows off her shoulders. That's as haram as those muhagibas in music videos. If western whores appear in music videos, that's only to be expected. But when the infidels try to legitimize their music videos by putting virtuous covered Muslim girls in them, they're trying to subvert Islam.

I can't say much with certainty about religion in the Inner Sphere or Periphery, but in Egypt in 2019, tattoos are very Christian. Muslims for the most part don't get tattoos. But if you're in the oppressed Christian minority, you want to make sure everyone knows you're Christian by tattooing a small cross on your thumb or forearm. Men and women both get cross tattoos.

While we're on the topic, the most visible aspect of pop-religion for Muslim men is the prayer callus. I've heard it called a zabib, which is Arabic for raisin. Muslim men, in order to show how pious they are, rub their foreheads into the carpet when they pray, or they place a small stone medallion on the ground and rub their foreheads on that.

Back to the game though, I liked the main campaign well enough. It's buggy and not entirely stable, but besides having to replay a mission or two, the bugs didn't affect me too much. I wish there was more to the game. From what I've heard about the DLCs, they're really not worth the money. If the third planned DLC is good though, I'll probably wait for some kind of DLC bundle sale.

About the pronoun issue, I think it's stupid that HBS included it. Does the game ever even refer to your character by third-person pronoun? It feels totally unnecessary. Yeah, everyone could just ignore it. But if the game allowed you to paint your mechs like giant clowns, I would comment on that stupid and unnecessary feature too.

My biggest complaint about the game is that there's no reason not to field your four heaviest mechs on every mission. If there were some kind of tradeoff, where you could take two mediums instead of one assault, or if there were a weight limit for your lance, or if you needed to field multiple lances at once, then there would be a reason to keep your other mechs around. But it seems to me that there's not much of a reason to keep too many mechs besides my "gotta catch 'em all" obsession. Yeah, maybe once in a while it's good to have a mech ready to use if your better mechs are being repaired, but that's not even a good strategy because then your crappy mechs get damaged, and they clog up the repair queue, so it's better to just sit around and wait between missions while you repair only your best mechs.

The campaign forces you to take the last mission immediately after the penultimate mission, with no time to heal or repair. That was a great idea. I wish they had made other missions do that too.

 

[GarfunkeL]

It just sucks because it shows a lot of promise but I can't help but be frustrated and annoyed that Mech Commander did so many things better back in fucking 1998. Especially as some of the nice things, like the detailed Mech customization, don't really matter at all because of (engine) limitations. In Mech Commander, you have a number of slots AND a weight limit for each mission. Battlech has no weight limit but only allows 1 lance of 4 Mechs, no matter what the mission. So why the fuck would I experiment with a bunch of different variants when the odds of getting to use them? But of course, even if I was allowed to bring 12 Mechs to the battlefield, it would just mean an even worse slugfest because the maps are so small. In every mission I tried to get off the beaten path but oh no, invisible walls! Fuck yeah that's what I want in a strategy game - arbitrary limits that constantly remind me that I'm just playing a game. Oh, enemy PPC got a critical hit on your Mech and now your character is dead? Okay, enjoy staring at the loading screen for several minutes. Yes, I installed it on an SSD.

Every time I played this, it just made me want to replay Mech Commander Gold.

 

[thesheeep]

Every time I played this, it just made me want to replay Mech Commander Gold.

That's actually the effect it had on me.
That and increasing my careful hype for the next MechWarrior.

 

[Black]

That and increasing my careful hype for the next MechWarrior.

Bad idea.

 

[Nathaniel3W]

I'm not going to go back and read through 78 pages of previous posts, so I don't know if this was already discussed. What was everyone's take on the setting? I had only ever played games set after 3050 when the Clans return to invade the Inner Sphere, so that was kind of what I was expecting. I liked this game's backstabbing and political machinations in the Periphery circa Third Succession War. But I was a little disappointed that I never got to salvage a Vulture or a Mad Cat or load my mechs to the brim with Clan weapons.

 

[Syme]

I'm not going to go back and read through 78 pages of previous posts, so I don't know if this was already discussed. What was everyone's take on the setting? I had only ever played games set after 3050 when the Clans return to invade the Inner Sphere, so that was kind of what I was expecting. I liked this game's backstabbing and political machinations in the Periphery circa Third Succession War. But I was a little disappointed that I never got to salvage a Vulture or a Mad Cat or load my mechs to the brim with Clan weapons.

I didn't like the time period to be honest, mainly due to the lack of ballistic weapons. I always preferred ballistics to lasers in previous games and Battletech has no UAC's, no RAC's, no LBX's, no light or heavy gauss rifles, and no machine guns. So the only shooty weapons you get are AC 2/5/10/20 and a standard gauss rifle.

To be fair though, the time period is still the least of my concerns. It easily ranks behind the shit performance, shit characters, shit story, shit one lance restriction, and shit overpriced DLC's that I didn't buy.

 

[underground nymph]

What’s wrong with the story though? I mean it’s certainly not the writing award nominee, yet the plot quite well done in resembling what were the Battletech books about back then.

 

[Cael]

I'm not going to go back and read through 78 pages of previous posts, so I don't know if this was already discussed. What was everyone's take on the setting? I had only ever played games set after 3050 when the Clans return to invade the Inner Sphere, so that was kind of what I was expecting. I liked this game's backstabbing and political machinations in the Periphery circa Third Succession War. But I was a little disappointed that I never got to salvage a Vulture or a Mad Cat or load my mechs to the brim with Clan weapons.

Retarded is the word I'd use. Wrong area, wrong ethnicities, wrong lore, wrong history, cameos for the sake of making money, not for the story, wrong everything. They might as well have white rulers of the Draconis Combine fighting the Spanish rulers of the Capellan Confederation and it would make for a more coherent story than that shit.

They also made your group blown up an intact Castle, for Pete's sake! Hello! Fuck the 4th Succession War! Everyone, let's go hunt down the fucks (i.e., your character) and show the whole Inner Sphere what we do to destroyers of LosTech.

 

[Syme]

What’s wrong with the story though? I mean it’s certainly not the writing award nominee, yet the plot quite well done in resembling what were the Battletech books about back then.

Because at no point does it feel like you're an actual mercenary mechwarrior. Instead, you play the white knight for an amazing and stunning and brave Mary Sue princess. Read the review here on the codex, it sums it up pretty nicely.

https://rpgcodex.net/content.php?id=10930

 

[underground nymph]

What’s wrong with the story though? I mean it’s certainly not the writing award nominee, yet the plot quite well done in resembling what were the Battletech books about back then.

Because at no point does it feel like you're an actual mercenary mechwarrior. Instead, you play the white knight for an amazing and stunning and brave Mary Sue princess. Read the review here on the codex, it sums it up pretty nicely.

https://rpgcodex.net/content.php?id=10930

Fair and very well put critique. And yet I’ll argue the story is far away from being shit. Sure it could have been much better, yet it’s 2019 — storytelling in games has seen better times.

 

[Cael]

The chief engineer wears a hijab but shows off her shoulders. That's as haram as those muhagibas in music videos. If western whores appear in music videos, that's only to be expected. But when the infidels try to legitimize their music videos by putting virtuous covered Muslim girls in them, they're trying to subvert Islam.

Forward it to ISIS and let the fireworks begin. Be sure to add that HBS is full of evangelical trannies who wants to convert good little muslims to trannism.

 

[Morkar Left]

The chief engineer wears a hijab but shows off her shoulders. That's as haram as those muhagibas in music videos. If western whores appear in music videos, that's only to be expected. But when the infidels try to legitimize their music videos by putting virtuous covered Muslim girls in them, they're trying to subvert Islam.

Forward it to ISIS and let the fireworks begin. Be sure to add that HBS is full of evangelical trannies who wants to convert good little muslims to trannism.

You guys realize that by the time the game takes place that might just be fashion choice...

 

[Nathaniel3W]

You guys realize that by the time the game takes place that might just be fashion choice...

I really don't think so. The character design is too intentional to be a whim of 31st century fashion. Other characters in the story have mismatched names: Indian-Scottish Raju Montgomery for example, and all the randomly generated names and faces implying that a thousand years of intermarriage have erased distinct ethnicities. But not Farah Murad with Arabic first name, Arabic last name, dark skin, and a hijab. No sir. She was intentionally cast as the Arab Muslim woman member of the crew. The tight-fitting sleeveless shirt shows that she can work hard and get her hands dirty, and that her clothing choice is her decision, wearing what's practical for an engineer rather than what patriarchal Arab-Muslim society expects.

Somewhere in 31st century interstellar space, an imam has condemned women who go to work on spaceships without their guardians, doubly condemned if they hypocritically cover their hair while sinfully showing their shoulders.

 

[Morkar Left]

You guys realize that by the time the game takes place that might just be fashion choice...

I really don't think so. The character design is too intentional to be a whim of 31st century fashion. Other characters in the story have mismatched names: Indian-Scottish Raju Montgomery for example, and all the randomly generated names and faces implying that a thousand years of intermarriage have erased distinct ethnicities. But not Farah Murad with Arabic first name, Arabic last name, dark skin, and a hijab. No sir. She was intentionally cast as the Arab Muslim woman member of the crew. The tight-fitting sleeveless shirt shows that she can work hard and get her hands dirty, and that her clothing choice is her decision, wearing what's practical for an engineer rather than what patriarchal Arab-Muslim society expects.

Somewhere in 31st century interstellar space, an imam has condemned women who go to work on spaceships without their guardians, doubly condemned if they hypocritically cover their hair while sinfully showing their shoulders.

There are still distinct ethnicities or the inherited behaviour (original or adapted) but by that point everything goes. There can be a traditional fundamentalisitc arabian regime as well as an ancient egyptian looking regime that ends up waering kilts instead of whatever egyptians were wearing back in the day. This can have fundamental reasons or just being some flavor fashion they somehow adapted or kept.

 

[Cael]

You guys realize that by the time the game takes place that might just be fashion choice...

I really don't think so. The character design is too intentional to be a whim of 31st century fashion. Other characters in the story have mismatched names: Indian-Scottish Raju Montgomery for example, and all the randomly generated names and faces implying that a thousand years of intermarriage have erased distinct ethnicities. But not Farah Murad with Arabic first name, Arabic last name, dark skin, and a hijab. No sir. She was intentionally cast as the Arab Muslim woman member of the crew. The tight-fitting sleeveless shirt shows that she can work hard and get her hands dirty, and that her clothing choice is her decision, wearing what's practical for an engineer rather than what patriarchal Arab-Muslim society expects.

Somewhere in 31st century interstellar space, an imam has condemned women who go to work on spaceships without their guardians, doubly condemned if they hypocritically cover their hair while sinfully showing their shoulders.

The mismatched names are a total insult to the whole idea of Battletech in the first place. Take the names of the famous people there:

Takashi Kurita
Hanse Davion
Arden Sortek
Scott Bradley
Morgan Kell
Morgan Hasek-Davion
Michael Hasek-Davion
Subhash Indrahar
Katrina Steiner
Melissa Arthur Steiner (later Steiner-Davion)
Ian Davion
Yvonne Davion
Nondi Steiner
Minobu Tetsuhara
Michi Noketsuna
Torinaga Kurita
Daniel Allard
Quintus Allard
Justin Allard
Naomi Centrella
Emma Centrella
Jaime Wolf
Natasha Kerensky
Kai Allard Liao

There are no fucked up names like Raju Montgomery or Anna-Maria Centrella. They are there because HBS wanted to push an agenda, pure and simple.

 

[Nutria]

The pattern I'm seeing there is that in the 1980s people thought that Japan would still be relevant in the future.

 

[Black]

And that German and Brit-like people will even exist in the future

 

[Trans-Financial-Man]

I'd recomend the Battletech Extended 3025 mod. It adds war for all the different houses which includes territory control shifting based on what missions you do. Along with a bunch of stuff to turn the game into a more freeform experience. Basically what this game should've been from the start.

https://www.nexusmods.com/battletech/mods/387?tab=description

I have high hopes that at some point another mod will come along that makes the game not boring. I'm looking forward to that mod.

 

[Morkar Left]

The mismatched names are a total insult to the whole idea of Battletech in the first place.

There are no fucked up names like Raju Montgomery or Anna-Maria Centrella.

Take the names of the famous people there:
Hanse Davion
Morgan Hasek-Davion
Michael Hasek-Davion
Subhash Indrahar
Nondi Steiner
Quintus Allard
Naomi Centrella
Kai Allard Liao