KickStarter BATTLETECH - turn-based mech combat from Harebrained Schemes

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Yea isn't this like the third agreement of this sort Harmony Gold has made?

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

 

[Cael]

Which reminds me: I have the full 18 book series of Robotech. Macross, Southern Cross, Mospeada, Sentinels and End of the Circle. Those were good times.

 

[Nutria]

Selling VHS tapes with an accompanying audio CD has to be the most 90s thing that has ever happened.

 

[oldmanpaco]

I check this thread every couple of months to see if anyone has un-fucked the engine. Still disappointed.

 

[Cael]

I check this thread every couple of months to see if anyone has un-fucked the engine. Still disappointed.

That is like trying to reverse a dick-hacking. It ain't gonna happen. Kevin is now Kevinna for life.

 

[Nathaniel3W]

I check this thread every couple of months to see if anyone has un-fucked the engine. Still disappointed.

That is like trying to reverse a dick-hacking. It ain't gonna happen. Kevin is now Kevinna for life.

Please let that stuff stay in the Horrors of Western Civilization thread. After that story about the--what's it called? Nuvag? Nugina? Something like that.--After that post, I decided I would rather stay ignorant.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

i crave mechs every day of the week.
grew bored of mw5 fast and the decent mods don't work with latest expansion, so i embraced the grief and updated roguetech, because this too vanilla has no reason to exist.
so many new features, so many things, several that no one asked for, so many that both ui and unity can't keep up with.
i could stand 15-20 minutes to load a mission (on a ssd), i could stand 10-15 seconds just to switch tab, the endless turns, the mechbay error messages without explanation, even the random freezes while trying to save, but i guess i draw the line at as sudden as unexplainable blue screens of death.

 

[razvedchiki]

extended is the best mod, advanced 3062 and roguetech run like shit.

 

[Lone Wolf]

MadMaxHellfire

Yep, that's the exact reason I stopped playing Battletech. Every loading screen was excruciating. Every action met by a lack of responsiveness. Over time, it just kills your willingness to sit through it. What I do enjoy about MW5 in its current form (I didn't play it on Epic) is that it's pretty damned responsive and light as an app. You can Alt-Tab to your heart's content while things are loading and it's instantaneous. Clicking through is snappy and straightforward. It doesn't feel like the engine is creaking under the weight of the game it's trying to run.

 

[Old Hans]

MadMaxHellfire

Yep, that's the exact reason I stopped playing Battletech. Every loading screen was excruciating. Every action met by a lack of responsiveness. Over time, it just kills your willingness to sit through it. What I do enjoy about MW5 in its current form (I didn't play it on Epic) is that it's pretty damned responsive and light as an app. You can Alt-Tab to your heart's content while things are loading and it's instantaneous. Clicking through is snappy and straightforward. It doesn't feel like the engine is creaking under the weight of the game it's trying to run.

yea just exiting MW5 is instant where as in battle tech the unity engine has to think about it for like 15 seconds

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

unity is third millennium's flash. nothing good will ever come from it.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

RT is a massive game and requires a lot of memory. Often, your computer will use PageFile (swap space) to ensure your physical memory (RAM) isn't overloaded. The RT-Crew's minimum system requirement is to have at least 16GB of physical RAM (32GB or more is STRONGLY RECOMMENDED) to minimize crashing from insufficient memory

AHAHAHAHAHAHAH no. this is retarded.

 

[Old Hans]

more like roguetech is using all your physical ram

 

[zapotec]

I am glad i have refunded it on GOG and bought MISSIONFORCE: CYBERSTORM instead

 

[razvedchiki]

it seems the game has a problem syncing various actions with its audio files, for example i noticed that there was a stutter of 0.5/1 sec everytime i choose a battlemech and ordering it to move/jump. disabling my pilots voiceovers made the moving actions almost instant. also disabled in options to wait for each weapon to hit, that also made firing actions almost instant.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

i can't find an answer to a very simple question o_O how do you hire new people in roguetech? all i can see is the known issue "if new recruits don't appear save and reload", but appear where? in the barracks i can see only my roster. how do you recruit in vanilla? can't remember either.

 

[Lone Wolf]

That's what you're after.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

it's not there in my games :V so either it bugged, *hard*, or it's present only on specific planets and i need to find out how which ones.

 

[Jason Liang]

I finished the campaign yesterday, after playing the game for about a week. The game is fun, but the fun mostly plateaued around the middle of the campaign (up to Nautilus Castle). What happened was I was worried that the default difficulty would be too easy, so I set it to harder enemy spawns at the start. This sort of backfired, because I spawned a Marauder on my first 2 skull mission (enemy reinforcements on a destroy Convoy side mission), which I ended up salvaging completely, then proceeded to build a headshot Marauder. Then one or two missions later (a Flush Them Out city battle side mission) spawned in Atlas, which was my first assault mech, followed by a second Marauder and a Cyclops HQ. So even before getting the SLDF Highlander I was already steamrolling through the game. Still, the peak of the game for me was an incredibly fun 5 skull Proxy War mission which was a glimpse of what the game's mechanics are capable of. Proxy War is an Attack and Defend mission (so you have to destroy the enemy base in time of else it will keep spawning new reinforcement lances), with the complication that the enemy base is defended by powerful turrets, and the no man's land is a battle royale between two different OpFors (Directorate and Liao). So basically I had to pick two mechs of my lance to sprint behind the Liao side in 3 turns, while my two other mechs perched on a cliff to referee the battle between the Directorate and Liao to make sure neither side dominated the other side. Even still my Atlas and Highlander got shot in the back by the Liao Atlas a few times (inexplicably) and I was pretty lucky to get through the battle without anyone losing a limb or a torso.

Proxy War - the peak experience of Battletech for me. I was very thankful for it was finally over with no one getting blown up.

This would be as close as I would get to losing this lance. The Atlas got roughed up bad.

Glorious wreckage isorla.

So my impression is that the expansions have solved some of the performance and gameplay issues of the game on launch. The game ran pretty smoothly on my 7th gen Intel i5 SSD laptop, although the heat starts to go nuclear about two minutes in (but the laptop does that with other programs too). Gameplay-wise, I think the expansions added a lot more variety to the side contracts like Attack and Defend, Proxy War and Pincer (where you have an NPC ally lance) so the missions have more twists to them. Having a lot more mech chassis to choose from also helps, although it probably takes too much rare components to pimp out a sweet Annihilator or Warhammer before finishing the campaign. They do make the battles more interesting though, since they spawn even in the campaign missions. Enemy Archers are a big pain in the ass, Marauders need to die immediately, and enemy Cyclopses increase the challenge of any battle where they are present.

Still the game has the same issue as Shadowrun Hong Kong, since the new toys unbalance the game ultimately making the challenge trivial. Both the Marauder and Cyclops gave my lance such a huge advantage that it really killed any of the challenge of the last few campaign missions.

I am now replaying from the start on the hardest settings (hardest spawns, mech components to 8, stingy payouts and salvage, etc...). I am also playing without giving my mechwarriors any experience gains and without modifying mechs from the basic loadouts. It seems to be like Age of Decadence in that you have to gimp yourself to make the game challenging enough for the experience to be satisfying. I think that will at least help prolong the game's sweet spot by delaying the staleness of completing an endgame lance of heavy/ assault mechs too soon, although it could be counter-intuitive since much of the fun of the game is in collecting new mechs and customizing them in mech bay. But on the other hand, being able to optimize mechs while the AI can only play with the basic loadouts is really what kills the game's challenge (ok the AI is kind of meh too). However, I think that the game as is on the default setting already maximizes it for "fun" and making the logistics of the game more challenging and frustrating probably doesn't make the game better. Sadly, there is no easy way to solve the ultimate issue that the game's AI cannot hope to challenge a pimped out endgame SLDF heavy/ assault mech lance even with huge numerical superiority.

I actually unlocked the Black Market right before Coromdir and found the components to complete my own Atlas II. Victoria got her King Crab gangbang assfucked. When your lance is 2 Atlas II, a Marauder and a Cyclops Z, it's time to retire. Is there a point to playing anymore?

I think it should be easy to make a simple mod that a) generates side contracts where you fight alongside 1-2 NPC controlled allied lances from your own company, so that you can have larger battles and have use for more than just 4 mechs and 4 mechwarriors and b) lets the AI spawn with some more optimized loadouts to make the battles less lopsided.

I also have some thoughts on the game's balance as a whole, but I might save that for later. While the basic balance between ballistic, energy and missile weapons is a little off from CBT, I think overall Battletech translated the feel of tabletop Battletech successfully. It feels like tabletop wargaming.

 

[razvedchiki]

Bigger drops/mission control allows you to drop an extra lance, plus another 1- 2 allied ( and 1-2 enemy opfor lances).

 

[Lone Wolf]

Jason, despite it being an absolute resource hog, it sounds like you need Roguetech in your life. You will be suitably challenged.

 

[Jason Liang]

Jason, despite it being an absolute resource hog, it sounds like you need Roguetech in your life. You will be suitably challenged.

I am worried that my laptop (which I just got last month) will go full chernobyl on Roguetech. But I will look into making a simple mod for the game.

 

[GreyViper]

Jason, despite it being an absolute resource hog, it sounds like you need Roguetech in your life. You will be suitably challenged.

I am worried that my laptop (which I just got last month) will go full chernobyl on Roguetech. But I will look into making a simple mod for the game.

RT is quite resource intensive, I made the mistake of installing it on HDD, not SSD and some enemy turns could take 5-15 minutes. BUT it adds so much customization and longevity the original game is missing.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

i later found the hiring hall button. a small, pale, forgotten white little thing in the lower right corner of the argo menu... where i usually kept the picture-in-picture streaming :V